Entering the spring semester with a focus on experience design and Museums it is refreshingly appropriate that my tangental readings have lead me to making connections to theatre. During a design conference last year, it dawned on me that I really hadn't drawn from a rich background I had been immersed induring undergrad. It must have been I was looking at the work of David Small that I had the epiphany. Now, somehow, it feels like theatre is rising from somewhere out of me-- poking it's head into interests I had discovered without it's help.
Searching for texts which would enrich my thoughts for our semester of thinking about Museum and experience design I found the book Global Museum Hans Dieter Schaal. The title was compelling enough, it wasn't until I really sat down to read the thoughts and look further into Schaal's work that I reconnected with theatre. Though it had been on my mind this semester, it was the first connection that chance threw my way to help me make sense of things.
Schaal is a German architect. See some of his work here. The work represented in Global Museum includes designed gardens, exhibition design, and set design. The quotes below are excerpts from his introduction into his set designs...
Like museums and exhibitions theatre too is a school of seeing.
Theatre is not about depicting and filming reality. This is a place that remains open to the possibilities of the imagination, of poetic reality.
Other notes/reflections from his writing: theatre triggers memory and association, allows for bridging new understanding, is a social and shared experience, is atmospheric, lures the audience into a state of concentration.
These characteristics have many parallels to what a meaningful museum experience has meant to me.
As a side note...
The book concludes with Schaal's idea of a Global Museum which interested me more from a standpoint of how he represented his concepts through a series of very crude but effective models and collages. Seeing this encourages me to take up this practice as I have somehow been reminded time and time again: to create some visualization of little ideas I have here and there.
Seeing Schaal's set design conjures up many wonderful connections: the opera Dr. Atomic which I was blown away by about a year ago, and a more recent splurge: the box set of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson.
