What is Scenography?

by Pamela Howard

Overview

The third edition of Pamela Howard’s What is Scenography? expands on the author’s holistic analysis of scenography as comprising space, text, research, art, performers, directors and spectators, to examine the changing nature of scenography in the twenty-first century.

The book includes new investigations of recent production projects from Howard’s celebrated career, including Carmen and Charlotte: A Tri-Coloured Play with Music, full-colour illustrations of her recent work and updated commentary from a wide spectrum of contemporary theatre makers.

This book is suitable for students in Scenography and Theatre Design courses, along with theatre professionals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138503052
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/25/2019
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	388
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pamela Howard is a Director/Scenographer working primarily in contemporary opera and music theatre. Her practice encompasses large- and small-scale productions, in major opera houses and unloved and forgotten spaces.

Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art (1958/9) she has had a full career as a theatre designer, developing a love of text and context with fine art. Since 2000 she has been the total creator of productions developing a scenographic language of beauty and simplicity on stage, where the performer is always ‘the carrier of the myth’. Sustainability and imaginative use of space are central to her practice. A compulsive observer of human life, she is never without a pencil and a sketchbook, notating the everyday, methodically storing her pencil sketches and reworking them on stage.

Pamela was awarded the OBE in 2008 ‘for Services to Drama’ and is International Chair in Drama at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama; Visiting Professor at Arts University Bournemouth; and Emeritus Professor at University of the Arts London (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design).

www.pamelahoward.co.uk

Pavel Drábek is Professor of Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull, UK. He specializes in Shakespeare and early modern theatre (Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre, edited with M. A. Katritzky, 2019), translation and adaptation, and theatre theory (Theatre Theory Reader, ed. David Drozd, 2017). He founded and led the Ensemble Opera Diversa, a professional Czech company, and writes and translates for opera, radio and theatre. He has worked with Pamela Howard since 2009.

Table of Contents

Part 1: 1 Space 2 Text 3 Research 4 Colour and Composition 5 Direction 6 Performers 7 Spectators Part 2: 1 Charlotte: A Tri-Coloured Play with Music 2 Carmen 3 The Excursions of Mr Brouček 4 Šarlatán 5 The New Jerusalem

Editorial Reviews

'Pamela Howard’s ground-breaking What is Scenography? was the first book to set out the bold new approaches to designing and directing for theatre which had dazzled audiences in Europe during the previous decades. It did us all a service by enriching the scope of how we understand the aesthetics of the stage... The lavish new materials (drawings, colour photos, new production analysis) included in this second edition make it even more essential for anyone interested in new developments in theatre.' - David Bradby

'To write, design, organize, manage, sculpt, educate, paint, research and above all, to passionately live the life of the performance is what Pamela has done throughout her whole career and, in one way or another, it is reflected here in this book: the universality of stage design, its elements and its soul.' - Ramon Ivars

'Gives an excellent sense of scenography and a window on a life in the theatre - which is fascinating. ...A superb book.' - Professor Arnold Aronson, Columbia University, USA

'Pamela Howard is the precise definition of what a scenographer of today should be: a multiple artist... Her vast experience with space, her rare and acute power of reflection, her workshops worldwide, her masterful control of drawing and painting and her ability to interconnect scenography with other artistic expressions qualify her to discuss with great authority what "space for staging" should be in the coming decades of this millennium.' - Jose Carlos Serroni

'Comprehensive and accessible, this ambitious guide includes a walk-in-wardrobe-full of insights and personal accounts... There are some informative and creative insights on the metaphoric meaning of furniture... and Howard takes a wonderfully integrative approach to scripts, looking at the physical shape of words. The book's production is similarly innovative... This is a rigorous and significant contribution. Invaluable for practitioners, students and the serious enthusiast.' - WhatOnStage.com

From the Publisher