Sunday in the park with George

The idea to make the design more contemporary came from the production of ‘Sunday in the park with George’, a musical inspired by the painting, ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte’.  The production was unique at the time it was conceived as it involved theatrical set design techniques that were yet to be fully explored. When Georges Seurat made the painting more than a hundred years ago, it was a novel experience for his audiences as he took the experience of the art of painting to a new perspective and gave birth to pointillism which eventually led to the concept of pixels in photographs. The musical was first conceived by Stephan Sondheim and James Lapine in 1984 also brought similar challenges to theatre design.

The entire production was designed with the painting projected as the backdrop but without the characters. The characters of the painting were transformed and moved out of the canvas and depicted as real people on stage. The actors would remain still as if they are frozen in a painted scene and move in accordance to the script to act out the story. The design when viewed from an audience point of view gave the impression of a painting being acted out. It was a visual spectacle that used projection and light to carry on a story. The projection panels were perfectly in sync, interacting with the actors making the production literally glide across the stage. There have been many productions of the musical since the first and they have all taken the design a step ahead but the idea remains the same.

To me, it was an amazing example of production design as it combined elements of live performance with set design to create an illusion of a painting on stage; almost like a happening or an event. The fact that the actors on stage stood in strategic positions on stage so that perspective could be used to give a three dimensional feel to an otherwise two dimensional piece of work was fascinating. My attempt at using a television screen as a backdrop was an effort to emulate the same technique on a smaller scale. The contents of my model, if made on a large scale could have a similar effect if the scene playing on the television screen is projected onto a wall with the layered panels (acting as stage props or actors) in front to create a single frame for an actual production or live event. The entire design when viewed through the proscenium would give the illusion of a single image with the sea and rocks on the beach. 

Reference:
broadwayworld.com. 2011. 5th Avenue's Sunday in the Park with George [online]. Available at:http://seattle.broadwayworld.com/printcolumn.php?id=51094. [Accessed: 10 June 2011] 
Sunday in the Park with George Highlights. 2009. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raQgy2dDCYw&feature=related

Project Realisation

My final project realisation is a space developed on the principles of perspective used in set design to create a sense of belief amongst audiences. The project will be a large-scale model of an Eidophusikon, which is a piece of entertainment art no longer extant but considered as one of the early forms of moving image. The version that I developed was an interpretation of the original. I incorporated certain elements into the process that made the design a little different and contemporary.

The original Eidophusikon was an eighteenth century attempt at virtual reality. It employed the techniques of linear perspective, diorama, and special effects using lights, gauzes, coloured glass, moving objects and smoke to create spectacular scenic effects. The objects inside the Eidophusikon were placed at strategic distance from one another so that when viewed from a certain angle they fell in place giving the illusion of one singular image. The image was then given movement to create the effect of an actual scene happening. I have followed the same pattern of construction and used linear and atmospheric perspective to depict a natural phenomena i.e. a view of the sun setting in the horizon from the beach which when viewed from the proscenium gave the impression of a single frame. The frame will give an illusion of a picture physically created on stage using an actual model set.

However, the way the model will be designed is different from the original Eidophusikon. Unlike the three-dimensional diorama used to create the content of the stage in the original Eidophusikons, I have modeled my scenery over the technique used in toy theatres in which scenes and characters were printed on cardboard. They were either in black and white or coloured. In Victorian times they were sold for ‘a penny plain and two pence for coloured ones’. The printed sheets were pasted onto thin cardboards, cut out and then assembled in layers on a small, toy stage to act out a play.

The design of my model is developed in a similar manner. I have sketched the scenery in a stylized style on card board, cut it out and mounted it on foam board to create various layers which will then be placed at various points in front of one another in linear perspective to create an image. The way I sketched the panels was influenced by Japanese Ukiyo – e paintings and woodblock prints of the Edo period that depicted landscapes in odd angles and shapes with emphasis on flat planes and strong linear outlines.

In the original Eidophusikon, the backdrop to the three – dimensional scene was made on stretched, painted canvas which was moved and replaced in a manner similar to a slide show as the scene progressed or changed. However, the backdrop of my model is a television screen playing a video of the sun setting over a sea. The video will play on a loop so the entire image would last for the duration of the sun setting before playing the same sequence again. 

Reference: 

EDM Studio 2006-2007. Eidophusikon [online]. Available at:

http://www.edmstudio.com/eidophusikon/index.html. [Accessed: 2 May 2011]

The Richard Balzer Collection, 2007. Available at:

http://www.dickbalzer.com/Panoramas_Dioramas.298.0.html.[Accessed: 2 May 2011]

Poulter R. 2007. Robert Poulter’s New Model Theatre – Eidophusikon [online]. Available at:

http://www.newmodeltheatre.co.uk/eidophusikon.html. [Accessed: 2 May 2011]

Influences and Techniques

There were some art techniques and artists that have influenced the way I intend to develop the contents of my model. Some of them are directly relevant as they contextualise the development but some are a source of inspiration in terms of how the eventual outcome could be enhanced or made different. The content would be created and visualised through a mixture of several artistic influences. 

