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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Matthew Sporzynski and Paper Sculpture

While recently flipping through a REAL SIMPLE magazine to cut it up for collages, I came across the work of Matthew Sporzynski, a paper sculptor who creates commissioned work for the magazine. His work is intricate and beautiful, often only using one color for the construction, creating a strong emphasis on line, volume and the texture of the paper he uses. What strikes me as interesting about his work is its connection with a magazine titled REAL SIMPLE. The magazine, and its accompanying website boasts "life made easier every day" and is full of simple solutions or creative ideas for many aspects of life, primarily geared towards women. Main topics include Food and Recipes, Home and Organizing, Beauty and Fashion, Holidays and Entertaining, Health, and a section on balancing Work and Life. All of these categories are full of ways of making one's existence more streamlined, efficient and beautiful, while keeping complications and mess to a minimum. Sporzynski's paper seems to fit in this mix, but fits strangely.
In one way, these paper creations are the essence of simplicity. Simple colors. Simple objects presented. Simple materials. These colors, objects and materials are also utilized both skillfully and beautifully, highlighting another main goal of the magazine, and bringing artistry into the cover pages of the different sections of the magazine, and embodying some of the essential values of the publication as it does so.
At the same time, these pieces seem an odd choice. The magazine, despite its appreciation of beauty and purity of construction also values a careful use of time and effort, and gives its readers some clear insights into how to limit complications in their lives. Commissioning art which portrays simple scenes and objects but does so in a which so utterly complicated manner seems odd. In their small paragraph on the REAL SIMPLE website, they introduce his work with the quip, "we don't know how he does it either." There's no sort of suggestions on how to get started doing paper construction yourself, or "how to" section like everywhere else in the magazine. These objects are purely something to look at and be impressed by. Is this as strange as I think it is? Or is it just fueling our culture's stubborn love of paper in an increasingly digital world?