This year’s Gordon Craig Lecture, in association with the Society for Theatre Research, will be given by architect and professor of scenography Serge von Arx, the artistic director of the scenography department of the Norwegian Theatre Academy (of the Østfold University College).

Scenography is the intertwinement of theatre and architecture, resulting in an amalgamation of two essentially opposing fields. At the same time their synthesis inherently is symbiotic in the emerging plethora of potentialities which it opens up to. The lecture will focus on the following two aspects of this dialectic:

Firstly theatre always is fictive whereas architecture inescapably is real. Naturalistic theatre does not exist. Secondly theatre inherently is ephemeral whereas architecture is enduring to a degree that the process of ageing becomes an intrinsic agent.

Our sensory experience of both, the expansion of our bodily knowledge, is where architecture and theatre coincide and where the two engage into a unity. That unity is called scenography. But scenography as such does not exist. It is mere agency. Scenography is the definition of potentials where the yet unknown unfolds. This lecture will question common understandings while trying to assess common knowledge.