Saturday, May 16, 2009
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The Project
THE PROJECT: A retelling of Sleeping Beauty. In the framing story, a mother uses a toy theater (a proscenium made from a small box) to tell her sleepless daughter a bedtime story about a princess who is doomed to never sleep again. In the story-within-the-story, the Queen - played by the same actress as the mother - resorts to asking her resentful-though-talented sister-in-law, Jocunda, for help when she cannot get pregnant. Jocunda’s semi-evil medical-magical fertility procedure is successful. However, when the royal couple forgets to invite her to the celebration of the birth, Jocunda crashes the party and condemns the baby princess to a life of sleep disorder and waking dream. The story is about how the princess, played by the same actress as the daughter, sets out on her own at age seven with the goal of finding Jocunda, who has been appearing in her dreams, and reconciling her to the family. What Eve wishes for is not only to sleep, but to make peace with the idea that she has more than one mother – the jealous and possessive one as well as the nurturing and encouraging one. The story will go back and forth between the framing story and the story-within-the-story, each set in a realistic/fantastic version of our contemporary world.
FINAL FORM: A “collage film” based on techniques derived from toy theater and multi-media theater. While the frame story will be told traditionally, with actors speaking directly to each other, the story-with-a-story will use a combination of hand-made cut-outs and drawings, puppets, stop-motion animation, video and still photography.
CONTEXT: This project extends my longstanding exploration of intersections between theater and film. In the toy-theater aspect of the proposed project – influenced by the ornately devised films of Melies and Karel Zeman, as well as by contemporary toy theater and puppetry by Great Small Works and Redmoon Theater. In Melies’ day, the distinction between theater and film was not absolute. I propose a return to this relative indifference to media purity, both because it opens the possibility that new hybrid media forms are yet to be discovered – and because impurity is a more accurate reflection of the contemporary.
CONTENT/FORM: This is a collage form whose final combination of hand-drawn, computer generated and photographic materials cannot be exactly foretold. We will be experimenting to see what works. For example, we will be experimenting with green-screening on many surfaces. In order to make a dress of eyes for Jocunda, we will be making a life-sized green-screen dress for the actor to wear. In order to get the images of the characters inside the toy theater, we will be painting puppets or whole surfaces with green-screen paint. We are not interested in creating a slick look, but a look in which the real and the surreal, the live and the pre-recorded, the hand-made and the machine-made are convincingly placed on a continuum.
IMPACT: The impact of THE WAKING BEAUTY is in its rewriting of certain traditional fairy tale elements. The story will reveal the female world of the traditional fairy tale as beset by the problems of contemporary women: fertility and infertility, jealousy and addiction, love and hate between mothers and daughters. We aim at creating a tale in which the feminist goal of female empowerment is shown as not only hindered by the big-bad-wolf of male dominance, but by other factors as well. In a sense, the story is Jocunda’s, the evil fairy who battles her love of drink, isolation, and revenge. In the end, this classic figure of the angry older woman is revised. While Eve’s hopes of being the agent of total familial reconciliation are only partly fulfilled, Jocunda’s dream of belonging is answered, at least in part, by her discovery of the pleasures of a “second-hand” maternity.
FINAL FORM: A “collage film” based on techniques derived from toy theater and multi-media theater. While the frame story will be told traditionally, with actors speaking directly to each other, the story-with-a-story will use a combination of hand-made cut-outs and drawings, puppets, stop-motion animation, video and still photography.
CONTEXT: This project extends my longstanding exploration of intersections between theater and film. In the toy-theater aspect of the proposed project – influenced by the ornately devised films of Melies and Karel Zeman, as well as by contemporary toy theater and puppetry by Great Small Works and Redmoon Theater. In Melies’ day, the distinction between theater and film was not absolute. I propose a return to this relative indifference to media purity, both because it opens the possibility that new hybrid media forms are yet to be discovered – and because impurity is a more accurate reflection of the contemporary.
CONTENT/FORM: This is a collage form whose final combination of hand-drawn, computer generated and photographic materials cannot be exactly foretold. We will be experimenting to see what works. For example, we will be experimenting with green-screening on many surfaces. In order to make a dress of eyes for Jocunda, we will be making a life-sized green-screen dress for the actor to wear. In order to get the images of the characters inside the toy theater, we will be painting puppets or whole surfaces with green-screen paint. We are not interested in creating a slick look, but a look in which the real and the surreal, the live and the pre-recorded, the hand-made and the machine-made are convincingly placed on a continuum.
IMPACT: The impact of THE WAKING BEAUTY is in its rewriting of certain traditional fairy tale elements. The story will reveal the female world of the traditional fairy tale as beset by the problems of contemporary women: fertility and infertility, jealousy and addiction, love and hate between mothers and daughters. We aim at creating a tale in which the feminist goal of female empowerment is shown as not only hindered by the big-bad-wolf of male dominance, but by other factors as well. In a sense, the story is Jocunda’s, the evil fairy who battles her love of drink, isolation, and revenge. In the end, this classic figure of the angry older woman is revised. While Eve’s hopes of being the agent of total familial reconciliation are only partly fulfilled, Jocunda’s dream of belonging is answered, at least in part, by her discovery of the pleasures of a “second-hand” maternity.