Theatre of Cruelty: Poster and Badge

Journal entry: Poster and badges!

For this part of my assignment as a props person, my job is to take care of the aesthetics of the entrance of the theatre. We have built our performance to make it look like it’s “A Play within a Play” meaning that the performance does not start inside the theatre, but outside since we greet our audience, as we want to make them feel like they are joining one of our cults “open days”.

Background story:

After talking to Katy and Lloyd, we decided that we wanted to make our audience believe that they were coming to see what happened within our society at the start, and thus our ambience had to be welcoming and joyous.

For this, I made a banner, as the one showed below in image 1,
This banner’s template is used frequently at gatherings to welcome the members, and because we wanted a realistic approach, I thought that this banner would be effective.

Posters:
As shown in the process below, those were the initial ideas:

Idea 1: Sun of Celestine

Idea 2- Celestine Sun 

The poster sigils I made myself from a given color scheme of yellow and blue. Yellow was used to imply hope and happiness through its brightness, which are essential objectives of the society. Blue is a calming and tender color, that is unisex, and commonly used for children. Our group name being “Children of eternal happiness”  I decided that the sun again is a known symbol for hope and light, and it coming out of the horizon made me think of the idea that everyday, we are given a new chance to live. This idea was relatable with the ideals of the cult, being that Celestine forgives her members past.

From here, I used the sigil for the posters placed around the room. Through my involvement with the HS  2012 play of “The Book theif”, specially the scene of “Hitler’s birthday”   I got used to seeing the Nazi sign. 

Image from online source: "Stock Image Ofnazi Flag." Royalty Free Image of Nazi Flag. Web. 25 Nov. 2012. <http://yaymicro.com/stock-image/nazi-flag/1927111>.

Also called "Swastika", it comes from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix. Up until the Nazis used this symbol, the swastika was used by many cultures throughout the past 3,000 years to represent life, sun, power, strength, and good luck.Today, the Swastika is known as a symbol of racism and anti semitism, which arises from the ideology of the German Nazi party and World War II, and is now a negative symbol.

Step one- drawn with one and acrylic paint

From my research into other signs of propaganda such as apple, I decided to keep the sigil for the posters without any name, and just the diamond, as I thought that just having the symbol and no name of the cult could suggest that the cult is secretive.

IMAGE: SIGIL ON POHOTOSHOP.

Image 2 shows the picture of the process of refinement, form acrylic paint to the use of photoshop to make the color brightness/contrast/sharpness more accurate. I got them print at “XPRINT” in Market Market, Manila.

Badges

Badges: The idea of badges came to mind when seeing my baby sister come back from a birthday party last week wearing a paper tag that said “hello, I’m Lucia”. These identification cards are a way of making the people socialize and interact with each other. They are useful as it breaks barriers when meeting a person for the first time and reflects personal identity. Because of this, I chose to play with the idea of identity.

I chose to make badges with the sigils in the background, and with the name of the group “Children of Eternal happiness” in the center of the sun. the reason for this being that although badges are meant to reflect your own personal identity, the fact that the individuals from the cult are not giving that information about themselves implies that they do no longer posses an identity, and therefore are all the same (as they are not identified by a real family, but they are all part of the family).
This idea is a juxtaposing complex of how cults abduct a persons right to be individualistic and unique.

Also, to further support the idea of “A Play within A Play”, I chose to push through with this idea as we will give out pins along with the brochures to the audience members at the start of the show, to straight away create this relationship with the audience of the first steps of abduction.

Image of the final product of the pins, printed at “XPRINTS” Market Market, Manila.

Final Product for Badge!