Scenography and National Identity
Within the National Exposition of this year's PQ exhibition we tried to innovate their set up a little bit: they are not organised according to the alphabetical order in the Industrial Palace's left wing as they were until now, but they follow the geographical order of the world map. Let us take the school atlas with the map of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. And because the entrance to the national expositions hall is in the right "bottom" comer, we enter our map of the theatre world in Australia and tho Far East, wo travol through Europe, Africa and end up in countries of North and South America.
The left wing is quite large, but too small to contain the whole world. And so the real borders and neighbours do not always match the borders of the "countries" at our exhibition, but the visitor should retain a feeling of an entity - a continent. Another change should bring up encouragement to the national exposition commissioners to draw up their presentations as "scenic objects, sculptures", that is as an open unit - the opposite of a closed "stand". We would like to, at least in a small scale, strengthen an idea the third millennium endeavours after: an opening of borders, a tolerance to neighbours, an understanding of their difference, but also an acceptance of mutual similarity.
Contributing to the feeling of fellowship and pervasion should also be the "Crowd of the Dramatic Characters", that will cross the whole exhibition space diagonally and whose dramaturgy forms the time axis of the whole exposition. The key to distribution of the materialised theatre costumes is the author of the dramatic artwork, since the Ancient times and legends until today, for whose play the costumes were created to, no matter in which part of the world they were created in the period of the last 5 years. Costumes displayed in the Crowd are, of course, part of the pertinent National Exposition.