'The Presence of Design': The Sets and Costumes are There, too

Abstract

We tend to focus on the actor and the audience when we think of being there. However, the design (the space, imagery, costumes and style) dictates the conditions in which the actors and audience engage. This paper will look at ways that design achieves presence in performance: a being there that is often overlooked because we only consider ‘presence’ as the domain of ‘consciousness’. Design is activated by the ‘nowness’ of performance but in different ways than a ‘site’ or pre-existing ‘space’, because we must consider what doing ‘design’ implies. The designer is involved in a complicated creative and interpretive process—the before—the making of set models and costume drawings and the actual consciousness of the collaboration between designer, director and actors. I will argue that the limited ways in which design has been written about reflects a general lack of understanding of how designers work and the ways that design shape the kinds of being there that occur in performance. This paper will build on material from my ‘ethnographic’ research of stage design processes to present some new ways to engage with designers and design.