White Plague
White Plague - a speculative project
(2021.3-2021.5)
White Plague is written by Czech novelist Karel Capek in 1937. Written at a time of increasing threat from Nazi Germany to Czechoslovakia, it portrays a human response to a tense, prewar situation in an unnamed country that greatly resembles Germany with one extra addition: an incurable white disease, a form of leprosy, is selectively killing off people older than 45. (Wikipedia)5 This project is raised by Prague Quadrennial, using “The White Plague” to resonate the Covid situation, taking inspiration of what we currently encounter to create a speculative design according to the script, with limit of 20 pages to demonstrate your idea.
In this project I tried to combine my interest of drawing and theatre design together, and explore the way of using graphic layout and notation to communicate the complexity of space and time for theatre design, like producing an understandable score for a symphony, and further to make it into a accessible interesting story book.
I got deeply inspired by the worldview of dystopia that connects to “White Plague”. I decided to let the play happened in the future, everything looks very well organized and advanced, as an contrast to what is actually happening on stage. My reference for the installation comes from Alexander Brodsky’s futuristic paper architecture1 and the concept of body movement from Vladimir Kokolia’s series painting of struggling human figure “Big Cycle” (1983-1989).
From the systematic body of the building/sculpture, Brodsky’s drawing of architecture looks like a gigantic machine, which makes people looks very insignificant, showing the constructed power. And with Kokolia’s painting, the strange behavior of the figure ironically depict the pain of being ruled under a society system, I identify some element from his work and add in some scenic body movement designed for the Others (character who’s counted as people not directly related to the storyline) to carry on doing as a ritual, to represent people who live under the system passively and finally their behavior get shaped in a weird way. The emotionless expression makes their beings more like non-human, and reflects the unrepresented majority that doesn’t exist on the script. For the whole design, I choose to use low-saturation color to indicate oppressive and isolation, without too much dramatic emotional flow for color tone of the set design but instead have some painting hanging on the wall, as a window for the emotion to leak out. I imagine the entire play is pretty quiet, because death is quiet, and the amount of death counted in the script is not what we can imagine at all, even for the current situation, the scale of the catastrophe can’t be perceived, in the end it becomes just numbers, and grief.
See the script here: https://is.muni.cz/el/1490/jaro2010/CZS34/11555494/lecture6/6f_WhitePlague.pdf
Sketches & Notes:
The Final Design:
