#((but i find myself imagining it being just a bunch of theaters all crammed together; each one playing a different musical!))

[theheadlessgroom]

https://www.tumblr.com/beatingheart-bride/715448548820484096/theheadlessgroom-beatingheart-bride

@beatingheart-bride

“O-Oh,” Randall nodded as he set down his candle, allowing him to better see her as he grabbed the stool he’d left earlier, sitting on it so that they could see eye-to-eye.

For a moment, he was mesmerized by her eyeshine: He knew some creatures, such as alligators, had them (having seen the shine of a gator’s eyes a couple times in his life); Dorian once told him the scientific term, tapetum lucidum, a funny word he struggled to pronounce when he first saw it, and had long forgotten until he looked at her now, in the dimness of the bathroom. Her eyes had a sort of rose-gold glow to them that was haunting in its presentation (once again reminding him of an alligator lurking just barely on the surface, watching laxly from its place in the water), and yet beautiful in its own right. He felt as if he could look at that shine forever.

Snapping out of his reverie, he remembered himself, and so he stooped to pick up the little bowl; there was plenty in there. Shyly, Randall looked up at Emily, then to the bowl in his hands, and then back to her, asking softly, “D-Do you, u-um...d-do you want me to, um, p-put more o-on?” He repeated the rub action, well aware of how warm his cheeks were as he asked her this, absentmindedly fidgeting with the bowl all the while.

[fantasticcats]

In which I go to London for 3 days: Fantasticcats attends the Professional Development Course from Punchdrunk.

A few ground rules, and the rest will be under a cut for the spoiler averse and because it is long as hell.

Things I can do: Describe what we did and show you photos of what my team created in two of the blank canvass spaces. Things I can’t do: Give you photos of the fully dressed Fallow Cross village. You can find some via this article though so you have an idea of what is there. Things I won’t do: Draw you a map and tell you how to get there or go into detail about the children’s programs they’ve created in the space.

London was having one of those snow storms I thought only people in Portland freaked out about, and after navigating cancelled flights and summoning the will to travel into a mess, I made it on time to the Saturday 1 day Design Masterclass with Punchdrunk Creatives. The email we’d been given noted that this was to be the last design class (ever? This year? I don’t know.) and we were given a copy of the short story The Lottery to read prior to arrival.

After standing outside with a bunch of equally confused and possibly lost folk, I found myself lead into an old classroom. It was that pale blue color of old public elementary schools everywhere and there was a nice skeleton hanging out in the corner. We sat facing our two hosts (which I’m also not going to name because: privacy) and introduced ourselves, revealing a variety of people whose interest in the workshop ranged from professional: museum exhibit designers to actors and video game designers to “because they really liked Punchdrunk!” I fell into an abstract category- being the only person who had come from ridiculously far away and also because I am curious how their design process might work with the art I’ve been creating for a few years now as well as my own home’s aesthetic.

We began by looking over photos of various Punchdrunk sets, and speaking about their use of repetition, scale, and creating tension. They told us that they like to create levels of tension and have spaces that are like breaks for the audience. They like to put the places that will have the most tension in the middle of spaces or floors, and have the breaks on the outside- like a sandwich. Think about your favorite Punchdrunk show and about the spaces and what happens in them and see if you can find this strategy. I definitely can with SNM NYC.

They also talked about how they are different from a lot of theater companies in that they can’t create a lot of the props because when you touched them in the show you’d realize they weren’t real, so the set creators spend a lot of time shopping to fill a space. DREAM JOB!

After the chat it was time to see Fallow Cross. They walked us through how the school children who had visited had the space revealed to them, and then recreated that moment for us. We knew what was coming, but I am pretty sure if I was a child and had that happen I’d lose my goddamn mind.

Some thoughts about being in the space: It’s bigger than it looks, with secret rooms, pass throughs, and second floors to discover. My favorite places were the candle maker’s shop, the church, and the optometrist (or was it an ophthalmologist?.....let’s go with eye doctor.) I loved the tones and Fulton-esque vibe of the eye doctor’s office, and the church had little hidden back rooms that gave it depth beyond it’s welcoming pews. We got to walk around unmasked for a while with the full lighting effects and Punchdrunk drone soundtrack we all know and love. I do feel like smells were missing, but it is also a lot colder in there due to the weather so that might have been part of it. When we chatted about the space later, it made me smile how many people found the mayors house- that was full of taxidermy- scary, or how they felt like people might jump out at them in other spaces.

They’ve said Fallow will never house a full show, and I think one reason for that is the density of the set design. The doll house maker’s shop has hundreds of dolls and doll parts crammed into shelves. The bric-a-brac shop looks like every small town antique shop you’ve ever been in. The candle maker store is like a more organized Hecate’s apothecary with lots of real candles and a tiny store room full of glass containers. Basically, a full audience would destroy this place in an hour. Maybe it was this sensory overload (or lack of a mask) that made me reluctant to touch or really interact with anything, but I loved every second of walking through the buildings and seeing what was around every corner.

After the space exploration, it was time for the first practical exercise. We were shown to a far corner of a village and three dwellings whose doors had been locked during our walk around. Our hosts divided us into 3 teams and assigned each a house. We were given a plastic bin containing big rolls of white paper, some string, some markers, a staple gun, a few chairs, scissors, and push pins, and told that we could staple and paper to our hearts content in the spaces. On the door of each space was an envelope containing a scene we had to create using only the items in the bucket.

We were given 10 minutes.

