Set In Time: Drawings from the Serge Lifar Collection / Enter Stage Left: The craft of theatre in art

This season, the Glucksman presents the exhibitions Enter Stage Left: The craft of theatre in art and Set in Time: Drawings from the Serge Lifar Collection, each exploring the relationship between theatre and visual art, from stage and costume designs by the pioneers of early modernism to contemporary works of film, sculpture, photography and installation.

Enter Stage Left: The craft of theatre in art
Artists: Ella de Búrca, Lothar Götz, Aoibheann Greenan, Barbara Kasten, Gareth Kennedy, David Noonan, Alexandre Singh, Althea Thauberger

The theatre is traditionally seen as a space of storytelling and illusion, where the spectator surrenders to the narrative. In Enter Stage Left, dramatic devices such as sets, props, lighting and script, are utilised by Irish and international contemporary artists to undercut this sense of artifice, following the playwright Bertholt Brecht’s conviction that: “the illusion created by the theatre must be a partial one, so that it can always be recognized as illusion.”

Lothar Götz’ Pas de Trois is an installation of drawings, paintings and prints that draws on the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 Triadic Ballet, while David Noonan’s linen collages appropriate and overlay silkscreened archival images from early stage productions. Encompassing sculpture, archival film and photographs, and hand-carved wooden masks, Gareth Kennedy explores the relationship between traditional folk theatre and the fascist ideologies prevalent in Italy’s South Tyrol region during World War II. In her double-screen video Saying is Believing, Ella de Búrca asks a 16-year old actress to read back a prepared script on her expectations as a female artist, while Aoibheann Greenan’s installation of handmade costumes and props takes George Bernard Shaw‘s philosophical commentary on Richard Wagner’s Ring tetralogy as its starting point. Barbara Kasten’s photographic Scenes address the spatial and atmospheric qualities of the theatrical stage, with the interplay of shadows and reflections evoking early modernist experiments in abstraction. Alexandre Singh’s array of sculptural busts, watercolour drawings and portraiture photography are components of his earlier work, The Humans, a three-act play that combines elements of Commedia dell’arte, Broadway musicals, and Greek comedy, while Althea Thauberger’s film installation re-stages Peter Weiss’ 1963 “play-within-a-play” Marat/Sade, in Bohnice, the largest psychiatric clinic in the Czech Republic. Her work re-imagines the original, which featured Sade directing patients in a play about the assassination of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, alongside documentary footage on the production and its setting.

Drawing on influences from the worlds of drama, design, music and art, Enter Stage Left includes works that reveal the hidden mechanics behind theatre. The exhibition reverses the usual perspective of the spectator, so that in place of the production, we see props and costumes, actors rehearsing lines, and tableaux being arranged.

Set in Time: Drawings from the Serge Lifar Collection
Artists: Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Cocteau, André Derain, Max Ernst, Naum Gabo, Nathalie Gontcharova, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Pavel Tchelitchew

Serge Lifar, the last great protégé dancer of famed Russian ballet producer Serge Diaghilev, collected paintings, set designs, and costume sketches from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and from his own later productions at the Paris Opera. This collection, recognized as invaluable evidence of the emergence of modernism in theatre and in Western art, is today unrivaled as a comprehensive documentation of the Ballets Russes.

Set in Time represents a curated selection of works from the Serge Lifar Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Including stage and costume designs by renowned modernist artists, this exhibition reveals the fruitful relationships and collaborations between the theatre and visual artists of the early 20th Century.

Enter Stage Left and Set in Time are curated by Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.