We have now gathered and started to ‘refract’ several renowned images into scenes in keeping with our company’s ambition to show loss, relationships and new beginnings. Each workshop is now themed on reshaping one particular image per session. This system appeals to me as it has started to sculpt the content of our performance. What’s more, we now have the name of our show. When You See It, ‘It’ being the refracted image, will be performed at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on the 17th May.
George Seurat’s pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte has provoked much interest since I brought it into rehearsals. We studied the different interpretations that could be contrived from the uncomfortably still, eerily atmospheric narrative of the image, practicing our ethos of ‘not seeing things in black and white’ (Refract, 2015). We decided the man in the foreground of the painting looks incompatible with the other figures. His attire suggests a different class and time period. We developed this proposition by devising an intimate story exploring the disparity between the bourgeois figures and the seemingly modernistic, proletariat man.
The devising period being a time for ‘growth, experimentation, creativity’ (Berger and Luere, 1998, 32), we resisted making a snap decision on the staging of the images narrative. Through improvisation, we decided to illustrate the contrast through dissimilar timed movements. The performers playing the upper class figures executed separate, slow, elongated movements which complimented their character’s persona and prop. I played the bourgeois man standing with a cane and focused my movement around the cane, slowly lowering it to the ground, marking my territory. After these movements were completed we froze and Morgan, playing the proletariat, walked brusquely through the space. These contrasting movements emphasised Morgan’s character’s detached relationship with the other figures. The scene concludes with everyone except Morgan regaining their positions in the painting, allowing an audience to determine the image we have ‘refracted’, but encouraging them to form a revised opinion of it.
Works Cited:
A Sunday afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (2015) [photograph] Available from: http://www.artble.com/artists/georges_seurat/paintings/a_sunday_afternoon_on_the_island_of_la_grande_jatte [Accessed 18 March].
Berger, S. and Luere, J. (1998) The Theatre Team: Playwright, Producer, Director, Designers, and Actors. London: Greenwood Press.
Lancashire, A. (2015).
Refract Theatre Company (2015) Manifesto. [online] Available from https://refracttheatrecompany.dev.lincoln.ac.uk/our-manifesto [Accessed 18 March 2015].