NYTimes.com: The director Michael Boyd had plans for a small lake of blood. Onstage at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, during a break in rehearsal for “Tamburlaine, Parts I and II,” he pointed with his foot to the spot where he wanted a hole drilled. Through it, blood would be pumped from beneath the stage. If all went well, it would gradually creep up the skirt of a character standing there. “We’ve designed a costume that’s very absorbent,” he said.
7 comments:
Oh my. That clean up must be horrendous. The pictures show a guy mopping up the blood with a broom. Does that even work? I think the best plan would be to have a drain or something that you can uncap and just wash all the blood down after the show. Mopping it up bit by bit doesn't seem like it would do anything besides spreading it around. Maybe sponging it up, but who wants to sit there with a sponge in a puddle of blood for a few hours after the show just to do it again?
It's pretty cool that they have different consistencies and recipes for blood depending on what it is used for. I guess it makes sense to that they can control the movement of the blood. It'd be terrible if blood got where it wasn't supposed to. Liquid blood is as hard to control as real blood. It's really cool that they took all of that into account when they designed the show. Attention to detail can make or break the show.
It's really interesting to see the difference between the affect they wanted to achieve and what actually happened. It's incredibly hard to control blood in a show so I feel for the shows that had a hard time making it work consistently. It's also really amusing the kinds of food they used to make the body parts and blood edible: the tortillas and fruit strips baby, peanut butter blood, and the cheese ball eye.
It would've been really interesting to see the eyeball-into-the-audience stunt. I can't imagine how they would've pulled it off while keeping a sense of realism. But then again, like the article says, you have to suspend some realism when in theatre, but there is a balance that must be kept for the audience to believe what you are doing.
I had the same thought as Kristen when I saw the clean up photograph. Mopping it down seems so impractical and time-consuming.
It's really interesting how many different blood recipes there are and how they make such different consistencies and colors. Plus having costumes which react differently to the blood is incredible. There is more thought put into blood than I thought there was.
What I find most interesting about this article is that the director has chosen to use blood in such unconventional ways. When an audience thinks of blood, naturally they think of wounds and death and all the fun stuff that goes with that theme, but I've only expected the appearance of that blood to occur naturally, as if the character were actually bleeding on stage. This director's interpretation includes all kinds of effects where the representation of the characters' deaths aren't as straight forward. That could be really really cool if you do it in such a way where those effects mean something in terms of the characters and aren't just for a bunch of cheap tricks. Regardless, trying something new with one of the most primal indicators of violence and gore is a very interesting concept.
Pumping blood up through the stage is a pretty cool method of delivery, but the clean up does look pretty awful. I wonder if they tested which of their many blood formulas was easiest to remove, or if they really needed quite so much to achieve the desired effect. It was a really interesting concept to have dying represented in such a conspicuous way. To some degree, I could imagine the blood being painted on by a child in all white would be a pretty clear parallel to the "angel of death" kind of motif, but at the same time I could see that being distracting, or just taking the audience out of the play a little.
I love hearing stories about fake blood. It's fascinating to me how were emulate people bleeding without causing harm to them. I've gotten good at making fake blood, but still struggle with distribution. I love all of these creative solutions to distributing blood in performances. The pumping out of the stage is brilliant! I, for some reason, just assumed they would want to strap a pack to the actor and have them pop it, but this is a was better idea. I really enjoy hearing the stories about when CMU did Sweeney Todd. I just thing that blood packs and how they can be triggered are some of the coolest topics I have learned about.
We'll be doing a big blood effect for an upcoming show which I won't name just in case it would spoil it for anyone. The biggest concern for any blood effect, or water for that matter, has to be actor safety. Fake blood can be very slippery, and it doesn't dry as quickly off the floor or off your shoes or feet as quickly as water does. Especially with a big blood effect like the ones described in this article, precautions must be taken and measures added to the floor treatment to make it less likely to injure an actor or crew member. I've done three shows that I can easily remember that were big on blood, but the most fun by far was a musical parody of Night of the Living Dead where the audience was also involved in the blood spatter. This was a very low budget affair, and while we made sure every audience member knew that getting covered in blood was part of the deal, the slip factor was not something anyone had really considered until tech when it became apparent that we might have a serious lawsuit potential on our hands. In that instance, carpet was the answer, but let me tell you, by the final performance that carpet was di-sgust-ing. Plan ahead when using blood, and try to think of all the ways it's going to effect your actors, crew, audience, and playing space.
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