All the World's a Pavilion

Scenic designs aren't the only constructs being exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial

By Randy Gener

Web Exclusive:
a photographic journey of world design at PQ 2007

America lost this past June at the stage design Olympiad. The Golden Triga, the grand prize of the 11th annual Prague Quadrennial (PQ), went to the Russians, whose wet, drab, moody but undeniably captivating pavilion contrasted sharply with the airy, pristine, gallery-style U.S. exhibit.

The coveted award, a magnificent emblem of a golden horse-drawn sleigh (based on the statue on top of Prague's National Theatre), was conferred by an 11-member international jury made up of theatre practitioners and personalities, including American director Mary Zimmerman. The jury praised the Russian exhibit for its "beautiful synthesis between the theme and its expression." "The Russian pavilion was a very theatrical space," stated Brazilian scenographer/architect Jose Carlos Serroni, the jury president. "The choice of the models is homogenous and balanced. The space is very provocative."

The installation, with its set models focused on a single theme, "Our Chekhov: Twenty Years Later," was heart-catching. Unlike the Americans, whose sleek retrospective offered a vast, bird's-eye view of the best U.S. designs of the past four years, the victorious Russians took a whimsical, experiential approach that concentrated on 13 models, all important Russian productions of Chekhov's plays or new pieces inspired by Chekhov's works. The architect/designer of the exhibition, Dmitry Krymov, dedicated the display to his friend, David Borovsky, the Russian scenographer who died in Bogota, Colombia, in 2006 and whose 11 models for Moscow stage designs were, coincidentally, on view in a nearby exhibition at the Czech Centre Prague.

The spirit of Borovsky and the soul of Chekhov weren't the only aspects that marked Russia's presentation as special and striking. Smaller in scale than the American display, definitely more conceptual in nature, the Russian installation put forward an arresting visual metaphor. It might have been an abandoned warehouse, an artist's garret or a dilapidated shelter with improvised furniture, loose wires and a leaky roof. To enter, you had to put on galoshes. To keep dry, you might have to hold aloft an umbrella. Walking from set model to set model required wading through the water. Light bulbs, hung extremely low, illuminated the models that were placed on a tuba, a pretzel of stacked chairs and a teetering tower of books. It's as if a terrible storm had passed, and the propped models were the artworks that had been saved from destruction.

Compared to Russia's atmosphere of battered glamour, the U.S. entry was open and inviting and lyrical. All right angles, this pavilion looked like a high-tech showroom in which six colorful puppets and 13 costumed mannequins had suddenly burst out of the rectilinear frames. On one side, a large plasma screen swung on a titled angle. Designed by Nic Ularu and Madeleine Sobota, the display articulated decidedly American values of optimism, inclusivity and energy. Somehow it managed to embrace 120 Broadway, not-for-profit and university productions, representing some 95 designers of diverse ethnicities and nationalities, with the catalog specifically highlighting Sobota's actor-wielded lighting experiments, Paul Steinberg's expressionistic opera designs, George Tsypin's jolting biomorphic shapes and costume/set designer David Zinn's eye-catching sensibility.

"What we see as the strength of our exhibit," said Alexandra Bonds, the commissioner for the U.S. stand, "is that it is representative of the democracy of our country. This year we were more successful in presenting innovative and ingenious designs that are in the same league as that of other countries."

In terms of its content, the entry denoted a huge step forward from four years ago—and a moon landing compared to 1999, which was swamped by academic works. "That was an all-time low," remembers Ursula Belden, the Ohio-based designer who has twice been a PQ curator. Few Broadway and nonprofit theatres were represented at PQ 1999; the designs of the few professionals who were (Robert Wilson, Julie Taymor, Eugene Lee) were "badly exhibited," Belden says. "The pavilion was not a museum-friendly space, not bad for puppets and masks, but terrible for costumes and models. In 2003, we made a clean, good-looking exhibit that was representative of contemporary American design—but all our choices were safe. We didn't go for the quirky, the strange and the unknown."

