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 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)

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/

Pottermore and books

The visuals for the intro video to J. K. Rowling's newest adventure combine some fascinating ideas about books as they transition between tactile and digital forms. The animated books, cut and shaped into moving sculpture show paper texts as malleable through digitization. Who knows how many websites sport Potter fan fiction right now, but J. K. Rowling is taking the her readers' writing under her own wings. As she says, "Just as the experience of reading requires the imaginations of the author and the reader to work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader."

What does this mean for books in the future? Many scholars have explored the expansive possibilities of digital texts, hypelinked footnotes, the kindle's dictionary on demand, comparative texts from different printings and editions made simple through the use of technology, but Pottermore seems to be something entirely new. Something part fan club, part DVD-special features, part video game, and part storylab.

The intro video with its movable books is a perfect introduction to such a phenomenon. Part nostalgia, part magic, part exhibition of technologies in action.

The Ice Book

The Ice Book (HD) from Davy and Kristin McGuire on Vimeo.

While looking into paper sets and pop-up books as sets Linden came upon this short film advertising for a miniature show made of pop-ups and light design. We're not going to turn the lights out on our audience in All's Well, but Davy and Kristen McGuire, the artists behind The Ice Book use the lights masterfully. For more information about their show read the information packet about their show, or go to their website.

What does a set made of paper contribute to this show? Is it just the delicacy? The portability of little theater? The translucence? Is there something about books coming to life that is itself magical?

Playing Paper

This is an essay I wrote for a class in Textual Culture here at Mary Baldwin which explains a great deal about the ideas and intentions behind this project.

My understanding of fairytales comes from storybooks. Hardcover, full-color beautifully designed books that send their messages through pages with decorated capitals and a font chosen to suggest manuscript. Books that evoke a tradition, a past, a notion that even if Paul O. Zelinsky’s Rapunzel was published in 2002, tells its story as though it belongs in a time beyond regular dates, far away and long ago. That message of the fairytale is one which seems to belong in paper, but also in performance, where the symbols which soak each page of a fairytale are easily recognizable onstage. We know the young girl, starry eyed and full of wonder, chasing after her dreams. We know the young prince seeking to find his place in the world, and we see the forces around them, be they magical or political or comical bringing them together or tearing them apart. They are characters which resist electronic transfer. What would the text of Harry Potter be without the the font designed for J. K. Rowling, morphed out of design or layout into the convenience of an ebook? It would still be the same words, but the aura of fantasy would be altered, and not merely altered but reduced.

When performing a play cast with fairytale characters, it seems most natural to return to books and to paper as the operating medium for the symbols those characters so richly possess. For All's Well that Ends Well, the cinderella story with the prince-not-so-charming, Linden Kueck is working ideas of fairytale to comment on ways in which stories are passed down from generation to generation, and how human beings, but particularly women color their actions to conform to the cultural stories they believe they should be a part of. To facilitate this goal, I will be working as her designer to build a set, props, and even some costume pieces out of paper. All the paper will be white, and at least in this point in the process we are imagining the paper clean and unwritten on, the blankness of a common metaphor for women, as the object on which men inscribe. The white paper also serves as a symbol which will work to emphasize the texture of the paper, and with no color to distract, except for any symbols of power (the crown, the ring) set off in a startling red.

You might wonder, if the set is to be a book made of blank paper, where is the artistry of design so looked for in a fairytale? Since first coming in contact with electronic books, I have been exploring the ways in which the tactile properties of paper affects the understanding of a story. This often true in picture books where much of the drama of the story lies in the turn of the page as a codex, something which would be lost if viewed on a screen unless the program simulated the turn of the page in some sort of graphic medium. I have already mentioned books published in a specific font which would loose some of their charm if morphed into the regular typeface of an ebook. But of all kinds of books, the type most resistant to digital translation is the pop-up book. I find it vastly amusing to see the “Tell the Publisher! I’d like to read this book on Kindle” link on Amazon for Robert Sabuda’s Movable Mother Goose, because pop-up books or movable books in general glory in the paperness of paper, and explore all of its creative potential. White Noise, a popup book by David A. Carter explores the different sounds that paper makes through a series of abstract pop-up spreads united through a poem. Others use cut shapes to show the figures they portray without any printing onto the shapes. Still others revisit often told tales and make them live by giving them a third dimension. Pop-up books seem especially pertinent at the particular point in history, as we, like the Early Modern culture are in a time of textual transition. Culture in England was moving from manuscript to print, and culture today is moving from print to digital, our times are mirrored in a way, and that mirroring deserves some comment, comment made by books which revel in their paperness.

But what can all this fascination with paper and stories lend to a rehearsal room? Would it merely give us a heightened awareness of the lines pertaining to paper and print? To the paper props? The letters? (Are they blank? If not, what’s written on them?) How does an historical awareness affect a production? Will the pop-up book set feature castles --slightly postmodern in their architecture? What if the posters were cut paper? Pop-up programs? What would that say about the production? Simply that paper is important? That it should be noticed and valued for the story it tells in itself, not only what is imprinted on it?

In this way, the paper itself can be a metaphor revisited. If early modern writers objectified women by using images of books and paper which are meaningless without a male hand composing their significance, playing with paper dismantles that binary. Paper can convey meaning through its own folds, a meaning without words but expressively augmenting the actions and words of the actors on the stage, presenting their stories with a backdrop of tradition and fantasy. Whose tradition and whose fantasy is up to the audience to unfold.