Toy Theaters
Theatre was the main form of popular entertainment in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Toy theatres became a popular form of family entertainment during the 19th century.


Toy theatres were usually constructed out of card and fitted onto a tabletop to be played with. The characters were printed on paper and card, attached to wooden sticks, and appeared on the stage by sliding in and out of slots on the stage floor. Different scenes and facades could be added to the basic set. Wealthy families often had a toy theatre custom-made.


They were originally created as souvenirs and advertisements for adult theatergoer’s and sold outside playhouses and vaudeville theatres. However, by mid nineteenth century, they were established as socially acceptable toys for middle- class children.


The sheets, which were produced with characters and scenery, came in different versions: cheaper ones in black and white or more expensive full-colour versions. The way in which they were created i.e. the cut outs representing actors frozen in action at steep angled, arms aloft and faces defiant, represented a stylized manner of drawing. The target-audiences were both adults and children.


The idea of the proscenium and using thin, cardboard layers to create depth on stage in a mini theatre was one of the main inspirations behind me using toy theatres as a source of inspiration. I will use a similar manner of construction to depict a scene inside my model. The famous saying of, ‘penny plain, two pence coloured’, the two ways in which the scenic content of toy dioramas were sold, was also an inspiration behind the way I will construct the layers as they will be sketched in black and white. 

Katsushika Hokusai and Uriyo - e 

The style in which i will sketch the panels of the model is loosely inspired by the works of the Japanese artist and printmaker of the Edo period, Katsushika Hokusai. The line work of his famous print  ‘The Great Wave’ is a style that I will try to incorporate while sketching the panels. However, the panels of my model would be more stylized as Hokusai used to create natural scenes in a more realistic way.

Katsushika Hokusai belonged to the famous Edo period in which art was characterized by a decorative style. The Edo school of art is best known for its Ukiyo – e paintings and woodblock prints. Ukiyo – e, which literally means ‘pictures of the floating world’, was a style of painting that was used for entertainment. It was affordable to recreate and thus was meant for the common people who could not afford paintings. The content portrayed wealthy courtesans, kabuki actors, everyday life and was used as a style of printmaking for advertising purposes. The most common theme in Ukiyo – e portrayed was landscapes painted in odd angles and shapes with emphasis on flat planes and strong linear outlines. 

Trompe d'oeil 

Another thing that i studied for a deeper understanding of the illusion of depth but which did not necessarily influence the development of my project was Trompe d’oeil, an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create optical illusions that depict objects to appear in three dimensions.

Trompe d’oeil has existed in paintings since the renaissance and has been extensively used by painters and artists ever since to study foreshortening, light and making objects appear three dimensional on flat surfaces.  It has long been used in set design to create the illusion of a much deeper space than the actual stage. A famous early example is the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, which has a permanent Trompe d’oeil stage. It was created by Vincenzo Scamozzi and depicts a seven forced perspective street scene that appears to recede into the distance.


REFERENCE: 
Horton, S. R. Where They Having Fun Yet: Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves [online]. Available at:http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft296nb16b&chunk.id=d0e554&toc.id=&brand=ucpress. [Accessed: 5 June 2011]

Museum of Childhood [online]. Available at:http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/collections/toys/toy_theatre/index.html. [Accessed: 5 June 2011]
Hokusai, A. 1994-2010 [online]. Available at:http://andreas.com/hokusai.html. [Accessed: 7 June 2011]

Pioch, N. 2002. Art of the Edo Period [online]. Available at:http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/tl/japan/edo.html. [Accessed: 7 June 2011]

Edo Peiod [online]. Available at:http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2128.html. [Accessed: 7 June 2011]

Delahunt M. 1996-2010. Edo Period or Edo Era [online]. Available at:http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/e/edo.html. [Accessed: 7 June 2011] 

Tokugava Gallery [online]. Available at:http://tokugawagallery.com/history.html. [Accessed: 10 June 2011]

 Ukiyo-e. Available at:http://library.thinkquest.org/trio/TTQ05064/Templates/ukiyo-e.htm. [Accessed: 10 June 2011] 

Saturday Art: Trompe l’oeuil Frecsco by Andrea Pozzo, Jezuit Church, Vienna [online]. Available at:http://my.firedoglake.com/karin/2011/04/09/saturday-art-trompe-loeuil-fresco-by-andrea-pozzo-jesuit-church-vienna/. [Accessed: 10 June 2011]