On the Ontology and Afterlife of the Scenic Model

Michael Schweikardt

One wants to live, even at sixty. - Sorin in Anton Chekov’s The Seagull

Abstract

For scenic designers, the building of a scenic model is not merely a component of one’s practice—it is an act of creation. Handcrafted from pieces of this and that, the model’s purpose is to imagine whole worlds in miniature that in turn inspire fantasies and daydreams. But when this purpose is ignored, and the model is regarded as simply a tool for communication, it is seen as having outlived its usefulness and discarded. The life of the scenic model, like any life spent in the service of art, is worthy of more consideration. We must imagine for it a better afterlife.

Introduction

The scenic model is a miniature, three-dimensional representation of a scenic design built in an exact scale. A common working scale for scenic models is expressed as 1:24, or ½”=1’-0”, meaning every half-inch in the model corresponds to one foot in real life; a five-inch-tall wall in model form equals a ten-foot-tall wall on the stage. While the scenic designer is required to produce a model for each and every production, (I’ve already made hundreds in my lifetime), the building of the scenic model is not merely a rigorous component of our practice—it is an act of creation. Lovingly handcrafted from bits and pieces of this and that, the model takes on a life of its own, imagining whole worlds in miniature that inspire fantasies and daydreams. But all too often the meaning of the model’s being, its ontology, is ignored and the model is regarded as little more than a tool for communication, and when it outlives that material purpose, it is

1 discarded on the trash heap. To this, I say, “attention must be paid”, for the model has a higher calling. The life of the scenic model, like any life spent in the service of art, is worthy of more consideration. We must imagine for it a better afterlife.

Three Ages of the Scenic Model

In her 1984 book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, poet and literary critic Susan Stewart states that there is an essential theatricality to all miniatures. She argues:

The miniature becomes a stage on which we project . . . a deliberately framed series of

actions. That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life—indeed, to reveal a

set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception—is

a constant daydream that the miniature presents (54).

Miniatures are theatrical because we project imagined performances on them. Throughout its lifetime, the scenic model, like the miniature, invites such performance, beckoning us to project imagined actions onto its tiny stage, thus creating new narratives. The life of the scenic model is long; it comes into existence before the production and it remains after it is gone. Transforming throughout its lifetime from childhood, to adulthood, to afterlife, the scenic model signifies something new with each new age.

The first age of the model—its childhood—is all potential, for at this age the model signifies something that is yet to come; the production exists only in the imagination of the scenic designer and the possibilities are endless. The scenic model begins its life as a model box: a scaled representation of an empty space. Playing with cut-up bits of paper and cardboard, the designer arranges, then rearranges shapes inside the model box. Slowly, through this process of

2 play, form is given to the empty space. As play is used to experiment with the physical design, performances of imagination are staged by the set designer and played out in the model. For every world ultimately realized on stage, dozens of alternative worlds have been imagined and performed in the model.

Eventually, like all children, the model grows up. It becomes definitive in form, and with its days of carefree play over, it is put to work. In the second age of the scenic model—its adulthood—the model is used, first and foremost, as a tool for production. Being a small-scale miniature that represents the full-scale set being created, the model’s job is to communicate to the rest of the creative team (director, choreographer, other designers), and to the team of theatre- artisans (scenic artists, carpenters, props-people), the scenic designer’s intentions for the look, feel, and shape of the final product. At this age, the model’s true power as a tool for production lies in its ability to allow us to think across scales. In her preface to the 2019 United Kingdom’s

National Theatre exhibition “Playing with Scale: How Designers Use Set Models” entitled

Thinking in 3D: Scale Models for the Olivier Theatre theatre-maker Eleanor Margolies states that:

Physical models have always played a significant role in the exercise of this facility to

‘think across scales’ because models allow us to grasp something. Not solely by holding

them in our hand, but precisely because we can hold them (4).

Being able to hold the model in our hand makes us capable of regarding the model from the outside, giant to it. Simultaneously, we can imagine ourselves in miniature and project ourselves inside of it. This is what is meant by thinking across scales. Margolies goes on to explain this phenomenon as a process of “zooming out to a distance at which the whole performance space can be held in mind, and then zooming in to define the smallest physical details for construction”

3 (4). For example, zooming in on the scenic model would allow the paint department to closely study the details of its color and texture. This ability to study the design on a granular level makes the model a useful tool for production for theatre-artisans. Zooming out on the scenic model would provide the distance needed to reveal to the creative team the organization of space and the implied paths of movement embedded in the scenic design by the designer.

In his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life, philosopher of unconscious behavior and semiotician Michel De Certeau writes of viewing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World

Trade Center. According to Certeau, examining the city from this distance “transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it . . . we can see things from a vantage point we cannot achieve when we are inside of something.” (92). Zooming out on the model allows for the same perspective of distance. And once the organization of the model’s spatiality is revealed, the model invites the director (and the choreographer, and the actor)—like Certeau’s city-walker—to improvise within that ordered system and create something entirely new. It is this ability to perform in the scenic model that makes it a useful tool for production for the creative team.

