With little time left in the city, I managed to spend the last hour buying a couple of souvenirs and a very nice bike seat for the new bike I have been working on as a birthday present! There was just enough time for a couple of last stops on the PQ trail. Firstly the exhibition of Edward Gordon Craig, who challenged the elaborately realistic theatrical design of the early 20th Century and pioneered the use of more abstract and mobile scenographic elements. The final event before heading to the airport was Doina's lecture, where the notion of what 'performance' might mean in an architectural context was challenged, and instead a proposal put forward for a 'social & political performativity', where the architecture is just one actor in the 'performance'. We were walked through examples of aaa projects in Paris, where the architect works together with local citizens as a agent for change, enabling those people to become agents themselves. Mapping was shown as way of representing both space and process. Critically, it was the architecture of the process here that was important, not necessarily the products or outcomes.
Very much like architecture, scenography is currently experiencing a difficult period - as a contested discipline and one in flux- with a dialectical erosion and expansion of the profession. As Arnold Aronson suggested, perhaps its not the profession that has changed but everything around it - the digital age has matured into a new culture of online-all-the-time, social connectivity and a saturation of imagery, which has fundamentally changed expectations of the audience. It was therefore interesting that the PQ adopted a new name and that this caused so much debate, and at the same time the key message of the architecture section was the theorists were challenging the nature of a theatre building while the architects were struggling to see where they fitted in.
There was a almost total absence of traditional dramaturgical examples; taking a text and composing it onto a stage. Instead contemporary practice suggests an increasing blurring between dramaturgy and the visual arts, performance arts, digital media, architecture and urban studies. In this context, by far the most interesting 'exhibits' were the new experiences - either installations or site-specific events, rather exhibition of costume/set design/theatre buildings from 'other' past performances. This shift perhaps reflects the altered digital society - where swithced-on audiences are always hectically chasing the next new experience. This became quite exhausting - possibly just due to the nature of being at a biennial / quadrennial type event, or possibly the nature of the city of Prague, where everywhere you look another type of social 'performance' is going on. Whether tourists or audience, the amount of '3rd-hand documentation' (Richard Gough's term for photo / videos of documentation) was staggering, with everything recorded via Smart phones or expensive-looking digital SLRs. At times it was a real shock how much people pushed to the front of a carefully crafted live scene in order get a clear photo without the back of anyones head in it!
Almost everyone referred in some way to the recent events in Tahrir Square and the Middle East (and social media in general) as 'performative' and therefore having some sort of fundamental impact on performance design, but no-one that I saw managed to articulate this connection in anything like a convincing manner. This was perhaps due to a lack of political assertion amongst the groups chosen to represent at PQ; the slightly underwhelming response to Doina's presentation was further evidence that theatre-designers are not necessarily inspired by the hard graft of social and political reality.
A warm day six began with a trip back to the Veletrzni expositions, as I was particularly intrigued by the Netherlands' walking trip '7Scenes'. This IPhone walking tour / treasure hunt / game was part of the new genre of 'performative user experiences' that are not theatre in the sense that they do not necessarily involve a live actor, but utilise mobile technology (phone, gps, bluetooth, 3G) to network 'live players' either together or to some central system. In this way players create their own experience from the instructions or narrative given by the creator of the performance. The freedom in space and time that these forms open up was demonstrated by 7Scenes, where players were guided on a route through the city using picture clues. The 'performance' was constructed around a set of old photographs, taken in Prague in the 1960s. When you arrived near the scene of one of the photos, a GPS trigger played a audio clip, instructing you to take a photo inspired by the original. As you couldn't see this, the audio offered a series of clues, such as 'take a self-portrait with your eyes closed'. The heightened awareness of being 'part of something' had a tangible impact in terms of framing the city - opening your eyes to things that otherwise might have seemed banal. Having said that, the mobile interface became a bit of a distraction. The nicest touch was that photos were automatically uploaded and printed in the exhibition space (alongside the 1968 ones), providing a fascinating insight into the multiplicity of ways that people looked at the city and interpreted the instructions.