This production, when regarding experience, requires audience members to leave preconceptions at the bar! This experience will challenge the concrete meanings of a wide variety of texts and juxtapose, blend and fuse their contexts to create a bricolage of material that will be immersive and engaging.

Our set designer, Libby Soper, has been experimenting with designs, which play around with intimacy levels and create opportunity for elements of visual and audio aesthetic to be created.

 (1)  (2)  (3)

Due to the piece being devised we are unsure as to what the necessities of our performance will be however, designing the creative experience first will assist us in the blocking stages of our production. We wish to include technical aspects such as projectors, projection screens and microphones to fragment the audio and visual delivery of the performance. These aspects will be a prominent feature of the show to reinforce the foundations of ‘text’ and show how important (or not as the case may be) contextual information is in finding the meaning. Is a text limited to one fixed meaning? This is the question we aim to experiment with.

WAR HORSE

In War Horse (National Theatre) the ‘playing space’ was intentionally left blank so that the creative team could design the space through light. The play requires two juxtaposing locations, the ‘nostalgic’ Devon countryside against the ‘mechanical’ war zone of WW1. Paule Constable says that the stage ‘space is a space of darkness which we define through light’. Our initial ideas are honing in towards this effect as the space is left blank for different fragmented sections of text performance. She goes on to ‘describes [the] ways in which we can paint and use light to describe very quickly where we were and to move people very quickly from one place to another’. This opportunity to develop and change location quickly is vital in our piece as we are attempting to create various ‘snaps’ of material. The lighting from above, as seen in the countryside locations in the play create a sepia, past ‘photograph’ essence which has a gentle glowing light.

Constable says that light from above creates a soft glow on stage, whereas the angular lights from below the projection screen create much sharper effects on the stage space and created a much more immersive environment for the audience, as if the lighting was metaphorically assaulting their senses. This is what I wish to create in our final production. I wish to frame the projection screen with two lighting bars, which will be visible to audience members. The projection screen featured in War Horse was a torn page of a sketchbook, which was the simple backdrop that was enhanced by lighting and projection to define location and atmosphere. We intend to use projection in our piece to enhance the performance and show that there are many layers to this performance, similarly to the layers of contexts that are available for interpreting the texts in the piece.

Work Cited:

1) http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/15/arts/15WAR-span/WAR-articleLarge.jpg (accessed 10/3/14)

2) http://chicagotheaterbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/3-Joey-and-Topthorn.jpg (accessed 10/3/14)

3) http://philly360.visitphilly.com/uploads/media_items/the-kimmel-center-presents-the-stellar-broadway-show-war-horse.562.325.c.jpg (accessed 10/3/14)

4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbns0hr5MQk (accessed 30/3/14)

5) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY4oNW6s_y0 (accessed 30/3/14)