Eventually, the set is built, and finally, we have the real thing on stage before us. But if the scenic model is solely a tool for production, then it would follow that it serves no other purpose once the production is realized. In his 2016 book Models and Interviews, internationally acclaimed scenic designer Johannes Schütz argues this popularly held point of view:

A model is like a manuscript, or like a polemic—it is supposed to achieve something.

Then it is replaced by something else, the right thing, and the model is no longer

important” (174).

4 In other words, when the final set design is achieved, the scenic model’s work is done, and it becomes redundant. Now considered obsolete, the model slips into its third and final age—its afterlife. Of what use is the model now? This is the question that my project proposes to answer.

In childhood and adulthood, the scenic model has a job to do: to represent the full-scale set design being produced. But at these ages, the scenic model transcends its pragmatic function as a tool for production. Be it the scenic designer dreaming new worlds in an empty box, or the theatre-artisan imagining herself a giant, or the director/choreographer envisioning herself moving in miniature through cardboard walls, in childhood and adulthood the model constantly engages the spectator’s imagination and invites performance. Why should we assume that the model suddenly ceases to inspire imagination and performance in its final age? Carefully consideration should be given to the possibilities for the afterlife of the scenic model before it is discarded. What follows is a survey of several different types of ‘afterlife’ that can be experienced by the scenic model.

Exhibiting the Scenic Model as a Designer’s Ego

Being put on exhibit is one possibility for the afterlife for the scenic model. Earlier I mentioned such an exhibition—the 2019 United Kingdom’s National Theatre exhibition

“Playing with Scale: How Designers Use Set Models”—but this exhibit highlighted the very thing I want most to avoid: the scenic model’s role as a tool for production. Other exhibitions that include scenic models tend to spotlight the name of the scenic designer; in these retrospective exhibits, the designer’s ‘stardom’ appears to have more value than the art itself. For instance, in 2018 the Franklin Stage Company in Franklin, NY mounted an exhibition of the work of scenic designer Marjorie Bradley Kellogg. It ran in conjunction with their production of

John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play Doubt, a Parable for which Ms. Kellogg designed the set, and

5 the exhibit was presented adjacent to the theater where the play was being performed. The small company was excited (and rightly so) to tout their association with Ms. Kellogg, a noted scenic designer whose work has appeared on Broadway, in regional theatre, and internationally. Note how the title of the exhibition, Franklin Stage Company Presents Marjorie Kellogg: Drawings and Maquettes, places the name of the theater company in close proximity to the name of the artist. In an article that appeared in BroadwayWorld on July 30, 2018, Patricia Buckley, Co-

Artistic Director of Franklin Stage Company proudly stated:

To have a set designer of Marjorie Kellogg’s caliber right here in Delaware County is

such a gift. When she graciously agreed to design the set for Doubt, we thought it would

be an excellent opportunity to present an exhibit of her models and drawings to run in

tandem with the play (BWW News Desk).

Thus, associating themselves in this way with this brilliant designer, served to improve the cache of the producing theatre company. In this instance, Ms. Kellogg’s name was the thing, not her scenic models.

Similarly, the schools of drama and architecture at Yale University staged a retrospective exhibition of the work of Kellogg’s mentor, scenic designer Ming Cho Lee, in 2005 entitled

Stage Designs by Ming Cho Lee. Known anecdotally as the “Dean of American Set Design”, Lee had been an acclaimed member of the Yale faculty for more than four decades and arguably, this exhibition was more a celebration of Lee’s association with Yale University than it was a celebration of his art. In both the cases of Lee and Kellogg, reverence for the artist/star is what defined the exhibition and reverence serves to humble the spectator, stifling the impulse for imagination and performance.

Exhibiting the Scenic Model as an Instructional Tool

6 Exhibits that put the name of the designer first, do, however, speak to the legacy of the artist, and Lee has a significant one. Understanding the legacy of scenic design is important as a way for future scenic designers to put themselves in context with the past. Michael Yeargan,

Lee’s former student and current co-chairman of the Yale School of Drama’s design department noted, that when he was honored at the 2005 Tony Awards, five of the six Tony nominees for

Design had studied with Lee. In a video interview for the Yale News, theatre historian and scenographer Arnold Aronson opined that, since “theatre disappears”, a younger generation of designers may not know the work of Ming Cho Lee. He stated:

What is now common vocabulary of the American Theatre started in many cases with

things that Ming Cho Lee did and it’s important to know where this work came from and

to understand, I think, what a great artist he is. [The Lee exhibit allows young designers]

to actually see the design of work that was done 50 years ago and to understand why this

was revolutionary when it was done; why things that [we] now think are old-fashioned

were new at one time, and they were new in many cases because Ming Cho Lee did them

first …” (McDonald).

Aronson believes, and I agree, that scenic models can serve as extant artifacts of design careers that continue to instruct and inspire generations of designers yet to come. But in the case of the

Lee exhibit, Lee’s models, the extant artifacts of his design career, were displayed inside of glass boxes. A story produced by Connecticut Public Radio explains:

With over 100 works in the collection, the exhibition . . . is a three-dimensional textbook

on craft, and each glass case protects a precious piece of Lee’s imagination and evolving

creativity (Wierzbicki).

