-
We commonly take relevance as we find it, as presented, as if we and our audience shared a common conception of what counts as relevant, by whom the counting is done, and to whom the counting applies. Yet when we undertake to persuade a critical and open-minded audience of the relevance of a subject, we must resist effortless presumption of a pre-existing consensus as to relevance lest our failure to explain our conception of relevance impairs the credibility of our appeal.
Thus, with art, with drama, with theatre, with stagecraft in particular, we start generally with the proposition that the visual and acoustical context, the settings, the levels, lighting, colors, tapestries, angles, what is revealed, what concealed, what elevated, and when, what moves and what is fixed, what flows from the rhythms and pitch, the tenor and bass, serve to enable the dramatic presentation. Indeed, they are the presentation. We set aside the criteria for identifying the “point” or “intent” – the conventional meaning – of the presentation, and, more fundamentally, the subject of the presentation, for these will vary within the audience and, in any event, are inseparable from the modes or, in our case, the stagecraft. We accept the inevitability of the disparate criteria and points of view and inquire, more generally, how the stagecraft informs and communicates, even as it is part of, the point, intent, meaning. The feelings, moods, the experience.
The lighting, how does it illuminate, or conceal, or gradually reveal, a character’s mood and message or the development of the mood and message, or the inability to give expression to a message? The levels. Do they reinforce the authority or subservience of the character, or place her in the dark or light? Angles, new vistas, where and when we peek into hidden thoughts? And so it goes.
The power of stagecraft. The subtle appeals. Beware when stagecraft leaves the theatre.