Moodboards

After my first meeting with my choreographer, I brainstormed a few ideas to make my set as authentic and as French Cafe themed as I could. A few ideas I came up with were as follows: French foods and drinks (bread, desserts, grapes, wine etc) I was very careful to select french foods only. I also researched the times when the caricaturist, Georges Goursat was around and used these dates to find out what the layout was like to stay in the correct time frame. For this reason I thought of people smoking in cafes as a social activity. So I added ash trays to my list.

 I wanted my set to be as detailed as possible, hence why I wrote down such small props, that would not be used in the performance, but would be on stage to promote the cafe and set the scene. I thought it was important to ensure that each table was dresses, like in a normal cafe / restaurant. I liked the idea of having a candle in the centre of each table, and also a bottle of wine / food. And also including small props such as a walking stick because people in the caricatures had them. I considered the idea of having a bike on stage too, however I decided against it because I felt that the set was more focused on indoors than out. Plus the bike would take up more room and I would have nowhere for it to stay.

As the choreographer said that she would like to create the illusion of a busy atmosphere, I thought that the more plates / props on the tables the better. I also had the idea of hanging coats on coat hangers to promote the idea of lots of people being there, without them physically being part of the set. I later developed this idea to emphasise the caricature element and decided to hang each jacket from the rig using fishing wire and a hook. This would then seem like people were in the cafe, at the tables, whilst resembling Georges Goursat's work.
However, it was then later decided that this would be too much to do / set up in such a short space of time and the work was far too intricate. Although I loved this idea, I thought it would be simpler to just have the jackets hanging off the back of the chairs around the tables.


 I need cream / white material (a sheet of fabric for the main table (copied from the choreographer's photograph) and also the smaller tables, which will be exam desks. See scale drawings for exact measurements. I will also need some navy blue material and thread to sow onto this cream/ white material the letters for the main table / table cloth, illustrated in the moodboard above.