7 While I understand the move to protect the models from damage, displaying them under glass prompts the spectator to admire them at a distance. Although we can still project our imaginations into them, we can no longer touch them or hold them in our hands.

Conversely, set designer Boris Aronson’s model for the original 1971 Broadway production of James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, was once displayed out in the open in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, serving as a vital artifact for future generations of theater-makers to examine and touch. In my youth, I’d visit it often to study first- hand Aronson’s model-building techniques and the way he composed space. Because the extant model was made available to touch, it presented me with the rare opportunity to connect with this great artist one on one—to touch the Follies model was to touch the hand of Boris Aronson.

Gazing into it I’d see Director Harold Prince, Choreographer Michael Bennett, and Composer and Lyricist Stephen Sondheim, blocking scenes, devising dance numbers, and writing songs.

They all performed inside of the model in miniature and it remained a container for their creativity. And what of all of those now-invisible-craftspeople in the scene shops and the paint shops who worked from the model? In the process of being handled, the model was physically- forever-changed by their great hands. Bearing the smudges of their fingerprints the model gives testimony to their existence. This model, too, has since been placed under glass. Spectators can no longer get to know it, as I did, in a way that is physically sensual.

Discarding the Model

Only a few, very lucky scenic models get to live out their afterlife under glass in an exhibition. While occasionally a designer’s favorite model might be preserved for posterity, usually, they are scavenged for small, individual elements that are time-consuming to build, like staircases and furniture. What is left is retired to the model graveyard—piles of forlorn models

8 discarded on dusty shelves in theater production offices, or under tables in the studios of set designers, or, in my case, packed into the corner of my garage. These are the remains of what we cannot bear to throw away—stacks of miniature, hand-made works of art left in ruin. This is a terrible fate, but more often than not, the scenic model will not be saved at all. A typical theatre company might produce five or six shows in a season, each requiring a model. As a set designer,

I might generate an average of twenty models in a calendar year for various companies. They accumulate at an alarming rate. Few theaters, and few designers, can spare the room required to store their models, so they are regularly thrown away.

In its afterlife is the model just trash, or spare parts for future models? No. On the stage our work exists only briefly and then it is gone, leaving little footprint of itself; this is the bittersweet, ephemeral nature of theater. But the model needn’t meet the same fate. It can continue to take on new meaning and purpose in its afterlife—by making it available for play.

Making the Scenic Model Available for Play

When I was living and working in a small, studio apartment in Manhattan, I would regularly move models from my own model graveyard to the trash for lack of space. I’d box them up and usher them down to the basement in a sort-of-funeral for foam core and illustration board only to discover, several days later, that they’d been rescued from the trash by my building’s superintendent, Bill—a humorless, dingy, man-of-few-words whom I prejudged as not having much imagination. I’d find my models set up on his workbench, under the light of a table lamp, resurrected for a command performance of Bill’s imagination, for an audience of Bill. This makes a case for the model’s autonomy as a work of art. For Bill, the model was an object separated from the context of the production for which it was made and divorced from the use

9 for which it was intended, yet, it created wonder in Bill; it sparked his imagination. For Bill, the model was a toy, and he was playing.

For most adults, it is easy to dismiss the value of play—as in, ‘play is for children’—but for Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, play holds a deeper significance. In his essay The Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon, Huizinga argues:

Play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex. It goes

beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. It is a significant

function—that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play there is something ‘at play’

which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action (155).

For Huizinga, all play means something, and although I cannot know how play meant for Bill, I know how play meant for the models: it meant revitalization for the discarded works of art.

To play with something is to act upon it, and Bill acted upon the models; he retrieved them from the trash, he unpacked them, and he set them up in a new arrangement of his own choosing. In the process, Bill physically changed the models and remade them anew. This phenomenon of renewal through change can be better understood by examining Russian-American linguist and literary scholar Roman Jakobson’s writing about the revitalization of art--a process he describes as “deformation”.

In his paper On Realism in Art, Jakobson argues that everything is based on convention— a system of rules and codes that work like a language. Using painting as his example, Jakobson says one has to learn the conventions of painting in order to “see” the picture (the idea the painting is representing). But over time, those conventions tend to ossify and “the painted image becomes an ideogram, a formula, to which the object is linked by contiguity. Recognition becomes instantaneous. We no longer see the picture” (21). For example, Realist Painters prized

10 verisimilitude—an accurate representation in art of the visual appearances of scenes and objects.

However, there is nothing “real” about pigment arranged on a canvas. This verisimilitude was achieved through a series of illusionistic conventions, such as perspective to give a two- dimensional canvas the appearance of depth, and the use of light and shadow to imply that flat forms have three-dimensions. And over time, the conventions of perspective and light that conspired to signify “real” in Realist Painting were lost on the spectator. Thus, convention comes to obscure meaning; we “see” only the convention and not the art. Jakobson argues that in order to see beyond the ideogram, the art must be deformed:

The artist-innovator must impose a new form upon our perception if we are to detect in a

given thing those traits which went unnoticed the day before. He may present the objects

in an unusual perspective; he may violate the rules of composition canonized by his

predecessors (21).

