Stage Directions • April 2019 • PQ 2019: Prague Quadrennial

The University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Theatre and Dance was selected to engineer and fabricate two exhibits — a professional designers exhibit and an emerging designers exhibit — that will represent the United States at the 2019 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ) in June. Both the National Exhibit and the Emerging Artists Exhibit appeared in Louisville at USITT 2019 and will now head to Prague.

Held once every four years since 1967, the Prague Quadrennial is the world’s largest event in the field of scenography and offers a competitive presentation of contemporary performance design — including costume, stage, lighting, sound design, and theatre architecture for dance, opera, drama, site-specific, multi-media performances, and performance art.

Begun in 1967 as a way to bridge East and West during the Cold War era, in recent years, the PQ has served as a meeting point for artists from every continent, artists whose traditions and professional lives might not otherwise converge. By exhibiting thousands of designs from dozens of countries, and by bringing together designers, directors, students, and the general public, the PQ provides an unprecedented exchange of ideas that goes well beyond the narrow confines of theatrical design and style. USITT has sponsored the U.S. exhibit at the PQ for more than 40 years.

In remarks made during a roundtable discussion about the exhibits at the NY Regional Section’s annual Frank Willard Winter Session and Job Fair, executive director David Grindle said that he finds the PQ an amazing gathering because “it really does let you see theatre design from around the world and it prompts the question ‘What does that mean?’ Each nation translates, so to speak, design to represent themselves. Our challenge, in the U.S., is that we are a nation of more than 300 million people. We’re trying to encompass the aesthetic of this massive nation in some format.”

The theme of the 2019 exhibition is porous borders. And there are no borders between the countries of the North American exhibit. “We purposely did that,” said Grindle. “Think about the other borders that we have that are porous. What are the borders between us? We create borders, artistic ones, emotional ones, relationship borders, that we try to pass through, so, in our nation right now, and in many nations, the idea of geographical borders is the first thing to come to mind. That was one of the first borders that we tried to get rid of as we worked as a multinational partnership.”

Grindle said that he is also excited that the U.S. exhibits have intentionally sought to show the diversity of theatre design. “Both design teams for these exhibits were led by female designers,” he noted. “That matters because design is still a heavily male-dominated world. We try to feature designers of color, because our nation is diverse, and we wanted to show all those different faces and perspectives. It’s a really exciting way to look at American design this year.”

Jonathan Shimon, an assistant professor in UB’s Department of Theatre and Dance and technical director of the U.S. entry, called being selected to host the build “a huge honor.”

Shimon and Grindle both pointed out that, to their knowledge, this is the first build team to use primarily undergraduate students. Of the nine student members of the build team, only one is a master’s candidate. The UB build began on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Shimon, a self-described “numbers guy,” determined that the nine students, along with UB colleagues Dyan Burlingame, John Rickus, Eric Burlingame, Rick Haug and himself put in more than 3,450 person-hours between Thanksgiving and mid-January to build the exhibits.

In addition to the investment in time made by the UB students, faculty and staff, Shimon noted that he had made 173 purchases for the PQ project, resulting in a total of just over $28,600 spent at local businesses in the Buffalo area. Grindle pointed out that of that amount, $25,000 came from a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. “We took those federal dollars and poured them directly into the economy of Upstate New York.”

After the preview at the NY Regional Section meeting, the exhibits were showcased at a UB alumni association reception before being disassembled and packed for the trip to Louisville, where the exhibits were on display on the Stage Expo floor during the Annual USITT Conference before being shipped to Prague for the quadrennial exhibition in June 2019. USITT will tour a scaled-down version of this year’s PQ exhibit until the 15th PQ in 2023.

In addition to the NEA, additional generous support and in-kind contributions for this exhibit came from Figure 53, J.R. Clancy, Rose Brand, Gantom Lighting, ETC, Nicopress, Rosco, Applied Electronics, and others. The Institute is grateful for their support.

This article was drawn from the excellent PQ coverage done by Jenn Shuron in USITT’s Sightlines. http://newsletters.usitt.org/issue/sightlines. Stage Directions will have detailed coverage of the PQ exhibits’ design and build details in the May issue.