Stage Design Project- Costumes (Kira)

this is the email i got from Kira. Mainly posting for Jules to include on the Power Point. Hopefully Kira can post something... and ill call you tonight so we can concertize...

most of the characters are animals, so i dont kno what i want to do with those. as far as the children, i want them in pajamas, white pajamas and the older girls in slips.

the white white is going to be in white horse motif. in a white pin up outift with a white chess piece horse life hairdo. living on top of the shoe she embraces evil and the aminals.

there will be a clear twnties, fifties, sixties, eighties characters.
i sent you some pictures, i was thinking maybe a celebritiy vibe, for the inspiration for clothes.

do we wanna dress the animals like that? or switch the animals to people? make it super abstract? what do you think? email or call me

kira

And her pictures:

Stage Design Project- Concept (Continued)

Conceptual Influences:
Shakespeare Santa Cruz's
Shakes To Go: Midsummer Nights Drean

Defamiliarization
-using sheets to create fairy wings for Titania

-feather boa becomes Lion's mane


Kate Edmund's Design for Shakespeare Santa Cruz's Holiday Show
The Wind in the Willows
their whole concept=very similar
The entire show takes place in an attic; everything created from everyday objects
Example: Bed frame becomes jail cell


White Witch Concept:
Staircase for palace/grand entrance:
Staircase- Stiletto shoe


Statues of Frozen People- Chess Pieces, Art pieces (statues or paintings)
Beaver House- Basket

Path/Stepping Stones- Puzzle Pieces

To Be Continued...

Stage Design Project- Concept

Play: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Here's what sort of inspired the concept:
Monologue from Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Harper is hallucinating. Prior is dreaming. The two meet.
Harper:
I don't understand this. If I didn't ever see you before and I don't think I did then I don't think you should be here, in this hallucination, because in my experience the mind, which is where hallucinations come from, shouldn't be able to make up anything that wasn't there to start with, that didn't enter it from experience, from the real world. Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... Am I making sense right now?
Key words: recycle, reassemble

Basic Plot of Lion, Witch, Wardrobe
Kids get sent to a boring home in the country for the summer.
Find Narnia, a mystical land through a wardrobe.

Our take:
The kids are still in the house (they can't physically enter a mystical world through a wardrobe).
Narnia is imaginary.
The imagination (Angels in America) cannot create.
Everything in Narnia is in the house.
Random objects in the house serve as inspiration for their imagination.

Concept
A defamiliarization of everyday objects.
The kids are able to use objects they find in the house as something new.

Think: its almost as if the kids are playing with action figures of themselves. While still in the physical world of the house, these action figures can be inserted into a fantasy world. Because of their size, a household pet (for instance) would become a monster to an action figure.



Important!
Nothing in the imaginary world could be just labeled as fantastical. Everything needs an explanation and a real parallel.

This served as the leaping point for our concept and we thought about what everyday objects could be transformed into something new and different.

Initial Sketch:

Key Locations/Elements:
Inspiration and Trasformation

Forest- Forks, Silverware, Coat Hangers/Hat racks, Brooms(?)




Lamp Post- Candle Stick, Desk Lamp




To Be Continued...

Stage Design Project- Pictures

As you know... we are going... TOMORROW. So hopefully everyone is ready for that.
Here's the pictures documenting how we made our model.

The Raw Materials

Stage Beginnings:

Ramp Inserted:

Lamp Post and mock coat hangers Made:

Nate bending the wire coat hangers:

Tea Cup, Lamp Post, Beaver Damn inserted:

Decorations (Puzzle Piece Path and Chess piece Statues) and Stiletto Staircase added:

Turn Table with Wardrobe constructed:

We had so much fun:

Questions

My big ones are...
1. What do you think of the X-Files?
2. More general... what do you think about the public depiction of extraterrestrials (in tv shows, movies, literature, etc)
3. as an astronomer... What is your position on Pluto? (Planet or less)
4. Also, if life where to have occurred elsewhere in the universe, what is the likelihood that it would be similar or identical to that of earth?
5. What concrete evidence is there of extraterrestrial life?
What about...
6. the Roswell incident?
7. Area 51?
8. Abductions?

