Poster

For those far away, this production will be performed at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, VA. Hope you can come!

On Publicity Photos and Plowing Ahead

At this point, we are quite in the thick of things. Clara is making paper hats and paper swords and pop-ups and paper paper paper. I am sewing endlessly, running rehearsals, and working to make sure everything comes together. It is a busy time three weeks before opening.

This morning, Amanda--our Helena--and I had a photo shoot so we would have a few shots to send out with publicity. So we traipsed about Staunton with pop-up books and paper stars. I thought I would share some of my favorites with you as a teaser for what's to come.

Some news coverage

Today people across America wore white to support women's rights, particularly women's healthcare and the current legislative issues concerning the government's control or coverage of that care. In Staunton, many of us joined the cause, myself and Linden included, and even our little Staunton made a bit of a splash. Although I, like many women on campus, was not able to make the "walk about town" this evening, you can see pictures here on the website for this movement.

Although work with white paper and costuming gender in All's Well is an entirely separately conceived set of ideas, the political movement and the production we are working to produce have a lot in common.  Both projects are seeking to question standard ideas of who holds power. Both are concerned with the roles of women in taking action and having freedom over their stories and their choices. Both are using the color white as a signifier for women and women's bodies.

When a news reporter came to lunch to interview people wearing white he latched onto our project, and focused the news report of the Wear White project on All's Well instead. You can see the report here. While grateful for the airtime for our ideas, we hadn't meant to usurp the press coverage, and our project isn't about fighting for women's rights exactly, but the Wear White project certainly is. I hope the men and women who wore white today have raised awareness for the legislative issues at stake in our country today, and I hope that a little over a month, our production can raise some questions for our audiences to ponder and mull over for years to come.

If you're new to this blog you can check out this opening essay to find out what the All's Well production and the paper design is all about.

For more information about Wear White, visit their tumblr.

Knitting, Masculinity and the Value of Craftwork

The emergence of Etsy “the place to buy and sell things handmade” and other online communities have made people’s skill available to the world to purchase. You can sell your knitting, your altered t-shirts, your 1000 paper cranes, to someone who will want them. In some ways this seems like the best sort of mix of capitalism and patronage. People who want to own the handmade things pay the people who want to make the handmade things, and everyone ends up happier. However it is not possible for the economy of Etsy to be self-sustaining because it depends on undervalued labor. As Sara Mosle writes in her piece, “Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy” the difference between younger women today and their work in handcrafts and their mothers and grandmothers, is that younger women want to “be recognized and compensated for their talents” (2).  There is no way to sell a knitted sweater on Etsy for a reasonable price given the cost of materials and the amount of time it takes to make it. As a result, hand-knitted sweaters become objects with a “priceless” worth. Worth so much that it is problematically valuable.

The problematic value of a handknit sweater plays into the most famous of all knitting urban legends, “the boyfriend sweater curse.” The story goes if you knit your boyfriend a sweater it will end your relationship, either by the process of knitting it, or by the boyfriend’s insufficient love of the sweater when finished. Books such as Judith Durant’s Never Knit Your Man a Sweater (Unless You've Got the Ring), organize their whole premise around the curse. Other publications mention the curse in their introductions. Guy Knits, a book of patterns for men to wear, bosts this introduction,

“Men who knit are still in the minority, but guys love knits--let's not neglect them. When we knit for a guy, it usually means that the knitter is not the wearer. So we need to understand what the guy is comfortable wearing.  Do this, and you needn't worry about that old boyfriend-sweater curse. As always, knit with love, but make sure that love is not blind.  After all, handknits should enhance, not complicate, a relationship.”

As a book full of patterns for men, the book assures the reader that these patterns are so excellent they are in no danger of the curse.

The introduction to Guy Knits also brings up an interesting question of gendered language. Although the introduction admits only a “minority” of male knitters, and that “usually “ they are not knitting for themselves, the author assumes that the reader, and therefore the knitter, is a woman. When publications do recognize the possibility of knitting men, the writers often congratulate those men for being man enough to knit with titles like Knitting with Balls. The tone of these congratulations often implies that knitting is something men need courage to undertake. Which is strange because although knitting is a female-dominated field, but it is also a powerless one, and one that men can enter if they happen to be interested in knitting, but they would have no other incentive to do so.

