Chroma
John Pawson
I have never designed for the stage before and when Angela Bernstein and Wayne McGregor first came to the studio to talk over the possibilities for collaboration with the Royal Opera House, I was aware that in many ways I was starting from scratch. I wanted to be clear about what makes stage design different, but I also wanted to understand what, as an architect, I could bring to the task which was not necessarily what an experienced stage designer would bring.
All architecture concerns itself with the way people will use and move through space, but these dynamic issues are obviously heightened on a dance stage. Part of the specific challenge lay in the way that, unusually for an architect, work of this nature splits how space will be physically experienced from how it will be seen. I wanted to make something which was comfortable for the dancers to use and visually comfortable for the audience. And I wanted to do something very special with light in a setting where, almost uniquely for me, there would be no sources of natural light.
The mental image I found myself coming back to was of the church of the new Cistercian monastery I have been working on in Bohemia. The apse of the monastery’s church is a simple white curve which rises uninterrupted for over 16 metres. Concealed from sightlines within the nave, a flight of stairs descends into a hidden void behind the altar where openings at ground level produce a series of ethereal effects of light, some of them entirely serendipitous. I wanted to find some way of recreating the essence of this on the stage, of effectively setting the dancers in that powerful and slightly mysterious void behind the monastery’s altar.
We started with three versions originally, each exploring a slightly different set of spatial conditions and colour options - black, white and grey. Models were constructed to give a sense of what the finished spaces would be like and these models became the focus of a series of conversations between Wayne, the lighting designer Lucy Carter and Mark Treharne from my own office. It quickly became clear that a particular version of the white void offered the richest creative possibilities, combining an authentic sense of architectural place with the spatially charged canvas for the architecture of the human body which Wayne had talked about when we first met.
The finished set is only a slightly revised version of one of those first models. Although the physical structures are all fixed, light can transform the character of the space – manipulating, for example, our perception of the back plane, which can be made to appear to advance or recede. The idea of the controlled opening was part of the design from the beginning, to frame the void and to act as a means of reading the body operating in space. The significance of the precise dimensions of the aperture had key functional as well as aesthetic implications: the slightest manipulation of the frame had an impact on the sightlines from a range of locations within the body of the opera house. The height of the lower edge was of particular concern: too low and you lose the sense of spatial intensity, too high and you lose the dancers’ feet.
In the end, my task has been to create the best possible container for movement and light – an environment where the eye is free to register the subtlest shifts in the musculature of the body and in the colour and character of the light. The result is, in one sense, a charged limbo. That the architecture required to create this manifestation of void is actually quite substantial is an irony not lost on the people responsible for its construction, one of whom commented that the set for a twenty-minute ballet is an edifice on the scale of a full-scale production of Carmen.