Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2007 - 51

Germany: Gold Medal for Best Realization of a
Production. Macbeth; Johannes Schütz (scenography
and costume design), Jürgen Gosh (direction).

dimensions the images of clothing in Kahlo's works. Uninterested in faithful recreation, the Figueroas take Kahlo only as departure point, transforming colors and texture, as well as expressing the theme of brutality
and pain through the use of 60,000 light-catching pins on the costumes
and props. In one scene, based upon Kahlo's My Dress Hangs There, the
painting's subject functions as haunting set piece above Kahlo, as well as
prop, costume, and spectre-actor. In their designs for Don Juan Tenerio, Mexican headpieces and nineteenth-century Spanish dresses contrast
with the straight lines and western ubiquity of the men's frock coats and
stove-pipe hats, while King Lear signiﬁed the same nineteenth-century
rational monochromism in the male rulers but located color and Kahlolike touches in the women while suggesting Middle-Eastern identity in the
minor characters. Monica Raya's design for The Skin, by contrast, used
cloth, tape, rope, ribbon, foam, fur, paint, pantyhose, plastic, gauze, etc.
to reveal, bind, demarcate, hide, and otherwise explore, in this groupcreated piece, everyone's initial "costume." The designs for an Oliver
Sacks-inspired dance piece, Puera de Tiempo (Out of Synch), by Eloise
Kazan (a native Croat) both adorn and reveal the performing body by using multiple layers of transparent organza with "see-through pockets" and
narrow, raised, opaque lines. The effect reveals parts of the individual and
striving body while also outlining the social mask of clothing, serving as a
metaphor for the fragility and dilemma of "broken" characters.
Nearly lacking costumes was one of the two winners of Best Realization of a Production, Johannes Schütz's (scenography and costume design)
and Jürgen Gosch's (direction) Macbeth at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus
(Germany, 2005). Costumes give way to nakedness early in the production, revealing even Lady Macbeth to be a man in this male-deﬁned world
of violence in a void. Surrounded by an utterly black expanse excepting
one spot where the nothingness seems to have "ripped" to reveal a sliver
of white, red chairs and blood, white tables, paper and powder are soon
overturned and scattered, littering the stage like a board-room battleﬁeld.
Particularly evocative was a forest of Dunsinane with actual twenty-foot
trees supported by naked actors within the red and white chaos.
South-African designer-director Brett Bailey's 2005 production of

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TECHNOLOGY
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Oscar van Woensel's medEia, an African revisioning of the Medea myth,
also grappled with brutality and its implied primary orientation in the
male sex, as armed gangs maraud remote villages for sex and proﬁt.
Its stark contrast with the German Macbeth suggests the irreconcilable
values within the jury that resulted in two Best Production awards. For
all its avant-garde extremism, the Macbeth reﬂected the containment of
traditional modernist spatial, conceptual, and aesthetic unity. MedEia,
however, ranged over the outdoor landscape and shacks of an abandoned

South Africa: Gold Medal for Best Realization of a
Production. medEia by Oscar van Woensel; Brett Bailey
(designer and director).

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