Stage and Costume Design

some club ‘18

Lucia Bushart

Rundgangpreis für Bühnenbild und Szenischer Raum 2018

The course covers a wide range of topics from a discussion of the classic stage area to experimental work. Students try out various techniques and media in order to develop as broad a range of tools as possible and train an individual understanding of artistic practices. Project work is based on intensive research in literature, the public space, everyday phenomena and their visualization.

The program includes both working on models portraying scenic options and the scale realization of a spatial design in the form of a mock-up stage set. In this context, the issues of lighting, sound, materials research and processing, and technical drawing and construction will also be discussed.

Something that is unique to HfG Offenbach is the inclusion of the Stage and Costume Design department in the institutional framework of the Hessische Theaterakademie (HTA). This means that, as part of their course, students can work in close collaboration with the directing, acting, singing and contemporary dance courses at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and the Masters course in dramaturgy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Students have the option of participating in the core courses of the above institutions as part of a reciprocal arrangement, which means productive interdisciplinary teams can form. This joint exploitation of the learning options available not only reinforces the students’ theoretical knowledge on a broader basis, but also helps when putting this into practice.

Students can try their hand at real theater work in their own productions and in the context of the HTA they can even do so at selected city and regional theaters in Hessen: Theater work for students under professional conditions.

Prof. Heike Schuppelius

schuppelius@hfg-offenbach.de

T +49 (0)69.800 59-250

Anex stage design/Main building, room B102/B103/B2/B3

Artistic collaboration

Fanti Baum

T +49 (0)69.800 59-250

Anbau Bühnenbild/Hauptgebäude, Anex stage design/Main building, room B102/B103/B2/B3

Teacher for special purposes

Nina Zoller

Lighting design

Jan Hartmann (Lighting Director at Frankfurt Opera House)

Textile workshop

Michaela Kraft

Archive 2009-2014

Projekte 2013-2014

Tristan und Isolde – Annual show 2014

»Descend, o night of love, (...) Unconscious – utmost rapture!«

A complex network develops: entanglements and entrapments between supreme love and supposed honor, loyalty and betrayal – confusion and disarray also reign between destiny and atonement, longing, renunciation and sorrow. But does their own insatiability not mean they are destined to always feel such yearning passion? Must the utopian lovers not inevitably fail as their passion, with all the (overwhelming) power of its feelings, will only ever lead to suffering?!

In Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” the utopia of love walks the fine line of the ultimate question: Is love (not) stronger than death? And this is indeed represented by the Tristan chord with its puzzling question marks – the definitive seal of all operas of the Romantic period and, at the same time, a radical precursor of the musical modern age.

It is with this pioneering dialectic and its meandering routes to the present that the students of the department approach experimental projects in ways that are as distinct as they are controversial. In their artistic works, they formulate potential answers to the scenic-musical world designs of Wagner, which always harbor latent disintegration of the world view.

It is these very paradoxes that the artists tackle in their broad-ranging projects. In various different performance and media constellations, in diverse scenic-spatial stations from which musical installations and sound collages arise, developing out of the latest technology and graphic musical scores – multifaceted superimpositions from pop, video game music, the sounds of nature, general noise and minimal music become a reflected space of resonance of Wagner’s acoustic image worlds.

Ultimately, all these differentiating experimental arrangements have one thing in common: In complex, condensed art forms, Wagner’s dramatic moments are elevated – becoming something immediately surprising, an unforeseeable now.

Scenic spaces, objects, costumes, light, video and sound all come together here to create entirely new constellations for the purposes of a current project focusing on a utopian “Gesamtkunstwerk”. Visitors are warmly invited to encounter the artists and their works. In this way, not least the observers themselves also become actors as they begin their tour.

wetter.gif

Interactive spatial installation, Tour 2014

Nils Wildegans

Projects summer 2014

Johanne Schröder

»Psychotropikum«, dance piece for two dancers, approx. 12 min.

Nils Wildegans

»wetter.gif«, interactive spatial installation

Yuko

»forcing and feeding«, soft sculpture

Lucia Bushart

»| to float |«, sound installation

Lucia Bushart

»Fenster« (Windows), spatial installation

Yunkyung Min

»UND- Endlichkeit« (IN- Finity), installation/sculpture

Carla-Luisa Reuter

»they see them objects«, video installation

Ivana Bischof

»Über die Wupper gehen.« (Biting the dust.), spatial and sound installation

Veronica Trebini

»Tequila Sunrise«, installation

Lena Elisa Dinse

»Hell is your private creation«, spatial installation

Kim Lotte Stöber

»Weltatem« (The world’s breath), walk-in spatial and sound installation

Ricarda Bechstein

»Sehnsuchtssuchmaschine« (Search engine of longing), mobile, walk-in spatial and sound installation

Mattis Kuhn

»soli t and i«, spatial and sound installation

Judith Altmeyer

»Desoli 440i«, costume exhibition

Carla-Luisa Reuter

»Ornament und Verbrechen« (Ornament and Crime), costume

Yuko & Ivana

»kissing the frog«, costume

Fenster (Windows)

Spatial installation, Annual Show 2014

Lucia Bushart

Über die Wupper gehen. (Biting the dust.)

Spatial and sound installation, Annual Show 2014

Ivana Bischof

Psychotropikum

A dance piece for two dancers, approx. 12 min.

Johanne Schröder

»Faust I und II« – Annual show 2013

The thematic orientation of the Stage and Costume Design department for the summer semester 2013 was Goethe’s »Faust I and II«. The huge dimensions of the dramatic cosmos of Goethe’s Faust mean it cannot be limited to »the thin thread of one sole enduring idea«, in the poet’s own words.

It was Goethe’s dramatic life’s work and, at the same time, a kind of literary legacy during his lifetime, the edition of which he also deliberately withheld from the social world around him.

Goethe’s Faust is the model of an artistic masterpiece with a grand plan behind it right from the start:

»But here too it was not about going directly from the gargantuan to the gargantuan, but rather the whole was made up of parts, occurrences, partial sophistications, from which the work, aside from the hugely scheming monologue, initially began in earnest. Auerbach’s Cellar, Gretchen Tragedy, una poenitentium; so many left-hand incursions could hardly be foreseen, yet they change the original plan and, in doing so, the substantial direction of the original material.« (Ernst Bloch: Raffael ohne Hände [Raphael without hands]. In: Spuren. Frankfurt, 1985, p. 92).

Faust’s crucial question: “Now whither shall we go?” is answered by Mephistopheles: »As best it pleases thee. The little world, and then the great, we’ll see.« Faust and his artistic environment became the starting point for impressive exploratory journeys and intensive experimental studies. New situations arose for »Faust I and II« in various visual, differentiated stations with a huge variety of individual styles and points of view. Diverse scenic-spatial, performance and media constellations were researched, created and staged.

Space, objects, costume, light, video and sound come together to form contemporary »Gesamtkunstwerks«, with the observer becoming an actor.

Mephistopheles’ motto: »Formation, transformation / Eternal mind’s eternal recreation« (V. 6285/86)

falco goethe

environment and performance

David Gonter and Sabine Born

Fuge (gap)

Dance performance, video, Annual show 2013

Johanne Schröder

Projects summer 2013