Enter a group of artists known as the Impressionists who prized movement and immediacy over verisimilitude. They replaced the illusion of three-dimensional perspective with a two- dimensional surface treatment made up of short, blurred brush strokes. The freely brushed color simulated the changing play of light and captured the transitory nature of time. These new techniques in painting deformed the conventions of Realism, revitalized painting according to a new aesthetic, and provided the spectator with a new way of seeing.

What is true of painting is true of scenic models. When the convention of ‘scenic model equals tool for production’ is left unchallenged, we come to recognize the model only as a signifier for the full-scale set. In order to see the model anew, an intervention by an artist- innovator is required. Bill was such an artist-innovator—he intervened in the model’s fate when he pulled it from the trash. He deformed the model when he altered its perspective and changed

11 its composition; he revitalized the model by physically transforming it into something new. The same process of revitalization can occur in a more spiritual way when performing imagination in the model.

For Bill, the scenic models he discovered were toys, and without play, toys become defunct. In the 2010 Pixar animated film Toy Story 3, Andy, the movie franchise’s young protagonist, is growing up. Now, a young man going off to college, Andy has forgotten how to play, which leaves the fate of his toys in question. They wonder, will they be abandoned, or thrown away; are they just junk? In the film, the toys exclaim things like ‘we don’t need owners, we own ourselves, we are masters of our own destiny’! Perhaps, but only in the movies. In real life, toys need to be activated by play in order to be vital. As Susan Stewart describes it:

The inanimate toy repeats the still life’s theme of arrested life, the life of the tableau. But

once the toy becomes animated, it initiates another world, the world of daydream . . . it is

the beginning of an entirely new temporal world, a fantasy world parallel to (and hence

never intersecting) the world of everyday reality” (57).

When left on their own, toys are nothing more than inanimate still lifes. Toys require someone to activate them with their imagination. When someone does stir them to life, toys reveal daydream worlds that write entirely new narratives—toys give performances.

This is true even for the toys in Toy Story. In his book Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar literary and cultural theorist Alan Ackerman explains that:

Early in each movie, Andy plays with his toys in a self-contained action of his own

imagining and making; in short, he stages a drama and, in doing so, as in any play-

within-a-play, comments meaningfully, if unintentionally, on the poetics of the larger

work (123).

12 Scenic models, like toys, are inanimate objects, frozen in tableaux—that is, until someone like

Andy, or Bill, stirs them to life with their imagination. This “stirring” of the model’s spirit is a kind of deformation whereby imagination ‘imposes a new form upon our perception’ of the model. Through this deformation, new dramaturgies begin to emerge, and the model is again revitalized. In his essay, A Philosophy of Toys, 19th-century French “poet of modern life”

Charles Baudelaire discusses the way children create new dramaturgies when they play with toys. He describes a solitary child playing at war; in the child’s imagination corks and dominoes become soldiers while books become fortifications, and marbles become dead bodies. He says,

"almost any object, with imagination, can become a toy, an actor in a performance” (199). If dominoes can become soldiers, and marbles dead bodies, then too, any object in the scenic model, with imagination, can become a character around which a narrative can be spun, and the model the environment for their story.

Like the actor, the model has a life both in and out of the theatre. These are two separate but related lives, and we must embrace them both if we are to know the model’s total ontology.

In the theatre, models serve a function as a tool for production, but Bill was blind to that fact.

Outside of the context of the theatre, Bill saw only toys which he engaged in play, and through his play, he deformed the models both physically and spiritually. Thus, in their afterlife, Bill revitalized the models and they created new narratives. The scenic model’s true purpose is as a starting point for new dramas to be made, and we must not throw away anything that still has the power to create. So, the question becomes, what do we do with the scenic model now?

Dreaming of the Exhibit

I propose an exhibition of my own discarded scenic models—one that does not focus on their job as a tool for production but liberates them of their past and inspires play. Bill, the super,

13 is my inspiration for this exhibit. It is Bill’s experience with the models that I wish to recreate, and not just for Bill, or for the spectator, but for the models themselves so that in their afterlife, they can become revitalized by play and reveal their deeper ontology as an engine for creating new dramaturgies.

In order to detach the scenic models from their duty as a tool for production, I must rule out an in-context exhibition. This type of exhibition provides the spectator with knowledge by way of labels, charts, and diagrams that serve to put the art in some kind of context. My aim is to remove context, so there will be nothing to provide the spectator with a greater story about the historical development of the models in production. Spectators must create contexts of their own for relating to the models. In carrying the models away from their original context, I explore their artifactual autonomy.

