Designing for deaf audiences brings very specific, practical challenges but also opens up huge new possibilities. As Deafinitely Theatre’s artistic director, Paula Garfield explains,
Deafinitely Theatre’s style is to be visual and so for me what we bring is that visual storytelling and I don’t just mean British Sign Language. I want to see the story happen visually on the stage to make it clear for any audience. That is why the design is so important as it compliments that visual storytelling element.
This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream came about as a result of the success of Deafinitely’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost for the Globe to Globe season two years ago. Deafinitely’s inclusion in Globe to Globe clearly signposts British Sign Language not just as a tool for accessibility but as a language in its own right. And what’s particularly exciting to a designer is that BSL is a visual language. Globe to Globe and Deafinitely also share a vision of productions transcending their specific languages, whether BSL, Italian or Guajarati; our production was very specifically conceived as being for a mixed deaf/hearing audience.
Visiting A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, currently at Tate Modern, is an odd experience for a theatre designer. The exhibition interrogates the relationship between performance and painting – and, in fact, other visual media – from a variety of angles, sometimes tenuously but almost always in a way that is engaging and thought-provoking. However, it does this entirely within the frame of reference of visual art. It is as if performance outside the art gallery either does not exist or is merely a cultural phenomenon to be knowingly referenced; not a major group of art-forms that have their own evolutions, their own traditions and their own avant-garde movements. Yet we, as theatre designers, are engaging with many of the same issues as the artists in the exhibition, and with no less professionalism and integrity.
Hard Places by Farhad Sorabjee, a Mumbai-based writer, had been previously produced in India by a remarkable company called Rage, mainly known in the UK as the Royal Court’s “go-to” for finding and supporting Indian playwrights. Hard Places was read at the Court, then picked up by Tinderbox Alley, which brought The Mercury Theatre in Colchester on board, with Rage as the Indian partner. The cast comprised two UK-based performers, Jasmina Daniel and Nabil Stuart, and one from Rage, Shernaz Patel, who is widely recognized in India, not least for her film work. This new production, directed by Chris White, was rehearsed and shown in Colchester before travelling to India.
I’m on the committee of the Society of British Theatre Designers. I’m also part of the Scene Changeand Freelancers Make Theatre Work networks and a member of Equity. I helped found The King’s Hall Trust for the Arts, and am currently its chair. I occasionally teach theatre design and sustainable theatre practice as a visiting lecturer, and have previously taught at universities including Goldsmiths and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and the National College of Arts in Pakistan.
I’m committed to making my design practice sustainable and am the co-ordinator of the SBTD’s Sustainable Design Group, which I also co-founded. I am part of the core team running Ecostage, as well as being a signatory the Ecostage Pledge and and a member of the Staging Change network.
(Please note, I’m having some issues with some photo credits not displaying. Please bear with me. I’m steadily working through all the images on this site, making sure the captions are visible. In the meantime, get in touch if you need any show info/credits. )
Tom Fool at Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre 2006 and The Bush, London 2007.
Cast: Liam Brennan, Meg Fraser and Richard Madden
Director: Claire Lizzimore, Designer Paul Burgess, Lighting and sound Graham Sutherland. Photo credit: Richard Campbell.
Deafinitely Theatre’s 4.48 Psychosis – a co-production with the New Diorama Theatre. Set, costumes and video: Paul Burgess. Lighting, Joe Hornsby. Full credits available on Deafinitely website.
Photographer: Becky Bailey
Deafinitely Theatre’s 4.48 Psychosis – a co-production with the New Diorama Theatre. Set, costumes and video: Paul Burgess. Lighting, Joe Hornsby. Full credits available on Deafinitely website.
