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.

We split! We split! We split! Reading, Rehearsing and Performing the Scene One of the Act One of Shakespeare’s The Tempest Within Three Baltic Winter Storms

Performance/Videoscenic Installation

Suomenlinna Island/Vapaan Titeen Tila Helsinki

Left: Video GoPro/color/sound/8'

Right: Image 1: documentation of the performance in situ / Images 2 & 3: Installation views

“Boatswain: Heigh, my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! Yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to th’ master’s whistle.—Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!” Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, scene 1, (circa 1610)

We Split! We Split! We Split! is a performance and video installation realized over the course of a winter in Helsinki. The eight-minute video consists of the simultaneity of three point-of-view shots, operated with an action video camera, of the successive acts of reading, rehearsing and performing the shipwreck scene (sc. 1, act 1) of Shakespeare’s The Tempest during three striking Baltic storms at the tip of the island of Suomenlinna in the bay of Helsinki. The process consisted of keeping a close eye on the weekly weather forecast for Southern Finland in order to keep up to date on major storm warnings. When a storm was about to hit the Baltic coast, I would take the ferry to access the island offshore from Helsinki. After walking across the island in the harshening weather, I would reach the cliffs facing the sea. Once there, the performance would consist of mono-vocally reading, rehearsing and performing the text of the opening scene of Shakespeare’s play in, with and to three successive raging storms. The recorded poly-cacophonic soundscape, the specific visual regime of the subjective camera and the simultaneous display of the three sequences through split-screen are combined in the video work in order to render this theatrical experience of performing on the edge, radically immersed and weathered within environmental turmoil. The durational project, whose progress and achievement depends fully on weather agency and whose eco-dramaturgy exposes my practice of directing to representational breakpoints, intends to challenge theatre through the excessive permutations between the backstage and the stage agencies. It engages with the question of how the anthropogenic control of the practice might collapse or indispensably adjust through weathering to the actual ecological demand on the revision of mimesis bearings. We split!(...) project thus intends to open experiential and critical access to unexpected flows of more-than-human “actants” entering into play as much as it addresses the possibility of a shift from spectatorship towards spectator networks.

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