I plan to present my scenic models in the ruined condition in which I discover them; no restoration of any kind will be attempted. Is the discarded scenic model a ruin? Yes. After all,

Bill discovered my models on the trash heap, and my own models for the exhibition will be coming from the pile of my model graveyard. Although I am arguing against this kind of disuse, being in ruin is the reality of the discarded model’s existence. Let’s not look away from it. In her book Destination Culture: Tourism, Museum, and Heritage theorist of curation and museum display Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett supports my choice when she says, “restoration may be resisted in cases in which the power of the ruin is its capacity to signify the destructive circumstances of its creation . . .” (18-9). In other words, if the circumstance of how an object came to be destroyed is important to the story one is trying to tell, then the restoration of the object should be avoided. Since the ruined model is created by virtue of its being discarded,

14 restoring the ruined model belies its fate. Furthermore, the visual markings of a life well-lived on the surface of an object is beautiful to me. The scenic model’s ruined state is part of its poetry.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett goes on to say that the ruin is “informed by a poetics of detachment” which makes appreciation possible (18). But if one appreciates ruins, one tends to preserve them unaltered. Will this detached appreciation discourage play? Perhaps not if I can appeal to the spectator’s ‘inner child’, for children are quick to play in a way that adults are not.

Baudelaire describes this call to play as an “admirable and luminous alacrity which is typical of children, in whose minds desire, deliberation, and action make up, so to speak, but a single faculty” (197). Children do not deliberate, they act, and this willingness to act is the opposite of detached appreciation. I believe there was a child inside of Bill who, when confronted by my models, was sparked to play. I believe there is a child inside of every spectator that can similarly be sparked to play.

This is the major design challenge in my exhibition: to present the models in some way that will invite the spectator to intervene—to make them as quick to play as Bill. Bill felt free to play specifically because the models were discarded in the trash; this signaled to Bill that they belonged to no one and authorized him to do as he pleased with them. Communicating to the spectator that they are at liberty to take ownership of the models is the key to lowering their inhibitions so that they might feel free to play; free to mix up and rearrange the pieces of the models as they please. In this way, each new spectator “creates the exhibit” for the next spectator, and so on. I would not need to intervene beyond recording the state in which the models arrive at the exhibit and observing in what state spectators leave the models after they play. The question is: what will they become?

15 In its lifetime the scenic model means both as an object in and of itself, and as a signifier for the finished set design. This makes it an allegorical character in its own story, and as such, the model is free to signify differently in its afterlife. Allegorical characters represent multiple meanings. Figures such as John F. Kennedy and Princess Diana are allegorical characters. When alive they meant as real people--physical manifestations representing themselves in their own lives--but they also stood in for broader concepts and ideas including, but not limited to, charisma, beauty, power, and class. In his book Theory/Theatre: An Introduction theatre theorist

Mark Fortier says that “like John F. Kennedy or Princess Diana, the allegorical character has a freer and wider significance in death than in life” (25). In death, allegorical characters become free-floating-signifiers, meaning they function as a vehicle for absorbing whatever meaning a spectator might wish to impose on them. Therefore, depending on the disposition of the spectator, John F. Kennedy or Princess Diana might come to mean as savior or saint, philanderer or whore, superstar or martyr. So too, in its afterlife, the scenic model becomes a free-floating- signifier that takes on greater signifying potential than it had when it was a tool for production.

In the exhibit, divorced from its mortal life’s purpose, the scenic model is free to signify new things. This points to the autonomy of the scenic model. The autonomy of the model is its ability to stand alone as its own work of art, without needing to connect to the context of some larger production or educational mission. If it can have these qualities, it will have breached its place as a tool for production and come into its own as an autonomous work of art.

Making the Exhibit

I scheduled my exhibit for two weeks in the late winter of 2020 at The Woskob Family

Gallery in downtown State College, PA. As it turned out, a lifetime working in the theatre

16 prepared me well for this moment. Whether drafting or photography, mise en scène or van packing, I relied on all of my skills as a scenic designer when making the exhibit.

I knew the exhibit needed to be imaginative, whimsical, and above all else fun; no cold, antiseptic, white-walled gallery show for my models. I wanted a casualness to the proceedings, an environment that would feel more like a vintage toy shop than an art gallery, so weeks in advance of the exhibit I set out to find pieces of antique furniture on which to display the models. First, I went to the Pennsylvania State University School of Theatre’s properties warehouse to inspect what furniture might be available to me. There I found an old cabinet-style radio, a small curio cabinet with a glass front door, a child’s dresser, and a few other vintage pieces. Next, I went to a local salvage business—four floors of junk piled inside a now-defunct, turn-of-the-century hotel—where I purchased four mid-century, Formica-topped grammar school desks. Finally, at a local second-hand furniture store, I bought more dressers, tables, desks, and most significantly, five primary-colored, molded plastic chairs for children.

In order to document the scenic models before they entered the exhibit, I created a jerry- rigged photography studio in my basement laundry room—a mess of black drapes, folding tables, cameras on tripods, and desk lamps pointed at all angles. I carefully unpacked each model, logged the title of the play for which it was built, the theater company that produced it, the date the show opened, and its overall dimensions. Then, I set about lighting and photographing the models to capture high-resolution, aesthetically pleasing images.

In planning the layout of the exhibit, I measured the gallery space with a tape measure and recorded the dimensions in a notebook. I brought that information to my drafting table where

I created a scaled drawing of the gallery’s ground plan. Using the footprint measurements of all the furniture I had gathered, I drew (in scale) shapes which I moved around the ground plan.

