O.S (Oren Sagiv) I'm not really sure what the background for our interview is.
T.B (Tammuz Binshtock) It's for a Maakaf issue dedicated to scenography. If I understand correctly, scenography is a renewing concept, and it is not very well established in the local scene. We are here to discuss questions such as "what is scenography?", "who is a scenographer?" and "what kind of a scenographer are you?" These, at least, are my ambitions for this conversation…
O.S Yes, that does seem quite ambitious. I can give you my perspective, but my story is very specific, I'm not sure it can imply a lot on the concept of theatre design in general. I think this is exactly the idea. It's for the "One on One" section, and you, Oren Sagiv, were selected for this one…
Oren Sagiv is just the right person for a one-on-one on scenography, not only, but also for the design works in his resume, such as Michal Heiman's Ma At Choshevet? (What do you think?), performed at the 2004 Akko Festival; The Town of Little People, directed by Ofira Henig (2004); Tamar Raban and Ensemble 209's The Second Thermodynamic Law (2005) and Old Wives Tales (2006); and Yasmeen Godder's I'm Mean, I Am (2007) and Singular Sensation (2008).
T.B Do you see yourself as a scenographer? Let's begin with this simple question.
O.S No. I see myself as an architect. And I'm not sure scenography is a renewing concept, it has always existed in other countries as a definition for theatre designers, stage designers, set designers. I do see a certain evolution of this concept. Not as a scenographer, I designed a little for theatre, but it's not really my type of thinking. I don’t understand theatre that much, and if I may confess, I do not really like theatre. But I do see this concept wants to evolve.
Oren Sagiv is the architect of Intersection, the main event in the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ), a large event dedicated to scenography. The PQ, taking place every four years since 1967, is an international display of design for theatre, with representatives from all over the world and a curator for each country. Intersection is a cross-continent project, bringing together artists from different cultures and fields of thought and artistic activity, and curated by Sodja Zupanc Lotker, the current PQ's artistic director. It includes a theoretical discussion as well as an interactive display of performances and installations. Scenography would probably not have merited a whole issue of Maakaf were it only practice; but it is a multi-participant discussion, and Oren Sagiv follows it closely from one of its major hubs.
O.S My work has brought me to various symposia that strive to expand this concept, such as the adequately named "Expanding Scenography", in which I recently participated; the question is how scenography relates to other fields, such as architecture.
T.B There is a great gap between eternal architecture and the time-limited theatrical scene.
O.S That's right; and for this reason, when we talk about scenography wanting to expand beyond the stage, beyond the black box of theatre and the play, a good definition will be anything that is temporary architecture. Architecture designed for the short-term – for me, this is a convenient definition, and it may also be an administrative one: "temporary architecture". It helps us discuss space and behaviour, space and culture, space and content from a much purer place.
T.B What do you mean by "pure"?
O.S I see myself as an architect who works with space, and with performance inside a space, with humanity's performance inside spaces. And I can be much purer in my testing and experimentation when it is not something that is built to last forever.
T.B You also know, more or less, what happens inside.
O.S Right, that's another aspect, it's much more precise. It may be simplistic, and that's a completely different lecture. But it's a more specific incarnation of a cultural desire. In architecture, we have the concept of a "brief", which describes what happens inside a building. In scenography, the brief is highly non-standard.
T.B So scenography is not a renewing, but an evolving concept. How does this relate to the set designer?
O.S I don't really know. I'm not that well familiar with this field. But I assume set designers have a different course of study. They study theatre, they study a lot about the stage, the history of theatre. The narrative is part of the curriculum, written theatre, plays, drama, and dramaturgy. I came from thinking about everyday life, about architectural situations that are perhaps emptier. I think I have a different approach to narrative.
T.B Sounds like your work for theatre is a fleeting, random episode.
O.S No, it may be random, but it's also essential. The people with whom I worked already knew they wanted to create a situation that was not a conventional set. When I worked with Tamar Raban on The Second Thermodynamic Law, for example, she was thinking of a classroom-like set. And what we created is really a distillation of the architectural situation of a classroom. The physical situation in which people sit, one person is standing and talking, and the attention should be directed at him, with a very clear hierarchy and very limited movement. We created a physical situation embodying the conditions of a classroom. It did not imitate a classroom, it did not recreate a classroom onstage; it created a new, unfamiliar architectural situation.
T.B So how does it work? The artist brings an idea, you draw a sketch? Are you in charge of building the space? How far are you involved? How far does your responsibility go? Theatre plays are usually performed more than once.
