SKETCHBOOK

2nd Performance - Stage Design for "Dream Play" (表演建築之二 - 舞台設計 - "夢之劇")

Daughter: This is Paradise!
1st coal heaver: This is hell!
1st coal heaver: What have we done? We were born poor, and our parents weren't very respectable...and maybe we got arrested a couple of times.
Daughter: Arrested?
1st coal heaver: That's right...The ones who didn't get arrest are sitting up there in the casino, eating eight-course dinner with wine.
Daughter: Why don't people do something to reform things?
Lawyer: Oh they do. But all reformers end up in prison or the madhouse.
Daughter: Who puts them in the madhouse?
Layer: All the right-think people, all those honorable...
1st coal heaver: And yet we're the foundations of society. Without the coal we deliever everything would die out or ground to a halt: the lights on the streets, in the stores, in the homes, Cold and darkness would descent over everything...and so we sweat like hell to bring you that black coal...What do you give us in return?
2nd coal heaver: Woke up an...? Children enter and screen in terror when they see the heavers.)
1st coal heaver: They scream when they see us! The scream...
2nd coal heaver: Damn it to hell...it's time to bring out the guillotines and chop away the corruption...
1st coal heaver: you said it! Goddamn it!
lawyer (to the daughter): it's all so crazy! but it's not people who are bad...it's..
Daughter: what?

The second project is to design a stage bases on Swedish author August Strindberg (1849-1912)'s "Dream play" (1901). The scene I chose is the dialogue between"daughter" (the daughter of the god) and the coal heaver. Daughter came down to the world from heaven and saw the prosperous cities with beautiful casinos and thought the world is a paradise. However, the coal heavers working underground made her realized that there is things happening in this world which she just didn't notice.

By creating two different worlds (the underground -coal mine and the modern city), the scenery is to convey the idea of unjustness and unfairness of the world). The above ground city with casinos is a completely distort space with transparent buildings and curvy floor slab (to protrait the illusionary psychological condition when money and gambling starts to take over life, the curvy floor also forms a nice media for ballet dancers). The bottom is the massive underworld with heavy machineries.

30/8/04 - 11/9/04 in Lund, Sweden

posted by ryxx @ 8:17 PM