Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012 - 79

who organized OISTAT's first World Stage Design
exhibition in Toronto in 2005, enlisted several
associate editors and dozens of contributing researchers. After reading this installment, I went
back to the original books to remember what
they were about. How successful were they in
their ambitious task? What I found was that, like
this volume, while they were imperfect beasts,
their value was their versatility as resources that
could be exploited for a number of purposes.
McKinnon and Fielding sought to present
designs that their editorial committee deemed
"influential in the world of stage design and
production, designs that made a difference." A
mix of renderings, sketches, and photographs
of models are accompanied by short statements that identify the event, the designer, and
the nationality of production, and a description
of the images or of the designer's importance.
Definition of what constitutes a design is broad
and encompasses performance design, stage
design, and scenography. Examples are drawn
from drama, musicals, opera, dance, street performance, and other performance events, such

as Samoan fire knife dance or Olympic opening
ceremonies. The chapters are divided by year,
and the page opening each section lists key international events that shaped the year. For 1983,
for example, it cites the bombing of the United
States embassy in Beirut that killed sixty-three
and the first release of Microsoft Word. These
flashbacks create the context of time and place
to contemplate the designs. They allow what the
editors term the "the comparative assessments
of stage designs from a plurality of perspectives,
rather than . . . definitive statements of either
specific designs, periods of designs, or social
contexts of designs." This device gives readers
the responsibility to make their own connection as they compare designs. For my own part,
while I looked at the images, I had a frightening observation that there was an absence in
the designs of explicit connections between the
productions and the social and political events
of that year. That is not to say there are not implicit connections between techniques or styles
in a time period, but rather that I was left to my
own thoughts.

summer 2012

design collage
Designs are laid out one after the other as a
collage. Next to each array of images are brief
statements that sometimes recount a biography
of the designer, other times describe the images
or the production, or occasionally explain the
importance of the design and the production.
The Appendix gives more detailed descriptions
of the design team. The descriptive content
works differently for each region. South American material tends to promote a designer's
importance in the context of the country's theatre, while descriptions of Northern European
performances tend to summarize a designer's
career. I found the most interesting commentaries were those that described why the design
was exemplary. For example, the commentary
with Zhao Yingmian's design of Orphan of Zhao
Family describe how its components offered
something new to traditional takes on the repertoire. Some designs are given the space to show
the development of a sketch to a production, as
with Robert Wilson's The Civil Wars (1984) or
Annelies Corrodi's Wozzeck (1983). An inquisi-

theatre design

& technology

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012