Stage Design is design for action and contains décor, side-scenes and properties, as well as costume and grease-paint. The one responsible for this is the Stage Designer, who together with the Director, creates the best conditions for the actors to perform in.
The stage, where the play takes place, could be either in a theater, an auditorium, or in another sort of room, at another place, inside or outside, and where the place itself inspires to theatrical performance and expressions. This type of theater is called Site-specific theatre.
Two examples of this is the workshop ”Skogen sjunger” (eng. ”The forest sings”) and the outdoor stage-setting ”Odysséen som Nausikaa fick höra” (eng. “The Odyssey which Nausikaa heard”). In ”Skogen sjunger”, sound in proportion to place, from which the sounds arose, was investigated. In ”Odysséen som Nausikaa fick höra” the Director and the Stage Designer used the landscape and wanted to recreate different places, in the play’s tale, which the audience should meet in the landscape. The tale and the landscape should complement and strengthen each other either figuratively, emotionally or spatially.
As there is Site-specific theatre there is also Site-specific art. The artwork is then created for a certain place and the artist incorporates the place when he or she plans and creates.
The Site-specific theatre and art, when the place is present in the performance or the artwork, and inspires to the expressions, is what have interested me most because it includes the landscape in the Stage Design.
As the place inspires to the Site-specific theater and art, the English billowy landscape and the wild nature inspired to the English landscape parks. In the same way I want, as a Landscape Architect, learn to listen to the place, to take in its spirit and let it be present in the design, either by working with contrasts or by following the spirit of it. It could be about listening to the sounds of the place, to se and use the forms, the colours the patterns of movement that already exist and about planning for plants in the already existing habitat instead of tearing it down and rebuilding it. It c...
