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Scenography and Genius
Loci
Re-investing Public Space with Mytho-Sculptural Elements
for Performance
by Slobodan Dan Paich
Presented at the
Scenography International Prague Quadrenniale Research Conference on
Transliteracy—The
History and Theory of Scenography: interdisciplinary making and reading of
images in entertainment environments
Abstract
The traditional concept of genius
loci, spirit of place, has a number of
meanings ranging from the special atmosphere of a place, through human cultural
responses to a place, to notions of the guardian spirit of a place. In the
theater, this expresses itself in thousands of ways, from Giselle appearing in
the forest clearing to Beckett’s characters buried in the sand. This paper for
the 2007 Scenography International Conference in Prague will explore the
category of investing existing non-theater space with scenographic incidents for
a performance, or, more specifically, articulating possible sub-categories of
site-specific work that focuses on reinvesting the space with new meaning for
the sake of a performance, utilizing scenographic
elements.
Additionally, this paper will discuss some theoretical,
dramaturgical, and visual issues raised by the presence of scenography in public
place, with the intention of furthering dialogue between scholars and
practitioners in this emerging field. The paper’s conclusions will be more in
the form of open questions rather than proofs of any particular
thesis.
For reasons of theoretical
exploration, not as ends in themselves, the samples will come from the author’s
current and past body of work, drawing from lifelong practice and
experimentation in staging scenographic elements in public place for theater
performance. The examples used will be with the intention of eliciting thinking
on typology and the theoretical and practical implications of creating a theater
setting without a theater building.
Introduction
Place-Marking,
Place-Making
The provocation for creating
this paper is a search for connections between territory marking,
place-making, and performance
spaces. The series of open questions throughout the paper introduce the issues
without presenting them as rhetoric or conclusions. Here we start with a first
set:
Is
place-marking perhaps an extension
of tool making, husbandry, and crop development?
Does the awareness of a spirit
of a place, genius loci, begin with
marking territory?
Is territorial instinct common
to all biological beings?
What characteristics are unique
to human claims of territory?
Is the creation of communal,
gathering, ceremonial, and symbolic space a function or result of territorial
claims?
Just as tool making, shared
only with a small number of other animals, distinguished humans as unique
species, so does place-making. A
large number of archeological findings reveal the very early creation of
communal, shared, and characteristically symbolic places.
In this paper we shall explore
some scenic manifestations and instances of place-making from the history of
culture. As stated in the abstract, we will look at a specific contemporary
performance practice for the sake of appreciating and understanding the presence
of scenographic elements in public space.
Image 1.
Grating of a Street Shrine in Venice,
Italy.
In Venice there is a street
shrine (image 1). Every day someone places a fresh flower onto the grating of
the shrine. The simple protective wrought iron covering incorporates the emblem
of Stella Maris, Madonna of the Sea,
the patron saint of seafarers.
Image 2.
Commemorative Plaque for a Dead Solder, Northern Italy.
The second example (image 2) is
a place-marker in the shape of
traditional ancient Roman inscriptions: a twentieth century commemorative plaque
for a dead solder in northern Italy.
Image 3. A
reconstruction of an osilum positioning. The original is in
Museo Nazionale in Naples. Reconstruction and photograph by S.D.
Paich.
The third example (image 3) is
an osilum, a votive object placed in
trees by ancient Romans to invest or mark a place with a special meaning. This
image is of a reconstruction of osilum positioning. Another osilum, Pan
Leading Bacchantes (image 4) is an
osilum from Pompeii, a good example of one of these ancient objects. The hole
for hanging it in a tree is clearly visible above the three
women.
Image 4.
Osilum from Pompeii depicting Pan leading Bacchantes.
Invested Place–Creating a
Scene
The concept of the genius
loci was prevalent in the language of
garden design, documented in the seventeenth to nineteenth century. The
celebration and understanding of the power and uniqueness of certain places was
as old as humanity. To clarify and share the concept of the-spirit-of-a-place we
shall give some well-known examples:
Stonehenge, a prehistoric stone
circle in Britain, is famous for its alignment to the rising sun at summer
solstice and was likely a place of worship for more than 3,000
years.
Delphi, in ancient Greece, was
an oracle center that held an archaic carved stone—the
omphalos—naval of the world. It
appears to have been a ceremonial ground prior to becoming the center of the
cult of Apollo.
The ancient Egyptian pyramids,
held clearly in the cultural memory and awareness of the world today, have an
impeccable alignment to the four cardinal points. This alignment determined
their placement.
Lesser known but excellent
examples of places invested with significance are the ancient Egyptian temples
such as Edfu, dedicated to the ruler of the people: Pharaoh, as an incarnation
of Horus. Another example from Egypt is the temple complex at Dendera,
celebrated in the ancient world for its connection to Osiris.
Some of those temples are built
around calendar events, and their scenic elements capture rays of the sun and
most importantly the reappearance and helical rising of the star Sirius, which
determined the Egyptian calendar. In this paper, we are responding to these
calendar events and their relationship to Egyptian temples by looking at a
series of ambulatory rituals and their scenic elements. We shall explore that
further in the section devoted to the root metaphor of
theater.
Historically closer in time to
us we can find many significant examples of scenographic elements as
place-markers in the symbolic garden
structures of Europe. As we said earlier, the genius loci was a concept prevalent in the language of garden
design during the Renaissance, Baroque, post-Baroque, as well as Classicistic
and Romantic eras. Both Stowe and Rausham in England—and many Italian gardens
such as Villa D’Este at Tivoli or Villa Aldobrandiny in Alban hills outside
Rome—used the notion of the genius loci in their creation.