17 Then I drew shapes that corresponded to the dimensions of my scenic models and I shuffled them around. When I arrived at an efficient and aesthetically pleasing arrangement of objects, I committed all of my decisions to the drawing. My pre-production planning for the exhibit minimized my efforts on the day the exhibit loaded into the gallery. By simply labeling all of the objects with post-it notes that corresponded to my ground plan (letters for pieces of furniture, numbers for scenic models), I knew exactly where things were going at all times, which eliminated the need for experimenting with different arrangements of objects in the space. While inherently practical, all of my pre-production was also an exercise in imagined theatre. Imagined theatre is what performance theorist Daniel Sack calls “thought experiments” in theatre that defy the practicalities of actual production. It allows one to see what lies outside of the boundaries of the word “impossible”. Imagined theatre is its own type of play—one that exists beyond the dimensions of time and space, and, for many months, I engaged in imagined theater with my models.

All the while I was busy unpacking, measuring, and cataloging the models, I recalled their past: I remembered building the models by hand in my studio, I remembered working in the models with my collaborators to devise the shows, and I remembered discarding the models in the garage once the shows had opened. In the present, while staging, lighting, and photographing the models, I became their spectator, animating them with my gaze. And as I planned the exhibit on paper, I imagined their future. All the while, the models continued to perform.

Although they were constantly revitalized throughout this process of imagined performance, with me as their lone spectator, the models were never truly divorced from their original function as tools for production. The models remained prisoners of their past because I held the memories of what they had been. To be truly liberated, to achieve the kind of autonomy

18 I imagined for them, I would have to give my models over to an audience who would not know them. Like Andy at the conclusion of Toy Story 3, I would need to take the final step and release ownership of my toys to another child who could help them author new dramaturgies.

Please Touch

I believe it is unconscionable to discard something that dedicates its life to service simply because it outlives its material purpose, especially if that something still has the power to create.

Scenic models spend their lives in service of making art, and in their afterlife, they are still capable of much creation. They deserve a place where they can be rediscovered for play--some final, new location where they can continue to create new dramaturgies.

So, from February 10 – 22, 2020 in the Woskob Family Gallery, located in the lobby of the Pennsylvania State University School of Theatre’s Downtown Theatre in State College, PA I mounted an exhibition of roughly two dozen discarded scenic models that I built between 2013 and the present entitled Please Touch: Revitalizing Scenic Model through Play. Displayed in their ruined state, detached from their original duties as tools for production, I invited audiences to play with the models; to touch and examine them, to move or rearrange them, as a way to revitalize them through engagement so that they can live again.

Results of the Exhibit

What I created in Please Touch was an assembled environment. In his book The Art of

Assemblage, art historian and curator William C. Seitz calls the art of assemblage “. . . the placement, juxtaposition, and removal of objects within space accessible to exploration by [the] eye and hand” (9). An assembled environment is a habitable space defined by a collection of

19 curated objects that can be experienced by sight and touch. Seitz goes on to explain that in assemblage, “as element is set beside element, the many qualities and auras of isolated fragments are compounded, fused, or contradicted so that—by their own confronted volitions as it were— physical matter becomes poetry” (85-6). In other words, by taking one object and placing it in proximity to another, the conflict and/or synthesis of the sum of its parts creates new meaning. In the process, the individual objects become deformed so that we “see” them anew. In my assembled environment, discarded scenic models and their various, carry-able small parts, are juxtaposed with vintage furniture. Taken separately, the models and the furniture might simply mean as junk, but assembled together in the exhibition, they come to mean as something entirely new—as a fictional toyshop to be inhabited by the spectator.

The exhibit’s prompt to touch and examine the models, to move and rearrange them, is an invitation to create new assemblages through play, and, if assemblage disrupts existing meanings to create something new, then every future assemblage created by the play of a spectator sparks the potential for authoring a new narrative.

On the morning of February 10, 2020, I finished arranging my exhibit in the gallery space and I photo-documented how I left it to be discovered by the spectator. Over the next two weeks,

I visited the gallery often to witness the exhibit’s evolution and to document the changes in photographs. Slowly, as the model pieces started to mingle with one another, there were many surprises.

Bits of wood-slatted model pieces for Fiddler on the Roof were mixed with the model for

110 in the Shade, a production that was mounted at Washington D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre, effectively placing Tevye, Lizzie Curry, and President Lincoln all in the same play. The turntable from Noises Off was lifted out of its model box and placed, whole-cloth, atop the turntable for

20 Great Expectations, creating a cobwebbed, Busby-Berkeley-like stage machine. Spare model parts from Cabaret mixed with the Gypsy model, imagining a space where dueling divas Sally

Bowles and Mama Rose could perform a mashup of “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Rose’s Turn”. But these are the imaginings of the models’ creator and the new dramas I daydream are still attached to the models’ old narratives. What did my ideal spectators, the ones with no attachment to the models’ given productions, make of them? I will focus on a few, particularly surprising outcomes.

