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.

Images from left to right:

- Cardboard replica and screen

- Spectatorium reconstruction, drawing by Robert Edmond Jones (Harvard's University, Houghton's Library collections - Internet ressource)

- Wave-maker, sketch by Steele MacKaye (forming part of Letters Patent N 0, 490,484, dated January 24, 1893 - in Mangrum, Richard A., Steele MacKaye; Inventor-Innovator, 1970)

- Hand-made prototype (my free interpretation of MacKaye's sketch)

- Wave-making using the hand-made prototype in a water bucket (9 images gif animation)

Kiiminkijoki (Spectatorium II, after Steele MacKaye)

Cardboard, Tablet, Headsets
Video, Color, Sound, 1’ looping
Headsets display: 3’40’’

A looping filmed sequence shows a part of the river Kiiminkijoki (Finland) melting in the spring. The ice is perforated in the middle and the hole produces a whirl resembling a hurricane eye with the reflection of the clouds in the just-melted water. The video is displayed on a screen, which covers the stage of the damaged cardboard replica of Steele MacKaye’s legendary collapsed Spectatorium (World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893), so that the viewer sees the scene from above, conferring to the spectators a planetary scale. By the replica a handmade prototype of MacKaye's wave machine, realized from a free interpretation of MacKaye’s sketch, is presented on a shelf, accompanied by five projected photographs, shot when the prototype was tested. Additionally, a short biography of MacKaye is displayed on an audioguide.

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