Marking a place–Permanently
or Temporarily
The other strong motivation for
this paper, which underlies all of the examples selected, is an attempt to read
images of performance and ritual in the broadest intercultural
sense.
The paper explores scene making
as part of a greater pattern of cultural continuity that expresses itself above
and beyond the instinct for survival. This subtle quality we will touch upon in
the final section.
Image 5.
Detail of painting Madonna with Saints by Piero della Francesca,
c.1470
In the spirit of broad
intercultural reading, the next six examples sited have characteristics of both
place-markers and imagination
triggers, carriers of elusive nonverbal
communication so typical of scenographic art. They are images that work directly
on audience’s inner imaginative function. Two of them exist in theater-like space typical of
Renaissance painting and engraving. First, a detail of the painting Madonna
with Saints by Piero della Francesca
(image 5), shows an egg suspended on a golden chain in a similar and evocative
way that osilums were hung in the trees and porticos of the ancient
world.
Image 6.
Alchemist’s Egg. Detail. [Maier: 1969, p.384]
The second example that evokes
a theater-like space is the alchemist’s egg (image 6), in a detail from an
alchemical emblem from Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens. Alchemical emblems such as these were designed to affect
the elusive inner imaginative function of the reader. Each emblem in the book had a musical
composition specially created for it, so the visual reading of images was aided
by words and music. Each emblem was also a scene composed with carefully chosen
mythological and fantastical images. The images were intended to work regardless
if the reader knew all the mythological references or not, and also addressed a
direct communication through images familiar to the audience without reading and
writing skills. In both examples, the egg is an imagination
trigger, employed for its instinctual
atavistic quality that may evoke a visceral connection to
origins.
Image 7.
Omphalos, the
naval of the world, at Delphi. Representation of the more ancient place-marker
kept in the inner sanctuary of the Temple of Apollo.
The ancients knew about the
scenic power of well placed objects. A great example of that is image 7,
representing the omphalos, the naval
of the world, at Delphi. The one in the illustration is a representation of the
more ancient place-marker kept in the inner sanctuary of the Temple of Apollo,
revered as tomb of Dionysius in pre-recorded times. That archaic stone carving
was the central scenic element at Delphi, and marked and determined the nature
of the place.
Image 8.
Co-existence,
an Artship Ensemble performance in Lafayette Park, San Francisco,
2005.
To introduce the
reading-of-images from contemporary performance practice, the following
integrates some of the ideas touched upon in the examples above.
Co-existence, performed by the
Artship Ensemble in San Francisco’s Lafayette Park, centered around fifty
egg-matrix scenic sculptures of
different sizes that were placed in and around trees on the half-acre
performance site (image 8).
As stated before, the ancients
understood the power of well placed objects. It could be restated that
communication through imagery has been highly developed and refined throughout
history and across civilizations.
The
aliveness-of-imagination and
reading-of-imagery were an important
part of cultures where only small number of people could read and write. As we
speculated earlier, the power of aliveness-of-imagery and the placement of
symbols was discovered early in the development of
cultures.
It is often difficult to
separate the organic and instinctual need of people to gather under a symbol
from intentional propaganda.
The two well-known examples of
this are the Kaaba (Ka’ba) at Mecca and the cave at Lourdes.
The cave at Lourdes was
launched when a fourteen year old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, saw visions of the
Virgin Mary there in 1858. The result of this visitation was a discovery of a
healing spring in the cave that has attracted believers ever since, many in
wheelchairs or on stretchers. These pilgrims crowd the cave for a taste of the
water from the spring with hopes for a miracle.
The Kaaba, on the other hand,
is the center of the Islamic world, and every pious act—particularly prayer—is
directed toward it.
The structure predates Islam.
It is believed to have been first built by the prophet Abraham and his son
Ishmael, although there are no archaeological findings to support this argument.
It is known, however, that the pre-Islamic Kaaba was rebuilt several times by
the tribes ruling Mecca. The pilgrimage to Mecca–the Hajj–is one of the Five
Pillars of Islam. It should be attempted at least once in the lifetime of all
able-bodied Muslims who can afford to do so. In this process the Kaaba is used
as a devotional focal point—a place-holder—which is a scenic signifier for religious
recollection.
In ancient Greece, crowds of
pilgrims made their way to the Delphic oracle at the Temple of Apollo or the
oracle of Zeus at Dodona. And once every four years, during the Olympic games,
the temple of Zeus at Olympia was the destination of worshipers from every part
of the Hellenic world.
For our purpose of exploring
aliveness-of-imagination and reading-of-imagery in the ancient Greek world we
will look at fertility festivals, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries celebrating
Demeter and Core-Persephone, as celebrations for the return of the nourishing
seasons. Also, festivals dedicated to Dionysus attracted large numbers of
pilgrims. There, fertility rites were celebrated as containers for experiences
outside everyday life, nurturing the need for symbolic function, which may have
evolved into the emergence of theater practice.
Image 9.
Ears of Wheat,
11.5 inches high. Made of gold. Found at Syracuse, c. 4-3rd century
B.C.
The example in image 9, the
gold ceremonial Ears of Wheat was
probably part of a rite of Demeter and Core enacted at Eleusis and a number of
other places in the Greek world. It was a potent, focusing scenic instrument
that united the participants—much like the image of the alchemist’s egg brought
out of its context and stood on end, or the hanging egg in Piero della
Francesca’s painting. The Ear of Wheat is an imagination trigger—it appears almost real, and yet is stylized by being
crafted in gold. The audience, recognizing that it was an artifice, was united
by an inward recollection—an evocation of the real thing. And in that way it
connected them, fulfilling the ritual purpose of the moment. This example
carries the great theater paradox: that representation sometimes evokes the
deeper connection to the represented then the raw object itself.
