Satyagraha opens tomorrow!

The choice of materials used for the Satyagraha set was informed directly by Gandhi’s story, as set designer Julian Crouch explains. “When I start working on a show,” he says, “one of my approaches is to find a palette of materials to deliberately set some restrictions right away. I went on a picture search to look at Gandhi and South Africa, and always behind him, there was something made of corrugated iron, including Tolstoy Farm, the big commune he set up.” That’s why the rear wall of the set, which also serves as a screen for various kinds of projections, is made of corrugated iron. “Also,” Crouch continues, “Gandhi is associated with poverty, and we’re playing in the most respected opera house in the world, so I wanted to use ‘poor’ materials, I guess. We’re fairly well known for taking simple materials and turning them into something special and beautiful.”

Apart from the corrugated iron, newspaper plays a key role in the production. “There’s a whole scene in the opera dedicated to Gandhi’s newspaper, which was called Indian Opinion,” the designer says. “We decided to take that as the theme for the whole show. It starts very simple, with a scene that’s not in the opera but in our interpretation, where we see Gandhi on the floor having just been ejected from the first class of a train. That’s where we pick up our story, and beside him in a bag he has some clothes, books and papers, and the papers are taken from beside him started to be animated. And then we take that further and further, so the newspaper element becomes larger as the piece goes on.” In the course of the opera, paper is shaped into various objects and animated live on stage by members of the Skills Ensemble. “It really seemed ideal for the Gandhi style of simplicity,” Crouch says. “With some newspaper and lots of people you can make something that looks like a large creature, but you can’t do it on your own. So that was the feeling—trying to create something that needed people working together, which is what the satyagraha movement was about.”

This entry was posted by Philipp Brieler on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 7:48 am and is filed under Satyagraha, New Production Countdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.