Scenographic Design Drawing: Performative Drawing in an Expanded Field

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This enlightening study explores the set design drawings for theatre and live performance, highlighting their unique qualities within the greater arena of drawing practice and theory. The latest volume in the Drawing In series, Scenographic Design Drawing encourages an interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of drawing with the inclusion of illustrations throughout. Scenographic design drawings visualize the images in the designers minds eye early in the design process. They are the initial design tool in the creative engagement with theatre, opera, dance, and non-text-based performance. It is, in particular, this body of drawings that is unique as both a performative and a theatrical representation of multiple worlds within the stage space. Sue Field illuminates this illustration process and identifies how these drawings have functioned and developed over time. Scenographic Design Drawing serves to satisfy an emerging global curiosity and a thirst for new knowledge and understanding in relation to the drawings executed by the historical and contemporary scenographer. This work addresses a critical research gap and shows how the scenographic design drawing continues to be a principal site of innovation, subjectivity, originality and authorship in theatre and live performance.

Reviews

Sue Field reveals the astute savant she is through this well researched examination of theatrical drawings. She has captured the zephyr that emerges when a designers marks on paper transmit to the viewer the soul of a theatrical work. Line by line and blotch by blotch, Field interprets a lineage of theatre drawings to generate a visual awakening in the viewer. Exploring the semiotics of imagery and layered revelation in the picture plane, Fields own drawings vibrate with compositional and graphic tension, where the viewer is asked to link metaphor, memory and meaning. -- Peter Cooke, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Dr Sue Fields passionate publication contains informed opinions and images about ideas, speculations and creative outputs of the scenographer whose often implicit knowledge is made explicit and known and then interrogated by the author. The result of this is a comprehensive account of the recent historical and theoretical insights into scenography and the value and potential of this very particular type of drawing. This book creates a new lens on the primacy of drawing and we begin to see something familiar yet excitingly different. -- Vaughan Dai Rees, UNSW, Australia
Sue Fields detailed study of scenographic design drawing presents a rich seam of analysis, shining a spotlight on the relationship between drawing, visualisation and embodied practice in contemporary design for performance. Referencing historical scholarship, the established tropes of scenography, and its reinvention in a post physical age, drawing is recast here as an autonomous thinking tool in the building of worlds. -- Paul Fieldsend-Danks, Plymouth College of Art, UK

Author Bio

Sue Field is a researcher at UNSW Art and Design, Australia, and a lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Australia. Sue has an exemplary history of working in the performing arts industry. She has extensive experience in scenographic design, lecturing and teaching, practice-based education and research, and is a practitioner in expanded drawing as an art practice. She has written scholarly papers for journals, national and international conferences, and has published academic book chapters. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 2018.