ABSTRACT
Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominance of the pictorial perspective started to be challenged. At the turn of twentieth century, the symbolists were also considering these elements of space imagined as a whole, movement and body, but from entirely opposed perspective to that of naturalism. Craig’s was “architectonic” stage design: single stage but consisting of panels and screens without pictorial motifs, and using lighting to transform stage setting. Consequently, the director who is helped, and even sometimes replaced, in his function by the scenographer-artist (so much that the two professions sometimes merge), becomes the one who proposes “installations” that emphasise the play of actor, the actor’s play with the stage and with audience, or the scenographic machinery itself. Additionally, the practitioners can choose to only represent a single object on an empty stage: a lone, real-life object that can serve, throughout play, to depict several fictional or symbolic objects.
