Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2023 - 59

Student creative
responses to the
Exhibitions of Countries
and Regions by Aurelia
Clunie (top left), James
Doolittle (bottom left),
and Lucas Holeman
(right). | Images courtesy
Clunie, Doolittle,
Holeman, and Shane
Kelly.
they also did so with ecoscenography.
Employing an Ecoscenographic Lens
The class' first response prompt was to
respond to their first full day in Prague.
After arriving on Monday, their first full
day on Tuesday was filled with experiencing
Prague before the festival began. We
had an extensive, informative, and fun tour
of Prague Castle in the rain where our
guide brought us through the extensive
history of Bohemia and Czechia as manifested
through the various additions to the
Prague Castle grounds and buildings. In
the afternoon, our group toured the Jewish
Quarter with a member of the community-who
had been part of the founding
of the museum area-who shared with us
massive amounts of history, community
perspective, and stories of the Jewish people
of Prague past and present.
The students' responses varied from
a self-portrait as Jan Nepomucký in the
various sites of Prague we visited, several
explorations of sgrafitto (a subtractive
wall décor technique, which can be seen
throughout the city), examination of the
shapes of Prague (the city, the churches,
and the synagogues), and evaluation of
the literal layers of the history of Prague,
which is especially easy to see around the
Jewish Quarter with its differing heights
of sidewalks, cemeteries, yards, etc. Now,
with a foundational sense of Prague, it was
time for the students to dive deep into the
Prague Quadrennial.
The PQ opening ceremony can be both
traditional-artistic leaders and government
ministers addressing the crowd-
and adventurous.
This year's
polystyrene cube maze (Slovakia), and a
rave shack (Germany), among so many
other exhibits.
The students returned from this cereopening
adventure
was guided by a performer in
a gold lamé dress and a blonde pageboy
wig waving a matching PQ 2023 flag. The
performer led the audience to a spinning
mechanical bull, which they stood on top
of and declared repeatedly via a bullhorn:
" We live in unprecedented times when the
forms of art are changing... In the current
state of precarity, uncertainty, and epochal
change, we call on performance designers,
scenographers, and performance practitioners
to use their rare imagination and creativity
to help us envision what the world
and theatre could look like in the post-pandemic
future. " The bull moved faster and
more erratically, but all the time, we were
being called in these unprecedented times.
The opening was capped off by a mylar
confetti drop and encouragement to take
in all the country, region, and student exhibitions,
which were many (51 countries
and region exhibitions and 46 student exhibitions)
and included dying at Memento
Mori (Chile), a fashion show (Estonia), a
mony with responses that considered their
senses and, for many, a sensory overload
of people, sounds, textures, lights/projections,
temperatures, and liquids. There
were also several responses about the " unprecedented
times " we live in.
Later in the festival, students were required
to respond to the Country, Region,
and
Student
exhibitions
after
having
viewed them multiple times and outside
the frenzy of the opening night. They were
asked to look at this response through the
lens of sharing these experiences with
their collaborators at home, as a proxy
for how to talk about their creative work
with their collaborators. Many commented
on the specifics of individual exhibitions,
such as the community roundtable from
Ireland, Cyprus' exploration of a ghost city,
or China's flipbooks, while other students
commented on multiple exhibits or explored
how they would propose adjusting
a particular exhibit.
Many performances at PQ are held
outside traditional performance spaces.
In 2011, I worked as technical director for
Six Acts, six devised site-specific performances
around Prague, including in the
FALL 2023 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | 59
Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2023

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