O.S Yes. Is that a problem?
T.B How much are you worried about what it will be like the next time?
O.S It's a question for architects in general. They are involved when they build a house, too. If we take a private house as a small-scale example: It is built. The family moves in. And how do they treat this thing, this structure?
T.B If you built a house for a family, anything can happen, life is amorphic. But a performance is a rigid structure, which only exists while being performed. The process of planning and building happens in parallel with your creative process.
O.S Working with Tamar Raban is very interesting, because she is truly different and unique, and there is great autonomy. As part of this process, it is agreed that I use the material of her performance as a trigger for creating a spatial principle, and then the two things meet. In Oldwives Tales, our second project together, we did not have an auditorium and a stage; we created a physical hole between what had been Tami's studio and the backroom storage, and this was the introduction, the beginning of a thought. It began with stories and folk tales on the one hand, and on the other an action, the action of baking. I began thinking about the space from a perspective of depth, which fascinated me at the time. In this case, I worked alone for a month. I came to her with a model, and she said: "Ok, I am going to work with it now." I think in one sense or another, it's always like that. There is always something spatial I'm interested in, that I research. I always bring with me some architectural, material principles. And the final work is a result of this interchange. For this reason, dialogue is crucial. I don't know if it answered the question.
T.B It got us somewhere.
O.S I think whoever tries, as a spatial designer, to do a total interpretation of literal and narrative ideas, will eventually miss something. There is an intuitive way to perceive a space and understand its qualities, which is different from the way one understands a story.
T.B What about the theatre in which the situation takes place? The audience enters a familiar space, sits at fixed seats, and exits.
O.S This is really the situation that interests me the least, and I don't do it much. Perhaps because it flattens the space into an aesthetic experience similar to that of an image. I don't have much to say about it in that respect.
T.B What about the experience of the performers, your influence on them, on the process, on the performance?
O.S Up there, on the stage?
T.B Yes.
O.S You're right, the same architectural situations I mentioned can be created onstage.
T.B But you're less interested in that.
O.S Yes. I design a lot of art exhibitions, which shouldn't be more interesting, on the surface of it. Now I designed an exhibition called "Still / Moving", curated by Suzanne Landau. It has no design, only an articulation, a division of space, a calculation of the number of steps that lead from one work to the next. And yet I find it more enticing than the black box and the stage. My client – who is not the artist nor the curator, but the client who will experience the space – will actually move through it, experience these steps, see something from afar and get nearer. I hope the aesthetic experience, the pleasure of space, will be a total pleasure, independent from the works on display. I hope the experience will be gratifying in additional ways: architecturally, to the wandering gaze, the eyes, the neck, the feet, the body, being inside a place.
T.B So may we simply say that you prefer the "white box" over the "black box"? Maybe it's time to talk about Intersection.
This year's Intersection, "Intimacy and Spectacle", will take place in a central square in Prague, facing the national theatre. 30 cubes-boxes the size of a small room will fill the square, and each will be dedicated to a work of performance or installation designed particularly for the closed space. A wooden shell built around and above the cubes-boxes will include sitting areas, a café-bar, and an open theatre, for the benefit of the general public, the exhibition's visitors, and random passers-by.
O.S I think Intersection set out to examine theatre first, and then theatrical space. The design was guided by a strong curational decision: not to provide answers. To perform an experiment and then see what happens. This is a huge privilege, and I am very lucky to work under this artistic direction.
T.B And how did this happen?
O.S I gave a presentation titled "Space and Truth" in one of those symposia for expanding the definition of scenography. I showed works that addressed architectural reality without metaphors, associations, or expressions, which contain some truth. Like the exhibition "Real Time" I designed for the Israel Museum: there, scenography was not achieved by addition, but by peeling the structure. We cut the museum's walls and peeled the envelope of the walls and ceiling. I tried to play with this concept of "truth", but I kept coming to the conclusion that truth was broken and that obviously, the spectators always created their own metaphors. At the end of the lecture Sodja Lotker just came to me and said she had a job offer for me. This was how it started. It was in Zurich.
T.B Did you hesitate?
O.S No. I knew it was going to be an amazing project.
T.B Because you were given an opportunity to be a meta-scenographer.
O.S To be a scenographer working with scenography, that's right. Reflection here is part of the story.
T.B Could you see yourself displaying in Intersection as a scenographer?
O.S Absolutely. I really wanted to. I kept wishing I had a box of my own.