I had embedded two empty model boxes in the exhibit, and over time, they became populated by new scenic designs all their own. One was artfully arranged for a performance. A patterned rug bisected the space, while across the back was placed a forced-perspective cut-out of a rustic barn. At the sides were plaster walls set on diagonals, and at right stood an upright piano surrounded by three straight-backed, wooden chairs. The color palette was a symphony of browns and sepia. The overall aesthetic achieved was so tasteful and well-judged that I was convinced this must be the work of another scenic designer. Like any good theatrical preset, the space was filled with potential energy, left waiting for a character to enter and bring it to life.

The other empty model box, which I had left on the periphery of the exhibit, had been moved to the top of a tall dresser. The new set which filled it was less tasteful but more whimsical. A miniature fortress occupied the stage. On top of it stood two cut-out figures of women dressed in clothing from the 1930s. They were joined by an angry-faced, storybook tree with arms sleeved in swags of green and yellow foliage. All three looked down on a rectangular platform in the middle of the stage. Across the back was placed a large, arched wall, and to the right was a Juliet balcony outlined in Celtic knots. Next to it, a primitive, wooden construction

21 defined by a huge wheel was placed upside-down, resembling a giant wheelbarrow. The stage seemed set for some alternative telling of The Wizard of Oz.

In several instances, spectators introduced foreign objects into the exhibit. A miniature red pickup truck that appeared to be made of foam and painted masking tape materialized and moved daily from model to model, rewriting many scenes in its wake. A pale-yellow Splenda packet, emblazoned in red, white, and blue, appeared atop the tiny newsstand in my model for

Guys and Dolls. The original set design was defined by billboards announcing products such as

Pepsi, and Doublemint Gum, and the newly placed Splenda packet appeared to be just another advertisement in the Times Square landscape. The words “thank you” written in white letters against a red background were carefully ripped from some label, or perhaps a magazine, and placed at the edge of the apron of a tiny stage, in front of a white-washed, clapboard wall. The models were now verbalizing their thoughts.

I had not anticipated that spectators would make entirely new stages. Someone had taken a simple black portal (masking from some other model) and leaned it up against two boxes on a tabletop, rendering the empty space between the boxes as a stage which they filled with scenery: a wall with two tall windows at the center, and a mysteriously silhouetted figure peering in through the window at stage left. When I was dismantling the exhibition, I found a surprise, hidden out of sight, under a plant stand. There, someone had made a stage, defined by the carpeted floor of the gallery on the bottom, the underside of a lower shelf at the top, and the legs of the plant stand at the four corners. On the stage was a tiny basement room, complete with plumbing pipes and a miniature 1920s washing machine, in which stood the cut-out of a young man in a red plaid shirt with his thumbs tucked into his pockets. He was looking longingly at a

22 shirtless cowboy who floated outside of the room atop a tall wardrobe. The whole scene was backed by a stunning, ochre and cerulean sky.

In one instance a newly assembled stage exploded into the gallery itself. Building upon a large model that sat on top of a maple dresser, a spectator made the unexpected decision to open the dresser’s top drawer, engaging the negative space of the gallery. Using only available model pieces, they hung a collage of walls, windows, and doors attached by wire to wooden battens, from the bottom of the open drawer. The dresser became a puppeteer manipulating a model- fragment marionette. Immediately below the open drawer was placed one bright, red, plastic children’s chair, around which were posed other parts of various models. The entire construction—model, dresser, chair, scenic model fragments, and room—became a work of art unto itself.

My own exhibit left me with many questions. Were the new assemblages made by a single spectator or were they the work of many hands? Were they created all at once in a confluence of creative energy and play, or did they evolve slowly over a long period of time?

What were the spectators imagining as they played? What dramas were being performed in the models? With some help from the Penn State School of Theatre faculty, I was able to glean some answers to my last two questions.

Penn State students in the general education theatre seminar THEA 101N – Performance and Society were given an optional assignment to view the Please Touch exhibit and to discuss its merits as performance in an online forum called Packback. I was given access to this forum and it provided me with first-hand insight into how “pure” spectators—spectators with no prior knowledge of the model’s use as a tool for production—experienced the work. For example, student Mohammed Ahmed Alawadhi reported:

23 The Please Touch: Revitalizing Scenic Models Through Play exhibition at the [Woskob]

gallery featured models of sets used for various productions. These sets, now abandoned,

feature all kinds of environments. While looking at them, I started to imagine how they

were used. What kind of performances were held in those rooms depicted by the models?

For example, there was a model depicting a large theater of some kind. There was one

chair in the middle of the stage. I imagined a nervous artist performing on that stage.

Maybe it was their debut or their most important performance yet. And I felt a little of the

anxiety they might feel.

Alawadhi attached no history of production to the scenic models. He understood them only as environments, and although he wondered what performances were meant to be played in the full- scale spaces the models represented, he ultimately wrote his own play about an anxious actor in a high-stakes moment, and he performed it in miniature in the model. Writing and performing this new drama was an act of creation.

