Pedagogy Of Stage Design

8551 Words35 Pages
On the Pedagogy of Theatre Stage Design: A Critique of Practice When I began my formal study of theatre stage design some thirty odd years ago, my class was assigned Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit. We were instructed to go home, read the play, do some research, decide on a concept, do small “thumbnail” sketches of possible scenic solutions, and, by means of some mysterious and inexplicable process, devise a floor plan. We all dutifully attempted to complete the assignment—with varying degrees of failure. Although our lack of success was no doubt due to our inexperience, in retrospect the way the project was laid out was not particularly helpful. The assignment was based on a set of imbedded assumptions about the design process that were, and continue to be, highly problematic for the teaching of scene design. As Raynette Halvorsen Smith writes in “Deconstructing the Design Process: Teaching Scene Design Process through Feminist Performance Art,” Unlike the visual arts, the fundamental technique and process for the design and production of scenery has not significantly changed for close to a hundred years. As most widely practiced, the scenic design process has become frozen, steeped in tradition—tradition so pervasive that we have become blind to it. While scenery has taken on the veneer of style changes in “looks” borrowed from other disciplines such as architecture, painting, and sculpture, at its core it has remained unchanged since the practices outlined early in the century by Craig, Appia, and Robert Edmond Jones. (3) In considering my own pedagogy I have been forced to come to grips with two uncomfortable facts. First, my teaching of scene design was largely based on an unquestioned replication of the training I had received as a student. Secondly, there was a major disconnect between my practice as a designer and the theoretical

More about Pedagogy Of Stage Design

Open Document