PS if you wanted someone to go with you and help out by taking pictures etc, Id be happy to help since I bet it will be an interesting interview to hear!
my number 650-353-6045
shoot me the time/date of when you think youre going to meet with him and i'll see if i'm available!
Keith

"Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language" (Keith's Reading Notes)

Reading notes for Aronson's article on Theater and Media

Aristotle's Warning: "spectacle is 'the least artistic' aspect of theater"
Past method: minimize the appearance of human agency

Thesis:
projected scenery, an especially film and video, does not work -does not function- on the stage!

Why projections do not work well onstage:
1. Product of a capitalist society (subjected to political, social and economic influences)
2. Theater is the only art form to use what is signified as the signifier of that object (ie chair signifies a chair)
-dealing with real surfaces and volumes (wood floor treated to look like tile still functions as a floor)
-we sense the spaciality of the stage
-actor exists in real time
KEY ELEMENT: a) space and b) volume, which imply c) time

When scenography includes a projected image...
-the audience experiences the disjunction of perceiving a different world
3. With projected imagery: no spacial continuity between stage and auditorium and, consequently, no ability to comprehend time
4. Pictoral space, while possibly mimicking the exterior world, remains self-contained and self-referential
-sets create an illusion of continuing the space of the auditorium onto the stage
-we experience the stage in the here and now
5. Photographs: Time has transformed the subject while preserving the object
-turns them into fetish objects (ie family portraits: look back on)
~"The eye has lost its historically privileged place as a processor of information. On a stage that combines live images observed through normal visual processes and photographic images in which an eye observes mechanically reproduced images, the two systems inevitably clash"
EXCEPTION- live video feed

KEY TO OUR COMPREHENSION= the FRAME
-frames create self-contained space carefully delineated from the world around it
-Theater: the action that unfolds before our eyes is framed by the stage
-Internal logic: a world on a different scale that obeys different rules

~"individual spectators are obliterated in the darkened auditorium and become a communal audience" similar to Feminist Spectator (oh fuck... thats TA61. not this class...)

Movies
-present us with an infinite world (no FRAME)
-documentary capturing reality> believing that what is on the screen must in some way be true
vs Theater
-composed of real objects
-transforms a concrete reality into a kind of fantasy> everything on the stage becomes a sign
=TENSION is created between the unlimited bounds of the projected image and the architechtural realities of the stage

Movies
-the movement is specifically enhanced by the subjective intentions of the director or camera operator
-experienced as subjected and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world

Stage set= permanent and unchanging (set is replaced but remains)
Projection= nothing but light/shadow> no corporeality
~"the very idea that one image, the projection, is created by light, and the other, the stage set, is created by objects that are made visible by their ability to reflect light, creates two perceptual orders, two kinds of reality"

My Question
1. Theater=present/Film=past(preserved): What about a period piece playing video clips (news, etc) that would be contemporary to the plays setting? No contrasting time periods...?
-Keith

Reading Notes- "The World on Stage" -Keith

Like the title says... some reading notes. For States' "The World on Stage".

Different perspectives-
1. approach theater semioticically
Definition: semiotics-study of signs/symbols as elements of communicative behavior
-"all that is on the stage is a sign" -Prague linguists
-things "conceptually referring to" the greater "world" outside of the performance
-bridge between the stage and its fictional analogue of the world
2. approach theater phenomenologically
Definition: phenomena- circumstance/fact observed (ie 'the phenomena of nature')
-signs "achieve their vitality... not by signifying the world but by being part of it"
-not what it represents, but why its there?
-"pursuit of the essence of things"

Author (States)'s perspective
3. defined by VICTOR SHKLOVSKY
-"Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things"
-things important "as they are percieved and not as they are known"
-"the object is not important" just associations to the object
-similar to PHENOMENOLOGICAL views
-DE FAMILIARIZATION- "removing things from a world in which they have become inconspicuous and seeing them anew"

SIGN vs IMAGE
1. Sign
-Correlative terms: signifier and signified
-of no value unless it repeats itself
-the material of the sign is totally indifferent to the object it signifies
2. Image
-Any likeness, or representation, made out of materials of the medium (gesture, language, decor, sound, light)
-emphasis on empathetic response
-unique and unreproducible
-the physical image and its object... resemble each other

