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.

Towards Hyperdramatic Theatre

Workshop
Transdisciplinary workshop proposed to MA students in Directing, Acting, Dramaturgy, Dance/Choreography, Live Art and Performance, Light and Sound Design

Institut del Teatre Barcelona

Theatre Academy Helsinki
Duration: 6 days – 42 h + Public presentation

CALL FOR REGISTRATION

This course examines the transformations of the notion of stage, and therefore of scenic practices, in the face of climatic and anthropo-technological mutations of the 21st century. The course is realized as a workshop, in which the participants are invited to techno-eco-dramaturgically conceptualize and realize a "hyperdramatic protoscenotype".
The participants are invited to experiment on the following questions:
How to design/direct/perform a stage on the brink of an environmental collapse and in the age of an algorithm-conditioned society? How to reconsider and give dramaturgical hospitality to more-than-human beings (plants, animals, minerals, meteorological phenomena, but also computational, algorithmic, artificial entities) as our contemporary stage co-(f)actors? How to review and ecologically renegotiate the human aesthetic control of the stage taking in consideration other-than-human temporalities? What kind of stage forms after the dramaturgies of the postdramatic, in this radical movement towards the techno-ecodramaturgies of a hyperdramatic theatre?
The workshop is stimulated by Roumagnac's artistic practice and research, which is introduced through several artistic examples and a selected – and discussed - referent bibliography, such as Timothy Morton (on hyperobjects), Donna Haraway (on tentacular thinking), Bruno Latour (on Gaïa), Bernard Stiegler (on neganthropocene), Theresa May (on ecodramaturgy) and some material from Queer Theory (on queer time).

Groups are formed in the first day of the workshop. Groups of, at most, three people, from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, who work in a collaborative way in the various phases of the experimentation. Participants are tasked to create a performative/scenic prototype and present it at the end of the workshop, as a (partial) response to the topics introduced, shared and discussed, and the way they reflect on their own developping practice at their contact. The protoscenotype may be a performance, a play, an installation, a scenographic display, a video, an image, a narration, or something else.

The workshop is developed on the base of a methodological process coming from artistic research field. The workshop will be divided between the study of a chosen theoretical material, artistic examples, and practical implementations. The workshop starts with a brief introduction to the history of the "future of the stage" and the (artistic and philosophical) movements/experiments of the "eco-theatre" of the 20th century, in relation to contemporary eco-aesthetic concerns.
Finally, every scenic/scenographic protoscenotypes realized by the participants has to embed a chosen Shakespeare's figure/text from The Tempest, Hamlet, King Lear or A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The frame/task for the conception and the realization of each protoscenotype is based on three picks and a constraint:

- one excerpt from the list of Shakespeare's fragments

- one extreme "background" from the following list: a dry apocalypse, a wet apocalypse, a great outdoor after the extinction of mankind or an artificial/machinic great indoor after the extinction of mankind

- one hyperobject from the following list: global warming, big data, global financial system, planetary pollution or radioactivity

- constraint: there should be no direct/live bodily/actorly presence in the protoscenotype

The workshop ends with a public demo.

After the workshop students should:
- be more familiar with some concepts around hyperdramatic theatre and deep(ening the) stage
- be more familiar with artistic research methodology and transdisciplinary working processes and aesthetic outcomes
- have explored and experienced the potential of the rescaling/repositioning of their artistic practices within contemporary new climatic regimes (Global warming/Big data).

Barcelona

Helsinki

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