Set designer is the creator of the scenery as an author, designer or manage all the visual elements of a show. In the staging theaters, the field of set designer covers tasks of scenery painter, sketch artist, costume designer, and in some American countries it focuses its activity on the total set of the visual part of the staging, including design sets, costumes, props and lighting, and creating the figure of the director set designer. In other approaches in production, the increasing complexity of productions has caused the work of a set designer to be sprayed, creating divisions in the distribution of theatrical work. According to the contexts, the set designer may appear or be considered as an artist or as a coach.
From experiences like assemblies of Cosme Lotti in Italy in the sixteenth century, the list of set designers starts in the second half of the eighteenth century with the application of perspective to stage space. A pioneer in this field was the Galli Bibbiena family, natives of Bibiena among various advances achieved with the painted architecture not only see the front, but from different angles and it helped the evolution of lighting, the footlights the great innovation of the seventeenth century.
Scenography is all about the visual elements of a dramatization, whether corporeal (decorated, accessories), the lighting or the characterization of the characters (costumes, makeup, hairdressing), either the staging destined to live performance (theater, dance), cinematographic, audiovisual, exhibition or used for other events.
The scenery or scene painting has its roots in the Greek theater. The Greeks used the special artifice in their theaters to change decorations, consisted of prismatic apparatus with a different revolution landscape painted on each of its three sides. In the Oedipus King of Sophocles (430 BC.), for example, the prism which stood on the right represented the district of the city which was part of the central palace, and the left showed in perspective countryside where the characters entered coming from Delphi. It is the origin of the racks, first used in 1620, in the Farnese Theatre Parma. The frame is a frame of slats on which a canvas or paper applies and is used by painting on both sides, each corresponds to landscape or architecture which should represent the stage, and the background gives the main characteristics.
Stage performances are liked by many people and there are many people who like to have a separate place to enjoy a stage show. For such people, there are special boxes available a little more fee than the general seats.
A box is a fenced platform shaped balcony where the public sits to see a stage show or performance. As an architectural element, it is integrated into the set of spaces that make up the local dedicated to the presentation of live staging performances. Materially it consists of a small compartment which has several locations and a certain degree of independence in access and privacy in habitability; sometimes it can differentiate itself as an anteroom.
The Types
The architecture of a theater or similar venues dedicated to entertainment, distinguishes various types of box;
- The scenic box where the theater space is composed of the stage itself or in which the representation is made.
- The stage of stalls is the closest to the stage or of the same level.
- The proscenium stage is at the level of the stalls, the adjoining the scene i.e. on the proscenium.
- The box of bathtub, also called lateral box located on both sides of the stage and part of it.
- The royal box is reserved to the family of monarchs, usually located in front of the stage, in the audience, and sometimes in the proscenium.
- The family box is reserved rented by a family. This type of box is only kept in very specific stages and theaters, especially in the operatic venues.
- The stage of mourning, named for being protected by a lattice that hides its occupants.
- The box for the blind which is usually too close to the stage and it has received this name because of its poor visibility.
In dictionaries, theater is mentioned as the like and occasionally synonymous with the arena, where the audience stood for the function. In the corrals of comedies, the boxes had class quarters and were equipped with a trellis or lattice, which increased their privacy, therefore, they were used by large the public figures to attend the performances without being seen.
Impressionists’ Boxes
Within the show, it awoke attraction in the impressionist painters, the boxes in particular were definitely a pet peeve. Renoir painted them several times, as the American Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzales, the student of Edouard Manet, Degas and also with some insistence, the post-impressionist Toulouse-Lautrec.