Theatralia 1/2024: RARE Visions of Performance Design and Scenography is now online!

Our fruitful long-term cooperation with PQ has resulted in Theatralia becoming a platform for sharing thoughts and research dedicated to scenography, costume design, direction, and more. Theatre studies scholars, scientists from related fields, and practitioners have shared their research in the new issue.

The issue was edited by our guest editors Věra Velemanová and Šárka Havlíčková Kysová from the Czech Republic, and Aziza Kadyri from Uzbekistan. The editors invited contributions from Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Czechia, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Lebanon, USA/Canada, and beyond.

The Yorick section offers five studies by Nikolas Kanavaris, Renato Bolelli Rebouças, Natália Dário Mendes Barros and Cristiano Cezarino Rodrigues, Xristina Penna, Tereza Stehlíková, and Katja Vaghi, reflecting the authors’ experiences as practical scenographers who simultaneously develop scientific and pedagogical activities in the field. You will enjoy the discussion of the spatialities of Giorgos Patsas and Dionisis Fotopoulos; muse on the ways scenography is connected to such factors as climate, environment, ritual, and unconventional, non-theatrical spaces; get drawn back to the pandemic era when digital technologies helped artists expand the conception of scenography in a non-theatrical environment; follow the audience’s participation in scenographic work; and reconsider the perspective of multisensory perception and bodily experience in theatre art.

The Spectrum section presents Zsolt Almási’s innovative contribution on the methodology of analyzing the metadata available for theatrical productions; Tomáš Bojda’s comparative analysis of Czech radio and audiobook adaptations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita; and Kateřina Korychová and Martin Bernátek’s case study of the dramaturgy in the contemporary circus (nouveau cirque) performance Thin Skin (2022) by Czech acrobat Eliška Brtnická and her collective.

The Guest section addresses different socio-political issues from the perspectives of Ian Garrett, a Canadian designer, producer, educator, researcher, and associate professor of ecological design at the University of Toronto, and Hadi Damien, a Lebanese scenographer and educator at St. Joseph’s University and the American University of Beirut.

The Reviews section focuses on the PQ-nominated Ross Brown’s Sound Effect: The Theatre We Hear, reviewed by Eliška Raiterová.

For the Events section, the editors have invited two PQ exhibition curators, Andrew Filmer and Klára Zieglerová, to report on The Performance Space Exhibition and Fragments Exhibition at PQ 2023. Albena Tagareva focused on Bulgarian participation in PQ, and Athena Stourna described two projects dealing with the possibilities of incorporating excluded individuals – the children of migrants, and prisoners – through scenography and visual arts.

In the Archive section, we present an essay by Chilean scenographer and teacher Jhonn Álvarez, who describes the approach to costume design of the Chilean performance collective Complejo Conejo.

Take a closer look at Theatralia 1/2024 at: https://www.phil.muni.cz/journals/index.php/theatralia/index.

You can also purchase a copy through Muni Shop or directly from the Department of Theatre Studies (Gorkeho 57/7, 602 00 Brno, Building G).