Is It Real? Staging Nature

Theatre designers manipulate building materials—metal framing, Styrofoam, muslin, wood, paint, and electrical equipment—reimagining stages as dense forests, winter wonderlands, swirling oceans, or surreal landscapes. Costume designers stretch their imaginations, as well as the limitations of fabric and embellishments, to transform a performer into a tree creature, a flying owl, a supernatural fairy, or an earthly element. 

The new Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts exhibition, Is It Real? Staging Nature, explores the technical side of recreating aspects of nature—flora, fauna, air, water, fire, and earth—in performance.

To illustrate examples of these designs, Is It Real? Staging Nature presents artworks from The Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts that highlight nature as depicted in stories from opera, ballet, and musical theatre. Artworks by theatre artists Boris Aronson, Franco Colavecchia, Natalia Gontcharova, Helen Pond, and Tony Straiges create conversations with sculptures by artists like Mary Frank and Barbara Hepworth. In addition, a magnificent set-piece—an expansive tree trunk and four projected canopies—both anchors and umbrellas the exhibition, giving guests the impression of standing center stage.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website