Director's Note on Fabric

The Fabric of Imagination

How we Weave Imaginings in ...Poe

Mark Hardiman

Earlier I spoke about synaptic connections and memory being part of the process of creating this work. Aligned with that is a metaphoric combination of the nature of imagination and its visual counterpart on the stage.

Time and time again in the rehearsal process, we find ourselves drawn to practical, realistic solutions toward solving the problems of scenery and props. But we constantly ask ourselves, “can this ever match the grandeur and detail of what we see in the minds eye?” So often, the answer is a resounding, “no!” Our physical production of ...Poe is based upon the idea that the most powerful scenic element we have is the imagination of our audience. We find it is often better to think of evocation rather than concrete solutions, particularly when dealing with strong narrative and powerfully descriptive text, like that of Poe. This collection of Poe’s work lives in the dreams and nightmares of us all, that is its peculiar strength.

So then, what is the solution? What, then, are we left with? We require a scenic element that has the peculiar elasticity of the imagination and dreams. Something that floats and swirls like our reverie and even our nightmares. Something the grows and shrinks, settles, and becomes as tumultuous as our thoughts. Fabric, being capable of all these things, is the solution. For this production we are using enormous bolts of diaphanous fabric. Fabric here, in our work, is the symbol of our own thoughts, sanity, or insanity, dreams, hopes, imaginings, and how they are so mutable, yet so solid and irrefutable. It ties us together in one weave: it binds one scene to another and can make them dissolve away or appear as just a shadow. We capture in its thread the pieces of Poe and bring them into and out of focus with a continuous motion that mirrors an extended imagining. In this way fabric in our production mirrors the viscosity of our imaginations.

We have posted a number of photographs of fabric being manipulated by ensemble members in rehearsal. Below are a few sketches from our intern, to give you another perspective on fabric in our process.

Cask of Amontillado 

Cask of Amontillado, part II.

Tell-Tale Heart. Two simultaneous scenes are created by having figures stand behind a fabric with light projected onto them, and, while shadows of their profiles are then cast across the fabric, we see the scene another scene continuing on the closer side of the veil. This makes telling narrative stories more active, while also illustrating how close, yet distant, loves lost can be.