One of the great advantages that performance mediums have over the plastic arts is their immediacy. The work exists in real time and consists of a direct energetic exchange between performer and audience. The immediacy of the performance experience is typically mirrored by a design style that has direct aesthetic resonance with the contemporary world. When dealing with classics, like the Greeks or Shakespeare, the visual style is often updated in such a way that there are two parallel stories occurring for the audience. There is the story of the dialogue and the story of the visual world. Handling contemporary works and classics are often quite clear. There is a middle ground, however, that can be nebulous and murky; the revival.
Revivals, as I am discussing them, are shows anywhere from about ten to a hundred years old. They are old enough that they have already had a successful life as a contemporary work but new enough that they land within, albeit near the edges of, contemporary aesthetics. Revivals are very common in the three major disciplines of dramatic performance; theater, dance and opera.
Last week I posted Antony Tudor’s notes on the design for Lilac Garden, a revival of which I lit several years ago. With that piece we had the dual job of remaining faithful to the spirit of the original and at the same time making the work visually accessible to a contemporary audience.
Finding the balance between the aesthetic spirit of the original and the contemporary eye can be quite difficult when reviving a work. We are ultimately concerned with creating relevant and challenging work for our audience and as such make decisions that at times run counter to how the work was originally presented. Were our interest merely to recreate the work exactly as it was originally seen it would fail dramatically in terms of creating an experience fully embodying the immediacy of now.
When I worked at San Francisco Opera we would run into this problem regularly. Pieces that had been sitting on shelves and in warehouses, literally for decades, would be dusted off and presented on stage. Sometimes the sheer force of history would be compelling like the Tosca which was a recreation of the original design that had opened up the Opera house in the 1930′s or the Traviata designed by John Conklin before his deconstructionist phase.
Many times the works would not stand up on their own and would need to be reconsidered. Colors might get updated from the greenish blues of the 1980′s to the cleaner blues used today. Heavy ambers, once quite compelling, would be exchanged for crisper warm tones. Intensities would be brought up to more accurately match an eye that is now used to brighter stages.
In each of these cases a balance must be struck between the design as it originally was and the production as it reads today. Similarly, these issues come in to play with new productions of older plays all the time. The South Pacific I am currently assisting on is one such example. The designs by Michael Yeargan and Don Holder at once contain the spirit of the show as it was written and pay homage to an older aesthetic viewpoint. At the same time their designs land firmly within the contemporary visual language we speak today.
This balance with the visual language is a significant contributor to the success of the show on Broadway. Creating a design that is not just a contemporary look backwards but rather a fusion of styles gives the piece its power and allows it to neither fall into the trap of museum curiosity nor pure commentary. Some aspects of the show which, given what we know about the world today, sound foolishly naive become accessible. The design at once frames the piece and gives the audience a way in to a different world. It is true to itself and is true to that historical world on its own terms.
This world into which the work gives us access is not the “world of the play” so often discussed by theater makers. It is the world in which the play was written. The visual style orients the audience towards the work in such a way that it can see through the gloss of time and access it as the deeply critical and risque work that it was when it opened.
Variations on this theme exist in all works that were created in a different time. Being sensitive to not only the work and text itself but the orientation of the audience to that work is what makes a design successful. We create the visual framing devices that allow the audience to see the work for what it is and give them access to a text that may land far afield of their own native experience. Our work as designers opens wide the doors through which an audience may directly engage with the energy of the performance. Our work constructs the conduit through which that energetic exchange exists.