Image 10.
Detail of a Guardian Sculpture at Isola Bella, an island palace
on Lago Maggiore, near Stresa, Northern Italy.
The example (image 10) leads us
to the more specific place-marking
and phenomena related to the spirit of the place and its expressions,
inventions, and physicality. It also points to antecedents, traditional links,
and furthers our attempts at articulating notions of investing existing
non-theater space with a scenographic
incident.
The example is a detail of a
guardian sculpture at the late Renaissance/Baroque theater in the gardens of
Isola Bella, the island palace on Lake Maggiore, near Stresa, Northern
Italy.
A garden as a permanent theater
setting where a walk acts as an ordering element will play a part in this
exploration of scenographic elements in the landscape.
John Dixon Hunt in his
Garden and Grove–The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination
1600-1750 talks about the influence of
the Roman poet Ovid’s opus Metamorphosis on garden design in the Renaissance. The botanical
allegories and transformational resolution of the majority of the myth he
describes has inspired programmatic starting points for garden designers.
Inclusion of Mytho-sculptoral elements in the garden invested the place with
implied meaning and made them into a particular scene. John Dixon Hunt
writes:
Equally, features of the physical landscape are
explained in terms of its presiding deities, whose stories are often told to
validate some particular numen of a
territory…[Hunt:1986, p.42]
In the same chapter, entitled
Ovid in the Garden, he
continues:
One
particular example of a garden’s deliberate invocation of the Latin poem as at the Villa D’Este. Here in 1645 John
Evelyn found “a long and spacious walk, full of fountains, under which is
historiz’d the whole Ovidian
Meramorphosis in mezzo relievo rearly Sculptur’d.” These
terracotta plaques along the Walk of the Hundred Fountains are illustrated in
various contemporary engravings, although without any precision of subject.
Today these plaques are obliterated with moth and maidenfern. [Hunt:1986,
p.43]
Image 11.
Abandoned
Tempieto in
Stresa at the shores of Lago Maggiore in Northern Italy.
The ambiguous relationship
between naturally-created and
art-made is explored by Hunt in the
same chapter when he analyzes Ovid’s linguistic painting of scenery for his
poems:
…that
there ‘was an ancient forest which no axe had ever touched, and in the heart of
it a cave, overgrown with branches and osiers, forming a low arch with it rocky
walls, rich in bubbling springs’. That forming (Latin
efficiens) ascribes to nature the
same properties as those derived from an architect; such effects were readily
achieved in gardens, too. A little later in the third book Ovid explicitly
claims an artistry for nature (his own poetry, of course, being analogous to
that art its presentation of scenery). [Hunt:1986, p.43]
Further in the text, Hunt
writes:
Even
when the description is explicitly of a natural scene, Ovid’s palpable effect is
artificial. [Hunt:1986, p.43]
Image
12.Lago Maggiore Tempieto close up.
Hunt follows the chapter “Ovid
in the Garden” with “Garden and Theatre”:
The
organization of garden space to accommodate and present visitors with the
Ovidian narratives discussed in the previous section clearly recalls
contemporary theatrical experience in ballets, intermezzi, drame per musica, operas or masques. Especially when the Ovidian
incidents were animated by hydraulic machinery and thus moved in front of
spectators, often to the accompaniment of music as at Pratolino, the equivalence
of garden and theatre was palpable. Indeed, the relationship of theatre and
garden in late Italian Renaissance was particularly close and indelibly marked
the English reaction to the latter.
The
progress of that relationship need not concern us in detail. It is necessary
simply to rehearse what is by now established in theatre history, namely That
Renaissance gardens came to play a significant part in the search for an
appropriate Theatrical Space, a lieu théâtral or luogo teatrele. [Hunt:1986, p.59]
As we mentioned before, the
ancients used to invest or mark a space with numinous objects. An interesting
example we already cited was that of the osilum of the Roman world, related to
similar votive practices in Greece, Egypt, and the greater Mediterranean.
Osilums, through their Renaissance revival, are direct predecessors of roundels
in English Elizabethan gardens.
Roundels were arranged in
English gardens similarly to the stations of the cross in churches, but their
subjects were often classical myths and allegories imbued with Renaissance
sensibilities of New Learning and
rediscovery of antiquity and historical continuity.
There is a speculation among
musicologists about a possible connection of roundels and their programmatic
walk to the development of the musical form marked rondo, as we know it later in the time of Mozart and
Beethoven. The walk in the Elizabethan garden from roundel to roundel may have
bean accompanied by music, probably similar to the music accompanying the
Renaissance alchemical emblems we cited before.
Our study of roundels leads us
to the concepts of pre-designed or implied spatial and visual arrangements and
introduces us to the element of a walk, dance, or ritual—as well as the aspect
of duration, time, into the mix.
The journey from roundel to
roundel, when enacted in the Elizabethan gardens, perhaps revealed and
re-invested the space with the sense of its unique spirit, its genius
loci and its associated
themes.
Image 13.
Detail of Church Pavement, Ravenna,
Italy.
Image 13 opens up the
discussion and reading-of-images further, in the field of performance. The
importance of pavement designs—particularly of the labyrinth—as a matrix for
dance and dramatic enactment have been largely overlooked. Mosaics and floors
have often been studied as surface decoration. The markings carrying hidden
choreographic notation have been lost over time.
Image 14.
Reconstruction of a Labyrinth Dance by Lars-Ivar Ringhom in 1938.
