Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2007 - 50

EXHIBITION PHOTOS BY RICHARD FINKELSTEIN

Mexico: Gold Medal for Best Theatre
Costume. clockwise, Tolita and María
Figueroa's dress (and close-up) for A
Few Small Nips; Eloise Kazan's semitransparent costume for Out of Synch;
four actors getting into Monica Raya's
costumes for The Skin. (Other recipients
of the Gold Medal, not pictured, are
Jerildy Bosch, Cordelia Dvorák, and
Humberto Spindola.)
that is to say, absurd. Every time the judges must have realized that they
can't go on, however, one of them must have murmured that go on they
would. And they did. The PQ takes place, after all, in Kafka's homeland.
Considering why one has been judged as one has in the trial of PQ awarding, and perhaps undergone metamorphosis into a winner, may reveal
as much about the conditions of judgment as it does the state of theatre
design and exhibition.
Four years ago, the PQ jury awarded gold and silver medals, a number of honorary diplomas, as well as "special silver medals" and "special
honorary diplomas" totaling twenty-three awards. Perhaps the difﬁculty
of deliberating twenty-three areas into agreement prompted this year's
quadrennial jury to limit its prizes exclusively to top winners and one
honorary diploma. Granting so few prizes in an environment of so much
compelling work from such disparate native contexts inevitably prompts
questions about the bases upon which awards are granted as well as the
circumstances of a design's "performance" at the PQ itself.
Curiously, despite decades of debate and the inﬂuence on the PQ's

development by the nature of Josef Svoboda's work, there seems little agreement
among nations about what constitutes scenography or the relative importance of the
design areas (at least for purposes of exhibition). Some exhibitions ignored costumes
altogether, and few featured lighting, props, or their designers. Some exhibits gave audible presence to sound design, but few used it as more than
ambiance. Consensus was clear, however, that set design is scenography's
cornerstone. Disregarding the overarching area of technology, the jury
supports this hierarchy with only one award granted for a non-set design
area: costuming. Scrutiny of the winning designs and exhibitions creates
a context for evaluating why these particular works may have won in a
tightly packed ﬁeld.
Rather than honoring a particular costumer, the jury granted the
gold medal to the costume designers from Mexico as a group for their
"vast array of approaches to adorning the performing body." The designs
they featured did, in fact, wrap, reveal, adorn, complement, play with,
disguise, and distort the performing body. Three sets of designers reﬂect
what seems to have caught the jury's attention. The sense of women as the
site of indigenous deﬁnition emerged from three designs by Tolita and
María Figueroa. Their A Few Small Nips (Unos Cuantos Piquetitos), inspired by Frida Kahlo's painting of the same name, expanded into three
THEATRE
F

2007

DESIGN

TECHNOLOGY

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