Page 189 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

CONSTRUCTION WIThOUT END MANUEL CIRAUQUI
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When Drama went indoors, it died; and when Drama went indoors, its scenery went indoors too. You must have the sun on you to live, and Drama and Architecture must have the sun on them to live (...) It was the movement of the chorus which moved the onlookers. It was the movement of the sun upon the architecture which moved the audience.15
Within this vision of scenery as coterminous with the world, the presence of items deliberately made for the stage set – such as a city represented in black ink on cardboard panels – would allow theatre itself to emerge as a character, and the scenery to act as effigy or emblem for the staging of the play itself – the theatrical representation. Actors confronting such objects – abstracted from, or indicative of, off-stage life – are actually faced with drama’s presence in a no less strange space. A kind of split has occurred.
Beyond Craig’s judgment on Baroque drama, however, we might turn to other scenographic practices from past centuries, when cityscapes afforded the natural locations for theatre plays. “Bonet Correa recounts how in the 18th Century houses were covered with fake façades made with large cut-out frames. Ephemeral obelisks and triumphal arches would last, just like the façades, ‘for three, four, five or even up to six days’. Except for Palermo’s Porta Nuova or the Arco de Santa María in Burgos, which became steady architectural features, nearly all of these structures would be destroyed a few days after being built”.16 Following this, it is legitimate to think that the cinematic camera may be the ideal medium through which such contrasts may be emphasized while the real, concrete space where they are generated is simultaneously preserved.
Stage scenery thus becomes a character incarnated in moveable items, elements for an endless transmutation where the city, as overarching city-stage, may see itself reflected in a synthetic mirror. In yet another well-known – and no less overstated and confrontational – text, Gordon Craig suggested the concept of “über-marionette” to describe objects that become more lively than the actors themselves: “The actor must go, and in his place comes the inanimate figure – the über-marionette we may call him, until he has won himself a better name (...) a superior doll (...) descendant of the stone images of the old Temples.”17
15 Íd., pp. 7-8.
16 Juan Muñoz, op. cit., p. 133.
17 Edward Gordon Craig, “The Actor and the Über- marionnette”, in The Mask Vol. One, no. 2, April 1908, p. 11.