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The Scenography Open Studio Exhibition is an annual event sharing works in-progress by MA/MFA Scenography students at Central. This year’s exhibition will take place on 26 - 29 June 2023.
Scenography Open Studio Exhibition 2023
26-29 June. MA/MFA Scenography 2023 students share their final projects in the Dench Studio.
View the archive of previous exhibitions below.
Archive
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Scenography Online Exhibition 2022
UnderPlay: The Space Between Making & Unmaking
14-17 April 2022
Crypt Gallery, 165 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BA
A series of immersive installations that playfully disrupt sensory perception.
UnderPlay is a free exhibition created by the MFA Scenography students from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. It explores audience interaction through its fun and immersive installations. Perfect for a day trip or to take some unique pictures.
Opening times
- Thursday 14 April: Opening event, invite only.
- Friday 15 April: 4.00pm-9.00pm
- Saturday 16 April: 4.00pm- 9.00pm
- Sunday 17 April: 10.00am-2.00pm
Booking
Entry is free. Register to attend the exhibition via Eventbrite
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Scenography Online Exhibition 2021
Photo: Daria Vasko6-9 September 2021, Online & Onsite
With great pleasure, we invite you to discover the final projects of MA/MFA Scenography students.
Virtual and physical, live and mediated, the works are concerned with relations at a time when our relational habits have been disrupted.
What have we lost, gained and learnt? How can we be together again? Or, how do we want to be together? And what are the opportunities and dangers at stake now?
![Work by Scenography student Carys Jones]()
Carys Jones (Wales) Hex ![Work by Scenography student Daria Vasko]()
Daria Vasko (Russia) Where Are The Edges Of Your Body? ![Work by Scenography student Jock Maitland]()
Jock Maitland (UK) - Collective (Play)Things ![Work by Scenography students Mari Katsuno & Guccini]()
Mari Katsuno (Japan) & Guccini (China) - Stop Moving! 
Programme of Works presented at Central from 10.00am to 5.00pm, 6 - 9 September 2021
By invitation only – RSVP to Simon.Donger@cssd.ac.uk
Throughout specific days:
- Monday 6 September - Karl Chaundy (UK) - We are Objects, Are We?
- Tuesday 7 September - Jock Maitland (UK) - Collective (Play)Things
- Wednesday 8 September - Carly Altberg (Canada) - No Words, Only Vocabulary
- Thursday 9 September – Carys Jones (Wales) - Hex
Throughout the week:
- Alexandra Amoroso (France) - Multistorytelling Through Multimedia
- Alexandra Bonteil (France) - The Body Is A Big Space
- Beril Yavuz (Turkey) - Dream Of The Bed
- Daria Vasko (Russia) - Where Are The Edges Of Your Body?
- Jacob Wu (Hong Kong) - The Visible Invisible
- Lloyd Chia (Singapore) - Do Not Touch
- Mari Katsuno (Japan) & Guccini (China) - Stop Moving!
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Scenography Online Exhibition 2020
A series of synchronous and asynchronous virtual presentations of work reimagining our relationship to space and others, by 15 artists studying on the MA/MFA Scenography.
Abigail Caywood (USA)
Transformation Through Repetition
How does the repetition of design revision produce new meaning and progression? I am exploring the rituals of the design process while designing for ritualistic theatre.
acaywood93@gmail.com
https://abigailcaywood.wixsite.com/theatredesign
Photo by Abigail Caywood
Albert Gavalda Martinez (Spain)
Future Melancholic Structures
This is an augmented reality project that pretends to create theatrical spaces easily and accessible to as many people as possible in these times, where people have to be physically distant and show spaces have to remain closed.
Cheng Keng (Taiwan)
Interiority. Exteriority. Interaction.
Have you ever noticed your inner thoughts? Do they come as a flash or gradually? I will be collecting the interior activities of my participants and then will translate, transform and project them into the exterior space with the participants. What relationship and interaction will they engage in?
kengwork642@gmail.com
www.cheng-keng.com
Chenwei Wang (China)
Multi-Layered Space
The performance is a collaboration between with dancer Lin Yun Hsin. Yun’s body left traces in a past experiment, these traces were presented again in a new performing space and in a new relationship to her. We are now exploring different ways for the audience to enter this space.
