Our first Production meeting

As we have just had our first production meeting, I thought it would be a good idea to blog and let everyone know where we are with regards to the technical side of our performance. As part of my role within FalseTitle. I am designer, so one of my main roles is set design, this played a heavy influence in our production meeting. This along with basic necessities for our performance that featured in our technical rider. I have attached our draft technical rider, along with my draft set design images in the technical documents page under the current programmes heading, should you wish to take a further look. The basis of this blog post however will be to talk about specific influences that developed our  set design to what it is as of the present.

The two main influence that featured heavily in our set design include, Tracey Emin’s – My Bed (Ellis-Petersen, 2015) and Wunderbaum’s – Looking for Paul (Summerhall, 2014). But first in order to justify why this art instillation, and performance influenced our performance, I will talk briefly about the style and content of our performance.

WOMENSwear, Features the stories of every woman, encompassing the hardships for all, but also their strengths, WOMENSwear celebrates women, and shows through juxtaposition, the ways in which women live all over the world. With particular reference to materialistic problems of the Western world, such as “I swear hair grips just get up and walk away by themselves.” WOMENSwear juxtaposes these materialist views of women with hard hitting accounts of women’s lives in countries such as Iraq, featuring content such as female genital mutilation, through the use of TED talks, WOMENSwear shows not just men, but also women, just how hard life really is to be a woman. This kind of juxtaposition provides a strong contrast in which the foundations for my set design arose.

Using the context of the script, particularly the contrast of the Western world, with other countries, I wanted to make a stark contrast between the two in my set design. When having a discussion about possible print images, a common theme that occurred featured the topic of the manufacturing of clothing. The majority of clothing in the Western world, is produced in countries abroad, in warehouses, or sweat shops, a theme which is constantly emerging amongst leading high street retailers, such as The GAP, and Primark. This kind of issue meaning that a great deal of the women we are talking about in our performance are subjected to working in these poor conditions, led to a real need to display this in our set design.

The image of Looking for Paul, (Summerhall, 2o14) with it’s use of levels, but also manufactured almost warehouse feel set design, led to a keen interest on using scaffolding in our piece, not only to provide warehouse atmosphere, but also to provide levels to separate the women’s stories, giving each character their own personal stage/platform upon which to tell their story.

Looking for Paul

 

(Summerhall, 2014)

 

 

In working with the Looking for Paul set design, I felt that the image of a hay bale bed also worked well, the discomfort of sleeping on hay, in contrast with fine Egyptian cotton bed sheets, gave a stark contrast between the Western world, and the other stories that are portrayed in the play. This mixed with the live feed cameras of which one is an IPhone,  and the other a camera, gave a stark contrast between the privileges that we receive in the Western world, in contrast with women who have to fight to go to school. This leads on to my second influence.

Tracey Emin’s My Bed, features the “monument to the heartache of a relationship breakdown” (Ellis-Petersen, 2015) this simple image provides stimulation for the audience instead of making the staging to obvious.

My Bed

 

(Ellis-Petersen, 2015)

 

This cluttering of the floor,  led way to the idea of slowly cluttering the stage as the performance progresses, leaving the start of the piece to look almost clinical, which gradually develops and descends into chaos. This image of cluttering features the use of cluttering the stage with apples, and books and carrier/grocery bags, strong relations to the words that are said but the women of the TED talks speeches, where the relay having to hide their text books in grocery bags in order to avoid being caught for going to school. This in contrast with clothing of the Western world, including a subtle reference to bras, as a symbolic reference to the burning bra image, that strongly protests for women’s rights.

These influences along with the addition of a metal bath tub, to symbolise the daily domestic life that many women face in a patriarchal life and the addition of a desk on a separate platform at stage left, with a desk, chair and type writer placed on it, reference to the working world of women all over the world, whether this be working in an office or in agriculture or a sweatshop.Untitled

The set design is featured above, please click on the image for a larger view.

Work cited:

Ellis-Petersen, H. (2015) Tracey Emin’s messy bed goes on display at Tate for first time in 15 years. The Guardian,  30 March. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/30/tracey-emins-messy-bed-displayed-tate-britain-first-time-in-15-years [Accessed 30 March 2015].

Summerhall. (2014) Looking for Paul – Wunderbaum. [online] Edinburgh: Summerhall. Available from http://festival14.summerhall.co.uk/event/looking-for-paul-wunderbaum/ [Accessed 30 March 2015].

 

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