[Kern:1982, p.405]
Lars-Ivar Ringhom, in 1938,
created the drawings presented in image 14, which connects the maypole to the
labyrinth and a dance sequence to the arrangement of ribbons around the
pole.
Hermann Kern, in his definitive
book Labyrinthe, Includes Ringhom’s
drawings as examples of an analysis of labyrinths, although he disagrees with
Ringhom’s interpretations.
Regardless of issues of
archeological confirmation that labyrinths were used with a pole or not,
Ringhom’s drawings are important in the exploration of scenic investments into
places, and they acknowledge possible visual and programmatic
readings.
Image 15.
Cathedral Floor from Southern Italy.
Images 13 and 15 show cathedral
pavements in Ravenna and southern Italy. The famous cathedral labyrinth at
Chartres, not illustrated in this paper, has provoked many published studies of
its possible interpretation. But for the sake of honoring and understanding
choreographic insertions as means of investing a place with a symbolic sense, we
shall spend some time with another famous pavement—that of the Presbytery at
Westminster Abby.
Image 16.
Plan of the Presbytery Pavement known as the Cosmati
Floor. Westminster
Abby, London. Drawing published in 1924 by the Royal Commission on Historic
Monuments.
The Presbytery Pavement at
Westminster Abby known as the Cosmati Floor (image 16), named after the Cosmati Brothers, the
Italian master builders who built it in 1268, is reasonably well preserved, but
it is only possible to see it once a year when the carpets and chairs are
removed. The floor design is 7.57m square. (The floor’s day of viewing is
advertised in Westminster Abby’s publications, but it takes some organizing.)
Some architectural critics and historians, such as Keith Crichlow, put out the
hypothesis that the pattern is a choreographic notation with steps and sequences
marked. According to Richard Foster, who reconstructed inscriptions on the floor
from historic records, part of one inscription reads:
SI
LECTOR POSITA PRUDENTER CUNCTA REVOLVAT HIC FINEM PRIMI MOBILIS
INVENIET….
(If the reader go carefully round all this he will
come to the end of the Primum Mobile [First Mover]) [North: 2004, p.211]
The other inscription around
the central circle, made of Egyptian onyx, reads:
SPERICUM ARCHETIPUM GLOBUS HIC MONSTRAT
MACROCOSMUM
(This spherical ball shows the Macrocosmic
archetype.) [North: 2004,
p.212]
In the bands around the circle
and the square are elements with an odd spacing and rhythm that hint of a
possible use beyond decoration. This pavement belongs to the international
language of architectural traditions. It belongs with the decorative and
ambulatory pavements in cathedral and ritual places similar to the throne at
Anagni Cathedral, built by the same Italian craftsmen.
Image 17.
Throne at Anagni Cathedral built by the Cosmati brothers.
Twelfth century.
Image 17, the throne at Anagni,
is an example of a scenic element infused with associations that invests a place
with a meaning that would not be there without it.
The
throne in question was plainly meant to imitate Solomon’s, for it had lions on
each side and the rounded back as did his. [North: 2004,
p.268]
Through evoking King Solomon’s
throne and biblical associations, the authority of the church was implied. Those
references were understood by contemporaries and subsequent users of the
cathedral. Anagni was a favorite place for popes over the centuries. It was at
this cathedral, and in the presence of the throne made by the Cosmati Brothers,
that Richard Ware was confirmed as the abbot of Westminster by the pope in the
twelfth century. Subsequently, he commissioned the Cosmati Brothers to create
the Presbytery Pavement for Westminster Abby.
Image 18.
The Ambassadors
painted by J. Holbein, 1533.
The twelfth century Cosmati
Pavement appears as a scenic element in the sixteenth century painting
The Ambassadors by Holbein. There are many discussions by a number of
authors about the similarities, dimensions, discrepancies, and reason for the
pavement’s inclusion in this double portrait. One thing most commentators on the
painting agree upon, in different degrees, is that the allusion was deliberate.
Like the rest of the painting, the careful arrangement of all the objects sets
the scene for us to appreciate the culture, achievement, and preoccupations of
the two men portrayed as representatives of their age.
The brief inclusion of this
painting in a paper about scenic elements—and the painting’s connection to the
Cosmati Pavement—demonstrates the way a significant allusion can be infused into
a scene for the sake of a reference to a place. The painting depicts a definite
moment in time and can be read on many instruments: 10:30 on April 23, 1533.
[Sejka: 1964, p. 181] Just as the throne at Anagni Cathedral refers to another
time and a mythical throne, the pavement in the painting links the ambassadors
to a twelfth century ambulatory symbolic journey. This stretching of context is
partly emphasized by the anamorphic skull on the painting’s floor, a mysteries
object, which could be only comprehended by walking around the
painting.
Here we can make a connection
back to the osilums and their descendants, the roundels, as markers of a
symbolic journey, a type of performance facilitated by scenographic elements
investing a location with a sense of place.
Root Metaphor, Tragoi,
Maenads, Satyrs and Companions of Dionysus
Now that we have established
that instances of scenic expression can be found and observed in unlikely
places, we can explore a possible root metaphor and motivation of theater
practice. Not only spatial arrangements and place-markings, but also the designs which include duration and
sequencing as possible choreographic scores, imply a symbolic journey. These
symbolic journeys can be gleaned from pavement decoration, sculptures and
paintings, or hinted at by topiary.
The examples from material
culture cited so far in this paper may prepare a way to ask some questions and
explore and extend the root metaphors of theater. The examples may also further
our discourse on the investment of non-theater space with mytho-sculptural
elements for a performance.
