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?

Blank Paper and Luxurious Textiles

Susan Frye’s excellent work, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England examines the many ways in which early modern women’s work in text and textiles re-defined femininity. In this passage she examines the ways in which Giacomo and Innogen speak of different material objects to symbolize Innogen and her body in Cymbeline.

“Innogen’s own language picks up on the extent to which textiles have become metonymic of her body when Pisanio shows her the letter in which Posthumus orders her murdered for her infidelity. But Innogen envisions herself as a completely worked garment rather than the blank sheet of chastity on which a man might write. Before she begs Pisanio to carry out her husband’s order, she castigates herself for having lost Posthumus’s faith in her, calling herself  “a garment out of fashion,” which, too “rich” to be translated into a wall hanging, must be reduced to rags: “And, for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls,/ I must be ripp’d:--to pieces with me!” (3.4.50-53). As a garment too elaborately made--too complete in its own identity to be cut up and translated into a wall hanging--Innogen must be ritually destroyed, ripped to pieces. To Giacomo, she may be the blank white of the sheet, but Innogen sees herself in terms of luxurious, colorful textiles, even as she imagines herself as that rich cloth ripped to pieces” (186).

In this project we’re looking at ways of re-defining the “blank page” of femininity, and it is exciting to see that redefinition happening as the texts are being written. What other characters use textiles as metaphors for themselves? Or for other characters? And what does it say about them?

Notes from the Director: All's Well, Fairytales, and Gender

I think, in the midst of the lovely work Clara has done and continues to do, it is time that I chime in about my end of this project. When Clara first had the idea for a pop-up book production, I spent days considering what play would suit the medium—what play would be right for such a fairytale aesthetic.

Eventually, I settled on All’s Well That Ends Well. For me, pop-up books conjure images of story time, of the fairytales I spent my childhood immersed in. My love for these stories has resurfaced in recent years when I discovered the delights of The Decameron and was fortunate enough to stumble across Andrew Lang’s beautifully-illustrated series of books, each named for a different colored fairy.

And I see All’s Well as just such a fairytale—but, somewhat unusually, with a female protagonist. So many fairytales feature a male hero who undergoes a series of trials only to be rewarded with a beautiful princess to marry. In this case, however, the hero is a woman—a woman pursuing a lover herself. And this shift is where some of the trouble seems to begin.

I was in a class this morning where the problem of the All’s Well’s ending came up in a review of a production of the play. The reviewer, Bernice Kliman, described the problem of the play in the form of a question: “what on earth does Helena—a fine woman, as Shakespeare’s text insists—admired by all right-thinking characters, see in that callow youth, Bertram?” Our professor insisted that the real problem was why everyone was so willing to attack Bertram for refusing to marry a woman he didn’t love. And I think this criticism is fair—Bertram does not begin this play as a villain; he cannot help that he does not love Helena. But in fairytales, this never seems to be a problem. The princess is simply never asked—no one cares whether she loves or does not love the hero. So why do we care so much if Bertram does? Why does the play make a problem of this?

And it is this that excites me about All’s Well—the way the questions of gender and marriage coincide without easy solution. The way the play uses and challenges the structures of fairytales. With the beautiful work Clara has done, considering paper in its early modern relationship with gender and modern relationship with digital media, I am excited to begin exploring this play in production.

Images by H. J. Ford

Some Academics

When beginning this blog I mentioned that my work for this blog is related to my work as a MFA candidate at Mary Baldwin College. So far this blog has been mostly curiosities, items to think about or look at. This past week The American Shakespeare Center hosted the Blackfriars Conference in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, (for more information about this conference see the ASC's description or for more information about the specific contents of the different paper sessions you can read all about them as they were liveblogged by the education department). With so many kindled ideas in one space, the sparks fly and everyone catches the academic fire. In response to the work of many of the scholars at this conference I put together a plan for the directed inquiry Linden and I will work on this spring, and thought I would share it here. The work planned out will clearly morph with the needs of the semester, but here is a plan of what you might expect to see on this blog over the upcoming months.

Objective for this Directed Inquiry:
To research and construct all elements of design for our production of All’s Well that Ends Well, paying particular attention to the construction of the set, costumes and props as signifiers creating meaning along with the words and bodies of the actors.

Things we need to accomplish in this DI:

Design and make the set
--Research the images/sketch out what we want to make
--Research how to make it
----Research the construction of popups
----Research the construction of large pop-ups

Design and make the costumes
--Find out what we have to work with
--Decide what else we need to do
----Alter the clothing/sew costumes
----Design and construct all paper pieces of the costumes

Design and make the props
--Figure out what they are
--Design and make all the props

Design the poster
Design the programs

Other things:
Reading the play-searching for images/props
Word searches: paper, letter, book
Researching Folklore
Researching folklore and Shakespeare
Researching fairytale imagery

Possible schedule:

Week one:
Re-read the play for images and props. Do word searches in the play. Go to the public library read fairytales, look at pop-up books-- draw pictures of ideas and things we like best. Write blog post.

Week two:
Research folklore and Shakespeare. Write blog post.

Week three:
Research pop-up construction. Design and construct a possibility of set design. Write blog post.

Week four:
Make sure we have all the cast’s measurements. Brainstorm about costumes, determine what have already with wits and with old laundry, etc. Sketch some ideas. Write blog post.

Week five:
Hit up all the thrift stores, procure patterns for any costumes we plan on building from scratch and go to Valley fabrics to get some materials. Write blog post.

Week six:
Make a plan for how the costumes are going to be constructed, who is helping, which tasks to tackle first, etc. Fill in the next three weeks with very specific details of task delegation. Write blog post.

Week seven:
Work costumes. Write blog post.

Week eight:
Work costumes. Write blog post.

Week nine:
Work costumes. Write blog post.

Week ten:
Research all the props and determine what they are and will need to be. Make a plan for all the props, and get started on them. Write blog post.

Week eleven:
Complete the rest of the props. Write blog post.

Week twelve:
Design the poster and program. Research the construction of extra large pop-ups. Write blog post.

Week thirteen:
Construct the pop-up set. Write blog post.

Week fourteen:
Construct the pop-up set. Write blog post.