Naga Mandala: A Play With A Cobra - the scenic design process

  Naga Mandala is a play by Indian playwright Garish Karnad.  I first saw this show in 1993 at the Guthrie Theatre and was enchanted by the play's structure - it is a play about a man who takes refuge in an abandoned Indian temple, who is told a story, and it comes to life on stage, but the man and "the story" (played by a young woman) are always present on the stage, and the set is always the temple.  The audience must use their imaginations to see the house, and village told of by "the story," and the anthill that plays such a large role.
     In 2001, I was very lucky to have the opportunity to design scenery and costumes for this play at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and it was selected to compete at the KCACTF in Pittsburgh.

2001 Naga Mandala, St. Mary's College of MD

The flames - 2001 production of Naga Mandala at St. Mary's College of MD

    Approximately five years ago I began suggesting we produce this play at SUNY Oneonta.  For various reasons, it never made the season, but tiny water droplets can carve caves over time, and so  suggesting this play every year, eventually got it on the stage.  
     It was imperative  for my design to turn the theatre into the temple - this is a  flexible space - currently set up in a strange cornered proscenium layout with quasi upstage depth.  As soon as the audience walked in I wanted them to see the temple - to be in the temple. I wanted the set to be very textural.  The carving on temples in India is incredibly detailed and so prolific, and I wanted to do as much as we could to emulate that (albeit in a simplified way due to our limited budgets and student crew availability).

 It was important to give the lighting designer ample opportunity for playing with light and shadow.
     How could I do this and keep the cost down?  Recycle.   In graduate school I had the honor and pleasure of working with renown designer, Desmond Heeley.  He  created a design for Oedipus Rex in which the columns were decorated with garbage - smashed soda cans, plastic cutlery - things that could be salvaged from the trash and applied to the columns.  It looked AMAZING.  I have never forgotten his work, and it came to mind as I approached this.  So, I got the entire Theatre department to start saving bottle caps - water bottles, milk jugs, soda, juice - all of the caps were brought in by students, put in boxes left near  trash cans asking to the caps, and the occasional foray into the dumpster.  We got several paint cans worth, sorted by size.  I also used  plastic yoghurt containers, as well as "canned" fruit in plastic snack packs.   Along with ethafoam rod/ backer rod, I applied the recycling to the  various columns, and the frieze band that bordered the entire set.
     All of this had to be painted in foam coat, as did the mutilated god, Ganesha - who had no lower arms or hands and who had ears that were broken off.  Then the entire set - floor, walls, columns, and broken column pieces needed to be based, then rag rolled in a two color  texture, and finally Ganesha painted  to look like he was a different type of stone.  Aerial silks had been rigged to created  hair for one scale altering scene, and finally, the eight foot square mandala I had painted needed to be installed in the floor.
   There were, as with all designs, things I wish I had had more time to do.  I had wanted to paint in large ashlar block outlines on the walls and floors, but in academic theatre - well, all theatre, sometimes you have to adjust due to time constraints, so the outlines did not happen.  Overall however, I am pleased with the outcome.
    What follows is a photo progression of the process.

laying out the mandala

some of our stash of caps

recycled materials

pilasters lined the walls

laying out the frieze band

supports  for the cobra pillar

reusing masonite from a previous show as well as the caps

Sonotube is a scenic designers friend!

naga pilaster in progress

foam coating the plastics

frieze band based

Chicken wire covered with muslin give a nice scale patter for the naga pillars 

view of the upstage area from above

pilaster, part of the frieze band, "broken" pillar pieces

beginning the rag roll colors

my sketch for Ganesha, and the beginning of the carving (I am no sculptor!)

