Drawings for Barriers

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Barrier(s) is a powerful and intimate love story that ultimately dissects itself and becomes a joyfully iconoclastic critique of deaf representation on stage. I designed a claustrophobic set for it, with two screens enclosing the action like the titular barriers, enabling rapid location changes through projected hand-drawn backgrounds that shift between different times of day or night, or provide different angles on the same rooms. Interludes were accompanied by animations – again all hand-drawn. There were also hand-drawn animations for the interludes and montage sequences.

Deafinitely is deaf-led, and this show was mainly in BSL, but their work is always accessible to hearing audiences, so captions were also integrated into the projections, sometimes very simply and sometimes as text messages.

Barrier(s) opened at Birmingham Rep, and then toured to Home in Manchester and Camden People’s Theatre, London. There’s more about it here on the Deafinitely website.

I thought it might be nice to share some of my drawings for the projections, along with Becky Bailey’s production photos, but first, here are the credits:

Writer: Eloise Pennycott         
Director: Paula Garfield
Associate Director: Lynn Stewart-Taylor
Dramaturg: Rio Matchett
Set, Costume & Video Designer: Paul Burgess
Lighting Designer: Tom Mulliner
Sound Designer: Marie Zschommler
Assistant Costume Designer: Sophie Barnard
AV Programmer: Jasper Mattel           
Cast: Em Prendergast and Zoë McWhinney
Photographer: Becky Bailey

First off, here’s the artwork for three locations: Alana’s living room (day and night), a street and a bar. They were created with enough width to show the room from different angles. Windows were transparent so I could put different skies behind them. The figures in the bar were also on a separate layout so they could be faded out, enhancing the intimacy and intensity of the two characters’ date.

And now, some of Becky’s excellent photos. I hope this play gets a lot more life. It’s got some great observational writing, but it’s also kind of meta and pretty punk too. But I’m being careful to avoid spoilers.

Remembering David Hockney

Posted on by Paul Burgess
David Hockney helped me with my schoolwork

Given the news, this deserves a re-blog. I studied one of Hockney’s opera designs at the Royal Opera House – Richard Strauss‘s Die Frau ohne Schatten – for an A-Level art project, not expecting to meet him. But I did, and he was incredibly helpful. We met four times in total. The whole thing was quite mind-blowing and doubtless shaped the rest of my life. You can read the full story in the original post.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything Hockney said, and I don’t like everything he produced – for me, his later work never quite matched his earlier brilliance – but that doesn’t take away from what a trailblazer he was – as an artist and for gay representation – and what a kind and generous man, nor from the fact that he produced some of the greatest art of his generation.

Time for another update

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Things have been quite challenging recently, but I haven’t disappeared. So, what’s been going on?

Last year was dominated by my father’s illness, his passing away, and funeral. This was a beautiful, woodland burial, amongst friends both human and arboreal. 

I haven’t done a lot of designing, but I did design Deafinitely Theatre‘s show Barrier(s), which opened in Birmingham before touring to Manchester and London. It got some great reviews and audience responses. It was an unusual one for me, in that the set was very simple, and most of my work went into the video projections. I was also helped by a fantastic costume supervisor, Sophie Barnard, who ended up as assistant designer. That was in the autumn, and then, as every year, in February I worked on Deafinitely Youth Theatre’s half-term show.

Over at Daedalus, we continued to develop the Dysbiosis project, with workshops in Sheffield and London, and exhibitions and performances at the Omnibus Theatre, Clapham, and the Queens Theatre, Hornchurch. I’m incredibly excited about this project, and you can find a lot more about it over on the Daedalus site. We also did a storytelling performance with some new tellers performing alongside some of our original group. A really beautiful show, it was as part of a Season of Bangla Drama, the annual Eastland festival that we are often involved with. Four of the performances can be found here.

Continue reading Time for another update

Update on my sustainability work (and other things)

Posted on by Paul Burgess

As many of you will know, I’ve been prioritising my work on sustainability recently. Building on the voluntary work for Ecostage and the Society of British Theatre Designers that I’ve been doing since before the pandemic, I’m now nearly halfway through a part-time MSc at the Centre for Alternative Technology.

I look forward to having more availability for design work next year, and applying the sustainability principles and practices I’ve been learning and developing. In the meantime, as some of you haven’t heard from me in a while, I’d like to share an update.

Working with the SBTD and Footprint Scenery, I co-organised and co-facilitated Makers and Designers Assemble! at the National Theatre. As the title suggests, this event brought theatre designers and makers together to talk about how better to support each other’s efforts to work in a more environmentally responsible way. There was a particular emphasis on circular economy; in fact, the event was part of Circular Economy Week. It started some exciting conversations beyond the event itself… which was precisely the aim!

Continue reading Update on my sustainability work (and other things)

Every Brilliant Thing (not just Some Brilliant Things)

Posted on by Paul Burgess

A wonderful part of the story of this hugely successful play is missing from this Guardian article. Sure, part of being a designer is being in the background, but in this case, it’s not just us; it’s a wonderful collaborative effort involving thousands of members of the public.

Simon Daw and I, then working under the collective name Scale, were approached by Duncan and George to create an installation to accompany readings of the short story that would eventually become Every Brilliant Thing. If memory serves, it was then called Sleeve Notes. We assembled a team of volunteers at our studio to write the list.

