Brazilian Students Exhibition
Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2023
The project begins with studies of volumes resulting in a vanity castle/maze, where the highest level emerges as a mixture of an oratory and a sanctuary. The remaining levels are the path to reach power.
From these four key aspects: castle/maze, which produce the scenic dynamics, and sanctuary/oratory, which materialize Lear’s vanity, the levels from the first idea of the design were dismembered, producing a labyrinth and a conglomerate of larger castles giving freedom to both the spectators and the actors.
Shakespeare’s plays are always a challenge. Its historical, spatial, and European cultural context combined with its complex textually is extremely distant from our contemporary Brazilian reality. The spatial intervention emerges as a proposal to create a universe that detaches the spectators from his contemporaneity and takes them to Lear’s universe. In order to make the transition more expressive, as in “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis, I created a Brazilian-style foyer: a space with tropical prints and colors, common in Brazilian culture, but rare in the rest of the world. From a curtain of floral fabrics, the “chintz and embroidery made in the southeast and midwest” (like Lewis’s wardrobe), transports the spectators to that new place that is that of Shakespeare’s story.
The colors were selected based on two criteria: The first one, is controversial to what is usual in Shakespeare’s plays, with lighter colors and a palette that moves to vibrant. Despite being a tragedy, the space is not tragic from the very beginning. It gradually becomes tragic and this choice does not initially deliver to the spectators the cruel plot that the play is directed towards. Allowing to bring counterpoint, sensory, and spatial dynamics that the story’s beginning from the beautiful to the tragic, thus enhancing its outcome. The second was to add Tomás Santa Rosa’s pictorial reference: The palette was taken from one of his works, O Orfeu (Orpheus), and part of the shapes also inspired some formats of these castles.
The forest/storm are translucent paintings like a hallucination, erected from the middle of one of the castles, symbolizing the conscious space in the space of the unconscious.
Finally, bringing the magnitude and beauty of Dover, a striking white velvet curtain was applied at the front end of the warehouse and on the right side of the space. Bringing the tradition of large curtains, not as an ornament, but as a spatial reference of history.