T.B So why not?
O.S I didn't have the time. I was too busy designing the whole event.
Intersection
carrefour, corner, crossing, crossroad, crossway(s), junction
: a point at which two or more things intersect, especially roads.
(in Mathematics): the set of elements common to two or more sets. The intersection of two sets A and B is the set of all objects that are members of both A and B.
T.B In this exhibition, 30 artists were invited to display their work in a given format – not the "black box" of the stage, but more like a "white box". Is the platform of the white box somehow considered superior to that of the black box?
O.S I would take a slightly different approach. I wouldn't hurry to compare the new situation to the white box of the gallery. I wouldn't rush to use this dichotomic analogy of replacement – now you are doing theatre in a gallery space. I think the spectator's experience is closer to the theatrical experience, perhaps to that of sitting in the front row. A gallery experience can be very unengaging.
T.B But the audience visits the works, moves between them, and if I understand correctly, also determines their duration, as they are ongoing, with no fixed beginning or end time.
O.S First you open a door, walk into a room, a very small room: they are all about 3 X 3 m. Once you enter, you find yourself on the stage. So this is a very unusual situation of viewing you're entering. In many cases, there is a single spectator and a single performer. And there are a few cases like MAREUNROL'S (fashion designers from Latvia), where there's a bench, you sit down, there's a small wall and you watch theatre through it. I agree it is a challenge, but one thing that surprised me was the artists' willingness, how quickly they all said yes. Romeo Castellucci – who is used to working in very large spaces; Ilya Kabakov - a very well-known artist who is closer to plastic art; Anna Viebrock, THE scenographer, perhaps the most amazing thing in the field of scenography today; and many others – I was surprised by how quickly they were willing to accept the limitation of space, and also the anonymity.
T.B Were you involved in approaching these artists? In their selection?
O.S Yes, of course. These are highly dialectical processes. It began when the artistic director, Sodja, began thinking about abstract qualities in artists she already knew she wanted to approach. In our first meeting she already had a list, but once we had the physical idea, it cancelled out some things and emphasized others. The dialogue between the artistic direction and the physical direction, the direction of the project's content and form, certainly ended up dictating the final list of participating artists.
T.B And do you work with each one of them?
O.S There is a dialogue, each according to their needs.
T.B 30 dialogues?
O.S Yes, yes… it's very beautiful, it's one of the most enjoyable things in the studio… One of the more beautiful moments was when we received the sketches from Ilya Kabakov, with his handwriting in Russian. That was certainly a "wow" moment, this is someone I admired as a student, and now we're having a dialogue about sketches… You could say there is some kind of dialogue with each artist. For some, I designed a specific space and was very attentive, and with others I only discussed technical requirements. Marcus Schinwald, for example, does his entire performance on the ceiling, everything is hanging from this contraption, so of course you must take care of all this technical aspect.
T.B You said these boxes were anonymous?
O.S To me, these boxes are 30 molecules of emptiness. And why? Because it happens within an urban continuum. It doesn't happen inside a building; it happens outside. There is an anonymous structure, made of anonymous substructures, each a void waiting to be filled with art. Then again, you have the shell, the public shell, the public aspect. Which is an inversion of the internal neutrality, of the collection of "voids" stuck in this square. The result is a duality, between the random crowd and ticket-payers who come to experience the event.
T.B In theatre, and in art in general, there is the question of insiders and outsiders...
O.S You mean in the audience, too? Those who understand, so to say?
T.B The event includes people who bought a ticket and are there intentionally, and random spectators, who did not know of the event and perhaps do not realize they are a part of it.
O.S Yes, absolutely. I have been asked if it was our intention to bring these worlds together or combine them. I said no. The idea is just to juxtapose them and see what happens.
T.B And what's your prediction? What do you expect?
O.S To be frank, the event wasn't planned for a public place. It was supposed to take place in the project's usual building. Are you familiar with its history?
T.B In the building that burned down?
O.S Yes, a 19th century building, art nouveau, all steel and glass with a huge central hall. This was the location of the Quadrennial all these years: the main event in the central hall, and the Exhibition of Countries and Regions in the palace's wings. I began designing for this space, and then the fire happened. So we had to venture outside, into the public domain. We immediately decided this was the experiment. As an architect, I understood right away that if it took place in a public place, it could not be a closed art event. Some publicness must invade it, become part of the design concept.
T.B This structure not only lets the public in, it also turns its gaze at the public. This stage, from which you can observe the event and the street, is designed for the public as another sort of performance.