The 2007 U.S. pavilion is a culmination of the stubborn efforts of the curators to increase the participation of top-notch professional designers in the PQ. Accurately, it captures how far many American designers today have adopted a European scenic vocabulary of eerie juxtapositions, minimalist environments and sculptural signifiers; how others playfully confront or shatter or subvert the limitations of the box set (William Bloodgood's painterly depiction of purgatory as a Spanish-style villa with warps and curves in Nilo Cruz's Lorca in a Green Dress—on the cover of this issue—offers a good illustration); and how recent experiments in digital design (especially by the Builders Association of New York) have greatly expanded the possibilities of theatrical representation. This is not to say that the American stage design has suddenly made a radical about-face between 2003 and 2007. It has not. The gallery framework for both editions speaks to the complacent demands of the proscenium arch to which American designers largely hew.

What's different this time around, however, lies in choice and emphasis. The curators intentionally turned their backs on decorative impulses and illusionist techniques. Instead they sought adventurous designs that had moved the stage picture away from the specific, tangible world of poetic realism, that might disrupt or revise our modes of perception, or whose hodgepodge imagery self-consciously quoted from other styles and periods. Many designers (Tsypin, Sonya Berlovitz, Michael Curry, Allen Hahn, Daniel Ostling and Basil Twist, for example) had never been tapped for PQ before. The curators also stuck their necks out by proposing the works of young and emerging designers such as Anna Kiraly, Federico Restrepo and Kimi Maeda.

"The work is of a high caliber," declared Pittsburgh-based designer Susan Tsu, a curator for both the national and student exhibits. "In my view we presented a more realistic overview of the kind of work that is being done in the U.S. But I have also found myself compelled by the unity of vision that can happen when a country decides to champion a single designer or a playwright whom their curator thinks is a great visionary. I am blown away by it."

Created for the purpose of touring in the U.S.—the itinerary includes the USITT Conference & Stage Expo in Houston March 19-22 and the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver in June 2008—the attractive pavilion bore the rather ungainly name of "USITT PQ USA 2007 Exhibit." (The United States Institute for Theatre Technology, the association of design, production and technology professionals, footed the entire $154,500 bill for the U.S. expo, which consists of three sections: a national pavilion, theatre architecture projects and student designs. The Tobin Theatre Arts Fund and Electronic Theatre Controls also gave financial support. The University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign's Krannert Center for the Performing Arts donated additional materials and time from faculty and students who built and assembled the exhibits. Everyone involved, including the curators, were volunteers.)

The theme, "New Voices, New Visions: Out of the Box," may not be a particularly theatrical idea, but the stage artifacts, production photography and sound booths in the U.S. pavilion do serve up a spot-on précis. America is a nation in perpetual flux; in tandem, contemporary design is a potpourri of styles, tendencies and influences, without a single iconic writer (Chekhov for the Russians, Shakespeare for the Brits) around whom the country could unequivocally unite. In the present cultural climate, it may also be too treacherous to ascribe to the existence of a truly national style, an American scenography that permeates all levels and aspects of our theatre, a dominant signature or artistic gesture that will be instantly recognizable to everyone.

Moreover, most of our designers seem unable or unwilling to overcome their own anxieties of influence; for complex reasons, these individualists generally recuse themselves from coming out as acolytes of a particular sensibility or from professing, in public, the nature of their design-training lineage—unlike, say, the sentimental Russians, who seem to have no problem openly deifying their own master designers (such as Borovsky). The glory of Czech and Slovak scenography rests on the foundations laid by such legends as Josef Svoboda, František Tröster and Ladislav Vychodil.

Drawing comparisons between different countries—indeed, debating the effectiveness of environmentally styled displays versus traditional assemblies of the detritus of the production process (models, renderings, plans, sketches)—is an endless parlor game at the Prague Quadrennial. Should honors have gone to exhibits that were conceived as thematic environments or mood installations? Is it not more relevant (and more instructive) for national exhibits to deliver the news, as imaginatively as possible, about the new state of affairs, based on a documentary sampling of four years' worth of the best and most innovative designs? Given that the experience of a live performance can never be recreated in an exhibit, how can curators and exhibitors truthfully and evocatively re-present the contributions that a design has made to a particular production?