If you watch any competitive cooking or design reality shows and have ever played along with what you would do in the allotted time, you can imagine what this was like. Now imagine you’re in a Punchdrunk space with Punchdrunk creatives watching you and the combination of howfuckingcoolisthisomg and oh holy hell I have to work with strangers and also omg now I only have 9:30 min left. So yeah, it was like that.

Our team was assigned the creation of a train carriage. We knew that once people from the other teams walked through that they would have to identify our space, but we were a little foggy on how much story we needed to get in the scene. We set our scene fairly simply, but I did make all One Way tickets and a sign that only had departing times and then they placed candles on the seats. A lighting tech came in with an iPad and asked how we wanted the scene lit, and adjusted things for us directly on his pad. And that’s another thing about Fallow Cross- despite looking like a quaint little town, it is wired in ways you don’t expect. One space is even completely soundproof, but you’d never know by looking at.

The time flew by. Once it was over, we were given time to tour the other spaces, and then we got together to guess at what we’d seen and if we got it right. While we didn’t have a very high intensity scene, everyone knew what it was, and someone did mention my one way train tickets, so I was happy about that.

The next practical exercise was my favorite, but I wasn’t allowed to photograph it. We were sent back into the main village where the street was filled with more giant bins, each containing detail pieces. Imagine files, photos, clothing, books, cards, trinkets, and basically anything you’d expect to find when looking through the drawers in someone’s house if were the kind of creeper that did that in the real world and not just Punchdrunk sets.

We were assigned a partner and a space in the village. I was paired with a person and sent to the eye doctor’s store. Our task was to read the description placed inside the envelope they’d tacked to the door, and use detail pieces to convey that description. I think we had 15 minutes this time.

As someone who has been deeply influenced by Punchdrunk’s set design for 5 years, I cannot begin to explain the joy this was for me to do. Short of actually working for them someday this was the best possible thing I could be doing.

AND OH MAN. I couldn’t think of anything more me than what we got: The optometrist is unhappy with the local church. They are drawn to the Pagan religion in a neighboring village and have been visiting there in secret.

I grabbed a screen in the room to create a barrier between the main office and the desk. After that I used playing cards laid out as tarot cards, found a great book called The Devil, and my partner went to work creating little notes with runes and sigils on them. After we had the desk set up we covered half of the scene with a cloth, turned the chair on its side like they’d rushed out, and I semi-trashed the office space in that “I don’t have the energy to manage my business with these assholes” kind of way I’d imagine it would be.

Our space seemed to be a success. Many people totally got what we’d done, and the facilitators liked how we’d split the room to make people want to walk behind the screen to check out what was there.

I also really enjoyed what other teams had done. One example was the bartender in the pub had a crush on the preacher’s daughter, and the bar was set up totally normally…..but if you went behind the bar you saw they’d set up a shrine to this woman. So perfect.

After that it was lunchtime. Time had sped by, and it was difficult walking from the lovely darkness of Fallow Cross into the chilly daylight.

Following  lunch was last practical exercise. We were taken back to the blank canvass homes again and handed back our buckets of paper and office supplies. This time, however, in the outside seating area, was a large bin of stones. It was time for our Lottery scene.

Three teams again, and each of the houses got a character from The Lottery. If you don’t feel like reading the story, I suggest this super quick short film so you get the general idea of who was who.

We got Old Man Warner, the cranky guy who bragged about how many lotteries he’d survived. Our team got to work pretty fast in the small home we were given. We were told not to invent a new story but to try to draw on what we knew about him and infer things. Other things they wanted us to consider was if our house was before, during, or after the lottery, and what effect would that have on the level of intensity in the space. We asked each other questions such as “Is his home neat? What is he reading? What are his other interests?” It forced us to really dig into what kind of man we thought Warner was.

We decided he definitely lived alone now, but had surely lost a loved one to the Lottery- and his determination to keep it alive was so they wouldn’t have died in vein. We set up a little memorial to the deceased (his wife) next to his bed. If anyone picked up the envelope under the shrine they’d find the ominous slip of paper with the black dot inside of it.

Next, we created 77 slips of paper and tacked them to a board to display, with a single chair and spotlight facing them in the dim lit room. We used the paper to create a wall, so that people walking through the door would want to look around the corner to see this set up.

Elsewhere in the room we put things we thought he’d be interested in: almanacs, newspaper articles about crops, and a giant sign that said 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon,' happily displayed for all to see. Outside of the building we created a paper garden with a sign to remember the lottery!

We had a bit longer on this project—I think maybe an hour? So we were able to really get in as much details as our material afforded us. Using only paper and string to create a full scene, especially when you’ve been in a Punchdrunk space all afternoon, takes your imagination and ability to make something from nothing to a new level. Once the time was up we toured other spaces, and after downloading the story into my brain for a week straight it was actually kind of unsettling to see it realized. The other two spaces were Mr. Summer’s house and the Hutchinson house.

One thing that really struck me was in the Hutchinson home, where it seemed to be set while the lottery was taking place—they’d created a dining room table and each place setting had a stone with the family member’s name on it. It was a powerful image.

After we finished visiting and critiquing the spaces, we gathered for tea & an informal Q&A in The Siren—the pub in Fallow Cross, before leaving. The day had flown by so fast, but I felt inspired and armed with practical strategies and a deeper sense of how putting the right effort into a process can capture attention, inspire a sense of mystery, and guide an audience.

I can’t speak for the entire class but those I did talk with seemed to have a really positive experience and were really happy they were there. While I know it’s totally nuts that I flew to London for 72 hours just to do this, I was happy I was able to make it happen and if they ever offered more design/creative based classes I would go again in a heartbeat.

This is already insanely long so I’ll just thank you all for reading. If you’re curious about the spaces other teams created I am happy to tell you all about them.