‘The soul of the designer: the essence of designing’

The Dutch pavilion aspires to be the central meeting point of the PQ’07.  A place where the focal point is the design process itself  rather than the final result. We want to centre on the invited Dutch designers and their working process and thus go beyond the pure exhibition of scale-models. We want to reflect on the ‘soul of the designer’. In a further concretization of the program we will also invite international designers to participate in round-table debates in our pavilion.

The Dutch pavilion will be staffed for ten days by designers who comment on their own sources and inspiration material, present their working process and share this with other designers here and abroad as well as the public.

In the eyes of the curators of the Dutch contribution, stage design does not just involve set design, but equally light, sound, costume and video design. These disciplines jointly constitute the design of a performance. That is why designers from all disciplines creating the design of a performance were invited.

Each invited designer will fill one day at the PQ. The designer is free to think up an exceptional concept for his or her day. Each designer will be asked to specifically zoom in on part of his or her work or to single out a specific design.

As a guideline each day has a fixed schedule monitored by a knowledgeable Master of Ceremonies.  Each day starts at coffee-time with the introduction of the designer of the day by the MC. During lunch ten theses on the soul of the designer will be discussed in a theme debate. Until High Tea there is an opportunity to do some actual work in a workshop-like situation with colleagues and interested persons. The day will be concluded by High Tea/drinks with a meeting between the guest and a foreign colleague, specially invited by the designer of the day. Most likely this person will have attended the whole day and will thus be able to reflect on the ‘soul of the designer’ of this day.

In the Dutch pavilion experiences in, images of and views on theatre and stage will be exchanged. To properly do so the Dutch pavilion consists of the most open and simple space possible, with tables and with a site hut in which work or presentations can be done with great concentration. The pavilion has the image of work in progress in a workshop. Furthermore all the items provided by the designer of the day can be seen. It should be noted that the invited designer and his/her (foreign) colleagues are asked to bring items from their sources of inspiration and other material by way of illustration of the process in the soul of the designer.

It is certainly an ambitious perspective of the Dutch contribution to concretize the volatile and intangible result of theatre: after a performance the set disappears into a storage-room or waste-container and only the image of a performance remains in the heads of the audience, on DVD, photographs or in scale-models. Exhibiting all this visual material does not by definition do justice to the intention and substance the designer had in mind. And so the Dutch contribution can be seen as an attempt to effect another form of exhibiting: not the display of a solidified result, but a visualized source of inspiration, a process in progress.

* (Mirjam Grote Gansey, Peter de Kimpe, Herbert Jansse, Catharina Scholten, Matt Vermeulen, Martien van Goor, Hans van Keulen and Eric de Ruijter)