null Enter the backstage



Vincent Roumagnac’s artistic research project Backdrop has elements of both installation art and theatre. The name Backdrop refers to the cloth hanging at the rear of the stage in traditional theatre houses and commedia dell’arte open-air stages. It delineates the stage and separates it from the backstage.

Roumagnac’s Backdrop is made of a semi-transparent greenhouse plastic film hanging from a steel frame. The work can be placed both indoors and outdoors, where it frames the view behind it, and invites the air as actor.

The plastic sheet quivers when the wind blows, thus constantly changing the experience of the audience, as we can see a smaller or bigger slice of the backstage through the constantly moving cloth.

The work is part of Vincent Roumagnac’s larger research venture, Anthroposcenic Chronotopias, where he questions the western inbetween- human-only theatrical conventions and its chronological and linear organization of time. Hence he asks: how can Western theatre practice evolve in order to diffract from humanist perspective in order to respond to contemporary ecological planetary challenges?

“I try to unsettle the human-centred stage by destabilising its conventional ‘now’. In my experimentations on other scenic temporalities, I invite durations that exceed human scale or I transfer the aesthetic and temporal agency to other-than-human elements. This project responds to the Utopia of Access theme of the Pavilion metaphorically but also literally as my question is: can we theatrically access the environmental backstage through a non-representational experience?”
 

Vincent Roumagnac

  • Born in the French Basque Country (Biarritz) in 1973
  • French actor and theatre director
  • Since 2010 participating in several artistic research projects in Finland
  • Doctoral student at Uniarts Helsinki’s Performing Arts Research Centre, Theatre Academy (Tutke) from 2015, after graduating in Lyon. Research supported by Kone Foundation
  • More info: vincentroumagnac.com
     

Photo: Vincent Roumagnac’s Backdrop experiment in spring 2016 during his art residency in Portugal at O espaço do tempo (Montemor o novo).

This article has originally been published in the May issue of Uniarts Helsinki's IssueX magazine, this time a special edition dedicated to the Research Pavilion.