The Scene as Machine

- If the stage scene should no longer exist in order to imitate or impersonate a pre-existing material reality, then what should it look like?
- Metaphor of the scene as a machine (a physical construct that theatrically locates and enables the public act of performance)
- Buhnenbildner - The stage picture-maker
- The metaphor and the implications of the scene as machine still have considerable contemporary relevance.
- Edward Gordon Craig
- Craig emphasized the mechanical reality of the stage constructions.
- Craig's screens function within performances, firmly established the idea of the scene as machine.
- Represents places that the act of performances are indicated. In this way, the screens created a place for performances that might represent imaginatvely simultaneously responding to the movements of the actor.
- Craig's belief in the aesthetic and functioning of the screens underpinned his shows.
- The act of living performance as it encountered the imagination of the audience. He suggests that the act of theatre takes place upon this liminal place of meeting, and that therefore the arts of scenography and architecture must combine to create these places that generate the potnetial for performance.
- Appia's drawings reveal little.
- Appia's scenographies for Wagner's music dramas are machinese for performance and like any good machine they work in intimate partnership with those who control their perception in time.
- The artist must explore seemingly abstracted neutral surfaces. The should understood that the physical scenography would be given form, colour, texture and possibly even dimension by the use of light. While light gives the actor the life of the story on stage.