Deepanjali (India)
The Spiced Kitchen
Entering into the spiced kitchen, let’s take a journey through the intermingling of spices across heritages, making way into kitchens by unique means yet rooted from common grounds. Spices seeping into fabric and crawling through kitchens across strata.
design.deepanjali@gmail.com
www.deepanjalidesign.com
Photo by Deepanjali
Elodie Chiper (Romania)
Exit
Starting from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, I made a series of short videos in which I’m exploring the body from different angles in the frame and the gaze in its various forms – the gaze of the camera, the gaze of the audience and the gaze of the performer, and ultimately the relationship that is formed between them.chiper.elodie@gmail.com
@elodiechiperr
www.elodiechiper.com
https://vimeo.com/elodiechiper
Ingerid Gullerud (Norway
Solid Translucency
ingeridbgullerud@gmail.com
www.ingeridgullerud.com
Photo by Ingerid Gullerud
J. Childe Pendergast (USA)
The Chairs
How can a design change, move and evolve throughout the production process? What about throughout a performance? What happens if the designer relinquishes control and stops self-editing? Let’s play.
Photo by J. Childe Pendergast
Jamie Lu (China)
Do you hear/see what I hear/see?
A speculative design based on Bertolt Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. By restricting the audience’s visual and auditory perception, to put them into an experience of uncertainty and make them question the “reality” they see and hear, also everything and everyone around them. I’ll be showing the speculative design through model and stop motion animations, and the ongoing process of modelling and filming during the exhibition.
Jamielu1991@gmail.com
@jamieludesign
Photo by Jamie Lu
Jessie Ning (Canada)
A Promenade in Harmony
This speculative project is a poetic rendering based on the theory of music chords and geometry. Here, the intangible harmony becomes forms, defines the temporal space and thus creates a landscape, within which the audience can wander along and experience music immersively.
jning@alumni.risd.edu
http://jessiening.com/scenography
Kevin Huynh (USA)
Kinetic Modularity – Grasp
Investigate what it means to have control over something. Believe that you’re an autonomous being capable of empathising with chaos. Sometimes that chaos snaps back at you. Sometimes you try to have a dialogue as a form of resolution. Whatever it is you wish to grasp, reach out.
knhuynh3@gmail.com
@kevin_n_huynh
https://kevinhuynh.squarespace.com
Photo by km95
Laura Honeybun (UK)
Tracing the Score
The trace is what we leave behind in the space, it can be a memory, drawing, or sculpture. These traces are there to act as a movement score to give the performing body a stimulus to translate their movement and inhabit the space.Photo by Laura Honeybun
Orange Zhu (China)
FeeL FRee
When watching a play, do you feel invited or forced? No chat, no phone, no snack, no toilet… Could it be more comfortable and free for the audience? This is an exploration about audience spectatorship and to find out how might it change in a theatrical space. Please feel free to come, and feel free to leave.
Design.Orange@outlook.com
Photo by Orange Zhu
Rebecca van Beeck (South Africa)
Patterns of Failure
Costume design is framed as participatory performance. The drama – of struggling to make – is built into the work, as I fight against pressures to perform, while performing. Fabric offcuts and failed attempts, the residues of a creative process, accumulate as scenes of possibility (and personality).
rebeccavanbeeck@gmail.com
https://rebeccamakes.space/
Photos by Rebecca van Beeck
Sophie Aubz (UK)
Washing and Drowning in the Male Gaze
“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur” (Margaret Atwood). This work aims to express the sensation of “the male gaze” and its invasion into the psyche, so deep that even the most intimate moments never really feel private.
sophie.aubz.work@gmail.com
@sopaubzwork
Photo by Sophie Aubz
Vivianna Chiotini [Greece]
Triptych: Chronochromie
https://m.youtube.com/user/bb230888/featured
Performers: Dimitris Ameladiotis, Chrysanthi Avloniti, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Martha Pasakopoulou, Alexandros Plomaritis.An online live experiment exploring the creation of a “movement of movements” between three isolated bodies in their own living spaces. The arrangement and orchestration of the three parallel scenographies are based on plays and oppositions, inspired by philosophy of painting. Using architectural and choreographic elements, the triptych performance explores relations rather than defined identities, and sensation rather than information.
Since her graduation from the MA Scenography in 2014, Vivianna has worked in theatre, performance and architecture internationally. Her practice incorporates the methods and vocabularies of those fields, aiming to reimagine and dramatise space and its relation with the live body.
