Thursday, December 10, 2020
Did You Know – The Classic Fourth Wall
ASTC: What exactly is a proscenium? What is a proscenium arch? Thanks for asking. Let’s have a little chat. The proscenium is roughly equivalent to a picture frame that surrounds a piece of 2-dimensional art. In the theatre world, this “picture frame” separates the audience from the actors and the stage scenery, except when it doesn’t.
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Now the American Society of Theatre Consultants is an organization that his its priorities in order. When describing what factors should determine the size of a proscenium the first that they list is the golden rectangle, which I had to google to make sure I knew what they were talking about. Later on in the list was life-safety issues after things like the type of performances. I was always thought that the proscenium was a staple of theaters, and I do not have the statistics on types of theater, so it probably is, but I think it is important that set designers and technical directors question that assumption and whether a theater with a proscenium is the right choice for the show. I once got to be involved in striking a show that was set in a white box with a thrust audience layout that was built inside a proscenium theater. Now that director and set designer did not take into account the architectural of the venue when designing the show.
The topic of prosceniums is actually something I have been thinking about on my own lately, especially with all the playground pieces debuting this past week. The frame of digital theatre is so different from how live theatre is framed, and I think it is something that digital theatre designers and directors in this new era of performance need to be more aware of. In a traditional theatre the proscenium arch is the window into the world of the play, and a scenic designer has to think about how to fill that space within that frame to pull the attention of the audience. I think its vital for the whole space to be used in an effective manner. In this new digital medium that everyone is getting into, the computer screen becomes that new proscenium, and in zoom theatre, there is often a lot of black, dead space, surrounding the little boxes the performer heads are in. I think more people need to be utilizing streaming software like OBS that let you put in backgrounds. We used backgrounds in our puppet piece and it not only helped us tell the story but eliminated that dead space.
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