Kyle Zufra

Back-Of-House

Scenography, Performance, Theater

Within the theater, there are two binaries that exist: the Front-of-House, serving the audience and public, and the Back-of-House. This binary establishes a clear division between them at the stage edge and proscenium.

The theater proscenium acts as a frame or viewport for the stage, one that prescribes a hyper-specific view for the audience. It also acts as a mask, concealing the dynamic and automated theater that lies adjacent, the Back-of-House.

The sometimes-invisible threshold that divides the audience from the actor today, the fourth wall, can be questioned and interrogated further to fully understand the relationship between the Audience / Actor and Front-of-house / Back-of-house relationship. Can this spatial binary become blurred or nonexistent as the idea of performance and the spaces encapsulating it are questioned? If it becomes blurred at what point does scenography no longer become scenography but a part of the performance space itself?

The Back-of-House is an area of production, or in some cases, re-production as the things being created are fictional iterations of real places whether they are representations or replicas of the existing thing. These new representations or replicas can be understood as non-human actors that play a role in contemporary performance and production culture.

Because the theater and its performance structure are ever-changing, the direct effect the back-of-house has on the performance itself should be questioned as a new method of design. Is the proscenium necessary as the stage and its container become questioned as a modeling facility for new narratives to be imposed upon it?

In today's digital culture, there is a new understanding of what is front-facing or back-of-house as digital production, distribution, and creation is blurred. Is the environment digital, was the environment replicated, or was it captured on-site? All these blurred understandings question the material culture of scenography, the spectatorship of an event, and the infrastructure of production spaces.

The thesis aims to reverse the typical outside-in approach to the spatialization of a theater and works in an inside-out methodology examining the relationship between stage, audience, actor, back-of-house, and its context.

Through the inside-out approach, a new methodology of working through programmatic adjacencies, centers, surfaces, stages, and its scenographic automation and techniques, to have a direct effect on the theater spatialization and the architectural output.

The new inside-out approach can be extracted to a secondary binary that exists at the facade. The black box method of design negates or fails to foster a proper relationship between the interior and exterior, the street and the stage, and the urban and the performance. The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, located on the corner of 1st & Bixel, lies just west of downtown Los Angeles and the 110 freeway.

The center positions itself within a ring of educational centers that serve the youth through public programs. The programs stage contemporary social justice issues using Shakespearean text and reveal how a contemporary approach can be extracted outside the context of theater and performance.

Its position in the greater context of Los Angeles lies perpendicular to the line of cultural centers downtown that runs along South Grand starting north with the Ramon C. Cortines School of Performance Arts, across the 101 to the Center Theater Group, the Mark Taper Forum, the Music Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, the Colburn School, and ending on the South at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The theater is a black box in need of intervention. Its four existing facades offer the opportunity for a change in the spatialization of performance on both the interior and exterior. As the black box becomes a new operable and automated machine, it can serve a larger range of performances and bodies beyond the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles Company, and other groups that exist within the larger entertainment community.

Projection Model 01

Projection Model 02

Fly Tower Rendering

Back of House Spatial Diagram

Existing Elevation Drawing