"You want the pavilion to perform—to be like the theatre itself, to be a space," says Zimmerman, one of only two directors on the jury. "Some pavilions are easy to pass by because they don't come at you; they're not dimensional. Some works on display are dim echoes of the production that was already done. Our instruction for the Golden Triga was: 'It should go to the pavilion that best expresses its own theme.' I feel that there should be a different prize for best overall work, which is a different matter. The Russian exhibit was gripping. It was an environment. But I'm not sure it can be strongly argued that each of those models represent the best designs."

Ironically, it was the U.S. that had led PQ down the path of conceptualism. In 1987, the U.S. seized a Golden Triga for John Conklin's recreation of a designer's studio which had separate rooms, a bathroom, a TV monitor (for the slideshow)—and fewer designers. Every square inch was covered with posters, memorabilia and design items (yellow stickies, sketches on napkins); a half-empty cup of coffee, colored pencils and stale pieces of pizza sat near a drawing board.

Now 40 years old, the PQ is the planet's largest competitive exposition of contemporary stage designs and theatre architecture. It is to the Czech Republic what the Venice Biennale is to Italy, what Documenta is to Germany—a global tapas where everyone who cares about theatre flocks to look, sample and judge the state of new theatre from around the world. The crucial twist, however, is that stage design is being exhibited at PQ on a pedestal of contemplation, and commerce is not part of the equation. Art dealers, collectors and hedge-fund types rarely flock to PQ, even though it aspires to engage the general public, not just theatre professionals and students.

This 10-day design derby—organized by the Ministry of the Czech Republic, realized by the Theatre Institute Prague, co-sponsored by the International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects and Technicians (OISTAT)—takes place in the neighborhood of Holešovice across the river Vltava in Prague in a stunning art nouveau building (the Industrial Palace, known locally as Výstaviste) during the punishingly hot summer month of June. The PQ is a seismograph of the changing political fortunes of each country and the bilateral squabbles of others. China, for instance, recalled its artists in protest from PQ 2007 and left its pavilion empty when Taiwan refused to merge "China" to Taiwan's title. With the U.S. war still raging in Iraq, few in Prague thought that this would be the year for the U.S. to win any sort of prize.

In a profound sense, theatre art and politics are inextricably mixed at PQ. The first PQ, in 1967, dedicated to stagings of Mozart operas in the city where Don Giovanni was first performed, grew out of the Bienal de São Paulo (Biennale of Visual Art) of the 1950s and 1960s, where the Czech and Slovak scenographers seized top awards for scenic design in four successive exhibitions. At the time, the country that was then Czechoslovakia was considered to be at the leading edge of world theatre design. In the midst of the Cold War, following the Soviet invasion that halted the Prague Spring of 1968 (Soviet tanks crushed budding free expression in August of that year), PQ persisted as one of Eastern Europe's major cultural events, but the primary impetus for going to Prague frequently had little to do with the appreciation of stage design. The city was treated, especially by non-theatre visitors, as a hip entryway into a repressive Soviet-bloc Communist regime. "PQ served a real purpose through the Cold War," recalls Joel E. Rubin, a USITT co-founder and producer of the U.S. exhibits at PQ 1987 and PQ 1991. "It gave an opportunity for countries in the Eastern bloc to meet their counterparts in the Western bloc." For Eastern European artists, it was a narrow window out of their isolation. Governments spent lavish funds on culture, transforming PQ into a Eurocentric battleground for Cold War one-upmanship.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution (which resulted in the country's first non-Communist government), the walls between countries broke down, but pocketbooks slammed shut. France, Cameroon and Venezuela were no-shows this year. "Since 1995, the government backed away from its financial responsibility," said Marcel Freydefont, secretary general of the Union des Scénographes. "The French exhibition was cancelled. The organizers did not receive enough help from the French Ministry of Culture nor from any sponsors. The essential problem lies in incomprehension and official disinterest in scenography." The French foreign-affairs bureaucrat who received the official invitation from the Czechs did not know what PQ was about.

