ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Scenography is the largest and most comprehensive collection of original essays to survey the historical, conceptual, critical and theoretical aspects of this increasingly important aspect of theatre and performance studies.

Editor and leading scholar Arnold Aronson brings together a uniquely valuable anthology of texts especially commissioned from across the discipline of theatre and performance studies.

Establishing a stable terminology for a deeply contested term for the first time, this volume looks at scenography as the totality of all the visual, spatial and sensory aspects of performance. Tracing a line from Aristotle’s Poetics down to Brecht and Artaud and into contemporary immersive theatre and digital media, The Routledge Companion to Scenography is a vital addition to every theatre library.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

Scenography or design

part I|61 pages

Scenographic elements

chapter 1|14 pages

Stage and Audience

Constructing relations and opportunities

chapter 2|9 pages

Scenery

chapter 3|6 pages

Costume

chapter 4|15 pages

Light and Projection

chapter 5|9 pages

Sound (design)

chapter 6|6 pages

Scenography and the Senses

Engaging the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory senses

part II|103 pages

Scenographic theory and criticism

chapter 7|21 pages

THEATRICAL LANGUAGES

The scenographic turn and the linguistic turn

chapter 8|17 pages

Seeing scenography

Scopic regimes and the body of the spectator

chapter 9|16 pages

Absolute, abstract, and abject

Learning from the event-space of the historical avant-garde

chapter 10|16 pages

“What is happening”

Notes on the scenographic impulse in modern and contemporary art

chapter 11|10 pages

Scenography Beyond Theatre

Designing POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

chapter 12|21 pages

Participation, Interaction, Atmosphere, Projection

New forms of technological agency and behavior in recent scenographic practice

part III|401 pages

History and practice

part |2 pages

Architecture as design

chapter 13|15 pages

Scenography in Greece and Rome

The first thousand years

chapter 14|5 pages

Imagining the Sanskrit Stage

chapter 15|8 pages

Tudor and Stuart Scenography

chapter 16|9 pages

Playing with materials

Performing effect on the indoor Jacobean stage

chapter 17|19 pages

Architecture as Design

Early Modern theatres of France and Spain, 1486–1789

chapter 18|6 pages

The Open-Stage Movement

part |2 pages

Spatial and environmental design

chapter 19|21 pages

Medieval Scenography

Places, scaffolds, and iconography

chapter 20|11 pages

Storyteller as Time-traveler in Mohammed ben Abdallah’s Song of the Pharaoh

Multimedia avant-garde theatre in Ghana

chapter 21|7 pages

Environmental Theatre

Selected Asian models

chapter 22|5 pages

The City as Theatre 1

chapter 23|7 pages

Site-specific Theatre

chapter 24|9 pages

Free reign?

Designing the spectator in immersive theatre

part |3 pages

Pictorial and illusionistic design

chapter 27|5 pages

Eighteenth-Century France

chapter 28|11 pages

Boxed Illusions

From melodrama to naturalism

part |2 pages

Symbolic and emblematic design

chapter 33|6 pages

The New stagecraft

chapter 34|6 pages

Bauhaus scenography

part |1 pages

Modern and contemporary design

chapter 35|9 pages

Metaphor, mythology, and metonymy

Russian scenography in the Yeltsin era

chapter 36|13 pages

Transformation of forms

Polish scenography after 1945

chapter 37|8 pages

Modern and contemporary Czech theatre design

Toward dramatic spaces of freedom 1

chapter 39|25 pages

Modern British theatre design

UK design for performance since 1975

chapter 43|9 pages

Contemporary Chinese opera design

The pursuit of cultural awareness

chapter 44|21 pages

Postmodern design for opera