In searching for a root
metaphor of the theater phenomenon as we know it in the West, it may be
interesting to look at performances and rituals in the ancient world of the
Mediterranean, which was—and still is—a confluence of currents from Africa,
Asia, and Europe. As we shall explore, some buildings, events, and objects may
not only be sources of factual information, but they may also offer ways to
approach the reading-of-images of antecedents of contemporary theater practice.
Here we are not interested in
proving that any hypotheses are right or wrong; that is not the intent of this
paper. The fact that the theater, like ritual, has existed and persisted since
antiquity is the starting point for our engagement and
thinking.
We might consider pointing out
possible root metaphors of the theater phenomenon and, by extension, of scenic
presences in public places. To do that, it may be interesting to look at
festivals associated with the origins of theater.
A simplified summary of the
origins of Greek theater—compiled from many sources and cited in the
bibliography—can be expressed like this:
It is the worship of Dionysus
that the dithyramb and
drama owe their origin and
development. The dithyramb was a chorus of approximately fifty men and boys
assembled to honor Dionysus. It has been conjectured that, over time, one member
of the chorus began to sing separately from the rest, marking the beginning of
the emergence of drama in early Hellenic culture.
It is commonly accepted that
the grave of Dionysus was at Delphi in the innermost shrine of the temple of
Apollo. [Frazer: 1922, p.389] Sacred offerings were brought to the grave of
Dionysus there. In every second or third year (historians differ on this), and
after spending an interval in the lower world, Dionysus was born anew.
The most ancient representation
of Dionysus consisted of wooden images with the phallus as the primary symbol of
generative power.
In Attica, Dionysus was
worshipped at the Eleusinian mysteries with Persephone and Demeter, under the
name of Iacchos, as brother or as bridegroom of Persephone. At Delphi, Dionysian
festivals proceeded from the innermost sanctuary of Apollo to the neighboring
mountain of Parnassus.
As a god of the earth, Dionysus
belongs, like Persephone, to the world below as well as the world above. The
death of vegetation in the winter was represented as the flight of the god into
hiding from the sentence of his enemies, but then he returns again from
obscurity, or rises from the dead, to new life and
activity.
J. Fontenrose, in his Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and
Its Origins says this about
Dionysus:
Our
impressions of Dionysos have been the opposite: he has seemed to be a god of
springtime and summer, of harvest and vintage, of renewal of life and the
ripening of fruits; and so he often was. But he was also a god of death, a ruler
of the underworld, like Osiris, with whom he was identified. For there is a good
deal of evidence that links him with Hades and the dead. [Fontenrose: 1980,
pp.379-80]
The ancient historian Plutarch
in his On Isis and Osiris, says:
It is
proper to identify Osiris with Dionysos.
Further in the same text,
Plutarch records the conversation with the high priestess at
Delphi:
That
Osiris is identical with Dionysos who could more fittingly know than yourself,
Clea? For you are at the head of the Thyiades of Delphi, and have been
consecrated by your father and mother in the holy rites of
Osiris.
H. Jeremiah Lewis in his
website, Sannion's Sanctuary, sites
thirty-two quotations— including the two previously mentioned—on the shared
identities of Dionysus and Osiris. Here are four more:
There
is only the difference in names between the festivals of Bacchus [Dionysos] and
those of Osiris, between the Mysteries of Isis and those of Demeter. —Diodorus
Siculus, The Library of History,
1.13
Osiris, they say, was reared in Nysa, a city of Arabia
Felix near Egypt, being a son of Zeus; and the name which he bears among the
Greeks is derived both from his father and from the birthplace, since he is
called Dionysos. —Diodorus Siculus 1.15
Dionysos and Osiris are the same, who are called
Epaphus. —Mnaseas
Osiris is he who is called Dionysos in the Greek tongue.
—Herodotus 2.144
Osiris’s wife Isis discovered
the grains of wheat and barley, and Osiris taught humanity how to plant the
seeds and how to tend and water the crops; how to cut, harvest, dry the grain,
grind it to flour, and make it into bread. He showed them also how to plant
vines and make wine.
Image 19.
Ship of Isis
from the walls of temple on the island of Philae. [Description De
L’Egypte: 1809,
Vol. I, pl.11]
Our example 19 is of the Ship
of Isis from the walls of a temple on the island of
Philae.
The image represents the sacred
ship with collected elements of the dismembered Osiris before his reawakening by
Isis. To understand the central role this example of a scenic processional
object plays in this paper, we shall attempt to summarize the story behind the
ritual performance of the Ship of Isis. The story’s recapitulation is from
number of sources cited in the bibliography.
The Story of Isis and Osiris
Osiris was king of Egypt,
beloved by his subjects. His brother, Set, was jealous of his successes and
plotted against him. Set secretly obtained his brother’s measurements and had a
beautiful casket shaped in the form of a man made to fit Osiris. Set then
invited seventy-two people—mostly conspirators—to a celebration, and he invited
Osiris.
At the height of the
celebration, Set unveiled the casket and promised to give it to anyone who could
fit in it. Everyone tried, but only Osiris fit perfectly. As soon as Osiris was
in the casket, Set shut the lid and sealed the casket with molten lead. After
that, he threw the closed coffin into the Nile.
Isis was bereft at the
murder of her husband and searched for the casket throughout Egypt and other
countries.
She found it at the roots of
an ancient tree in a place far away from Egypt. After that, Isis brought the
coffin home for a proper burial.
While she was preparing for
burial rites, she hid the coffin in the rushes of the estuary of the
Nile.
As fate would have it, Set
found the casket while out hunting and in a fury, he chopped the body of Osiris
into pieces, and scattered them throughout the land of
Egypt.
