It
had all the excitement of a rock concert. Swarms of exotically
garbed and coifed young theater designers milled around the forecourt
of Prague’s historical art-nouveau Industrial (Prumyslovy)
Palace, chattering away in a babble of languages. Then a Sudeten
Czech brass band, attired in traditional red shirts and gold waistcoats,
struck up with beery blowhard determination and led them, like
a bobbing stream of colored corks, through the towering iron and
glass facade.
Prague’s 11th International Exhibition of Scenography and
Theatre Architecture, the Prague Quadrennial, was open. Launched
40 years ago, the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) was inspired by the celebrated
Czech designer Frantisek Tröster and has since become the
Olympics of theater design, featuring the best sets, costumes,
lights and sound from around the world.
Nineteen countries participated in that first exhibit and, in
the years since, the PQ became a must-make pilgrimage for Eastern
Bloc designers. After the fall of the Communist governments in
Eastern Europe the PQ took on a new lease on life, with the number
of participant countries almost doubling. And this year for the
first time ever, the general commissioner was an American, Arnold
Aronson, from Columbia University.
 This year’s exhibits filled four enormous vaulted halls,
half-hangar, half-cathedral, with rows of booths laid out under
massive arched steel girders and soaring, painted windows. For
10 days from June 14 to June 24, over 23,000 visitors viewed the
work of 95 professional theater designers and 420 students. And
for the first time, UCSD students showed their stuff alongside
the best and brightest design students from over 40 countries around
the globe, as well as having the opportunity to view the work of
professional designers from 52 countries.
“I felt so inspired by all the countries’ showings,” said
Michele Hunt, M.F.A. ’07, one of nine UCSD students (out
of a group of 40 from the United States), who were invited to attend
the PQ to show their work. “I wish I still had a couple of
years of grad school left,” said Hunt, “so I could
use my experience for inspiration.” Hunt, a costume designer,
was one of three UCSD theater graduates whose work had also qualified
for the design competition based on Aristophenes The Birds. Maggie
Whitaker, M.F.A. ’08, another costume design student and
Nicole Black, M.F.A. ’08, a set design student also qualified
for The Birds competition.
“The students were able to broaden their horizons and share
their art and passion with their colleagues and peers in a very
unique context,” said Shahrokh Yadegari, Ph.D. ’04,
a professor of sound design in the theater department. Yadegari
was invited to Prague to present “Laptop Connection,” a
sound installation performance at Prague’s Masarykovo railway
station, which linked six groups with collaborators in real time,
around the world.
All in all there were over 170 different kinds of performances
mounted over the ten-day period of the festival as well as lectures
and workshops that ran all day, every day. “Seeing all that
work from around the world was inspiring,” said Kim Ehler,
M.F.A. ’07, who was invited to show her work on The Tempest,
in the student exhibit. “It showed me that theater is not
as dead as I had feared, but alive and kicking all over the place,
for example, Estonia. Wow, I wish all theater was as refreshing
and creative as their site-specific, crazy version of King Ubu.”
Caleb Levengood, M.F.A. ’07, felt similarly inspired. “I
now have an inkling of how other theater artists are telling their
stories in other places,” says Levengood, who was invited
to show his set designs in the student exhibition. “Seeing
how the U.K. is reinventing classics, or how Belarus is using Joseph
Cornell-like imagery to design
costumes and sets, or how Latvia is very influenced by middle class
life really helps me sort out where I would like to go as a designer.”
 Susan Tsu, a professor of costume design at Carnegie Mellon University
has seen the student presence at Prague grow exponentially since
her first visit in 1999. “Now we have our own entire building,” said
Tsu, co-curator of both the U.S. student and national exhibits, “and
this is the first time that the American students actually have
an exhibition space with light and a performance space in it as
well.”
The work of professional designers was displayed in distinctive
national booths in another hall. The Japanese constructed a complete
sushi bar with dishes of plastic sushi laid out along its counters,
and theater sets displayed behind each succulent seafood setting.
Brazil’s darkly imaginative flamboyance was summed up in
the large quotation hung over the entrance: “The theater
is really cruel, an abscess, it doesn’t have to be chocolate
and cognac.”
 Judith
Dolan, a UCSD costume design professor, described the national
exhibitions as essentially artistic installations. “Each
somehow reflected some unique aesthetic of their country,” said
Dolan, whose own designs for Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (produced
at Houston’s Alley Theater) were selected to be shown at
the U.S. professional exhibit. “These national exhibitions
ranged from the startling simplicity of Iceland’s small glass
house to the Czech aged-wood circular fairground to the wide-ranging
variety of designs in the USA’s densely bannered, colorful
marketplace to Israel’s gray concrete wall with theater designs
embedded in it.”
 This “unique aesthetic” was most obvious in the “dramatic” Russian
exhibit, which celebrated the exquisite and stark work of the designer
David Borovsky. Constructed on a waterproof floor, models were
displayed on heaps of junk under a leaky ceiling. Visitors were
provided with rubber galoshes to wade through the water, and an
umbrella to protect them from the dripping roof. It was no surprise
when the Russians won the golden Triga (the PQ’s highest
award).
Celebrating its 40th birthday, the PQ’s official website
rather whimsically says that it “is entering a midlife crisis—wanting
too much and all at once.” But with a new generation of designers
discovering the exhibition and the wider world community of theater,
there may be no such thing as too much. 
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