Scaenae frons: Audience' Space, Actors' Space

Scaenae frons - 관객의 공간, 배우의 공간

The continuous struggle to establish virtual reality on the stage during the history of Western Theater has been centered upon the development of scenographic setting and devices. It began with the Classical Greek drama where the place of performance became separated from the place of the audience. These two places were united as the orchestra - the place of the Dionysiac festival in the earliest stage of the Greek theater. And the skene, once a storage building outside the theatrical area, became an essential factor of the scenic space to provide illusion of the other world where the actors dwell. As a natural consequence it followed the structural change of Roman theater where the stage became a high and wide platform and the skene converted into the permanent stone scaenae frons. Such a tradition of the Classical theater was revived in Italian Renaissance and Baroque theater, which succeeded Vitruvius' concept of scaenographia as well as the vestiges of Imperial Roman theater. The cases of Serlio, Palladio, and Andrea Pozzo reveal the way how Western theater conjured the fictional space by traditional representational scenery, including architectural background setting and painted devices. It resulted in the physical and emotional division of actors' space and audience's space. The rejection of representational scenery upon the stage by avant garde artists like Edward Gordon Craig in the early years of the twentieth century should be interpreted as an attempt to recover an emotional attachment of actors and the audience, which was the case of Greek antiquity. This new scenogrpahic endeavor in modern theater is to challenge the main purpose of traditional scaenae frons to establish the boundary of the illusional 'scene' of performance where the audience should remain as passive spectators, and instead, to try to unite the action of actors and the audience upon the stage as a 'place'.