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.

9H057 7rI0 (70 3dW4rd 9. cR4I9)

Triptych. GIF (loop 10'' on tablet)/Laser level/(Re)-drawing (A4)

9H057 7rI0 (70 3dW4rd 9. cR4I9) is a triple installation happening simultaneously in three black box-type studios of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki.

In the first studio, a gif loops on a tablet taped on the stage left wall. The gif was realized by turning the iconic image of Edward Gordon Craig’s wood engraving “The Storm King Lear” (1920) into a black-box-like 3D print simulation. The original engraving depicts Lear, Kent and the Fool walking through the raging storm in the fourth scene of Act III of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In the second studio a self-leveling cross line laser level, installed on a turntable and fixed on a tripod in the center on the studio, scans continuously the black box with a 360° traveling of a red cross-line. Finally, in the third studio, a hand-drawn reproduction of a slightly glitched version of a sketch by Edward Gordon Craig for Ibsen's The Pretenders produced at the Royal Theatre Copenhagen in 1926, is taped on the stage right wall, lit with a sharp profile spotlight (découpe).

The title of the work 9H057 7rI0 (70 3dW4rd 9. cR4I9) is the transposition in leetspeak of "Ghost Trio (To Edward G. Craig)". Ghost Trio refers to the television play by Samuel Beckett (1975), which reflects Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Trio (Opus 70, #1), known as The Ghost.

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