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.

Kostia

Contemporary Multimedia Theatre Production

The play is a free re-writing of The Seagull (Chekhov). Treplev is here a young video artist lost between different levels of reality. Nina is a software programme, she exists only through a grid of images projected on three screens. Trigorine is a kind of Nam June Paik and Arkadina a celebrity. The stage existence of the characters is measured through Googlerankings and social media interactions. The mise en scène entangles different temporalities and manifold regimes of images overlapping rehearsals, performance, VJing and live concert.

Kostia is the last theatre production that I made on the stage of a theatre, and as director of a theatre company. Before drifting towards other regimes of appearance of a stage, off straight theatre time ecology and in vitro architecture. This drifting led me after five or six years to the actual doctoral research, still pondering, but from a queered perspective, theatre presence-ing, stage dis/appearance, and diversity of regimes of scenic representation.

Mise en scène: Vincent Roumagnac

Text: Emmanuel Guez (after Chekhov)

Premiere cast: Muriel Coadou, Gilles Chabrier, Denis Lejeune, Nathalie Ortega, Sophie Rodrigues and Vincent Roumagnac

Set disign: Audrey Gonod

Light design: Richard Gratas

Live music: Vale Poher, Anahit Simonian

Premiered in Théâtre de la Croix Rousse (Lyon, France)