Natalie Rewa, Ed.: Design and Scenography

NATALIE REWA, ed. Design and Scenography Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 15. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2009. 162pp. MICHAEL MCKINNIE, ed. Space and the Geographies of Theatre Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 9. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2007. 226pp. ANDREW HOUSTON, ed. Environmental and Site-Specific Theatre Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Vol. 8. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2007. 196pp. These three books read together as series of ongoing conversations between scholars, artists, places, and ideas. Although these reflections take different routes and perspectives, and foreground discrete questions and concerns, all three volumes invoke geographies, spaces, and identities. Places, productions, artists, and voices are threaded through them as touchstones or shared points of reference. Reading them is not unlike walking through landscape which offers different scenes and vantage points at progressive stages of the journey, revealing new vistas and hidden landmarks. In her introduction to Design and Scenography, Natalie Rewa outlines the productive tension between design and scenography, allowing that scenography, understood as an architectonics of visual/aural narration of performance, has become the word of choice, and is usually deployed to indicate the presence of dramaturgy. The collection takes catholic range of approaches to the themes: theatre as collaborative practice, treatments of individual designers and their engagements with the field, and concerns of cultural and regional diversity particular to the Canadian context--a consideration that will play through all of these volumes with differing inflections. This collection opens with an extract from Herman A. Voaden and Lowrie Warrener's 1930 Symphony: A Drama of Motion and Light for New Theatre. This piece, shaped through interaction with landscape and the movement across it, articulates and space explicitly. This is the first invocation, in this collection, of the landscape (or rather the various landscapes) which has given rise to the range of thoughts here. These are fore-grounded again and again, from Michele White's treatment of the work being materialised in gallery spaces in Toronto and Vancouver, to Michael Devine's account of Jillian Keiley's mathematically-based choreography and directing practice based in Newfoundland. There are investigations here too of the spaces inside performance: Natalie Rewa's own unpacking of Astrid Janson's sculptural design does good work here. There is much of the politics of location and of being located. Ronald Fedoruk considers immigration and pedagogic questions; Rahul Varma discourses on Robert Lepage's colonial fantasy in Zulutime. Jerrard Smith on the process of seeing place in environmental scenography, and Kathleen Irwin on the Bus Project both offer perspectives on movement and staged displacement. Camellia Koo, finally, compresses and extends the whole series of questions into space of eight by eight feet, making landscape of exchange out of the theatre itself. Space and the Geographies of Theatre begins with map of Canada--the world within which its questions, intersections, and divergences are staged. Michael McKinnie's fluid introduction begins in the landscape, situating questions of and space in performance as intellectual and political projects rooted in material geographies. Here we find geographies embedded inside theatre, and outlines for the environmental, political, and cultural geographical lenses through which the territory covered in the book will be perceived. There are significant interests in material geographies of course: we traverse the nation from the frontier between Canada and the US, in Mayte Gomez's thoughtful piece; through civic centres and the ways in which they imagine and manifest the citizens they serve, in McKinnie's own contribution; to the idea of north itself, in Sherrill Grace's subtle account of a landscape of extremity that resists the human need to capture it in words (133). …

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