Satyabrata Rout’s ‘Scenography’ sets the stage for a visual delight

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

A WELCOME addition, ‘Scenography: An Indian Perspective’ by Satyabrata Rout should be considered essential reading for students of acting, design and direction, and an invaluable resource in the visual composition of performance making.

This voluminous compendium cuts across time zones, digging into histories, cultures of the past and leads us to the present with a scholarly eye. Analysing and investigating visual material, gathered from dusty archives with systematic structuring and arrangement, is an exercise that would satisfy the most critical eye.

The scale of Rout’s exploration travels from the classical to the pre-modern, post-modern, experimental, conventional, amphitheatre, small spaces, black box, improvised spaces, traditional space: a range that is not only mind-boggling, but leaves you wonderstruck by the quality of the research that has gone into its making. This underscores the dictum that there are no short-cuts in research!

‘Scenography’ comes from the Greek skenographia, which is a combination of skene, or a small building, tent or hut on stage, and graphia, meaning writing. Putting them together, it means scenic writing. Despite its etymology, the term remains obscure and does not grasp the intricacies and its immense potentiality.

Scenography, as a concept or even as a discipline, was initially drained of all its complexities and was vaguely referred to as a set design, a backdrop of painted curtains, or windows and door ‘cut-outs’ on the stage. It could also be extended to include lights, costumes and choreography. Today, scenography implies a relationship with not only design and lights, but also architecture and technology. It encompasses a broad and divergent sphere of activity.

The book makes scenography the central frame of reference. An intricate matrix of overlapping practices that are impossible to study in isolation from the creative imagination of the director and the actor are the gems that the book reveals.

Scenography appeared in theatre lexicon almost a decade ago in Europe, but made an entry into India a few years later. It is still not clear for most theatre directors. One initially felt that it was a grandiose term for a set designer. The term was mocked, and dismissed as pretentious posturing!

Scenography is actually a very important aspect of theatre making: it is the total visual creation in the theatre space, and is today a subject in its own right.

Rout’s book is a timely intervention and throws up innumerable challenges for a student of drama. It is much more than set design or putting props on the stage. It requires contextualisation, aesthetics and the creation of a specific iconography for the play which is being designed.

Theatre is a visual language, scenography in a certain way challenges the supremacy of text in theatre. Conventionally, we have always considered the spoken word as the main ingredient for play-making. Traditionally, the playwright was the fountainhead and every other aspect of mounting a play was subservient to the written word. This is not an attempt to debunk the poetry of words and speech, it’s about how meaning is made and how metaphors are created through scenography. Theatre is not an extension of the literary art, but an independent art form with its own assertions and power.

Right at the outset, Rout underscores that each scenographer has to have individual aesthetics, personalised and belonging to his/her imagination. To chisel, refine and hammer that vocabulary into tangible visual assertions is a lifetime struggle and journey. He also coins his own definition, very appropriately, ‘as the art of writing of the stage’.

Rout, being a designer and scenographer, has written a book that explores and understands the inextricable linkages between design, scenography, technology and visual expression. This book needs to be celebrated, as it is the starting point for a kind of critical debate and discussions that underpin creative work and move the subject forward.