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.

Double Trouble Oil and Trouble

or La Dispute

or Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610) and Ostrovsky’s The Storm (1859) biting.

Two books, cardboard and paper – Courtesy of the Theatre Academy Library of Helsinki

For Lewis and Maslin the new geological era began around the year 1610, with an unusual drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the irreversible exchange of species between the "New" and "Old" Worlds. Other researchers argue that the Anthropocene began with the discovery and exploitation of oil in 1859. In the same year, the implications of Darwin’s discoveries established that Homo sapiens are simply part of the animal continuum with no special origin. Whatever date is chosen to point the origin of the epoch, it marks a turn in temporal representation, from Western arbitrary visions on time and the way they would be imposed to the ‘rest of the world’, to a ‘real’ timing, that of the coundown to the Sixth Extinction (Kolbert, 2014). One of the result of this turn is the actual deregulation of weather phenomena e.g. the increasing of number and violence of tempests/storms.

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