Isis again had to search for
the parts of her husband. Eventually she found all the parts but the phallus,
which had been eaten by a large fish. By her power she reconstructed the missing
part, and produced it out of herself. She wrapped Osiris in bandages drenched in
beneficial herbs and breathed life back into Osiris's body. It was then that
Horus, the original Pharaoh, ruler and protector of people, was
conceived.
Scenic
Ship
Image
20.Sacred Ship of Isis. [Garrigue: 1851,
pl.470]
The representations of the Ship
of Isis in images 19 and 20 show typical uses of sculptural scenic objects in an
ambulatory performance in public space.
Once a year in ancient Egypt, a
beautiful scenic model of a ship was carried from the Isis Sanctuary to the
Nile. There, it was floated or transported to the other bank, and celebrated in
a series of ritual performances before returning to the mother temple. This
ancient Egyptian ritual performance continued as the Greco-Roman festival of
Ploiaphesia, also called Isidis Navigum. The Festival of the Ship of Isis celebrated Isis as
Goddess of the Sea. It persists as the Christian festival of Stella Maris,
during which a statue of Mary is carried on boats in Catholic countries. A
similar continuity occurs in Greece and other Mediterranean countries with a
Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) rite, where young boys send models of little boats
to the sea before Easter.
While studying Tarantella and
other women’s dances, the author of this paper inadvertently came to the
Dionysian festivals and other regeneration rites and celebrations. As we
described before, the central object of the Eleusinian Mysteries is of interest
to us as it was a minimal, portable, scenographic element with the power of
investing and marking the place and signaling its spirit. The Eleusinian
Mysteries of Demeter and Core/Persephone are very similar to the tri-annual
celebration of the return of Dionysius.
In summing up our thinking
about root metaphors in the western theater tradition and its scenography, we
present the following open questions:
Whose grave was it in the
sanctuary of Apollo’s temple at Delphi? Was it Dionysus? Osirus? or perhaps
Python?
Was the sanctuary at Delphi
build around a more archaic ritual center?
How do we understand the
paradox that Dionysus—a relatively young god—has such ancient and archaic roots
whose temple is centered around an even older scenic
element?
Did the festivals of Dionysus
continue the rituals of mourning and jubilation over the seasons’ return from
some older times?
How do we interpret accounts of
ancient authors and historians—and speculations by a number of scholars—about
the association of Dionysus with Osiris and Demeter with Isis?
Was the core revelation of the
Eleusinian Mysteries akin to the Isis celebrations, particularly to the ritual
procession of the Ship of Isis, Isidis Navigum?
Are the
tragoi, the goats, of the dithyramb
(the chorus of approximately fifty men and boys assembled to honor Dionysus) and
the Maenads (the cohort of women and girls amid the mountain at night) a part of
the same festival origins?
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To link the ancient material
with contemporary practice, the following images (image 21) were projected while
the story of Isis and Osiris was presented in Prague at the 2007 PQSI
conference. The images, although unrelated in subject matter, are similar in
some way in the usage of a prop. Here it is an attempt to integrate past and
present through juxtaposition.
Image 22.
Publicity image, collaboration of Slobodan Dan Paich and Sabine Grande, for
Artship’s production Same River Twice. 2004.
Image 23: Any ship or boat,
just by itself, is an experience to behold—even without any theatrical
intention—particularly when the vessel is of an unknown type to the spectator.
The example here is of one such vessel: it is an image of a
gajeta, an ingenious boat from
Komiza, an Adriatic island off the coast of Vis, Croatia. As you see, the gajeta
has a remarkable scenic quality.
Image
23.Life-size operational reconstruction of Gajeta Falkuša. [Photo from an article by Dr
Joško Božanić, Brodarski Institut, Zagreb. 1996.]
Image 24 documents the annual
burning of an old gajeta boat in Komiza, at the feast of Saint Nicholas, the
patron saint of mariners, seafarers, and children. It is an ancient ceremony,
adopted by the local Christian church. The festival consists of a single scenic
element and takes place annually during the shortest days of the year—around the
same time of the year that the Greater Dionysia were celebrated in pre Christian
times. The boat burning is an expression of a sacrifice and purification in
anticipation of the return of longer days, fecundity, and a plentiful harvest
from the sea.
Image 24.
Burning of an old Gajeta Boat. Komiza. [Photo from an article by
Dr Joško Božanić, Brodarski Institut, Zagreb. 1996.]
The images here are from a
small UNESCO-sponsored book describing the reconstruction of the ship and its
journey from Komiza to Lisbon for an international exhibition. Dr Joško Božanić,
playwright, scientist, boat builder, and citizen of Komiza, was the author of
the articles in the UNESCO booklet and a member of the
expedition.
Image 25.
Kaledari in Friuli, Northern Italy. Photo by Pellis.
[Ciceri: 1980, p. 119]
Before we turn to a few
examples of contemporary re-investing of public space with scenographic and
theater elements, let us look at some ritual ambulatory performances of the
Kaledari. This winter ritual performance is widespread west from Alpine regions
in Europe throughout the Balkans, and across the Pannonian Plain; traces of it
can be found in Czech, Polish, and Russian territories to the north, and
Romania, Bulgaria, and all the way to the Black Sea to the east. The ritual
consists of costumed men wearing head masks of a goat/stag/devil type who are
covered in sheepskins with the wool on the outside. They are so covered and
disguised that they are hard to recognize as individuals. The Kaledari are
intended to be frightening to malignant spirits and help rid their community of
potential difficulties. In some regions one of the men is dressed in a woman’s
clothing, and his performance allows for bawdy, erotically forward, procreative
gestures without ruining a maiden or matron’s reputation. The Kaledari go from
place to place and knock on all the doors. The moment they arrive or are heard
nearby, the place is transformed. With bells attached to their limbs, they dance
around the house, moving furniture and fighting invisible spirits with wooden
swords. There is humor, as everyone knows that it is play. The band of Kaledari
men are beautifully bonded, and young boys cannot wait to be big enough to be
admitted into the performing group. It all happens on and around the shortest
day in the year and it is another example of a festival of regeneration where an
everyday routine is disrupted by scenic elements and a performance/ritual.