O.S Yes, it has several aspects. I will try to describe them with an example, perhaps it will help us reveal something essential. Think about an opening for an exhibition, as an analogy.
T.B A very theatrical event.
O.S A theatrical event, an erotic event, a sexy event; an event where you have paintings on the wall and a table with wine and lots of beautiful young people standing around it. Where would you like to be? Around the table, or looking at the paintings? I don't know. These two events support each other, the artistic event that demands attention and a quiet gallery, and the real-life event, with the table and crowd and conversation. There is something very sterile about a work of art. A product, an object, self-containing, hermetic. It's an objective state, as opposed to the fluid state in which anything can happen, which is far more erotic to me, everybody around the table drinking that cheap white wine, and you sit and drink and it's free and you talk and create human contact.
T.B In Intersection, is it the scenography that enables it or frames it?
O.S It does exactly what you say, it frames it, it articulates it, it brings out the story in a very poignant way.
T.B For what kind of spectators?
O.SEach individual can be part of any of these situations. Each visitor can go up to the bar and physically look down on the situation. They can enter a box and be there all alone, secluded, united with the artwork in a place we may call the psychological. They can also wander about between the cubes in an in-between, semi-collective place. And there is another place, the street, which observes it all. As an architect, I want people to miss it. Not the art crowd; the people who use this square or pass by it, I want them to miss this sudden transformation.
T.B As the cliché goes, "all the world's a stage"?
O.S Theatrum Mundi. As the cliché goes, yes. The thing is, who's the monkey? Sodja and I found each other through mutual curiosity about what art is and what publicness is. I think the city is humanity's biggest creation. A city like New York or Paris, the more a city the better. The anonymity, humanity, and intimacy a city can create, it's amazing. And Sodja and I were in the same room, ready to explore it, to create something that would be thought-provoking in that respect. I don't know what will happen, I don't. Maybe it will be a disaster.
T.B There is also a dialogue with popular culture and the "big brother" concept, it's inevitable.
O.S The voyeurism? The populism of art?
T.B On the one hand, everyone becomes a star once the camera focuses on them, the gaze turns towards them. On the other hand, the private viewing, one-on-one in a small room, mostly resembles television. In the past, cultural events were highly social, even communal.
O.S Yes, it may very well be a populistic, or popular event on that level. I haven't thought of it before. In the sense that there is no ritual of communion as in theatre, when you dress up, enter, sit in a dark hall with four hundred people and suddenly you all become one. I think this classic ritual has many additional qualities. I am all for it. I said I did not like theatre, and it's not true, I actually love theatre, I just realized it. But you know, I learn as I go.
Oren Sagiv does not perceive himself as a scenographer and has an ambivalent relationship with the world of theatre and the "black box". He comes from architecture – from architecture studies at Bezalel and at New York's Cooper Union, and today holds a significant position at Bezalel's Department of Architecture. His thinking about space and what happens inside it, and his personal, supposedly random trajectory, give birth to a non-traditional, yet very clear definition of scenography, that in many respects, may also be more relevant and up to date.
T.B Is scenography part of the curriculum?
O.S In Bezalel?
T.B In architecture.
O.S No.
T.B And should it be?
O.S I'm in charge of a first-year studio class at Bezalel, which is a practical class. I do talk a lot about my take on scenography-related issues, whenever possible. The relationship between performativity and physical space, the organization of materials in space and performance. It happens spontaneously, because it's me.
T.B Do you think it should be included in the curriculum?
O.S It depends how scenography is defined. If it is defined as the relationship between space and performance, it certainly has a place. We discuss it a lot in the second semester, but it does not exist in Israel as an independent field and its absence is noticeable. Young people approach me, and they have nowhere to learn it here. The Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University once offered a specialization in Stage Design, and I think there was also an MA. But unfortunately, it didn’t last.
T.B So who is responsible? If scenography can be part of architectural studies under a very wide and specific definition, I assume it also exists in a very specific form in costume design studies and perhaps also in industrial design. Are theatre studies in charge of scenography?
O.S In other countries there is also a PhD in scenography, and I think there is certainly room for that. Beyond combining many fields, there is a crucial difference in relation to time, which requires a double sensitivity. For the temporality, and for the time of performance, which is more specific. It's not the amorphic time of reality. An event has a very specific tone. These sensitivities to time need to evolve in the student, something that does not happen today in neither of the study courses you mentioned. There is certainly room for a 4-year study course. Yes, I think so.
Amen.