Juliet Rufford
Juliet Rufford is a researcher, writer, teacher and curator who has held academic posts at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Queen Mary University of London. Her work in the fields of theatre and architecture focuses on the politics of space, the performativity of architecture and the object-world, and ideas about construction and critical un-building in performance. Her chief interest is in how the theories and practices of theatre can be used to explore and question architecture (and vice versa), producing new modes of knowledge. An artist contributor to the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space and to the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, she has on-going professional associations with the International Federation of Theatre Research (as co-convenor of the Theatre / Architecture Working Group) and the Architecture Section of the Prague Quadrennial. Her academic articles have been published in journals including Contemporary Theatre Review, Journal of Architectural Education and New Theatre Quarterly, and she is currently co-editing (with Andrew Filmer, Aberystwyth University) a volume of essays on shared practices and pedagogies between architecture and performance as well as writing a monograph on the theatre projects of Haworth Tompkins Architects. Her short book Theatre & Architecture (Palgrave Macmillan) is due out in December 2014.
BRIEF OUTLINE OF THEATRE & ARCHITECTURE
Theatre and architecture enjoy a rich, complex and sometimes fraught relationship: in part, they are radically dissimilar (perhaps opposite) disciplines. Yet they share overlaps of material, concern and practice that range from a focus on time and space, interests in the production, articulation and programming of space, in the structuring of action and event, in the construction and contestation of social relations, and in the meeting between human bodies and the built forms they occupy.
In this short book, I argue that theatre and architecture are caught up in an interrogative aesthetics, one that uses the ruptures between them as much as their points of convergence to explore their signature dilemmas, the affordances and limitations of each. The book is divided into two main parts. In Part One: On Architecture, I discuss two terms (‘mimesis’ and ‘performativity’) that are closely related to theatre but are contentious when applied to architecture. I show how the former provides exciting opportunities for an architecture that seeks to enact different meanings for its users, and I argue that the latter, considered as an architectural process, might make use of the tools of performance to create alternative architectural performativities. In Part Two: On Theatre, I trace architecture’s historical role in producing theatrical meaning; I show how early twentieth-century theatre-makers disrupted one architectural order - that of the proscenium-arch stage - to establish other, more radical uses of architecture and how contemporary experiments use architecture to debunk myths that include, and extend beyond, the theatre. The book ends with an argument for the tectonic - the poetics of architectural construction - as a potentially valuable means of analysing and making theatre.
Throughout, I question some of the assumptions we make about discrete disciplinary processes, and I reassess relationships between theatre, architecture and world. In working through these issues, I have been less interested in the history of theatre architecture than I have been eager to know how theatre and architecture each unmask and re-negotiate defining features of the other (although I do engage with key examples of theatre architecture - purpose-built and otherwise - and I challenge theatre-makers and architects to think deeply about what a theatre building could be like). The book is about how theatre and architecture as disciplines and inter-disciplines act on one another in ways that might prove critically and artistically generative.
Theatre and architecture enjoy a rich, complex and sometimes fraught relationship: in part, they are radically dissimilar (perhaps opposite) disciplines. Yet they share overlaps of material, concern and practice that range from a focus on time and space, interests in the production, articulation and programming of space, in the structuring of action and event, in the construction and contestation of social relations, and in the meeting between human bodies and the built forms they occupy.
In this short book, I argue that theatre and architecture are caught up in an interrogative aesthetics, one that uses the ruptures between them as much as their points of convergence to explore their signature dilemmas, the affordances and limitations of each. The book is divided into two main parts. In Part One: On Architecture, I discuss two terms (‘mimesis’ and ‘performativity’) that are closely related to theatre but are contentious when applied to architecture. I show how the former provides exciting opportunities for an architecture that seeks to enact different meanings for its users, and I argue that the latter, considered as an architectural process, might make use of the tools of performance to create alternative architectural performativities. In Part Two: On Theatre, I trace architecture’s historical role in producing theatrical meaning; I show how early twentieth-century theatre-makers disrupted one architectural order - that of the proscenium-arch stage - to establish other, more radical uses of architecture and how contemporary experiments use architecture to debunk myths that include, and extend beyond, the theatre. The book ends with an argument for the tectonic - the poetics of architectural construction - as a potentially valuable means of analysing and making theatre.
Throughout, I question some of the assumptions we make about discrete disciplinary processes, and I reassess relationships between theatre, architecture and world. In working through these issues, I have been less interested in the history of theatre architecture than I have been eager to know how theatre and architecture each unmask and re-negotiate defining features of the other (although I do engage with key examples of theatre architecture - purpose-built and otherwise - and I challenge theatre-makers and architects to think deeply about what a theatre building could be like). The book is about how theatre and architecture as disciplines and inter-disciplines act on one another in ways that might prove critically and artistically generative.