NEITHER SIGN or IMAGE
-"things that resist being either sign or image"
-"stage images do not always or entirely surrender their objective nature to the sign/image function"
1. working Clock
-astronomical time would clash with theatrical time
-awareness that theatrical time is being measured by a real clock
-SELF-GIVENNESS onstage>obeying its own laws of nature
2. Fire/Running water
-mildly distracting in the sense of being interesting
-retains a certain primal strangeness>something indisputably real leaks out of the illusion
3. Child actor
-"how well he acts, for a child!" / "Do they understand the play?"
-success depended heavily on the audience's "double vision" (seeing both child and character?)
-DOUBLE VISION- disparity between the actors and their roles" -Shapiro
-innocent child vs characters that "flirt with the audience"
-Kids did comedy/satire (genre's most closely linked to the audience's immediate world) instead of tragedies/serious plays (depended on a suspension of disbelief)
4. Stage animals
-trained or tranquilized, but cannot be depended upon
-No good behavior, only behavior
-BISOCIATION- intersection between two independent and self-contained phenomenal chains- natural animal behavior and culturally programmed human behavior
-can claim dog as the likeness of a dog (acts well by acting as it normally does)

Other
-Moliere playing Moliere (an exception to the aesthetic rule that the image is not the thing)
-Zoos> dingo- dog playing a dog from Australia

LAW OF COMPLEMENTARITY:
to the extent that something on stage arouses awareness of its external (or workday) significance, its internal (or illusionary) significance is reduced

Melanie's Exhibit!

So a couple weekends ago, Konstantin, Edgar and I (to name a few) all helped out to (help) set up Melanie (our TA)'s art exhibit downtown at the Museum of Art and History (MAH). Thought I'd share some fun pics (I'm taking most the pics, which is why you might not see me that often...)

(Above) Getting started. Lots of work to do.

(Above Right/Left) Lots of work on lighting the exhibit. Working with gels and whatnot.

The Lighting Result:

You can see (Above) the mood for one of the sections was kind of psychedelic. Hence the colors. I liked the picture. With the headphones it kind of looked like one of those trippy ipod commercials.
And the artwork!

(Left) Spiking where Melanie's images are going to hang. With nice lighting. And (Right) the wall of boxes with fun (or not so fun) facts about the effects of technology on humans.

And finally...

Me. Doing some hard labor. Eh... For more on the exhibit ask Melanie or... VISIT it. Downtown. Museum of Art and History. 705 Front Street • Santa Cruz • CA. DO IT.
-Keith

COLLAGE time!

Well, I'll start things off with a pic of my (Keith) collage.


And I was... for some reason... really into this assignment, so I thought I'd tell a little bit about my... thought process. My collage centered on the innature(?) of animals to go with the flock and the idea that humans, as mammals, are also subjected to this manmade desire to fit in. It was sort of a motivational piece about rejecting the pressures of the majority to abandon the individual. So I first included a couple of examples of animals migrating or being herded together and contrasted that with an image of an animal "breaking off" from the rest of the group (Examples A and B).

So here are two of the examples of herding: the cattle and then the pigs. You'll note that for each, there is then an example of an animal who decided not to go with the flow. Its small, but in the cattle one, there's a pic of a cow running off alone into a church (symbolic, yes?). In the pig picture, there's one pig that doesn't want to be herded, so he is, instead, leaping away from the group, only to be restrained by his owner (like society reinforcing this need to fit in). Note that each are examples of animals that might not naturally decide to migrate together. Instead they are being domesticated by humans to do so.

I tried to tie this back in to humans with the central juxtaposition of two images, that of a pig and a human. Exhibit C(3?).


Its pretty deep, fyi. If you noticed, the pig and the woman almost have the same expression on their faces. That's because the pig is the woman. And vice versa. The pig is being forced by the man to go with the other pigs. The woman is similarly burdened (illustrated by the sand bag she is forced to carry. FORCED... BY SOCIETY).
This culminated in another of the central images, that of humans. Like animals flocking together.


good. that should do it. more posts to come.
Keith Burgelin