REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES)

vincent roumagnac

REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES) An Ecotonal Doctoral Piece in 40 Scènes, 15 Parergonal Writings and 5 Double-Postcards. From the perspective of mise-en-scène (staging), and correlatively that of the place and the practice of the metteur-en-scène (theatre director), this artistic research project addresses, examines and experiments on the question of the scenic/scenographic representation of a postnatural world, in climate transition, affected by global warming and moved by abstract data-flows, in a tangled web of storms, information, and algorithms. While lived and conceptual "time", no longer telically given as linear and chronological, is being anthropodecentered and, therefore, diffracted into an open plurality, the Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses) artistic research project takes the earlier notion of time as a raw material to reexamine, from an eco-scenic and research perspective, in order to transform the theatrical practice of its author and to trigger the latter’s specific contribution to artistic research milieu. By obliquely playing on one hand with memories of theatrical history of scenic internal modi operandi, architecture, and literature, and on the other hand with institutional requirements for doctoral research appearance, the project aims at repositioning the director's practice in a movement of transition of scenic thinking and imaginary through a series of artistic and research experiments, whose enactments and resonant redistribution are poetically at interpretative play in this exposition.

de rêves (of dreams)

Photoscenic piece realized with Aurélie Pétrel as Pétrel I Roumagnac (duo)

Images: A Midsummer Night's Dream - mise-en-scène in Vartiosaari (left)/de rêves, photoscenic piece n.1, act 1, 2 and 4 installations views (right)

For seven years, I have been working in partnership with the visual artist and photographer Aurélie Pétrel. Our work is placed under the sign of the encounter of our individual research, and on how we look into, and queer, the conventions of our practices in relation to the history of our respective media and disciplines: theatre and photography. The question of time and time-specificity is a shared concern that is put into experimentation in the pair's works. After working on installations with protocol of reactivations, we two have begun a second series of works, called photoscenic pieces, which address more directly the question of theatre. This second movement in the duo’s work coincided with the beginning of my doctorate in Helsinki, and has been notably influenced by the research (at that time I was ending the first year of my doctoral project in Helsinki). Even though our work developed sideways from the scope of my doctoral research, it seemed fair, and I reckon interesting, to include this first piece in this doctoral project report. Having been made near Helsinki, being based on Shakespeare and as it concerns the multitemporality, dark ecologies and contemporary animist revival, this piece reports on how my solo research has tangentially produced off-the-frame experiments that fedback into the research itself. At the time of the final composition of this research exposition the piece was exhibited in France in the Grand Café Centre of Contemporary Art in Saint-Nazaire, in its fourth iteration (act 4). This is the translated text in the handout in French (I translate here) that we wrote for the visitors: “de rêves, photoscenic piece n°1 is inspired by William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: in a forest, a little magic, and during a nightless night of the summer solstice, we follow the adventures of four young Athenian lovers, gods and a group of six amateur actors who are controlled and manipulated by the forest spirits. The forest’s sensuality and magic have provided the material for Aurélie Pétrel and Vincent Roumagnac’s free rewriting of the comedy, in the company of Swiss artist and mask designer Nagi Gianni and Finnish choreographer-performer Simo Kellokumpu, on an island near Helsinki. Together they translated the original play into festive forest scenes, transposed themselves into photographs and transformed themselves into photographic objects. In this piece, where everything is determined by the unstable laws of metamorphosis, transformation and reconfiguration are at work and play. Eighty-six photographic objects, which constitute what the duo call the “reserve”, are thus redistributed “on stage” through a succession of twenty-nine scenes, that appear and disappear during the nights of the exhibition.”

A short dialogue on our photoscenic pieces ►

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