Scenographers are shaping how theatre is shown, received and internalised

There was a time when artists often stood on stools or ladders to hammer nails directly on walls for hanging paintings. This required careful wall markings to ensure eye-level display. Directors of plays by Mohan Rakesh or Anton Chekhov emphasised on worn-out furniture to evoke provincial households. The scenario has drastically changed. Artists now require curators to select, contextualise and present their works in exhibitions, evolving beyond the simple hanging of paintings in galleries. Today, everything is curated — from dinner menus to wedding arrangements.

Theatre directors and visual artists rely on scenographers to design immersive spatial environments — sets that enhance the narrative and visual impact. These roles emerged due to the professionalisation of the art world, to which curation and scenography brought conceptual depth, audience engagement and critical framing.

For a long time, the word ‘scenography’, even ‘curator’ for that matter, remained a vague term. Was it a spelling mistake? Or just a grandiose word with no clear meaning? Today, it is no longer provocative but has become a part of the arts vocabulary, embraced by many young enthusiasts eager to study, research and practice this art form. Scenography and curatorial work demand a journey seeped in conceptualisation and a spirit of collaboration, a necessity for making various departments of art compatible with each other. From the atmospherics of the show to the framing of the characters, to the stage-setting, lighting, music choreography and colour palette. The word ‘theatre’ itself comes from the Greek “place for viewing”. We say we are going to see a play, not hear one — seeing precedes hearing. Viewing is shaped by our senses, which are personal, interpretive and political. In this way, each viewer is the lens, the focus and the angle of his/her own experiences. As John Berger put it: a child looks and recognises before he can speak. Looking is a complex web of sensory interactions, influenced by historical and cultural contexts. The scenographer and curator frame the act of seeing, not only for performances but also visual arts, sculptures and set designs. Curator/scenographer has today become the buzzword for any artistic endeavour that shapes how art is shown, received and internalised.

I recently returned from Kochi where I attended a festival organised by the Manorama Hortus media group. In Kochi, I watched a performance of ‘Ubu Roi’, the famous French play by Alfred Jarry, directed by Deepan Sivaraman. The experience inspired me to write about scenography.

A maverick director and a celebrated scenographer, Sivaraman is known for his experimental and chaotic style. His play features live soundscape, political edge and immersive elements like smoke billowing over the audience and confetti flying in all directions. The boundaries between performers and spectators blur, creating uncertain and intense experiences.

‘Ubu Roi’, written in 1896, is an absurdist satire of grotesque farces targeting power, greed and bourgeoise hypocrisy. The play, staged in a school ground under a PVC-coated polyester fabric roof, transformed a playing field dramatically into an arena where surrealism stalks the stadium. The audience sat on either side, with the central portion used as performance space. The show opened with a cavalcade — a limousine accompanied by motorcycles and flags — evoking a Republic Day parade with all the fanfare and pageantry. It defied norms of realism with exaggerated costumes, symbolising power and wealth, scatological humour and symbolic props layered with meaning. The performance was raw and boundary-pushing.

Having worked with Sivaraman, I know his ability to make the impossible possible. In my production of ‘Hayavadana’, he created a truck that seated 24 people and even moved — an engineering marvel that bewildered theatre owners and drained the sponsors. For ‘Lemon Soda’, a devised production performed at the National School of Drama, he designed a revolving stage, challenging me to explore unusual ways of navigating text and visibility.

Anuradha Kapur’s ethos of collaboration is evident in projects like her production of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, where Sivaraman’s gothic scenography utilised mobile trucks and existing spaces to emphasise corporeality and polyvocality. His design for ‘Virasat’, Kapur’s radical reinterpretation of Mahesh Elkunchwar’s celebrated play ‘Wada Chirebandi’, transformed into a poetic mediation on decay, memory and the collapse of the joint family structure in Maharashtra. Sivaraman’s design is legendary and is often cited as a turning point in Indian scenography.

The set was monumental yet fragile and atmospheric; a skeletal, decaying wada (or mansion), constructed of bamboo scaffolding and tied together with a torn muslin and khadi cloth, evoked a fading grandeur. A bundle of old letters, sepia photographs, broken furniture scattered in various spaces — all seemed to suggest a feudal family with depleting wealth and dysfunctionality. The space was organised in a way that you could see the action happening in the various rooms of the wada. If you sat near the kitchen, you got the smell of food being cooked; if near the bathing area, it was possible for splashes of water to sprinkle on you. Household activities unfolded simultaneously through multiple viewpoints, making the audience feel like voyeurs witnessing a household’s everyday routines.

The first scenographer I worked with was Sumant Jayakrishnan, who is now designing larger-than-life spectacles but also works with installation artists and galleries. His capacity to traverse between an Ambani wedding and an installation piece for artist Nalini Malani shows his remarkable ability to switch from large-scale work to more contained and silent areas of expression.

‘Kitchen Katha’, directed almost two decades ago, had Jayakrishnan transform everyday spaces into immersive experiences. He used fabric on which recipes were calligraphed. Like an alchemist, he used ‘marking cloth’, a white cotton fabric, mostly used to line the back of curtains, dyed in amber hues. He used them as backdrops that he stretched across a steel grid to prevent from flapping.

In the fashion shows that he designs and executes, he evokes magical forests and ponds with floating lotuses, acrobats and aerial dancers, transforming a soulless hall into an exotic field of magic. In Tim Supple’s play ‘Mid-Summer Night’s Dream’, Jayakrishnan transformed the proscenium stage into a hybrid interpretation that fused South Asian performance traditions with a dreamlike chaos. Scenography is about shifting the focus of theatre from just words to how things look and feel in space. Instead of letting dialogue lead, it blends visual arts, film, architecture, and performance to create an immersive experience where text becomes just one aspect of the whole picture, sometimes more like a visual or a texture than a script.

Actors use their bodies to express emotions and ideas through movement and sensory action, almost like performing poetry. Found objects and images become meaningful symbols and the space can be both intimate or associated with a site-specific location, inviting the audience to dive right in, instead of watching from a distance.

This approach examines the idea — are words the most important part of theatre? Taking inspiration from traditional Indian performances like Ramlila and Kathakali, which mix rituals with rich visuals, it imagines theatre as a creative blend where visual arts, architecture, movement and videography come together, dissolving barriers between different art forms.

Scenography turns the arts into a shared sensory experience, mixing traditions with new ideas to create a ‘way of seeing’ that speaks through space, images and movement as powerfully as through words.

— The writer is a Chandigarh-based theatre director