Revision as of 20:57, 5 July 2012

Languages of Film and Theatre

Description

For the graduation show, I have made a short film-document that illustrates how my engagement with film as a medium has influenced my work as a theatre designer. Since starting my studies at Piet Zwart Institute, I have completed three theatrical designs. Each project reflects on the nature of the frame and the cinema screen, merging their properties with the perspectives of theatrical space. All these projects approached the presence of the screen differently. Firstly, a production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (directed by Susanne Kennedy) creates the illusion of a screen by putting the actors inside a framed rectangular box within a greater, darkened space, like people moving inside a television screen. The second project is Dea Loher’s Land Without Words (directed by Jaap Spijkers). This time an actor moves before and behind an actual semi-transparent screen, one that is also used as a canvas for painting. By placing the screen diagonally, and making it larger than any audience member could take in with one glance, the design creates an experience of depth. The last project, Susanne Kennedy’s version of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, is the only one where images are projected into the design. This design fuses elements from the previous two projects. A gauze screen separates actors from the audience; sometimes this screen forms a barrier onto which text is projected; sometimes, when the space is lit where the actors perform, it offers a window into their claustrophobic world. At the back of the space is a second screen onto which images from medical films (microbes and blown-up x-rays) and of clouds appear, presenting the elemental aspects of the characters’ experience. Although I have used elements from film and video before, these three works together form a trio, a way of making the ideas and practices explored in the Masters course at Piet Zwart Institute my own.

Media

Photos

Video

Essay

Thesis in progress click here to download

Bibliography

Rosenblum, Robert, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975)

Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1998)

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, „Newman: The Instant“ in The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)

McFarlane, James, ed., Henrik Ibsen: Penguin Critical Anthologies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).

Merx, Sigrid, “Swann’s way: video and theatre as an intermedial stage for the representation of time” in: Ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).

Andrew, Malcolm, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Greg Giesekam, Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre (Theatre & Performance Practices) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, ed., Mapping Intermediality in Performance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011)

Denis Cosgrove, Stephen Daniels, ed., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Moi, Toril, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form, Essays in Film Theory (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977)

Additional Information

One page itemised budget estimate

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-= Little Eyolf =
+= Languages of Film and Theatre =
 == Description ==
-The following question inspired my graduation project: how can I create the experience of an outside space within a theatre?  I aimed at the illusion of an open place, one that extends beyond any visible walls.   My research’s main practical outcome is the set and video design for a theatre production of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf (1894), (premiere on 3 May 2012 at Het Nationale Toneel in The Hague).
+For the graduation show, I have made a short film-document that illustrates how my engagement with film as a medium has influenced my work as a theatre designer.  Since starting my studies at Piet Zwart Institute, I have completed three theatrical designs. Each project reflects on the nature of the frame and the cinema screen, merging their properties with the perspectives of theatrical space. All these projects approached the presence of the screen differently.
-My research assesses how in live performance, digital video technology influences the perception of space.  My starting point was to create a room that represents a state of mind; actors were to be vague figures in an apparently endless landscape of fog and air.  With the help of projections, scrims, and artificial fog, I established the impression of a scene set outside, yet paradoxically also on location within a human mind rather than inside a theatre.
+Firstly, a production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (directed by Susanne Kennedy) creates the illusion of a screen by putting the actors inside a framed rectangular box within a greater, darkened space, like people moving inside a television screen.  The second project is Dea Loher’s Land Without Words (directed by Jaap Spijkers).  This time an actor moves before and behind an actual semi-transparent screen, one that is also used as a canvas for painting.  By placing the screen diagonally, and making it larger than any audience member could take in with one glance, the design creates an experience of depth.  The last project, Susanne Kennedy’s version of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, is the only one where images are projected into the design.  This design fuses elements from the previous two projects.  A gauze screen separates actors from the audience; sometimes this screen forms a barrier onto which text is projected; sometimes, when the space is lit where the actors perform, it offers a window into their claustrophobic world.  At the back of the space is a second screen onto which images from medical films (microbes and blown-up x-rays) and of clouds appear, presenting the elemental aspects of the characters’ experience.
-My aim was to create a three dimensional space for images, combining layers of projection within an amorphous substance like fog.  Rather than a conventional flat  screen, I sought the illusion of depth and perspective on a nebulous body. The audience experience the tension between the scale of the human frame and the scale of the space around them.
+Although I have used elements from film and video before, these three works together form a trio, a way of making the ideas and practices explored in the Masters course at Piet Zwart Institute my own.
-The collaboration intrinsic to theatre is essential to my working practice. Therefore my research entails analysing the results of the cooperation between different professions such as stage design, sound design, light design, directing, and acting.  As this particular theatre production aimed at bringing natural and universal powers on stage, I was especially interested to see how all crafts combine together to create one entity.
-Like cinema, live performance takes place in an empty black space; my fascination with this fact forms the subject matter of my designs. Looking back on the other theatre designs I made during the Master Course at Piet Zwart Institute, I will show how my research into cinematic language influences my approach as a designer.
 == Media ==
 === Photos ===

User:Lena Mueller/Lena Mueller Little Eyolf 2012: Difference between revisions