MFA Thesis Project
Exit the King — Scenography as a Living System
MFA Research-Creation Thesis — University of Alberta, 2019
Set, Costume & Lighting Design — Reza Basirzadeh
Supervisor: Lee Livingston
Project Overview
This thesis explored scenography as a dynamic system — one that adapts, transforms, and responds to the performer’s movement and the shifting state of the narrative in real time. Using Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King as a case study, the research examined how design elements (space, light, costume, and object-performance) can stage mortality as a process, not a conclusion.
Rather than illustrating death as a singular event, my design treated the stage architecture as an eroding kingdom — a body in decline. Each performance revealed a slow dismantling of the scenography: lighting structures dimmed and collapsed, platforms warped directionally, and costumes deteriorated to reflect a monarch’s gradual disappearance from power and from being.
Research Contributions
Proposed a system-based approach to scenography: mutable, relational, and actor-responsive
Investigated how performance space can mirror psychological decay
Developed modular objects that shift function through embodied interaction
Demonstrated scenography as a temporal organism rather than a static picture
Design Execution
As the King weakened, his environment literally began failing him — light withdrawing, costumes losing their structural support, the throne receding into emptiness. The scenography enacted the inevitability of ending; the kingdom’s collapse was the King’s collapse.
This project merges critical theory on impermanence, entropy, and post-human scenography with rigorous design experimentation — positioning scenography as a thinking partner in performance, not an accessory.
