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.

The Final Stage

The Final Stage consists of the re-staging, during the final defense week, of the doctoral exposition (the commentary) in a black box theatre. The screens of three computers connected to the Research Catalogue are placed on three tables in the middle of the audience and mirrored on three large screens on the stage. Every day three people are invited to navigate, simultaneously and during ninety minutes, on the exposition online. Spectators are invited to attend this hyper-reading session of the three users as if they would attend a performance. The rest of the time the installation is open to free consultation of the exposition.

The mosaic of entries constituting the doctoral piece, visually organized in a grid of sixty cells, superimposed on a glitching two dimensional draft of the Greek antique theatre of Epidaurus, is a free transposition of Giulio Camillo's Theatre of Memory1 (c. 1530), based on an open combinatory and a random path of reconstruction and interpretation. “The Final Stage” is its activation in the form of a live performance and a durational installation. “The Final Stage” complements and diffracts the activation of the piece by online hyper-readers.

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