"Porous realities, open scenography: a study of the Lebanese exhibition at PQ 2019"

in Theatre and Performance Design Journal
Volume 6, 2020 - Issue 1-2: PQ2019: Imagination. Transformation. Memory.

Hadi E. Damien was invited to contribute to the Theatre and Performance Design special issue covering the Prague Quadrennial 2019. He reflects on the process of curating the National Exhibition of Lebanon, how he engaged with PQ themes, responded to the aspects of contemporary Lebanon and glocal performance, how this shaped his process as a curator, and how it informed the final result.

Special thanks to Jane Collins, Arnold Aronson, and Nick Tatchell.

Abstract: This article proceeds from our understanding that scenography is the environment in which performance unfolds. It presents a reflection on what forces shaped the design of the exhibition we displayed. The article further examines the political realities of Lebanon and their socio-economic consequences that shaped this exhibition, where actions and whereabouts are publicly shared in cyberspace – the modern, accessible and still unrestricted common space. The exhibition of Lebanon at PQ 2019 was a reflection on an audience trend we identified while attending performances. It displayed a landscape of raised hands, holding mobile phones and showing images of performances. The mobile phones examined the decreased reality – the effect of seeing a performance on a phone – and posited a few questions, helping those viewing the exhibition to contextualize it, and inviting them to think about this practice. The wall-less exhibition also offered attendees the possibility of sharing their photos of performances they attended during PQ 2019, and including them in the Lebanese exhibition, further marking the (lack of) tension between the local and the global – the local being the performances staged in Lebanon, and the global being the pictures that depicted performances from all over the world during PQ 2019.

Hadi Damien (2020) Porous realities, open scenography: a study of the Lebanese exhibition at PQ 2019, Theatre and Performance Design, 6:1-2, 48-57, DOI: 10.1080/23322551.2020.1785230