In my series I have been writing over at Isaac’s blog I said the following statement, “A good design is the visual expression of a particular reading of the text.” I think it would be important to more closely examine that sentence because it contains, so far as I see, the very essence of what it is that a designer does.
I have never encountered a single definitive reading of a text. This is true of theatrical works as well as any other text one might encounter. In fact, it is the particular readings that give a text its life. For what drives a text through history is the tension it encounters through engagement with differing historical contexts. Every text contains within it the possibility of truth, or the seed necessary for the revelation of truth. As we read a text, we are looking at that text as a point from which we can extract meaning, understanding and truth. Design, is another reading. A reading that manifests visually.
What we do as designers is create a world in which the play happens. This world is made up of structures and objects, clothes, light and sound. As we begin to explore the text we discover that the literal expressions in the play are not always the most true to the story. Prospero’s island, for example, is as much an island of the mind as it is a literal physical place.
While there may at times be overlap between the literality of the setting and the emotional truth of the text, quite often the two diverge rather soon after we begin our reading. The psychological and emotional worlds inhabited by the characters do not necessitate coexisting in a world that we immediately find understandable. It is more often the case that what is true for the text does not wholly adhere to the rules and forms of our daily world.
What we are looking for in the construction of a world for the play is a faithfulness to the emotional dynamics at play within the text. Of first interest to us are the various relationships, how they move, change, get born and die. The fact that The Tempest takes place on an island is more about an expression of the idea and complex of feelings that surround social isolation, ostracism and banishment. What we concern ourselves with is a visual expression of that complex of ideas and emotions first. Should such an exploration lead us to a literal place that would look much like you or I would understand an island to be, so be it. But such an outcome should never be presumed.
In Early Greek Thinking Martin Heidegger begins a discussion of the Anaximander Fragment, one of the oldest textual fragments extant in the western philosophical canon. He presents two different translations of this text, commenting that one is more literal than the other. He then goes on to say “[W]hen a translation is only literal it is not necessarily faithful. It is faithful only when its terms are words which speak from the language of the matter itself.”
This is a very powerful and clear expression of what I am speaking to here. While one could certainly set The Tempest on a facsimile of a “real” island, we would not necessarily be doing justice to the heart of the text. The literality of that space does not “speak from the language of the matter itself.” The matter being that complex of ideas and emotions outlined above. Rather it speaks from some generalized notion of what an island is, but in no way approaches the specifics of our island.
For the island of Prospero is no mere terra firma set against the seas. Rather it is like a being itself, alive with spirits and magic and all manner of things foreign to our experience. To say that such a place of magic and wonderment is identical to a location one might find in a National Geographic is to fail the text by leaving it behind for some preconceived notion derived from experience outside the text itself.
Such a failure to engage the text occurs all too often and we see it in art, or attempts at art, all the time. It happens too often in the real world where our search for an idea clouds our perception of what is. That question has been explored in a great many ways throughout the history of art and yet it keeps coming back. What is the real?
From as far back as Plato the Western tradition has been questioning the actuality of appearances vs. some more fundamental reality. When engaging with a text it is necessary to stay rigorously bound to the matter of the text itself or else our work becomes like a boat without a sail, merely adrift upon the waves of thought with nothing to guide it to its intended destination.
As we read a text it is important, if our goal is truth, to create a work the result of which is the revelation of the essential character of the text. In this working we are not creating a definitive expression as the text itself allows only certain expressions to be revealed within any given historical context. That said even if a definitive expression is worked for a particular historical moment, as time passes that piece becomes a piece of history and loses its definitive quality.
Textual identity shifts over time as the surrounding cultural context changes. In performance not only are we dealing with a text that is shifting against the backdrop of historical occurrences, but we are engaging with it in the context of a performative medium that provides new insights, questions and perspectives about that text as text and as performance.
Our visual reading of the text must be an attack upon the literality that too often fails the emotional reality. If a text is to keep moving through history in a relevant manner, we must serve as agents of action interpreting that text within our current historical situation. Art is born from the deepest probing of truth. Heidegger says in The Origin of the Work of Art, “Art is Truth setting itself to work.” As artists then, it is incumbent upon us to search tirelessly for the authentic truth contained within the text.