Meanwhile, PQ entered an identity crisis: "What was the role of PQ in a post-Communist era?" asked Arnold Aronson, the Columbia University theatre professor who curated the 1995 U.S. exhibit and served as president of the PQ jury in 1991 and 1999. "In the face of radically shifting politics, something as esoteric as scenography became a luxury that not everyone could afford."

But PQ today is a mammoth beast that will not stop growing. Statistics alone tell a major part of the story. Of the estimated 23,000 visitors from 79 countries (a new record), 5,000 were registered participants and professionals; another 3,700 attendees were children. About 720 Americans had registered to attend. The U.S. was a major presence: In addition to the American delegates, Aronson was the first non-Czech to be appointed PQ's general commissioner. (Full disclosure: In addition to giving two lectures and speaking at an OISTAT History and Theory Commission symposium, I was a member of the Scenofest team and was on the editorial staff of the PQ daily newspaper. A supernova of youthful activity, Scenofest took over the central hall of the Industrial Palace, giving emerging designers, theatre-makers and student architects hands-on experience in large-scale projects.)

This year several parades, including a carnival of people costumed as characters from Aristophanes' The Birds, spilled out of the Industrial Palace and proceeded across the river Vltava to reach the main tourist hotspots of Wenceslas Square and Charles Bridge. This profusion of sessions and events combated the frequently static nature of the exhibits; it acknowledged the inextricable links between scenography and performance. Yet this very plethora made PQ an overwhelming, exhausting, jam-packed, stimulating, bleary experience. A crazy bazaar that shouts rather than murmurs, PQ has begun to emulate the model of a fringe festival.

"It's been a conundrum in the past that PQ has seemed to only provide artifacts of theatre productions without really showing the social and political context from which they came," says Tsu. It was also difficult to dutifully inspect and apprehend the hundreds of stage artifacts on display and glean how these elements had been translated onto the four-dimensional world of the stage in ways that would be sympathetic to the original meaning of the performances. In such a hothouse setting, lighting and sound suffered the worst. "At least, with the video, you can see the movement of actors and scenery," commented lighting designer Michael Lincoln, a curator of the U.S. exhibit. "In a photograph, you can capture a moment in a two-hour show. But still whatever the video camera reports, in terms of light, is not at all the same as what our own eyes would see."

PQ 2007, the Burning Man festival of world design, was a free-for-all. For the first time, national curators were left to their own devices, and the result was that the picture-postcard palace of stained-glass ceilings became the scene of a war of international promotion. The old guard tended to scorn the increasing trend toward fewer models and the lack of physical artifacts; the new guard stressed the greater importance of digital and virtual presentations, with some extremists (the Dutch pavilion was essentially a media bunker to conduct talks with designers) shoving display aside in favor of live interactions.

"The biggest change this year," noted Tsu, "was the amount of new technology, digital television and computer work that were either integrated nicely, like the Iceland exhibit, or was simply there for its own sake. South Korea only had plasma screens. Perhaps I'm old fashioned. I respond well to the tactile quality of design works where I feel the presence of the artist."

Aronson's opening remarks sounded like a call to arms. He inveighed against all forms of digital codes and electronic impulses, arguing that "stored information bears no relation to the original—it is neither a replica, nor simulacrum nor a transformation. A videotape or DVD in itself reveals nothing of its content to the human senses. Design that used to require light in order to be visible now often is a source of projected light. Not only does this alter consciousness and the way in which we perceive the world—I think we're undergoing a change as deep and profound as that of Europe in the Renaissance—but it further marginalizes the theatre." Elsewhere he asked rhetorically, "What will happen to our understanding of the world if the thing itself [i.e., the physical surface of the hardware] bears no relation to the real world?"

The battle lines between the forces of scenic materiality and the armies of encoded intangibility had been firmly drawn. Walter Benjamin's age of mechanical reproduction is now over; design has entered the age of digital information. Skirmishes were fought in symposiums, bars, cafés, restaurants, hotels, meeting rooms, maybe a few bedrooms. Many observers whispered their misgivings and disappointments with exhibitions that did not have a more enchanting theme to unite the disparate elements, or whose primary appeal is to theatre-design specialists. "In my opinion," commented the Polish actor, director and designer Pawel Wodzinski, "PQ should be rather an exhibition of art instead of an exhibition of craft."