All of this is a big messy issue, but one which is close to my heart for several reasons. One is that my boyfriend is a knitter and a good one. He knits lace and cables, writes and designs his own patterns, he's even had a pattern he designed published in Interweave Knits, a widely recognized knitting magazine. When I tell people that my boyfriend knits most people are both very surprised and very impressed. I think people are impressed for two reasons: for one, I think people are impressed that he thinks something which is usually considered a female craft (at least at this point in history) is worth learning. They are impressed that he is interested in knitting as a craft, and interested enough to learn how to do it. The second reason people are impressed is because he knits astoundingly well. Not just because he chooses (or creates) really beautiful patterns, or because he uses very high quality materials, but he knits very evenly and carefully with an admirable attention to all the details of weaving in loose ends, and fixing all the mistakes he makes along the way. He doesn't just knit. He knits really well. And this is the reason I think all of our crafting is worthwhile. Even if none of us make money on Etsy. Even if Linden and I have spent hundreds of hours doing craftwork for All's Well, this work is important not just because our work has given value to those objects and costume pieces, but because our work has given value to ourselves. We have and are building some really exciting skills. Both of us have been learning a lot through the experience by learning new skills. We've both become much more creative and capable with paper as well as with fabric. Learning from Jenny McNee of the American Shakespeare Center has been lovely in part because she is a good teacher and a good sounding board for our ideas, but also because she is incredibly skilled. She knows how to make fabric do incredible things. I think that skill itself is a thing of value, worth learning, worth possessing in oneself and worth preserving for the future.

Writing and Sewing - Women's work then and now

In her beautiful work, Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England, Susan Frye writes about the instabilities of gender constructions and how women in early modern England created much of their own identity as they worked with textiles and with text. Some of her book re-evaluates some of the misconceptions held by many today. She writes,

“The first misconception is that only women were associated with the needle and only men with the pen—a misconception held despite repeated attempts to complicate this binary by scholars as well as by early modern people themselves. The second misconception is that the needle was only associated with drudgery, while the pen was only associated with intellectual work. To a certain extent the needle represented women’s obedience to a rigid insistence on sexual difference, but it is an unstable signifier and, as an object, it is small but phallic, penetrating as well as penetrable, conveying activity, even violence as well as creativity. The needle conveys the potential for active, thinking feminine, without precluding women’s use of the pen in paintings like Alice Barnham and her Sons Martin and Steven” (16).

She then discusses this remarkable painting and the stories it can tell about women's agency with a pen as well as with the more traditionally accepted needle, and it strikes me that this semester Linden and I are sewing and creating work with our hands, but also writing. We get to use these two expressions of feminized power together, to put on a play. And tonight as I'm typing up quotations for a social history paper, all this seems beautiful and serendipitous, and much like a gift.   

For more on the painting: http://www.bergercollection.org/index.php?id=5&artwork_id=75

Some pop-up videos!

There are some wonderful resources on pop-up books available freely on YouTube. Here is a seven minute video by the Smithsonian Libraries in collaboration with their exhibit on movable books. It details the process of making a pop-up book. 

Here is a 53 minute lecture by David Carter which he gave at the Smithsonian Libraries, talking about his work in book making. Tidbits include his work on a giant book for an exhibit, his work teaching children about pop-ups, and a lovely question and answer session in which he talked about a pop-up ap for iphone.

And finally, if you'd like to get started yourself, a one and a half minute video on how to make a particularly stunning pop-up card.

Enjoy!

Tell me, who is Helena?

The paper has arrived! Clara and I have been fortunate enough to receive of gift of good, sturdy fine art paper from which to build our pop-up book. Clara's father, who is an art professor, insisted that a project this artful should, indeed, be a work of art and therefore must be crafted out of quality materials--so he sent us a generous gift of beautiful, strong bristol board among other papers.

Serendipitously enough, the box the paper came in is the perfect size for crafting an overlarge pop-up book and Clara and I are already plotting ways to paint it white and make it the cover of our book. As Clara begins to construct prototypes of the four sets that will form the pop-up book (you will see the pictures scattered throughout this entry), I have begun to think about the ways in which the book and pop-ups and writing will feature in the production of the play itself.

