The Flying Box Theatre

Ornamentation and pattern will play a big part in our puppet theatre design. Beauty is not dead! I’ve been playing with a pattern taken from a 1850s Bavarian garment, pictured below right. I love translating the 160 year old pattern through my pen because it feels akin to learning a story… Where are its twists and turns? Which elements appear, and what are their relationships to one another? What gets lost if I begin to improvise and stray from the original? Then there is the matter of medium: making my loose digital sketch is an utterly different experience than making an embroidery. Similarly, our performance will be in the medium of puppetry while the stories were recorded as a part of a shared oral literature–seeing our show will surely be different than hearing the stories by the fireside, perhaps for the 10th time! There is a lot to be learned by imagining, remembering, and investigating this gap, I think.