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.

On Such A Winter Day (For Night)

On Such a Winter Day (For Night) is the 26th and last scene of my doctoral piece Reacclimating the Stage, which is currently coming to an end with the final expositional stage of the project. During two afternoons I would install this last scene, to share it with the audience both as an artwork and as an anticipated object of research through the public and simultaneous documentation of it.

On Such a Winter Day (For Night) welcomes the visitor to decode, on a duration of time that she decides, a set of new data - collected during a summertime spent in San Francisco, Morro Bay, and Los Angeles – in a room with a sea view. This set is proposed as an echo scene, in the same way we can talk of an echo chamber, bringing into resonance diverse traces and signs sampled during a recent residency on the American west coast. Here, Silicon Valley neo-gold rush, climate-change denial, nuclear “peaceful” projects for reshaping Earth, tectonic plates manifestations and social cataclysms, enter all at once the multitemporal stage and play opposite ghostly citizens with a few tragic lines from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1607). The set is also proposed as a mise-en-scène of its own displacement in its near future of replayed object of research through documentation in the framework of the research.
Playing another time with oblique references to theatre literature, architecture, and scenic elements, combined with references to contemporary techno-conditioned lives in a time of biospheric mutations, I propose to trigger an experience and a reflection on the current state and status of mise-en-scène, spectacle, and tragedy, taking California and the United States of America as a stage paragon of crisis.

List of elements/materials:

Sequins curtain

Video-projection: Morro bay/Coriolanus (Shakespeare, Act I Scene I) - loop 3'

Hard foam board, cut

Theatre armor + electronic components

Video on LCD screen: Goldrush - loop 15"

Paper fire, miniature set

Wooden stage-keyboard

Three gobos

Electronic components in a plastic packet with instructions on paper

Two spotlights (blue and yellow)

Blue filter, shredded

Slide projector, vintage

jpg files turned into slides (photos shot at the Department of Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California)

A3 prints, two projections on Simo Kellokumpu's body (projected image: archive of the Carryall project in California (1963)/part of the Plowshare Peaceful Uses for Nuclear Explosions Program

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