In a meeting at the beginning of the semester, my thesis supervisor, Ralph Cohen, challenged me to make sure that the concept Clara and I had created for the design of the production was a part of the directing of the production as well. This was something I had already been considering--in the early stages of this process, Clara and I tossed around

various ideas: having characters quite literally be on book, reading their lines, characters performing the act of writing in significant moments in the play, and even--in a wild moment--burning the entire paper set as a statement about the ephemerality of theater (something we have reconsidered in the face of our tremendous hours of work and the quality of some of our materials).

As we have settled into our ideas somewhat, it has become the connection between gender identities and paper and writing that most interests me and will be at the center of what I do as the director of this production. We have been thinking of pop-ups as feminine--paper telling its own story--and written text as masculine--the phallic pen put to passive paper. And what originally drew me to this play was the way in which Helena both does

and does not write her own story. She has more soliloquies than most of Shakespeare's heroines--she is certainly trying to tell her own story in a way so few female characters get to. But at the same time, once she has married Bertram, she must play by his rules--she must fulfill the story he creates when he writes the letter.

So what we will be playing with as we begin rehearsals in a month, is this very idea. Who opens and closes the pop-up book? Who turns the pages? Who, in other words, is responsible for the development of the story? I have begun to think more and more about which characters might interact with the book--Helena, Bertram, the King--and how and when they might do so. I have also decided that Helena will, indeed, be literally on book for parts of the play. She will be reading her lines from a text that has been given to her, delivered in or with Bertram's letter. Part of what we will explore in rehearsal is when Helena is on book and when she is creating her own story.

One of the effects of this choice is that--as Ralph Cohen put it--the actress playing Helena, in this case, the lovely Amanda Noel Allen, must perform the act of reading. This offers a lot of potential--when is Helena surprised? Delighted? Disgusted? When does she laugh at what she says? When does she resist saying it? And, more intriguingly, who, then, is Helena? If she is not the words Shakespeare (and his editors) have given her, who is she? Is she Amanda herself? Me? Some sublime combination of the two of us? Or the three of us? Whose story do we end up telling? As we consider these questions, I leave you with an Oscar-winning animated short. It has a lot to say about the act of reading.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011)

One of the myriad reasons (along with our participation in various plays and thesis

festivals) Clara and I have been slow to post lately is that we are actually getting deep down into the nitty gritty of putting things together. Our days consist of sewing projects and paper cuttingand pop-up construction and making lists and having fittings and checking out costumes and going over it all again. It is a time in which much work is being done, but there is not much to say about it all.

It is, however, a particularly exciting phase in the process. There is a nice sense of things coming together--particularly

as we make put actors in costumes and make final decisions--alongside all the looming possibility of the projects left to

accomplish. We've got most of the actors who play women

costumed, the Countess' dress is coming together nicely, the boot covers are well on their way, and Clara has prototypes of two of our pop-up settings--not to mention the countless paper medals, plumes, snowflakes, and other bric-a-brac

we've been producing in fits and starts as the whimsical desire to make paper crafts strikes us.

And I am turning my own thoughts to all the day-to-day work of directing: finalizing cuts to the script so I can get it out to the actors, planning rehearsal schedules, and taking endless notes in preparation for the work.

Soon, we will begin having finished projects to show, but in the meantime, here are a couple photos from our costume fittings.

Helena's final

transformation

The Widow

Pop-up Books and their Engineers

In a time when e-readers are becoming more popular, pop-up books and the field of paper engineering mark an important contrast to an increasingly digitized world. In a pop-up book, paper is not the passive canvas on which the text provides meaning, paper is a sculpture, a dancer, a story in itself. I'll be posting several posts on pop-up books, but this first one is mainly to educate about some of the important paper engineers working in the field today. If you click on these artist's names the link will take you to their websites all of which include "how-to" sections, to make your own pop-ups at home.

Robert Sabuda is the world's most popular pop-up artist. Besides some beautiful original works such as Christmas Alphabet or Winter's Tale, he has created pop-up re-tellings of familiar tales such as Alice in Wonderland (left) or Beauty and the Beast or the lyrics to America the Beautiful (above). He often works primarily in white or solid colored paper, which really shows off the stunning artistry of his work.