Several distinct factions emerged among the juxtapositions of national pavilions. Traditionalists typically came from countries that had the financial wherewithal to ship boxes of models, design materials and objets trouvés to Prague and then assemble a carefully conceived museum stand. Among the edgier standouts were Mexico, Spain, Israel, Brazil and the U.K. A giant, rust-colored crescent metal sculpture, created by scenic designer Ralph Koltai and sculptor Stephen Pyle, dominated the good-looking British exhibit, which tackled the theme of "Collaborators." "We wanted to make a real piece of artwork that was not part of a set from a production in another place and time, nor an exhibition structure," says curator Kate Burnett. "Our exhibit takes a distinctive personal style, while still framing a representative selection of design works."

Proud Brazil represented itself as a black, steel-framed labyrinth space that paid tribute to the rabble-rousing words and disturbing imagery of Nelson Rodrigues, dubbed the "Brazilian Shakespeare" in Latin America. "To our mind, we went beyond retrospective," said curator Antonio Grassi. "After all, this playwright's body of work, the most staged in our country, is not very diffused throughout the world. Our goal was to change this, even if only a little bit."

The minimalist camps featured one set of designs (Chile, Romania, Peru) or gathered smaller displays for the sake of making sure that their countries were not left out (Norway, the Philippines). Peru's series of set designs, by the well-respected architect/sculptor Luis Longhi, was the very emblem of austere: four pieces of wood, with photos on two columns. "It is one of the best, one of the most simple," commented Jean-Guy Lecat, the French technical director, space designer and longtime Peter Brook collaborator. "The photos have the exact proportions. The way it is organized is very clever and elegant. You cannot imagine that they could do it any other way."

Some minimalists came in the guise of technologists, because their exhibits consisted only of videos. Norway impressed everybody, though not with an elaborate pavilion (its space was basically a box where the curtained entrance was flanked by two huge photos on the outside, and films and stills were projected on the white interiors). The curator Hilde Skancke Pedersen had alerted the world to the spirit of winter folly of the Beaivváš Sámi Teáhter, a small indigenous troupe near the Arctic; the sets and theatre for its two Sámi-language shows, The Lay of Volund and Hamlet, were entirely made out of snow and ice. (Zimmerman: "To make theatre out of ice—not only the play disappears but the theatre melts.") To keep the actors warm, the Sámi costumes had to be made out of reindeer skin and sealskin.

"I started out with the idea of building a big freezer room, with models and costumes placed on shelves of snow," said Pedersen. "In the end we had a very scant budget, and the minimalism was forced on us." Because the exhibit singularly focused on Sámi culture, the Norwegian government gave no financial support. "The Sámi Parliament did not fund this project because the Norwegian Culture Council did not either," Pedersen added.

Estonia, too, showed only a film—a video installation on three screens showing Theatre NO99's polymorphic 2006 production of Alfred Jarry's King Ubu on an abandoned military airfield with 12 actors and two camera operators. Those of us who sat through all 45-plus minutes of the film came away convinced that this might be the prototypical Ubu for the 21st century. But the enormously gifted designer Ene-Liis Semper did not even earn an honorary mention for best realization of a production. Germany and South Africa shared this prize instead for their respective shows.

As a form of evidence, video documents are superior tools because they permit the very possibility that the performance can be seen at all. Videos allow for careful analysis and preserve the means by which works may be restaged with accuracy. And, with the right equipment, they can be cheaply produced. However, the characteristics of video as a medium and an activity (in short, to watch video as video) seemed to score higher jury points when they were embedded within a larger hybrid environment—the prejudice against delivering stand-alone digital pavilions was so great among the old-guard. After all, one snarky designer said, one might as well stay home and look at the images on a computer.

Archetypal experientialists erected architectural structures that housed as many models and designs as possible. Japan's witty sushi bar served up maquettes on black ceramic platters. Gorgeously, Iceland depicted itself as an old greenhouse of creativity (designed by Gretar Reynisson for an actual show), its glass walls either shattered in places or opaque with fog and icky substances that necessitated entry to see clearly. Small DVD screens were discreetly situated behind the models, which hung in the air.