Photographer: Becky Bailey
Flush by David Dipper at Soho Theatre, directed by Bijan Sheibani. In this photo: Burn Gorman
Switch ECHO by Adriano Shaplin at WUK, Vienna, directed by Alex Leiffheidt
Jonah and Otto by Robert Holman, directed by Clare Lizzimore, with Ian McDiarmid and Andrew Sheridan
Our Country’s Good at The Watermill, Newbury, directed by Alex Clifton
Shoreditch Madonna by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, directed by Sean Matthias
Deafinitely Theatre’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in BSL at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Paula Garfield. Sets and Costumes by Paul Burgess. Photo: Simon Kane
The Red Ballon, written and directed by Carolyn Defrin
Deafinitely Theatre’s production of Contractions, with Fifi Garfield and Abigail Poulton
The Rememberers, a live, hip-hop graphic novel, written and performed by Kenny Baraka. Video design by Arnim Freiss using drawings by Cristian Ortiz
Stranger, by Same Stuff Theatre with perormers Phan Y Ly and Ho Ngoc Bao Khiem, director Rob Hale and scenographer Paul Burgess. BlackBox, Hanoi, World Stage Design, Cardiff, Tara Arts, London, and The Albany London
Stranger, by Same Stuff Theatre with perormers Phan Y Ly and Ho Ngoc Bao Khiem, director Rob Hale and scenographer Paul Burgess. BlackBox, Hanoi, World Stage Design, Cardiff, Tara Arts, London, and The Albany London
Other Hands by Laura Wade, Soho Theatre, dircted by Bijan Sheibani, designed by Paul Burgess. Cast in this photo: Anna Orton and Michael Gould.
On the Rocks by Amy Rosenthal, directed by Clare Lizzimore and designed by Paul Burgess, Hampstead Theatre
On the Rocks by Amy Rosenthal, directed by Clare Lizzimore and designed by Paul Burgess, Hampstead Theatre: Nick Caldecott, Charlotte Emmerson, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Ed Stoppard
Remembering the Future, created by artists Carolyn Defrin, Paul Burgess, and Levitt Bernstein architects, at St Paul’s Centre, Hammersmith, and Borough Road Gallery.
Graeme Mackay, Susan Worsfold and Onur Orkut in Selfish at The Arches, Glasgow
A Place at the Table, Daedalus Theatre Company. Performed at Camden People’s Theatre, Southwark Cathedral and (in this photo) Amnesty International. Directed and Designed by Paul Burgess.
The original Guardian article, to which this responds, can be read here.
“Why don’t more visual artists do theatre?” This was the somewhat alarming headline introducing a Mark Lawson article in The Guardian in July. The piece itself was more nuanced. Crucially, he accepts that “stage design is clearly a form of art” and narrows “visual artists” down to “full-time painters and sculptors”. Nonetheless, there is something very fundamentally wrong with the underlying assumptions. I would argue that this is because we see ourselves not as jumped up scene painters, out of our depth in complexities of visual art, but as amphibians – operating fully in both visual and performance environments.
Slice: London-Lahore is in an experimental project in a very real sense. As well as providing a framework to allow artists from two cities to respond to their built environment, it tests methods for long-distance collaboration. As has been reported in Blue Pages, I have previously visited the now defunct Theatre Department of the Pakistani National College of Arts to share ideas about teaching design, run workshops and seminars and, on my second trip, to design a show. But travelling is expensive, time-consuming, polluting and often fraught with red tape. Slice: London-Lahore offers an alternative approach.
Three years ago I had arrived in blazing sunshine to find a fledgling university department, just one year old, stretching its wings. It felt like an exciting time. My visit, backed by the Society of British Theatre Designers (SBTD), was part of a programme of events run by the Department of Theatre of The National College of Arts, Pakistan’s much respected arts university. I had been invited by Claire Pamment, a theatre director and dramaturg I’d worked with in UK, who was now resident in Pakistan and leading the effort to establish the department. My specific remit was to head a week-long seminar leading to a showcase of visual theatre. Entitled Rang, an Urdu word meaning roughly ‘colour’, this ‘performance without actors’, ranged from a tiny puppet holding the attention of the audience to a massive projection of fire filmed live on stage. The seminar, on the other hand, focused on comparing approaches, looking at the boundaries of scenography and investigating what the purely visual can ‘say’ in its own right. Another more general aim of my visit was to raise the department’s profile, engage students in a range of projects and, crucially, to bring together a group of professional artists and designers to discuss how to establish and run what would be the first public funded BA theatre degree in the country.
What’s On Stage, 14 April 2009: The Big Interview … Paul Burgess
Daedalus Theatre Company’s A Place at the Table, looking at the repercussions of the assassination of Burundi’s President Ndadaye in 1993, opens this week at the Camden People’s Theatre (15 April to 2 May). Katie Blemler recently caught up with the show’s director/designer/producer Paul Burgess to find out more.
Could you give us a brief history of the events that occurred directly following President Ndadaye’s assassination?
President Ndadaye won the 1993 election. He represented the Hutu majority. But he was killed by the Tutsi military elite who wanted to hold on to power. This led to reprisals against Tutsis and a cycle of violence which evolved into civil war. Our play looks mainly at the coup and its immediate aftermath, including the Kimiba massacre where many school children were burned to death.
