What is Scenography?

About the Author

Pamela Howard is a Director/Scenographer working primarily in contemporary opera and music theatre. Her practice encompasses large- and small-scale productions, in major opera houses and unloved and forgotten spaces.

Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art (1958/9) she has had a full career as a theatre designer, developing a love of text and context with fine art. Since 2000 she has been the total creator of productions developing a scenographic language of beauty and simplicity on stage, where the performer is always ‘the carrier of the myth’. Sustainability and imaginative use of space are central to her practice. A compulsive observer of human life, she is never without a pencil and a sketchbook, notating the everyday, methodically storing her pencil sketches and reworking them on stage.

Pamela was awarded the OBE in 2008 ‘for Services to Drama’ and is International Chair in Drama at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama; Visiting Professor at Arts University Bournemouth; and Emeritus Professor at University of the Arts London (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design).

www.pamelahoward.co.uk

Pavel Drábek is Professor of Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull, UK. He specializes in Shakespeare and early modern theatre (Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre, edited with M. A. Katritzky, 2019), translation and adaptation, and theatre theory (Theatre Theory Reader, ed. David Drozd, 2017). He founded and led the Ensemble Opera Diversa, a professional Czech company, and writes and translates for opera, radio and theatre. He has worked with Pamela Howard since 2009.