Revelations: Production Design - Set and Costume

‘Revelations’ continued Pavelka’s collaborative partnership with choreographer and performer Liam Steel (co-founder DV8 physical theatre/dance company) now Artistic Director of ‘Stan Won’t Dance’. Using two narrative sources the project explores the secret worlds of lust, lies and loss to ask the question ‘How far would you go for the one you love?.’ Performance conventions involve the employment of dance, sound and the spoken word in a contained scenographic environment with illusionary components. Often (literally) suspended in a moral vacuum, the performer’s physical environments are a domestic world of a kitchen and a scenographic web representing the outer worlds from which the complex images and figures from ‘The Book of Revelations’ can intercede.

Pavelka’s design was engineered entirely using 2D and 3D computer programmes rather than conventional drafting/modelling techniques, thus representing a departure from usual collaborative practice. This process deepened the critical engagement between choreographer, scenographer and performer throughout speculative phases of the project and its further impact will be monitored and reviewed in later stages. Described as 'the new face of British Dance Theatre' (The Guardian), 'Revelations' was co-produced with the South Bank Centre in association with Laban, commissioned and presented by Dance Touring Partnership and supported by Arts Council England, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. The production was developed through ‘Jerwood Changing Stages Choreolab 2’ at DanceXchange and at The Lowry as part of its‘Choreographers in Residence' scheme.

Pavelka presented a paper on the collaborative working process context of this project, and offered an analysis of the process of production, and the media used, in a paper given at Tate Britain for the WCA Research Week. Pavelka’s research process and production photographs were exhibited at The Centre for Drawing Project Space, WCA (December 2006).

Michael Pavelka is an award-winning international scenographer who has designed over 130 productions world-wide, many of which have been new plays or new musicals. His 'Midsummer Night's Dream' and 'Galileo' both won Manchester Evening Standard Awards (for Best Production and Best Design respectively). 'Rose Rage' (a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy) won the 2002 Barclay's Theatre Award for Best Touring Production and (in a later production at the Chicago Shakespeare Company) the Chicago Jeff Awards nominated him for Best Costume Design. His designs for the Royal Shakespeare Company include 'The Odyssey', 'Two Gentlemen of Verona', 'Henry V' and 'Julius Caesar'. While on the Designer's Committee of Equity, he played a role in formulating prototype professional contracts for theatre designers. He is Course Leader of the Design for Performance course at Wimbledon College of Art.

Pavelka's early theatre work included designs for two productions by Lindsay Anderson including 'Holiday' at the Old Vic and for numerous other West End plays and musicals. He has exhibited at the 'Time and Space' and '2D>3D' expositions of stage design. From the mid to late 1990s Pavelka worked in Uganda with leading African writer-performers on the first African language production (in Lugandan) of Bertold Brecht's 'Mother Courage And Her Children', which toured the Grahamstown Festival in South Africa, and the African Odyssey season at the Kennedy Center, Washington DC.