| Title |
A Study on Visual Metaphors that appear in the Stage Design of Bob Crowley - Focused on the stage design of ‘AIDA’ ? |
| Keywords |
Bob Crowley ; Stage Design ; Visual metaphor ; Musical ‘AIDA’ |
| Abstract |
The main purpose of (the) performing arts is to efficiently communicate the themes and meanings which performances contain under limited time and place to the audience. Stage design should visually express play writer’s scripts and director’s interpretations of works, amid limitations. Although it is mostly designed metaphorically, in many cases, it is used only as a tool describing the background of performances but fails to effectively convey the true message of scenes to spectators. On the other hand, Bob Crowley has been recognized for his own design presentation skills to win ‘Best Scenic Design of a Musical’ of Tony Awards for six times and still exerts great influence on the musical and performing arts fields as a set designer. This study analyzes his reading of scripts and visual metaphor expressions, focusing on the musical, ‘Aida’ where the skills are mostly notable. To that end, we studied the concept of stage arts and theory of visual metaphoric expression to derive the features of his own technique in visual metaphor. Then, the features were applied to each scene of ‘Aida’ to see how they are displayed on stage. The result shows that Bob Crowley not only describes the background on stage, but also visualizes characters’ personality and emotions in scenes. Such method of his expression is a proof to enhanced performance level by maximizing the atmosphere. Considering that a stage design should be based on the capacity of a designer to reinterpret the space with renewed viewpoints, visual metaphoric expression can serve as an effective tool to deliver clear messages to the audience under limited time and space, which is open to various methods of expressions. |