Light Night 2021 - Rebel City
This project, due to the pandemic, was a speculative design project for Light Night 2021 with the possibility of being able to realise elements of some designs in summer 2021.
The brief was to create an outdoor piece involving large puppets and/or large structure for Nottingham's Light Night. The theme for Light Night 2021 was 'Rebel City', looking at Nottingham's rebellious history and how Nottingham is still considered a rebel city through its arts and literature.
As someone who enjoys history, I chose to look at Nottingham Castle, especially at the 1831 Reform Bill Riots, which led to the castle being burned down by angry rioters. However, I also wanted to give nods to other historical protests and modern-day issues within my designs also.
My final design involves a group of people, all representing either an 1831 rioter, a knight during the siege of Nottingham in 1194, a suffragette or a 21st-century protester. Each person wears a piece of the castle wall on their backs that joins together around a large puppet of an 1831 rioter (controlled by 2 others who look like 1831 rioters as well). The puppet's hands are chained up, to show that the working-class people in Nottingham at that time felt boxed in and chained up against many issues in a very hierarchical society, including the issue of suffrage.
(Pictures and information about my research and sketches will be on my blog)
Violence on Violets
After this speculative design project, my coursemates and I were given a speculative group design project for a site-specific piece of theatre to be held in the Arkwright Building in Nottingham. My group tried to create a short performance based on elements of our individual designs from the previous Rebel City speculative design project. My group found that most of the projects in some way related to the fight for equal suffrage and womens' rights. We therefore decided to create a performance based on the suffragettes, feminism and toxic masculinity.
We each took a scene to design, mine was showing toxic masculinity through construction workers building a castle wall (taken from my rebel city design about Nottingham Castle) destroying large purple neon violets (which was the flower of the suffragettes). I created one visual with Photoshop and another with pencil, fineliner and chalk.