Theme-park experientialists, like the Forman brothers (the twin sons of the filmmaker Milos Forman), tucked away the assemblage of designs. The Formans' entertaining county-fair installation for the Czech Republic was a hit with children and kids-at-heart, because they could play in the makeup studio, see a three-minute marionette cabaret show or take a fun insect ride that ran through the center of the colorful stand. "I hope it's not a big mistake that our exhibit doesn't represent the Czech Republic in a grand style but, rather, in a smaller way," Matéj Forman told PQ Today. "It's like a personal encounter where visitors must slowly realize for themselves where these people come from." Nowhere did the Formans actually identify the country that put up this pavilion.

"I must confess," said the American delegation's Nic Ularu, "that sometimes the desire to impress with the concept of the installation is detrimental to the design works produced by the respective country in between the PQs. At this particular PQ, entire exhibits were reduced to a political statement."

Ularu was referring to Poland and Hungary, the iconoclasts who baffled, surprised and perplexed PQ visitors and traditionalists who had been weaned on thematic or chronological displays. Of the two, Poland risked being perceived as an aggressive reactionary with too much money to burn, because, for years, it had turned in bleak, forbidding-looking pavilions. Commented Lecat: "A lot of pavilions just want to show that their scenography union is very rich. The challenge of PQ is not that. Looking at Poland, you think they were going to sell a computer or a car. We should maybe give some limits: Don't spend too much money."

Poland's multimedia installation, "The Reality of Transformation/The Transformation of Reality," was the very antithesis of poor theatre: a giant, shining pink Plexiglas tower shaped like this Eastern European country. Inside this queer expo, built by Mirek Kaczmarek, were videos of politically oriented plays by a young generation of Polish writers, actors and directors who have been actively engaged in confronting their present realities. This installation wanted to toss the romanticized theatre of symbolic metaphor out the window. The contrast between the pink exterior and the white interior, Wodzinski explained, represented "the two aspects of our country—one is modernized and transformed, another one still mired in its own social and political problems." The colors alluded to the Polish national colors of red and white. "But the red color is a little gayish. This refers to recent critical comments by Polish politicians who are full of intolerance to homosexuals."

Hungary's idiosyncratic "Liliom in Baghdad" terminal took off from the Hungarian Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom, which "has become a national symbol for the Hungarian theatre," said the curator András Forgách. Several Hungarian set designers built a sort of ideological way station, a checkpoint at an airport, stadium or any public place under terrorist threat. Visitors had to stand in line with their assigned numbers, pass through a metal detector, were photographed and fingerprinted, and filled out identification forms. The turnstile was an imagistic pun to the American cooptation of Molnár's classic work, best known as the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel. Irony, polemics, gallows humor, the themes of openness/barriers, feelings of stasis/helplessness, the notion of designers confronting post-Communist forces of globalization—all of these were definitely at play. "I wanted to show the Hungarian sense of being eternally the go-between of cultures and still living in a linguistic isolation," said Forgách, adding that, for theatre artists in Eastern and Central Europe, the road of post-socialist transition has been marred with "contradictions, hidden agendas and retrothinking."

Contrarian, interventionist, avant-garde installations, like those of Poland and Hungary and Serbia (which toyed with movement through the use of lenticular photography), aggressively call into question the Old World modes and attitudes by which nations have staged their national identity through pavilions of scenic art. PQ is a meeting place, a global klatch, a transnational feast, a micro-universe, a display of passions, a designer's paradise, a babel of vocabularies, a vast university, a utopia, a commitment, an aspiration, a competition. Whether or not gold medals were the ultimate goal, PQ 2007 suggests that pavilions can be radical artworks unto themselves—spaces for new metaphors, vessels for glocal thinking and new subjectivities, incitements for designers to create new stages that sweep us into new states of awareness. Pavilions can be open enough to articulate or represent our present states of mind—not simply as retrospectives of craft well done, but organic design structures that dare to perform acts of transformation.

Randy Gener's lectures at the Prague Quadrennial were made possible by the Ford Foundation through the Institute of International Education.