Monday, May 7, 2007

A List Of Every Single Image I Could Find in volume of smoke

A monster seated in the heart
Bones of a carcass pecked clean of its meat

Purple sunsets
Skies painted with the whitest of clouds
Nightscapes
Snow capped mountains
Rolling oceans
Old fashioned stage backdrops
Hemp ropes
Sales
Schooner
Sunset
Mountains
Canvas
Scarred hands
Splinters of rope
a curtain
Ocean of rolling heads

The sprit of Shakespeare
Possession by ghosts
Dousing a man on fire w/ water
Lines performed by 100s of actors
Burning theater
Burning Curtain

Chandelier (what kind did they use?)
Glow with stray flicker of light
Candles
Pulley
Varnish
Laquer
Morning sky
Tapestry catching on fire
Flames rising
Litany of backdrops: skies, sunsets, daybreaks, rolling ocreans, streetfronts, mountains, houses, living rooms, chruches, clifftops, roof tops, starry skies, clouds, snow, lightning bolts, tidalwaves, temples, bedrooms, cityscapes
35 tapestries (Why are they called tapestries?)
Hanging
Building flames Hiding
Panicked audience
stampeding
standing ovations

A bent back
A hunchback
wood armrest, cast iron body
Movement of sitting person
Multiple people moving at once

"best" seats, front an dcenter
Orchestra
stage
balcony
audience melting
blindfolded wife
removing a blindfold
oil lamps, falling to the floor
kerosene bursting
kiss
standing ovation
flames enveloping the proscenium
cattle being corralled
Stream of people
Sitting and watching fire
People racing, yelling + screaming
The view
Curtain dropped
Swelling bright light
"flames ate through"

Fresh air
lungs
floor
feet
eyes
smoke
piggy back
head in the clouds

Child @ mirror w/ mother behind
curling hair procedural
fire spreading over body
head burning
Child kicking chair
child laughing
child being punished
broken dam
drowning in people
being stepped on
bird flapping
pony whinnying up
a child too small for her dress

soft floor
blindness
climbing over people
trampling
smoke
climbing
women crying/singing
turning the tides
salmon swimming upstream

fire burning all musicians
people buried
kids spitting
sticky paper
sheet music bruning
fire eating
flames reading sheet music
fire burning muscial instruments
fire playing music

creaky floorboard
worn wood
actor alone, wandering stage
ghosts of actors
ghosts living in theater

desserts: chocolate mousse, coffee pudding, pecan tart, apple dumplings
escaping a building

burning hallway
people jumping
broken people
destroyed french horn

pigeons
burning pigeons
smoke spiriting up
umbrella w/o webbing

slave ship
over a hundered slaves
pregnant woman
storm
giving birth (in the ocean)
blue baby
jumping women
shattering glass
catching women
shackled to chosts
haunting

Bones of many different quantities
piles of bones
adam and eve

Mass of burned bodies
cold, stiff bodies
badly burned bodies

A narrow audience aisle
Unplastered roof
stars in the sky "framed in flames"
Flimsy staircase
Pile of people
monumental church

Unknown bones
cemetary
mass grave
orchestra pit

Chimneys
stove pipes
ash
phlegm
spit
drowning
babies
burning lungs
cigarette smoking
our bodies are burning playhouses

dead play
ghouls
the devil
zombies

turrets
a warrior
clock
lady fair
old Ellinore
the bleeding nun (description of)
horse

burning theater
stage blood
woman wandering desperately
ghost
"i dress in weeds"
the bleeding nun

hell on earth
Job

Churches collapsing
the earth burning up
heaven

mosquitos
malaria
yellow fever
bibles as flies
ahses
cooling cinders

a person on fire
a person with the holy spirit
dancing (x 2)
ripeness
people in mourning
bag of tricks
reverent as actor

raw materials
church running in circles
candle
god in the flame
stage
bones

lots of theaters burning
people dying
weeping
beseeching the almighty
city burning down
---

So my thought is that other than fire imagery (which is pretty clearly going to be present in a play about fire) I notice a lot of nautical imagery, a lot of animal (particularly bird) imagery, and a lot of human anatomy imagery.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a fascinating exercise. It reminds me a lot of Christine Jone's process, which is far more verbal and text-based than most other scenic designers. She takes words and phrases from the script and elsewhere and writes them on pieces of paper. Then she starts to organize the pages, sometimes incorporated with visual images as well, and the physical arrangement of the words (i.e., how things group, which things are isolated, if there are lots of staccato single items or each item flows into the next) starts to point to physical staging and the rhythm of the piece. Her process, of course, is very organic and likely to change with each project. She has a number of other exercises she sometimes does (and teaches to her classes, I understand) which are useful and notable in part because of their lack of things like set sketches or traditional furniture research.

If you're curious, I can talk about this for hours.

Anonymous said...

Also, (and a bit off topic) I always had the same question about the "tapestries" and also the way they were described as being covered with lacquer and varnish (or whatever it was they said). Because it doesn't gibe with my understanding of the way scenic drops worked historically, I always found that moment a little jarring. Is that something from the interviews, or is that a poetic invention for the play? Or is my knowledge of scenic history just less strong than I thought?

Jillomama said...

Isaac,
This is my first comment on a blog ever! Truly exciting. Would like to follow this, sounds like a great project.
See you at the theater!