Hidayet Softaoglu [Turkey] & Jasmine Tutku Teber [Cyprus/Turkey]
Butterfly 2Taking Lorenz Attractor as a piece of scientific material, this project explores how chaos can be performed and displayed scenographically. To do so, the butterfly effect is taken as a starting point of understanding the meaning of chaos in the first phase which will try to explore how butterfly effects would be represented in a performative way by using sound and 3d model as a source of representation. This work will start with the bodies of the two performers and will invite the individual bodies from the universe to develop and magnify/amplify the extent of the butterfly’s wings.
Besides being a freelance scenographer, Hidayet is an assistant professor of architecture at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture in ALKU (Alaaddin Keykubat University). Her research interests in spatial representations and representational spaces in another saying the semiotics of spaces. Hidayet leads workshops for design students to explore different materials of the space including writing stories on space, structures, tectonic relationships or other semiotic aspects. She has collaborated with Jasmine since studying at Central, taking her sound design as an important material that contributes to a spatial representation. Hidayet’s work combines 3d models with moving image and sound. With Jasmine, they have recently organized an audio walk exhibition for a workshop: https://www.artsteps.com/view/5ee3ce7e22e78e741743419b
Jasmine is an Istanbul-based freelance scenographer and an amateur bedroom musician, currently working as an assistant director in the TV sector. For quite some time, she has been keen to explore the possibilities of sound as a scenographic element and its relationship with the audience. She finds playfulness is a key to meet her creative needs, thus she usually tends to work through improvisation in relation to sound. She frequently collaborates with Hidayet since 2018, finding each other’s way of working very nourishing in terms of intersecting different materials. Other than sound design, Jasmine’s design practice consists of moving images, photographs and drawings.
Amanda Ramasawmy [UK]
Heal Wave
https://www.amandaramasawmy.com/heal-wave
Take a deep breath, sit comfortably, and engage in a collective audio-visual meditation. Heal Wave attempts to visualise the vibrations of a sound bath session through cymatics - using natural materials and water as a spiritual conductor - creating a remote shared healing space to re-align our physical and energetic bodies.
Amanda is a London based artist and designer. She’s interested in using scenographic means to explore untold stories from marginalised communities. She has recently created work for Flat Time House, Barbican Centre and Gate Theatre (Assistant Designer).
Christine Bach Hornsved [Denmark]
The Last Supper
https://www.instagram.com/mind_da_art/
In a dystopian world, human arrogance and misconduct has led to infertile soils that are unable to provide plants with the nutrients they need. Collapsing food supplies forces humanity to reconnect with nature, but are we still able to? This performance investigates human vs nature, power dynamics and connections between the two.
Christine is a London-based designer working in theatre, events and urban art projects. She has a degree in Architecture from Aarhus School of Architecture, in Denmark, and completed her postgraduate studies in scenography at The Royal School of Speech and Drama in London. Her work is focused on visual storytelling, connections with an audience and creating out of the ordinary experiences. Her work ethos is focused on sustainability which shows both in concepts and materials.
Grace Lee [UK]
We Might Be Healing But Our Lives Are Not TragediesUsing some of the moving image work from her MA Scenography’s final project entitled Mother Rage, which explores the role of technology and its effect on our nervous systems, Grace expanded upon this work in an installation created at Battersea Arts Centre in 2019, by incorporating paintings of trauma responses, with the purpose of opening up the conversation around mental health and working against stigmas of shame. The aims of this spatial installation, which includes film, sound and a wall of paintings, are to examine the questions of ‘how can we accept our mental health states, look at healing our exposure to trauma and build resilience for imagining a better future?’ https://www.blackmindsmatteruk.com
Under the moniker SOME.GAL, Grace is a multidisciplinary artist from Sheffield. Her practice involves painting, sound, film and sculptural installations. Grace has experience in producing cross arts events for emerging artists at Battersea Arts Centre and The Roundhouse in London and Sidney & Matilda Gallery in Sheffield. Her work draws upon influences from Afrofuturism, mask art and the subversive nature of carnival culture. As well as her exploring her identity as part of the African Caribbean diaspora with striking colours and textured compositions, she is interested in the intersections of technological change, in interrogating both its possibilities and concerns. In particular, how it affects nature, and our own human nature, as well as mental health, in the age of the Anthropocene.