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Aronson's "The Stage is a Dangerous Machine" Analysis

-          Not only is there physical danger, but there’s also an artistic danger as well, such as designs being jarring, disconnecting, and displeasing to the audience. This is why Tyspin takes into account that his designs should have a balance between being visually aesthetic, but also shocking to the audience.

 

-          Tyspin’s best use of steel in his designs was when he did “The Electrification of the Soviet Union”, in which he designed a metal that was very flexible and put foam on it so that the actors could throw themselves against it without any danger of hurting themselves.

 

-          In Western architecture, you’re supposed to understand how the building is put together, while in Russian constructivism, it’s all about structure, or destroying the structure.

 

-          In Tyspin’s film design, he feels that space and color are the two most important factors to a film, and that props aren’t a complete necessity, because when a scene isn’t cluttered with stuff, then the scene’s space and color take over and set a feeling that you wouldn’t have otherwise if the scene had props scattered throughout it.

 

-          The art of drawing is important because the plan has to be beautiful in order for the building to be beautiful, but some designers don’t see it and make awkward scenes because of ugly ground plans.

 

-          When Tyspin did “War and Peace”, he had the setting as a globe on top of a turntable at the front of the stage to get the feeling into the audience that the world is on the edge of a precipice. It was exciting for him because he could see the balance between physical danger and theatrical danger.

 

-          He feels that, for the most part, productions are made too safe and cautious when the theater is actually driven by danger, and theater wouldn’t exist without it.

Baugh's "Scenography as a Machine for Performance" Analysis

 

–        All theatre artists have had to (and still do) contend with the complicated inter-relationship between the real-time existence of the living performers and the physical actuality of their surroundings- their place of performance.

 

–        The metaphor of the scene as a machine- as a physical construct that theatrically locates and enables the public act of performance (creates the setting and a location for the story to work with)

 

–        Neher distinguishes between the designer of a stage picture, which cannot in any sense be real, because it imitates an earlier reality, and the construction of a place on the stage that has its only significant reality at the moment of performance, and therefore has a true theatrical reality.

 

–        [Gordon] Craig was concerned to emphasize the mechanical reality of the stage construction that he proposed- For the foremost characteristic of this scene is that it is… a solid three-dimensional unit which adapts itself to the actor’s movements a group of screens which stand up by themselves.

 

–        Instead of reproductions in theater (which can be impossible to do), representations can be used instead to get the point across.

 

Design aesthetic is not determined by style but by the purpose and functionality of an object

Borges "The Metaphor" Analysis

-          The amount of viable metaphors is staggering

-          Argentine poet Lugones thought that poets were often using the same metaphors, so he decided to create metaphors of his own for the moon

-          Lugones also stated, “that every world is a dead metaphor”

-          When using a word we often forget that they are metaphors for meanings that we don’t often think about

-          The ordering of the words in a metaphor often cause the reader to take away different meanings (patterns can be the same, but meanings are different)

-          Patterns- endless time, brutal word negated by the use of a beautiful/peaceful one, life being a dream (“Have I dreamt my life, or was it a true one?” –Walther von der Vogelweide)

-          What is really important is the fact not that there are a few patterns, but that those patterns are capable of almost endless variation.

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