Scenography - The Miraculous Mandarin - Saito Kinen Festival
The Miraculous Mandarin is a ballet composed by Béla Bartók between 1918–1924, based on the story by Melchior Lengyel, which premièred in 1926 in the city of Cologne. The plot, which created a scandal upon its premiere, and saw the ballet immediately banned.
The story is underpinned by dramatic currents, and the concepts of Eros and Thanatos, it is a story of darkness. In order to translate the essence of this story into the scenography, the question was asked of how to manifest this darkness physically. To address this, only the boundary of the beginning and end of the space was evident: the whole stage was covered by a thick black carpet which absorbed all light. The main characters on stage become darkness and shadow, alongside sixty black mannequins, moved by fifteen black dancers. Carpet also served for the ceiling design, with 600m2 rolled into cones and suspended from 680 different points.
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