Western Theatre Scenography, Anne Surgers

Theater only exists in the present moment of an encounter between two groups of people: the actors who bring the fiction to life and the spectators. Once the encounter is over, only traces remain: a text, images, memories. Scenography is one of the most legible of these traces of the present of this encounter. Through the analysis of numerous texts, drawings, plans, illuminations, paintings, and photographs, the author offers us an emblematic, rhetorical, or allegorical interpretation of the sets. These vestiges of time - where architects, stagehands, decorators, and painters, though not "scenographers," never ceased to collaborate in the perpetual invention of stage space - also carry a vision of the world. For theater, whether a religious ceremony, as in Greek antiquity and the Middle Ages, or entertainment, as in Rome or Italy during the Renaissance, is the expression of a civilization, an era, a way of thinking. Anne SURGERS is a professor at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie.