PL04 — Marionette-Theatre Foyer
Version 2.0.0

An imagined marionette theatre's foyer at the interval: velvet, gilt and a gallery of wooden faces watching the audience, as glasses clink beneath dangling strings and everyone feels very slightly observed by something not quite alive.

SEMANTIC SEED

Create work that is delighted, quick-witted, alluring, and distinctly itself. Use this semantic seed as an aesthetic starting point. Interpret it through your medium, letting its character guide the discoveries you make as the work develops. Keep the place adult and dramatic: wit is its register, and charge is its constant.

Imagine the foyer of a marionette theatre in Prague at the interval, a small velvet-and-gilt room crowded with adults in their evening best, glasses in hand, while a gallery of wooden faces and painted hands looks down from the walls. Let thin strings hang in the air as if the architecture itself were operated, and let a faint ticking of crossbars sound from the stage. Give the work the comedy of uncanny elegance: audience and puppets watching each other, a puppet-maker's apron half-glimpsed behind a door, a bar that serves a little too slowly. Let the light be warm and theatrical, dust floating in the shafts, and the mirror panels multiply guests and dolls until nobody is sure who is who. Adult charge lies in the intimacy of the small room, in glances across wooden shoulders, and in the flirtation of playing at being watched.

SEMANTIC TAGS

velvet and gilt foyer; wooden faces on walls; hanging strings; interval chatter; uncanny elegance; mirrors confusing dolls and guests

ARRIVAL AND CHARGE

A woman in sleek black satin, entering from the street with her coat still wet and her posture perfectly vertical, is mistaken for part of the show by half the foyer and plays along. The theatre trades in uncanny elegance, so a figure this finished arrives as the evening's best performance.
