Stage Design
All are made for a fixed viewing distance, so sets, costumes and even faces get exaggerated into signs, whether the body on stage is a shadow puppet or a painted actor.
Dictionary entry
- Wayang Kulit traditional–present / Style
Javanese shadow theater works pierced leather puppets between a lamp and a screen, and in doing so perfected a formal language of contour, silhouette and the stylized profile.
- Bakst Stage Design 1909-1914 / Style
Sets and costumes rebuilt as a painter's single picture. Jewel-deep colors laid over one another, with swirling curves and orientalist pattern drawing the dancing body itself into the design.
- Bauhaus Stage 1921–1929 / Style
Schlemmer's stage workshop turned the body into geometry. Spheres and cones in the Triadic Ballet costumes set the human figure dancing as a form in space, and performance art traces its origin to them.
- Constructivist Stage 1922–1930s / Style
Revolutionary Russia's style that discarded painted backdrops for a bare working machine on stage. The turning structure Popova built for The Magnanimous Cuckold remade stage design as working construction.
- New Stagecraft 1890s–1930s / Style
The stage reform that dropped painted realism for light, levels and simple volumes shaping space for music and the body. Appia's living light and Craig's moving screens created the very profession of lighting design.
- Commedia dell'Arte 16th–18th century / Style
Masks and fixed costumes let Italy's improvised comedy name each character at a glance. Harlequin's lozenges and Pulcinella's white belong to a system of visual signs that art, fashion and graphics have never stopped quoting.
- Kumadori 1673– / Style
Kabuki makeup that exaggerates muscle and vein in red and indigo lines, diagramming a role's character on the face. With Sharaku's actor prints, the origin of the strong graphic face in Japanese design.