Another student, Rachel Stofanak, echoed Alawdhi’s performative experience with the exhibit. She wrote:

I especially [enjoyed] moving pieces to places where they obviously didn't belong, such

as putting dark set pieces that looked like they belonged in a serious play in front of a

brightly colored backdrop. It became a game to me to guess where the set pieces had

originated, and what their role in the "wrong" play might be. Actors bring the set of a

play to life, so I definitely enjoyed imagining how an actor would work with such an

"incorrect" set, incorporating the mismatched pieces into the lives of the characters.

Like Alawadhi, Stofanak wrote an entirely new drama to be performed by a character in a scenic model, but where Alawadhi’s play was written in response to a space that he found in the exhibit

24 (a model depicting a large theater with one chair in the middle of the stage), Stofanak’s play was written in response to a space that she herself created by assembling together different parts of the exhibit: an ‘incorrect set’ made up of mismatched model pieces that didn’t belong together.

One student, Teagan Kloss, used the exhibit as a foundation to create entirely new, autonomous works of art of her own. Kloss noted:

The Please Touch exhibit downtown gave viewers the opportunity to use [their]

imagination to create [a] performance. Personally, I viewed many of the displays as dark

and eerie. I even took photographs of some of the displays in black and white which

further accentuated my dark perspective.

On the surface, the photos that Kloss took at the exhibit would seem to be of my scenic models, however, the real subject of Kloss’s photography is Kloss herself. With her camera, Kloss captured images that embodied her own response to the art she encountered—this is the narrative of her photographs, not the models themselves. Moreover, Kloss’s photographs have the potential to outlive the exhibit that inspired them.

The moment Kloss captured her images, the souls of the scenic models transferred to

Kloss’s photographs. This ‘transmigration of the soul’ as Geek philosopher Pythagoras described it and as the philosopher of temporal existence James Luchte explains in his book Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls supposes that all beings possess “an immortal soul, one thought to be capable of communion with the divine'' (Luchte). Although the soul is greater than the body that possesses it, it requires the body as a vessel to carry it on its journey to becoming All (part of the divine). Throughout this journey of becoming, the soul must migrate from one mortal vessel to another, for “the body, here, is not an end in itself, but ‘plays its part’ amidst a narrative that asserts a different destiny for the soul” (Luchte). I believe that

25 objects, too, possess souls and that those souls migrate from vessel to vessel on their way to becoming. In the exhibit, the souls of the scenic models left their containers and were reincarnated in Kloss’s photographs. This was just one step of many on their journey.

Conclusion

A brief recapitulation of my monograph’s main points will serve as a concluding summary for my project.

First I outlined the three ages of scenic models: (1) childhood--the age of potential--when models signify as something yet to come, (2) adulthood--the age of work--when models represent full-scale scenic designs, and (3) the afterlife--the age of retirement--when models are considered obsolete. I demonstrated how models in their childhood and adulthood transcend their material purpose as a tool for production and function as space for imagined performances. It is this capacity to engage the imagination and invite performance that makes the model worthy of more consideration in their afterlife.

Next, I surveyed several possibilities for the ‘afterlife’ of scenic models, including displaying them in retrospective exhibitions, and preserving them as instructional tools for future scenic designers. In both cases, I showed how the models, as extant artifacts, remained tied to the productions they were originally created to serve. Then, I revealed the most common fate for scenic models--being discarded to the model graveyard, or worse, being thrown in the trash. A new possibility for the afterlife of scenic models was inspired by Bill, the super who rescued my own models from the trash bin: making them available for play.

I devised an exhibit for scenic models that divorced them from their history as tools for production. I presented them instead as toys, and invited spectators to play. As they imagined

26 and performed, in the models, stories of their own making, the models revealed their true ontology as engines for creating new dramaturgies. Thus, liberated from their past and revitalized through play, the models finally achieved their autonomy as works of art.

Afterword

When I spend time with my models, my past becomes present and I feel my age and mortality. This feeling is nicely captured in a quote from theater theorist Mark Fortier, whose book Theory/Theory I referenced earlier in this paper. It reads:

Works of art are privileged instances of endurance in time, an endurance always

accomplished by death, loss of origin, loss of self. The endurance of art reminds us that

life is short; the presence of a single work of art reminds us of everything else that is

passing or missing (34-5).

In other words, it is my art’s potential for outlasting me that makes me aware of my impermanence, but if all the art I make is temporary, then what of me endures? Like the model, I had a childhood that included performances of imagination about what I might one day become.

Like the model, I grew up and spent my adulthood in service to the theater, imagining many performances, and laboring to realize them. I am only halfway through this life, and I have much more to create, but I feel the coming of the next generation of artists. I must move out of the way or be moved. Like the model, I will become obsolete. So, I have tried to change the way we see the scenic model to make it worthy of more permanence, not preserved like an artifact under glass, but reincarnated as other works of art. In this way the model, and I might endure.

27 What is the next evolutionary step for this project? I imagine some kind of retirement home for aging models where we can visit and play with them—but where will we find the space? Who will pay for and maintain it, and how will we ultimately decide which models are worthy of being included and which models are left out? I know this idea seems highly impractical, but ultimately, I want for my models what I want for myself (and for my colleagues): a place where we can be together in dialogue, unpacked and played with, performing and performed upon—some final, new resting place where we can continue to create.

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