{"id":689,"date":"2008-11-24T10:09:36","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T10:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp\/2008\/11\/goodbye_to_all_flat.html"},"modified":"2008-11-24T10:09:36","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T10:09:36","slug":"goodbye_to_all_flat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2008\/11\/goodbye_to_all_flat.html","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye to all flat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this autumn, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon came out in front of the curtain at Sadler’s Wells in London to introduce his company Morphoses<\/a>. (Why don’t more artistic directors do this? It’s totally endearing, and gives an audience who hasn’t had a chance to read the programme notes a few reassuring direction signs.) Talking about his new work, Commedia<\/em>, Wheeldon explained that the satiny pierrot costumes and silky cartoon backdrop (designed by Isabel and Ruben Toldeo) had all been carried to London by the company members, folded away in their luggage.
\nIt was an attractive image, one that fitted Commedia<\/em> and its suggestion of an itinerant troupe of players. Pack up the luggage, tra la la, as Sondheim’s actress heroine sighs in A Little Night Music<\/em>. Hi-ho, the glamorous life.
\nBut it’s really only ballet that could get away with this sort of portability. In Britain and western Europe, we’ve been living through an age of statement design for theatre and opera. Big objects, bulky with quirk or portent, have been familiar intrusions on the stage. Imagine trying to squeeze the vast leathery rhinoceros from the recent Royal Court production of Ionesco’s play into your hand baggage, or cramming the portentous revolving door from the National Theatre’s Oedipus into an overhead locker. Other productions create entire environments – like Tom Piper’s rusting permanent set for the RSC’s Histories cycle (England as a machine running down), or site-specific projects in which the building (an abandoned office block, a burger bar, the British Museum) is the pull.
\nIt has been a while since stage design was closely allied with painting and the foldable branches of the visual arts. I’ve been reading a fine survey of the career of British writer, illustrator and cartoonist, Osbert Lancaster, who was also a successful stage designer in the mid-20th century. Cartoons and Coronets <\/em><\/a>is written and selected by James Knox, and accompanies an exhibition running at the Wallace Collection <\/a>in London until 11 January, and the section on his stage work makes clear the connection between paper and proscenium. Lancaster was a master of the largely lost art of the backcloth – the book includes appetising views of Algiers, Galicia and a fudge-coloured Florence for All’s Well That Ends Well<\/em>.
\nMore on Lancaster and 2D-design after the click:<\/p>\n


\nLancaster was a celebrated architectural illustrator and historian, and brought the same qualities to his stage work: impeachable period detail with a humorous gleam. He was inevitably pressed into service for comedy – notably by the Old Vic (Sheridan and Shakespeare), Glyndebourne (Falstaff <\/em>and The Rake’s Progress<\/em>) and Sadler’s Wells Ballet (Copp\u00e9lia <\/em>and Ashton’s La Fille Mal gard\u00e9e<\/em>). His backdrops create a heightened reality, but not too heightened – Knox notes Lancaster worrying that his 1955 Falstaff<\/em> sets might resemble the currently fashionable ‘Stockbrokers’ Tudor’: ‘the more correctly period the furnishings of Ford’s house, the stronger the feeling that the Southern Electric will whisk him to the Stock Exchange first thing on Monday morning.’
\nLancaster’s costumes too are distilled versions of his cartoons and illustrations, with their keen eye for fashion minutiae. After seeing All’s Well <\/em>at the Old Vic in 1953, Cecil Beaton wrote to congratulate him, adding ‘clever of you to make everyone look like one of your drawings.’
\nBallet needs to clear room for dancing, so the backdrop clings on. Even here, choreographers and artists explore other means of playing two-dimensional design against palpable human bodies. Infra<\/a><\/em>, Wayne McGregor’s new piece for the Royal Ballet, is backed by an electronic screen displaying Julian Opie’s moving stick figures, while To Be Straight With You by DV8<\/a> pulls out all kinds of whizzy graphics.
\nHave painterly backdrops gone for ever? It’s become rare to see a really mouth-watering flat – the best example that comes to mind is Pinocchio<\/em>, designed for the studio theatre at the Royal Opera House by filmmakers the Brothers Quay. This was choreographer William Tuckett’s dark version of the classic tale, and Stromboli’s circus for naughty truants was backed by a stuff-of-nightmares curtain. It brandished a leering washed-out clown, head askew, with tubular arms reaching out to the wayward little scamps. As the kids turned into donkeys, the curtain pulled back to reveal a glue factory. Perhaps we’ve lost our belief in sunny flat enchantment; for the Quays, a flat design encapsulates a perilous nostalgia that’s just waiting to bite us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this autumn, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon came out in front of the curtain at Sadler’s Wells in London to introduce his company Morphoses. (Why don’t more artistic directors do this? It’s totally endearing, and gives an audience who hasn’t had a chance to read the programme notes a few reassuring direction signs.) Talking about his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-689","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}