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Reviewed by:
  • Drama and Desire: Artists and the Theatre
  • Ashley Williamson (bio)
Drama and Desire: Artists and the Theatre. Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto, ON, 19 June-26 September 2010

The immediacy of theatrical performance has made exhibiting performance beyond theatre walls a problematic endeavour. Away from the stage and the "liveliness" of a performance, theatre becomes a partial or incomplete art form; what remains to archive is not theatre, but rather historical objects and references. Recorded performances like those in production photographs, video, or audio records, and objects generated by a production (like props, costumes and maquettes), no matter how evocative, are merely suggestive of performance. Indeed, they inevitably accentuate what is missing from the assemblage of artifacts: the liveness of a theatrical experience. This conundrum has created an untenable position for theatre and performance in the gallery or museum space. In the face, then, of this apparent incompatibility of conditions of display, what advantages might accrue to a gallery that attempts to chart the intersections of drama with painting and sculpture?

Last summer, the Art Gallery of Ontario attempted to answer this question with its methods of presentation in Drama and Desire: Artists and the Theatre. Through its curation, the exhibit not only sought to highlight the emotion depicted in visual and dramatic art of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France, but to underscore the interrelations of the two art forms, using one to support the other. The gallery's success at employing these alternative entry points for its audience was mixed. Viewers were encouraged to view two-dimensional paintings as three-dimensional objects. By experimenting with creating narrative journeys for the viewer using movement (through the use of live performers) and directing the viewer's eye using scenographic techniques like lighting effects, the gallery worked to underscore the strong stylistic similarities between visual and dramatic art. Conversely when artifacts with theatrical origins [End Page 103] like maquettes, costumes, and photographs were treated like art objects and displayed in static cases, the vacancy and emptiness that these objects projected undermined their ability to engage the viewer. This emptiness and lack of life also ran counter to the gallery's objective to illuminate the heightened emotionality of dramatic art at the time. The exhibition was ultimately more successful in engaging the viewer when theatrical convention and performance were used as a tool to draw out dramatic elements in painting and sculpture than vice versa, presenting the material residue of theatrical performance as objects d'art.

Like a theatrical production, museum and gallery exhibitions are designed to convey a central idea to an audience. Scenographic tools such as lighting, set design, casting, and blocking are echoed in curatorial and interpretive strategies used within an exhibition space. The paintings, sculpture, and artifacts the curator chooses to convey the thematic vision of an exhibit can be likened to casting the actors to suit a director's vision for a play. Similarly, the choice of space, the lighting, and the placement of the art dictates a path for the visitor to take that will most clearly reveal the ideas the curator wishes to highlight just as a director arranges the stage pictures for each moment of the play, composing key scenes through the use of lighting. The didactic panel functions like a theatrical program as it provides basic information needed to understand and contextualize the art—the who, the what, the where, and the why. In the case of Drama and Desire, this parallel between curatorial and directorial approaches to shaping the audience experience was very much in evidence.

Although there are similarities in technique, engaging an exhibition audience is often more complicated than engaging a theatre audience. This is because there are inherent differences between looking at inanimate objects and watching a performance. The immediacy of theatre limits the length of time an audience has to closely examine what it is seeing; studied contemplation, however, is an essential exercise for gallery-goers. Theatre is at an advantage then, since its conventions enable it to control pace, timing, and the length of and placement of a viewer's focus in a way that a stationary display cannot. By including both visual and...

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