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.

The Tempest

In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (circa 1610) sailormen yell “We split! We split! We split!” and in the wrecking they sob “All lost! All Lost! All Lost!.”

For researchers Maslin and Lewis the Anthropocene began at the beginning of the 17th century with the irreversible cross-ocean exchange of species alongside a pronounced dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide centered on 1610 and captured in Antarctic ice-core records. Bruno Latour intervenes in the dispute of the dating of the Anthropocene and, relying on their hypothesis, picks up on the argument by framing it within the cultural transition between the “old” and the “new worlds” and specifying that this transition was marked by a significant shift in the representation of time, namely the transformation of western arbitrary time into the real-time of the countdown to the Sixth Extinction. The project The Tempest was carried out over the course of the first three years of my doctoral artistic research on expanded theatre and time ecology in time of the collective and critical acknowledgment of the Anthropocene.

Each of the four videos consists of three point-of-view shots, played simultaneously, and filmed on an action camera, of the successive acts of reading, rehearsing and performing four different key scenes of Shakespeare’s play: the shipwreck scene (sc.1 act.1), the encounter with Caliban (sc.1 act.2), the love scene between Miranda and Ferdinand (sc.1 act.3) and Prospero’s renunciation of magic (sc.1 act 5). The three different footages of each video were produced on different days in the same location, over the course of one week to three months.

The four videos were shot in four different locations: on the island of Suomenlinna/Helsinki (Finland) in winter, in the tropical greenhouses of Montreal (Canada) in winter, in the Site of Reversible Destiny in Yoro (Japan) in autumn and in a cave under a sea rock in Biarritz (Basque Country-France) in spring.

The recorded poly-caco-phonic acting and environmental soundscape, the specific visual regime of a subjective camera, and the simultaneous display of the three sequences through split-screen are combined in the videos in order to render a theatrical experience of the representational diffraction of the mythological play, both temporally and spatially.

Episode 1: We Split! We Split! We Split!... Reading, Rehearsing and Performing The Scene One of The Act One of Shakespeare’s The Tempest Within Three Winter Baltic Storms

Episode 2: Bogs, Fens, Flats…; Reading, Rehearsing and Performing the Scene Two of Act Two of The Tempest Within Three Illusive Aboriginal Forests

Episode 3: Ye elves of hills…; Reading, Rehearsing and Performing the Scene One of Act Five of The Tempest With/in The Site of Reversible Destiny by Gins and Arakawa

Episode 4: I do not know One of my sex…; Reading, Rehearsing and Performing the Scene One of Act Three of The Tempest In the Cave Underneath the Basta Rock in Biarritz at Low Tides

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