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 Skene Expedition I & II

Scenographic Hike

“Most recently, increased access to the continent for creative artists has seen the production of multi-media performances, in which the ice, no longer imagined as simply a sublime spectacle or a blank white surface to be traversed and conquered, becomes instead a fragile, unstable element, threatened and threatening on a global scale. I trace this evolving history of the far south on stage, paying particular attention to the use of theatre to domesticate the “alien space” of the Antarctic icescape, and conversely to exoticize the familiar space of home.” LEANE, Elizabeth. 2013. Abstract: Icescape Theatre: Staging the Antarctic. Performance Research, Volume 18, Issue 6, On Ice. pp.18-28.

Snow- and icescapes have been simulated as décor on Western stages during the last hundred years of modern theatre. Whether using empty white spaces or geometrical forms, white clothing, Plexiglas, fake snow or even real ice, the representation of the high North and the far South has been subjugated to the closure of the stage, its anthropogenic temporal framing, and therefore, in my view, to its failure in triggering a satisfying experiential perception of (ant/)arctic-materialities and becomings, other than through suggestive and representational means. The Skene Expedition, Parts I and II, carried out during a two-week Ars Bioarctica artistic research residency in Kilpisjärvi, in Northern Lapland (Finland), proposes a performative dialogue with Leane’s writing (quote above) and an illustration of the representational tension that is at work when trying to seize scenically arctic materialities at a time of global warming. The project consists of the making of a model for a theatre set replicating, at a miniature scale, the mountain range by the subarctic Lake Kilpis (Kilpisjärvi). Once realized, the model would be carried out and staged in specific locations in the Kilpisjärvi area, to which access would demand an intense physical effort due to the quality of the terrain or due to the extreme weather conditions of the region. The project plays with the figure of the explorer, halfway between the identity of the scientist and that of the hero, overlapping with the identity/character of the artist (proximity enhanced by the specificity of the residency - art and science - where the project was taking place). Informed by land art and site-specific performances history, the stage director – me – turns himself into the (anti?-) hero of his own mise-en-scène, being, successively and simultaneously, actor and spectator of the ongoing “piece”. Using the codes of the self-portrait and site intervention documentation, I address here my concern on the revision of the relation between stage and backstage (from exclusion to inclusion) with a self-derision-oriented work on my status of artist-research in Finland, carrying out research in those hostile polar regions, engaging poetically with the planet’s shrinking cryosphere, in a desperately vital form of a quasi-scientific experiment.

Skene: in ancient Greek theatre, a built zone behind the playing area that was originally a space for the changing of masks and costumes and that eventually became the background before which the drama would take place.

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