David A. Carter is a paper engineer and illustrator who has done some really lovely abstract pop-up art for readers of all ages. His more recent books feature bold colors, in dramatic, innovative designs showing off a beautiful intricacy of design as well as some spreads of absolute simplicity. White Noise is book partially about the sounds paper makes as it flutters, or folds, or flaps, or saws. The spreads are united by a free-verse poem which dallies with the sensual beauties of paper. Pictured right is 600 Black Spots, a beautiful book containing exactly 600 spots for those interested to count them all. It's reviewed with more charming pictures of this girl here: http://intheknowmom.net/?p=6856 

Matthew Reinhart works a great deal with Robert Sabuda collaborating on some of the Candelwick pop-up encyclopedia books, such as Encyclopedia Mythologica: Gods and Heroes. He has also illustrated some classics such as The Jungle Book (left). His Pop-up Book of Nightmares, and Pop-up Book of Phobias lend a darker side to the realm of pop-up books for adults. 

Bruce Foster is another name which means a great deal in pop-up circles. He does some beautiful work on pop-ups in a large variety of projects. Perhaps most famous for Harry Potter: A Pop-up book based on the Film Phenomenon, he has also worked on an incredibly beautiful work on Angels, which is soon to be released, and a book holding paper models of some of the greatest architectural wonders of the world. 
 
 I'll post some more about pop-ups soon!

Thesis Festival

This past week we the MLitt/MFA program held our thesis festival, a marathon of scholarship where every MLitt student and every MFA dramaturgy emphasis presents his or her thesis in a combination of scholarship and stagecraft. Though I will be posting some more about many of the ideas in this thesis, I thought I would share Cass Morris' excellent summaries of all of the presentations so that you can read about my most presentation as well as the other exciting work going on in this program.

http://americanshakespearecentereducation.blogspot.com/2012/02/2012-mlittmfa-thesis-festival-session-2.html

Picture by Ralph Alan Cohen, for more pictures of the festival go to the program Flickr account: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbc_sap/

Image sharing and idea sparks

Our semester is already in the swing of things; our colleagues’ productions are coming together, the Mary Baldwin Mlitt/MFA Thesis festival is fast approaching and Linden and I are working hard on designing for All’s Well, and really enjoying meeting with Jenny McNee every week. Some of the work we’ve been putting into this show is looking to find the best means of communicating our research, and we’ve decided to expand outside of this blog. We now have a Flickr account to share pictures of the things we are making as we make them, as well as many images of our sketches and plans for characters and costumers.

You can find our Flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allswellindesign/ 
 

Additionally, Linden and I have dived into Pinterest, an online bulletin board or images, videos and project ideas. Not only has it been delightful to pin photographs and artwork which inspires our thoughts for this project it has also put un into contact with other pinners and their ideas and creations. For instance, one can make ordinary plastic toys look like ceramics with only the help of a can of glossy spray paint click here for details of that project: http://dreamgreendiy.com/2011/08/15/pinspiration-monday-white-horse/

You can find our Pinterest account here: http://pinterest.com/agenttam99/alls-well/ though you will need to sign up for Pinterest if you want to see it.

What is all this sharing and exploring doing for our process? It means not only that we’re getting lots of people to see at least pieces of our work, but that we can shape our ideas by the images we find. Some of our images are not based out of the words the characters say, (Helena will have stars because she is always talking about them) but the characters from other sorts of fantasy stories or fairy tales which the characters remind us of. LaFeu doesn’t share any lines with the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, but those characters remind us of each other, so we’ll give Lafeu a pocketwatch, and maybe have some clockwork decorations on his jacket and his hat. The healing of the King in this play may also draw some inspiration from the Lord of the Rings and the Two Towers’ movie’s portrayal of Theoden returning to health and the costume choices for the king before and after Helena heals him. These images will morph in our ideas for the play as we keep studying its roots and other productions, but finding inspiration in this forum, (and now these others) is an adventure for us both.

