Romeo & Juliet — Week 7

This week, we’re looking at some members of the creative team.

There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes, to present a stunning show to our audience. And it takes quite a few people to cope with this.

One person that puts a lot of effort into it, is the poster designer. Meet Isi – she created the lovely artwork for our R&J poster.

Isi is originally from Italy and moved to Germany in 2012. She has been involved with previous Entity productions. Originally a biologist, she discovered her love for paragliding and has been working as a professional paraglider ever since. And if she doesn’t paraglide, she puts her energy into artwork. She loves to express herself in this creative way.

For the artwork for R&J, she looked at the lovers, of course, but also at the fact that they come from two feuding families. Creating two towers in Veronese style, she pictures the Capulets and Montagues in the background, literally ‘towering over’ the two lovers and thus highlighting their “star-crossed” love.

Spinning the theme of the two houses further, another artist takes over. Meet Olga – she created the wonderful coats of arms that will be decorating the two towers on set.

Coming from St Petersburg where she graduated from an art school, she has moved to Munich from France and has been searching for an opportunity to put her painting skills to use, which she has found in Entity Theatre. For Olga it was very inspiring to draw decorations for the Shakespeare play thanks so an amazing atmosphere and enthusiasm surrounding it.

The coats of arms are inspired by Renaissance Italian sources. Also, we intended to maintain the colour theme of blue and red for the both houses.

You can follow Olga #olgish.art and on facebook! Check it out, you’ll find some cool stuff there.

For our production, we got a lot of inspiration from the Italian Renaissance. While the production team visited Verona last year, we were particularly taken by awe of the magnificent marble we found there. Here you can see Ken nicking the marble slab for Juliet’s tomb…

However, we don’t want to take away too much yet, but we think we came up with a brilliant marble tomb for Juliet as well. Come and see for yourselves!

You can’t look at the Italian Renaissance without being influenced by Leonardo da Vinci, right? This painting, which is attributed to him, shows a young lady with adorable headgear.

We certainly wanted this one to be taken up in our production, this is our rendition of it, made by one of our costume designers, Marion Schoop:

We think Juliet looks pretty much like the real thing.

And this brings us to our photographer. All the wonderful photos are her work – meet Dora:

Photos of rehearsals and performances do have quite a different characteristic. While she can get close, really close to the actors during rehearsals, practically being on the stage with them, she concentrates more on the interaction of the actors with the audience during performance while staying in the background.

When she takes photos of the rehearsals without and then with costumes, she does not only concentrate on the scene rehearsals, but also what happens before and after that. And in between the scenes. She tries to focus as much on the crew and the stage personal, all the ‘background people’ one does not necessarily see during a performance, as much she pays attention to the actors. Because they are all needed. It’s a team effort after all.

She continues: “I do not see my work as art, but as a type of documentation of events, emotions and of a process. How a performance comes to life, what it takes to make it happen.” And yes, it takes a lot of preparation, mistakes, hard times, inappropriate jokes to ease the frustration when it still doesn’t work despite of one’s hard work. And the joy and relief after the first performance, that we made it.

Capturing those moments in a theatre varies quite a lot from the photography she normally does. Her own project usually includes empty spaces, architecture, static surroundings, where she can take her time to figure out the best angle, wait for the most perfect light… All these are not valid in the theatre, if you are not at the right spot with the right settings of your camera, then that was it. You missed it. And you can be absolutely sure, that the actors will never retake a scene the exact same way again, no matter how many times they re-rehearse it. You add to that the outside space, where light is constantly changing, especially on a cloudy day, and you have a six hours up-and-down running ahead of you. And once you’re done, you go home and spend about the same amount of time with post-production as with taking the shots.

This sure was a challenge and still is.

Another challenge is a rather private one. When someone declares that he or she is not photogenic (and someone always does), Dora tries to prove them wrong. Because she believes that every single person has at least one good angle, it’s only a pity that it hasn’t been discovered yet. So she has a couple of weeks to find that angle and steal another person the fear of the camera. “Just like it was stolen from me,” she says.

Want to know more about Dora? Follow her here.