The installation was then shown at the Village Underground in Shoreditch, East London, as part of a club night, the name of which I’ve now forgotten. People were encouraged to add to the list. I have no idea how many did, but it was quite a lot.

Continue reading Every Brilliant Thing (not just Some Brilliant Things)

A climate triptych (and some thoughts on painting)

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I take painting pretty seriously. It hugely informs my theatre design work, and I’ve frequently created video material from it. The work I did for the Dulwich Picture Gallery commission was a kind of digitally animated painting (involving a lot of very real painting on a wall). I’ve done several painting commissions. My first pocket money job was scenic painting at Harlow Playhouse.

Allow me a brief tangent, as I’ve just noticed a nice parallel. The pocket money job at Harlow Playhouse came about because I did work experience there aged 14. They must have liked what I did because occasionally, over the next few years, they got me in after school if they were short-handed on a paint call. My first properly paid work in theatre was, rather similarly, after doing a work placement. This was at Shakespeare’s Globe. They kept me on as an assistant in the wardrobe, where I worked on several ‘original practice’ techniques, including painstaking work slashing patterns in silk. I also helped source calico, silk, leather, pewter buttons and other period-appropriate items, and got an excellent working knowledge of London as a result. It was a really fantastic job, to be honest, and it led me eventually to design the sets for a full-scale Globe show.

Continue reading A climate triptych (and some thoughts on painting)

Plot 17 x Hello Stranger

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Every four years The Society of British Theatre Designers celebrates UK theatre design with a combination of books, exhibitions and events. This also feeds into the UK display at the Prague Quadrennial.

Last time round, we had an exhibition at the V&A, which included my design for Deafinitely Theatre’s 4.48 Psychosis. This time round, it’s a three-part publication series including a catalogue representing the breadth and diversity of UK theatre design, and a programme of regional events and exhibitions.

My entry this time round is the set – a converted horsebox, in fact – that I designed for Plot17. One of my favourite projects, it’s a mobile hip-hop block party for ages 7+, travelling the world raising awareness, inspiring action and spreading the message of “making things green”. The lead artist on the project, Kenny Baraka, is himself a force of nature, producing amazing lyrics and inspiring the youth up and down the land. It’s a great show, made a brilliant team, but it’s also a doing something really important by making the business of caring about nature and the environment accessible and cool for thousands of kids. And it’s out touring again this year.

Continue reading Plot 17 x Hello Stranger

David Hockney helped me with my schoolwork

Posted on by Paul Burgess

The 1985 Hockney Paints the Stage exhibition at the Hayward Gallery made a huge impression on me as a child. When I came to choosing a topic for my ‘A’ Level art project, and I saw that Hockney was designing a new production for the Royal Opera House, I knew what I had to do.

The new production was Richard Strauss’s Die Frau Ohne Schatten, directed by John Cox, with whom Hockney had already worked on several operas including the celebrated Rake’s Progress, a harmony of music and scenography that makes it one of the most perfect operatic designs I’ve seen. 

I wrote to the Opera House and Susan Usher, head of production, very generously invited me to watch a design meeting. At the end of that meeting I was told I could come to a further meeting attended by Hockney. A few days later I was in the production office at Covent Garden, a few feet away from one of titans of my teenage world, with his blue and red hearing aids and a personal supply of camomile tea bags. By this stage there was a close-to-final model but it wasn’t Hockney’s own. He’d made one at 1:8 scale. The ROH had then made the rather more accurate 1:25 version we were now looking at. At one point it became apparent that he had to remake the Emperors’ throne. ‘I can’t work this size – too niggly for me!’ he declared. He ended up making it at 1:8 when he got back to LA, and sending it over to be scaled down.

Continue reading David Hockney helped me with my schoolwork

Dysbiosis in development

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I was incredibly pleased with how this went. I had the idea just before Covid but then decided to step up and focus on promoting environmentally sustainable design in the theatre sector. Between the Society of British Theatre Designers working group, Ecostage and everything else, this has rather taken over my life! However, the reason I stick with a career in this precarious and often badly-paid sector – and the reason I want it to be sustainable in all senses of the word – is the creativity. Dysbiosis sits right on the overlap between ecology and art. Thanks to Queens generously giving us space, we did a week of experimentation with some really wonderful creative practitioners. Such a privilege!

Here’s a summary from the Daedalus website:

Dysbiosis R&D at Queens Theatre, Hornchurch

A call for collaborators

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Queens Theatre Hornchurch, where I’m on the Environmental Responsibility Subcommittee, is committed to the idea that its journey towards environmental sustainability should be reflected in its creative output. As part of this, David Shearing led This Story is True for Most of Us as part last summer’s the Blueprint Festival. I was a creative associate on the project, which took a vegan meal on the theatre’s roof as a basis for an exploration of time, locality, ecology and – of course – our relationship with food.

Now QTH has given me space to start developing a new piece of theatre. I don’t know what the end result will be, except that it will be open, accessible and connected to the community. But I do know where we’re starting; by looking at our relationship with Nature through the lenses of language, culture and queer ecology. This is how I like to work, starting with research and, by applying my design process to the directing process, working collaboratively to find a logic and a shape to the piece.

Continue reading A call for collaborators