Community

Clara and I keep talking about how many people we are going to have to thank. We have started keeping a list so we don't forget any of the endless contributions. Not only are there the usual suspects--production teams, supportive friends, family, thesis supervisors--but also, a whole host of people who have stepped up to help with this project. There is my Dad, who has composed a musical score for the play. There is my mother, who crocheted a white collar for me to use and who gave me a collar my grandmother had crocheted. There is Clara's father, who gave her paper samples and books on pop-ups. There are Celi and Monica and Katy and so many others, who immediately went through their closets and brought us anything white they weren't using or didn't plan to use. There is Owen, who will be knitting us a hat for Lavatch. There are the women at the wedding shop who gave us fabric scraps for free. Although we have asked for some of them, many of these things have been offered without request, out of curiosity or excitement. It is so lovely to think about the ways in which this play will have been built, not just by the cast and production team, not just by thesis supervisors, but by an entire community of people.


As Clara and I spent the week looking at other versions of the All's Well tale--including the story of Giletta de Narbonne that Shakespeare likely used as a source for the plot as well as various related tales about clever wives and the fulfillment of tasks--I have been thinking about the ways in which storytelling is also a community event. Each version of a story is unique--something the teller fashions in a way that is idiosyncratic to their own gifts and abilities. Shakespeare adds clowns. Some versions include an exchange of horses, rather than rings, as a token of the bed trick plot. But these versions also find a way to situate themselves in the conventions of the community from which they come--and then to shape those communities as well. And, although I have been reading written versions of these tales, many of them come from oral traditions (indeed, The Decameron, the original source for the Giletta story, calls attention to this tradition, situating the stories within a frame narrative in which a group of young nobles tell stories to each other as they escape the plague in the Italian countryside)--which are, by nature, communal. Stories are shared not only with a horizontal community, but also with a vertical one, where the tale is shared within a community and then handed down generation by generation through time. Community is at the heart of the tradition from which this story was born, and it is at the heart of the way this production is being created. And it is lovely to watch it unfold.

Illustration of The Decameron by John William Waterhouse

Notes from the Director: Visual Motifs

As Clara and I began looking at picture books and fairy-tale collections for images and ideas that might inspire our design aesthetic, I was struck by the way these stories rely on motifs. Perhaps a function of their roots in oral tradition, where repetition could anchor the story telling, so many of these stories have textual and—in the case of illustrated editions—visual motifs.

In Paul O. Zelinsky’s Caldecott-winning retelling of Rapunzel, Zelinsky repeats both the visual motif of the Rapunzel plant in the blue of Rapunzel’s dress and the flowers that adorn her jewelry, as well as the textual motif of tightening clothing as a signifier of pregnancy. Of Rapunzel’s mother, he writes, “one spring, the wife felt her dress growing tight around her waist,” a problem Rapunzel later confesses to her witch-mother.

Sometimes these motifs even suggest personality markers. In Amy Erlich’s retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Wild Swans, Susan Jeffers’ illustrations subtly indicate the trustworthiness of various characters that the heroine, Elise, encounters. When her evil stepmother tries to spoil her beauty by sending toads to her bath to cover her in slime and filth, Elise’s goodness and innocence turn the flowers into poppies. These poppies appear again and again: first, on the skirt of a strange woman in the woods—who helps Elise find her lost brothers—and then again, decorating the reigns of the horse the prince—her future husband—rides. These cues suggest that the strangers Elise encounters are, much like herself, good, innocent, and trustworthy.

As I looked at these images, I became interested in the ways our costumes could chart similar personality traits and motifs—both from the play and beyond. I began to think about Helena’s countless references to stars (“Twere all one that I should love a bright, particular star”), LaFeu’s description of the “boys of ice,” and other such images as visual motifs that might mark the costumes of each character. The Countess with a spray of winter flowers and snowflake-lace sleeves; Helena with a tangled yarn apron, catching at stars; the King dripping with ice until his health is restored and he blossoms into spring branches. Over the coming months, Clara and I will be building costumes, props, and set pieces with visual motifs that resonate with the images of the play and the world of the fairy-tale.

Castle images

Because of where we are in the designing process this blog will be passing along a huge number of images in the next few weeks. Here are some of Castles. If you have thoughts about particular castles and what meaning or contexts they convey comment to share with us.

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