The White Plague|Co-Set & Costume Design & Co-Director
Prague Quadrennial Competition Winner | Site-specific conceptual design | Written By - Karel Čapek | 2020
RAE Bedford Wind Tunnel Site, Thurleigh, UK
Written in 1937, Karel Chapek’s satirical comedy The White Plague explores the rise of white supremacy through the metaphor of an unstoppable plague. Working as a team of five designers our interpretation intends to leave our audience questioning their role in a narrative eerily resonant of the political and health crisis the world is currently facing.
The site-specific design uses a WW2, aviation, wind testing facility. We set out to utilise the building’s architecture to create varied interactions between performers and the audiences. The vintage colours throughout the space are also suggestive of a medical environment specifically PPE blue. The space has inspired costumes and set pieces that frame each scene whilst breaking the industrial logic. For instance, Galen’s clinic is open and at the centre of her community, whilst Sigelius’ fluorescently lit bubble office is invasive, insular and ultimately futile.
Story Boards
We have proposed a promenade performance (without interval), in order to allow for the story and audience to flow through the three levels of the Wind tunnel. Slow moments such as the bubble’s expansion and other transitions give our audiences time to travel between scenes and allow a pause for thought.
Costumes
The costumes combine comic, impracticle silhouettes and nostalgic colours taking from the pallet of the building. We intend to draw attention to the farcicality of the characters and the extreme situations they find themselves in. The use of colours not only assign hierachy within the building but also suggest our collective amnesia and its relation power and oppression, regardless of era.
Process
We worked remotely as five performance design students from The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, from unique background, through lockdown to co design the set and costumes. We used newly learnt software (cinema 4d) to digitally render the entire site specific space as we couldn’t visit to take pictures.
Reference Images
