Four Quartets is built around a live reading of four T.S. Eliot poems by the actress Kathleen Chalfant and includes a music score by Kaija Saariaho played live by The Knights, a Brooklyn-based chamber music ensemble. Taylor's scenery is based on four very different paintings by the great American minimalist painter Brice Marden: one image associated with each of the four poems: "Burnt Norton" uses "Uphill 4," "East Coker": “Thira," "The Dry Salvages" a new work that Mr. Marden is calling "Untitled (Hydra)" and "Little Gidding": "Painting Study II." The Artistic Director for theater and dance at Bard College, Gideon Lester, conceived the project. Bard Summerscape is a program of Bard College, Avondale-on-Hudson, New York. They produced the work in association with the Barbican in London and UCLA, where the production will travel in the future in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the poem’s publication. The New York Times, which gave the piece major coverage, noted: "The scenic designs by Clifton Taylor uses four paintings by the artist Brice Marden, employing both bright and soft colors, in some of the finest stage imagery of our time. The way one follows another helps to make this "Four Quartets" a spiritual journey. We’re taken, poetically, through planes of existence. Some of the décors include doorways and screens without being intrusive. And the lighting, also by Mr. Taylor, makes the space and performers even more thrilling, sometimes with effects of shadow and silhouette." Check out the lighting plots here.
"Conor Mulligan assisted me on the project for lighting, and Steve O'Shea and Samuel Vawter did additional drafting work. Betsy Ayer was our indispensable Production Stage Manager for the project. Props and Paint of Nyack, New York built the scenery. Scenic Arts Studios, also of Nyack, did the hand-painted work. Big Image Systems of St. Louis Park, MN did the large-scale printing on their printer in Potsdam, Germany, and Rose Brand did the smaller print work. J.C. Hansen provided some rental scenic goods and we made full use of the wonderful facilities, inventory and capable crew at Bard College led by Vincent Roca, the Director of Production," says Taylor.
"I had designed the scenery and lighting on a project at the Juilliard School for Pam Tanowitz a couple of years ago, "thunder rolling along afterwards" that was very well received. This project and another that we worked on together for Ballet Austin, "Shade," arose out of that collaboration. I’ve actually designed a fair amount of scenery over my career, though I work primarily as a lighting designer," Taylor notes. "The idea of working with Brice Marden and using his images was a primary impetus for the project as conceived by Gideon Lester. The choice of the images and how they would be used in the production came about organically as Pam and I started working together on the project. Marden very generously gave us access to his entire history of paintings and we set about determining how different paintings could work with the different poems. Pam expressed that she definitely didn’t want four backdrops for the piece and I know from working with her on the other projects that she is always very interested in changing the spatial dynamic of the stage and creating an architecture of space that allows for and encourages unexpected entrances, exits and movements.
The work of Brice Marden, encompassing several decades of painting consistently at the leading edge of the art world, is a rich and varied collection that explores color relationships, line, and architectural forms. We were interested in finding paintings that not only related to the themes of the poems, but also represented well the visual themes that Brice has explored through his career.
"I was very interested in how the visual works could relate to the human figures performing the work (members of Pam Tanowitz’s dance company plus the choreographer herself) and sought for ways to make the presentation of each painting unique within the show and surprising for the audience as the show proceeded. We manipulated the scale of the stage throughout the work, changing the proportions of the frame and the depth of the stage continually to create a visual journey for the audience to follow the dancers through the work." Taylor adds.
"The first three poems proceed through a series of scenic transformations wherein we follow a path in which each scenic piece flies away to reveal the next piece, the next idea, to, finally, a bare stage. At this point, the performer’s relationship to the visual image changes. During the third poem "The Dry Salvages," the dancers act upon the scenery, rolling on from the wings a copy of Brice’s latest painting "Untitled (Hydra)" onto the stage," points out the designer. "This action is a key to understanding the progression of the text and it signals a big change in the dancer’s relationship to the artworks.
"We present the dancers in a different relationship to the scenery in each of the sections of the dance. "Burnt Norton" is performed behind a painted scrim and the dancers are, essentially, inside the image. "East Coker" is a monumental architectural set that the dancers move in and around. At times they appear to be coming out of the seams of the painted image as fields of color, an instant later emerging as human figures. As these are each in turn taken away, and we are left with a bare stage, the figures who are at scale with the painted artwork are in an explicit dialog with it," says Taylor.
"The final section, "Little Gidding" is presented in front of a 1980 work of Brice’s titled "Painting Study II." I designed this work as a translucent backdrop that is backed by an opera plastic. It is luminescent and its color palette shifts over the course of the section from a very cold, winter light through sepia tones to a final image of pure bright incandescent white to end the entire work. "Painting Study II" was very important to me to end the work for several reasons. Most importantly is how it relates to the image that we chose for "East Coker": "Thira." These two paintings share an idea of splitting a frame into three major parts with additional smaller divisions, and I see in Painting Study II the bones or scaffolding that perhaps underlays "Thira." But, importantly, the two works are completely different in technique, materials, color and proportion. They are also radically different in terms of how they can be expressed in stage lighting and I love the relationship and resonances that come out in those similarities and differences," adds Taylor. "Throughout the design process, I looked for ways to light these sets in unexpected ways. Shadow became a very important tool and that, along with the heavy use of scrim materials in the set, became a unifying visual theme that brings these disparate images together into one coherent whole."
The 900-seat Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry Architect/Theater Projects consultants/Yasuhisa Toyota Acoustician, opened in 2003 on the Bard Campus in upstate New York with a then state -of-the-art conventional inventory. "I used this inventory for the production with no moving lights, no color-changing gear, no LEDs, though I believe that we completely maxed out the dimming system and probably used just about every piece of gear in the space! It was a perfect venue to put this work together and vital to the resulting show, Bard gave us the theater for almost two weeks to put it together," explains Taylor, who shares more about his designs in this slide show with images of Four Quartets by Maria Barnova. Check out the lighting plots here.