Scenographic Design Drawing

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