Written by Virginia Woolf
Role: Set Designer
VCA- Hypothetical Design Project
Director - Ingrid Voorendt
Set Designer - XaSha Chua-Huggins
Costume Designer - Harry Gill
Lighting Designer - August Shearman
This set is designed to transport the audience to the ephemeral cosmos that Orlando is engulfed within. This will be executed with an immersive tyvek cyclorama surrounding the audience. As the natural world is important to the character and play Orlando, my design attempts to bring the audience to an outdoor theatre experience, to be in touch with nature in an immersive way as if they were outside. An area within the cyclorama’s semicircle will be a clearly marked bed of artificial grass for the audience, who are invited to bring cushions, beach-chairs, picnic rugs etc. Not being in a traditional seating bank and put on the performers level, the audience will be taken out of the viewers mindset, and be more so immersed in Orlando’s world. Behind the audience is a wardrobe which stores Orlando’s costumes as well as a changing screen. Orlando will walk through the audience in each act for a costume change.
Act 1
In Act one, this set design projects Orlando’s animated perspective, following their journey. The animations are inspired by classicism, by utilising specific, definite lines. This movement not only represents the 1500s but correlates with Orlando’s journey, conforming to the periods societal norms and worshiping the divine such as the Queen and Sasha.
Act 2
In the 1600s, Romanticism is characterised as very emotional with a strong sense of light and dark to portray this, the design therefore incorporates an expressive use of line in order to create a sense of lightness and darkness. This echoes Orlando's distressed period having lost Sasha.
Act 3
Having woken up as a woman, Orlando attempts to follow the societal structures created for women much akin to Academicism artistic rules. Like the period the design utilises bold lines to create shapes within the set and shade to add a sense of dimension.
Act 4
In the 1800s Impressionism rejected the academic constraints and sought to evoke their impressions of the world. Similarly, Orlando realises that neither herself or Marmaduke conform to the expected gender characteristics and begin to form unique impressions of their world. The design creates this with short brush strokes in watercolour to convey the fast impressions of the world.
Act 5
In a like manner to Orlando seeing the world in a truer form, uninformed by the biases of society, surrealism aimed to present ‘automatic’ meaning, unconsciously grown without the influence of reason, morality and aesthetics.