Through humor, dressing up, music, and noise, the Kaledari may be a catalyst to
dispel collective fears and reconfirm communal closeness.
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For the moment, we shall leave
ancient and traditional examples and describe and reflect upon a number of
contemporary examples initiated and carried out by the author of this paper over
a period of approximately thirty years. Not knowing anything at the time of the
Kaledari’s roaming traditional performances, our first project, illustrated in
images 26-28, was also ambulatory. A sculpture was mounted on a track that moved
every two weeks to another location in Liverpool during the summer of 1969.
Twelve artists, dancers, actors, and volunteers animated them with household
vacuum cleaners attached to their backs. Meanwhile, below the sculpture, stories
were told, read, and enacted throughout the day.
The point of the inflatable
sculpture and the track—temporarily infusing an unexpected meaning into the
urban spaces it visited, does not need to be labored over. The project,
commissioned by the Great George’s Community Cultural Centre in the Liverpool
docks, England, is mentioned for the sake of the development this
paper.
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Images
29-31. Scrap Metal Sculpture Great George Community Cultural
Center. Liverpool, England. 1968.
The scrap metal sculpture in
images 29-31 was also created in Liverpool the year before as a climbing
sculpture with an accompanying puppet show. The audience, mostly children, sat
and played on it while watching the show. The puppets and the play were made by
older children and the artist in a very short time. The sculpture—looking
something between a sports car and a steamroller—offered multiple opportunities
for play. Its shape seemed to inspire endless imaginary journeys. The fact
that it did not move provoked
vigorous imagining.
(In an attempt to hint at
possible thinking of typology, we will underline the summaries of the projects
to follow, as above.)
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In 2005, Artship Ensemble was
invited by friends of the DiMiaggio Park and Playground to create a piece for
the reopening of a newly refurbished public pool in the North Beach district of
San Francisco. The Ensemble responded with the staging of the Persephone Myth,
enacted in and out of water and at different edges of the pool. The
commissioning group and the Artship Ensemble were interested in creating
culturally significant work that was both an art and public commemoration piece,
liberated from the clichés of public openings and yet being an element of one.
The intention was to engage the imaginative, poetic side of the diverse
neighborhood, give an unexpected but approachable performance, and mark the
occasion with a memorable, once-in-a-lifetime event. Fabrics were the main
scenographic elements for that purpose. Some of the fabrics had hundreds of ping
pong balls sewn into them by volunteers, affording floating scenic elements on
the surface of the water. Other fabrics were allowed to trail from the edge,
through shallow parts of the pool, all the way to the bottom of the deepest
part. Some extremely large off-white silk fabrics were covering poolside
furniture and objects. Although the top of the fabric was dry and sensitive to
breezes and movement, the lower ends plummeted straight to the bottom with the
water’s weight. Hades performed at one end, surrounded with life-size sculptures
of human figures covered with semi-transparent black synthetic silk. Clad in a
generous black toga that was decorated with silver grommets, he beat a large
dark drum. On the other end of the pool, in the Upper World of Persephone’s
mother, bits of color contrasted and harmonized with the general off-white of
that area. The performance took place along three edges of the pool while the
audience sat or stood at the larger forth side.
The majority of the
performance’s color was in the costumes: A figure in an orange dress and
pantaloons characteristic of Hindu and Muslim women’s clothing entered the water
fully dressed as pilgrims do in many cultures. This reference was not lost on
Californian audiences. Persephone’s mother, still wearing black, celebrated her
daughter’s return with a long red cloth she danced with. Persephone and a
welcoming childhood playmate were
wearing white, but she also wore an open wrap-around green and blue pleated
skirt. The African American narrator who mingled with three musicians wore a
simple regal beige robe. The music, specially created for the occasion, was
played on cello, Caribbean steel drum, and accordion. The juxtaposition of
modern pool architecture, the unexpected use of scenographic fabrics, and the
restrained, conscious use of color in the performance costumes created an
atmosphere which was very similar to images that manifest in the dreaming
process.
The amount of detail included
about the performance here is to help us look at image-making
and interdisciplinary
image-reading in connection to
temporary place-making for a
performance. This leads us to an open question that may be central to this
paper:
Is any theater setting a nexus
for the inner world of human psychology, where the intangible realm and the
material world can coexist and unite in a memorable experience for the audience?
In discussing the scenographic
characteristic of place-making—both
in a performance setting and as an imaginary space—another sub-theme emerges:
the biological needs of the human nervous system for fantasy and involuntary
image-making.
After seeing the performance of
Artship Ensemble’s Persephone myth performed in the swimming pool, Dr. Paul A.
Pangaro, a theoretician of conversation theory and cybernetics and a contributor
to discussions on artificial intelligence, wrote this about it:
….my
scientific training holds that our nervous system has as its fundamental purpose
to maintain SYNCHRONIZATION with our environment. This started with pure physical
survival, of course, but generalizes to language and culture. This encompasses
evolution of all kinds. The homeostatic processes of the body are
synecdoche, so to speak, for our living
together in the world…
What is the role of cultural
experience, theater experience, and unique scenographic place-making in this
characteristic of the human nervous system to continuously adjust and respond to
the environment?
