Description: "Scenographic Design Drawing prompts scholarly debate on the set design drawings for theatre and live performance and highlights their unique qualities within the greater arena of drawing practice and theory. This volume addresses a critical research gap and encourages an interdisciplinary dialogue. Sue Field explores the undertheorized but highly complex interaction between performative and theatrical space, embodied in the scenographic design drawing, and also considers how scenographic design drawing, in which the palimpsest is the unique interface of 'time, motion, action and space' contributes to a different expanded drawn space. These central questions are of increasing significance, not only in the field of scenography but also to all disciplines that draw upon theatre and performance studies, fine art and architectural discourse"--
Brief description: Sue Field is a researcher at UNSW Art and Design, Australia, and a lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Sue has an extensive history of working in the performing arts industry as a production designer, academic, educator and author. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from UNSW, Australia in 2019. She has written scholarly papers for journals, national and international conferences, published academic book chapters, and is the author of Scenographic Design Drawing (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Review Quotes:
"Sue Field reveals the astute savant she is through this well researched examination of theatrical drawings. She has captured the zephyr that emerges when a designer's marks on paper transmit to the viewer the soul of a theatrical work. Line by line and blotch by blotch, Field interprets a lineage of theatre drawings to generate a visual awakening in the viewer. Exploring the semiotics of imagery and layered revelation in the picture plane, Field's own drawings vibrate with compositional and graphic tension, where the viewer is asked to link metaphor, memory and meaning." --Peter Cooke, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
"Dr Sue Field's passionate publication contains informed opinions and images about ideas, speculations and creative outputs of the scenographer whose often implicit knowledge is made explicit and known and then interrogated by the author. The result of this is a comprehensive account of the recent historical and theoretical insights into scenography and the value and potential of this very particular type of drawing. This book creates a new lens on the primacy of drawing and we begin to see something familiar yet excitingly different." --Vaughan Dai Rees, UNSW, Australia "Sue Field's detailed study of scenographic design drawing presents a rich seam of analysis, shining a spotlight on the relationship between drawing, visualisation and embodied practice in contemporary design for performance. Referencing historical scholarship, the established tropes of scenography, and its reinvention in a post physical age, drawing is recast here as an autonomous thinking tool in the building of worlds." --Paul Fieldsend-Danks, Plymouth College of Art, UK