D. W. Winnicott articulates a
response in his writing on the transitional object and transitional
space:
The
place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the
individual and the environment. The same can be said of playing. Cultural
experience begins with creative living first manifested as play. [Winnicott:
1971, pp. 96-97.]
In another place he
says:
It is
in the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between
people—the transitional space—that intimate relationships and creativity occur.
[Winnicott: 1951, pp. 98-99.]
In the scope and expertise of
this paper we are only able to point to the issues raised by the existence of
temporary scenographic elements in the outer environment. We approximate their
impact on spectators through studying their feedback. As of yet we have not
carried out a systematic study of the relationships of poetically created
imaginative objects, situations, or places in relationship to the continuous
image-making process of our nervous
system. We know from experience and literature that we compensate and help
ourselves every night, through a dreaming process full of images. How we read
them (if we remember them) is an open question. Can we read the images created
in art, performance, and entertainment by the same means? Would a cultivation of
performance literacy and
multidisciplinary transliteracy help
deepen our response and understanding of the function of cultural
needs?
Typology and Sub Categories
of Site-Specific Performance
The examples so far, and
examples to follow, are included with the intention of continuing and eliciting
our thinking on typology, and the theoretical and practical implications of
creating a theater setting without a theater building. Examples 39 and 40 are
instances of a simple redefining of a place with a scenic object and performers.
It is different from the next example, image 41, of a site-specific project
related to the site, inspired by—and only possible on—that site. The
Mirrors in the Forest Project
is possible in any forest with any amount of mirrors and performers.
What name or definition would
we give to this type of scenic intervention?
Images
39-40. Mirrors in the Forest, violinist Edvin Schmitz,
singer/performer Mira Musich, 1989.
Image 41.
Growing Up Invisible. Site-specific performance in the
stables of an historic house. Commissioned by Pardy Home Museum.
1995.
In 1995, Artship’s performance
company, then called the Augustino Dance Theater, worked closely with the Pardy
Home Museum (home of Mr. Pardy, an early Governor of California). The two
entities collaborated in creating a performance about life in the stables behind
the Governor’s house. It was a performance based on oral histories of house
owners and their servants collected by the museum. The audience sat on specially
made pews stained the same colors as the old stable’s wood. Musicians hidden in
the tiny attic of the stables oozed music, which came muffled through the
rafters. The musicians were discreetly, almost invisibly, conducted from the
back of the audience through closed circuit television. The big house was also
wired for sound, so from time to time, a recording of the awkward piano practice
of the governor’s little girls, long deceased, could be heard. Every inch of
space and every moment was linked to the history of the place. It was an
embodiment of the site-specific genre.
Image 42.
Icarus. Augusto
Ferriols in solo performance on the tower of the Moorish Castle at Gaucin.
Southern Spain. 1990.
Loosely based on the Icarus
myth, the performance documented in image 42 was conceived with verticality and
the space of air and sky in mind. People present looked up to see the event. The
unspoken poetic notion was to be in relationship to the vastness of space hinted
at by the distance of the figure of the performer. The mythological element was
both a communication device and a link to the atavistic myth-making aspect
within the spectator. It is a site-inspired, but not necessarily site-specific, mythological
association. The figure with wings is a scenic theater signifier acting to
thematically reinterpret the site.
Image 43.
Windfall of Memories. A Collaboration of Artship and
number of local and city agencies to revitalize amphitheater in Arroyo Viejo
Park. Oakland, California. 1996.
Image 43 is from a performance
at Arroyo Viejo Park in East Oakland. There, an amphitheater was built in late
1930 as a WPA Project—the same program that built the Golden Gate Bridge. This
amphitheater was popular until 1960 when it became a nexus of crime and illegal
activates. A coalition of neighbors invited Artship artists to animate city
agencies to repair the amphitheater and support a series of daytime performances
in the summer. Unlike the Persephone myth project, a
community
commissioned art piece, at Arroyo,
it was important to give voice to and represent as many people as possible.
Hence the image of the reluctant performer, overcoming his shyness by hiding
inside a scenic element. His commitment to help reclaim the space overcame his
perception of his awkwardness. Joan Maeda, the stage designer of New York’s La
Mama Theater, worked with the Artship artists, interns, and volunteers to create
the scenic elements for the show. The author of this paper worked to elicit
memories of all kinds from the community and let them flow through the
performances. Reclaiming Public space for community use was a main driving
force of the project. It was more of a people-specific then a site-specific
performance.
Image 44.
Rondo Dance.
Augusto Ferriols. Tuscany. 1991.
Rondo Dance was a signature dance of the Augustino Dance Theater,
the original name of Artship’s performance company. Conceived and choreographed
by Slobodan Dan Paich for and with Augusto Ferriols, image 49 shows the
performance given on the terrace of an 400 year-old house in Tuscany, with the
audience seated inside. The dance was inspired by three strands: first, a
painting of Ganymede with a hoop from an ancient Greek vase; second, roundels,
osilums, and other life-cycle
allegories in ancient gardens; and third, the music form of
rondo. Rondo is a type of composition in which one section recurs
intermittently. By Mozart’s time, the rondo had evolved into a standard pattern
and was much used for the last movement of a sonata or concerto. A simple rondo
is built up in the pattern of ABACADA, where A represents the recurring section
or rondo-theme and B, C, and D
represent contrasting sections or episodes. The rondo theme can undergo some
variation in its reappearances.
Image 45. Rondo Hoop as a Proscenium. Augusto