no hands, broken ears

Rani, Naga, and the flames

Rani and Naga, looking through to the upstage area

Rani, sleeping

The Story and the song

Rani and Appanna in front of the village elders

Naga in the hair

the flame, leaving the lantern

Stage right

Stage left

Ganesha (or an "absent god") and the naga mandala

Naga pilasters defined the edge of the space

Sisyphus, I feel your pain

     And here we begin the yearly ritual heralding Spring - the flooding.  For many years, it was the basement - the room which was to have originally been a play room, then a workspace - but finally the place where storage boxes go to hide so they do not need to be emptied.  We would get many inches of seepage and become  quite familiar with the shop vac and  steam vac.  But, after quite a bit of money, we seem to have gotten a handle on that.
     Now, we have the farm, and the barn, which was built (foolishly) below grade of EVERYTHING.  The  original dirt bridge, the driveway, the pasture - so many possible places for water to run from and end in the barn!  We spend a lot more money to have  drainage worked on and springs re-routed, and a pond built, but that still does not raise the  barn. (I'd like to raze the barn and start fresh!)   Two dump truck loads of gravel last fall and we got the  back of the barn raised up some - but the snows startedin Nov., and then our contractor went to Florida, and so on, so the front of the barn is still as it was last year - low, and now wet.
     Today, in the gorgeous sunshine and warm temps, my eldest son, my husband and I spent the day pumping out the barn,  chipping ditches into  earth that is frozen solid, and trying to re-grade the driveway a bit.  We have gotten quite good at "paddling" the water out of swampy puddles with snow shovels.   As soon as it  is pumped out more seeps in... Not to be a total grump, but I am not looking forward to the  next two days of  warm, and then four or five of predicted rain!  Can we jump right to summer, please?

He is not amused!

This was chipped away a sliver at a time.

Armageddon for Shrews

     We have two dogs.  Pound puppies both, we do not know their breed mixes.  One has terrier, and the other most definitely lab, but maybe some husky, or some Staffordshire terrier.  Either way, they are hunters.  Usually, Libby, the smaller one, sniffs something out, and Annie, the larger, does the digging.   I do not know who did what today, but apparently all hell broke loose in the shrew population residing in our backyard.
     All morning the dogs have been whining,  and in and out of the house.   At one point, I saw they had given me a present - a dead shrew was deposited at the top of the stairs for my viewing pleasure.  Oh joy!  I disposed of the stiff little carcass and continued my morning  work.  Upon looking out the window I see two more dead bodies on the patio.  Someone found a nest.
      When emerging from the laundry room I looked down the hall and saw the entire bottom shelf of a four foot wide bookcase, as well as some of the next shelf up had been emptied - books strewn everywhere across the floor!  Was one of my children searching for something?  I doubt it - Daphne DuMaurier, the history of Chinese culture, and William Golding are hardly their reading preferences, and they all know better than to do this to books.  Upon closer inspection, I see scratch marks along the whole of the shelf and the puzzle pieces clip together.
      I am surmising that my "gift" came into the house, not dead, ran into the basement where it was given good chase, and eventually excavated from its hopeful haven in the books.  But a basement bookshelf is not Notre Dame, and perhaps it did not squeak "Sanctuary" loud enough, for the books were cast asunder, the victim dispatched, and the offering laid at the kitchen entrance.
     
   

breeding and what to do afterwards

   We have Finnish Landrace sheep.  They are smallish, very sweet and friendly, and they can breed out of season.  Ours were born in April, so we were debating about breeding them at all this year. The shepherd we purchased them from said it should be fine, but be certain the ewes met a certain weight before breeding.  Like a 14 year old girl, they might be capable of having babies, but should they?  Not if they are too small.  So Rosie was not bred. We made a little pen for her next to the others, and we put Maxine and Frodo together, and Sam and Arwen together.   And we waited about 5 weeks.  And we fed them grain as well as hay.  And we hoped.
    Last week we separated the rams from the ewes.  The girls were pretty pleased to be back together again, but the rams - well...
   We put the rams together in their pen, and they began to head butt each other.  This was not unusual, but they were pretty fierce.   We thought, well, let's put them out so they have a little space.  BAD IDEA!  A little space meant they had lots of room to back up and gain speed before they slammed into each other.  It was sickening.   We tried intervening, but they are strong and fast.  I grabbed the leaf rake and as they approached each other  I would waggle it in their faces.  This was confusing to them, but not completely off putting. Finally they slammed into each other so hard that Sam started bleeding and his  little horn nub was depressed into his head.  Time to break this up.  We got Sam into the pen and left Frodo in the pasture with the llama.  At first he chased the llama, wanting to be next to him.  Then, this silly ram tried several times to mount the llama - who would walk away, or side stepped him.  Finally,  Elrond, the llama, had had enough.  He chased Frodo into the run in, and stood there as if to tell him, "Enough, you puny ovine!"
    As soon as we got home, we turned to the internet for advice from more seasoned farmers.  Well, we had done everything wrong.   So we went back and  put the boys in together, but we  made a tiny pen out of their spacious one by  taking a gate and tying and bracing  it so the rams could get to their feeder, their water and minerals, but they  only had enough room to turn around, lie down, but not ram each other.

Alex checking out the rams.

Close  quarters

Even with these close quarters, they tried to get at each other, so we threw a couple of bales of hay into the corners to  cramp their style a bit more.  The next two days they were living cheek by jowl, but when we  opened up their space a bit, they tried ramming each other some more.  

     The next recommended deterrent was to  spray their  noses and their testicles with perfume to mask any smell of the ewes they had been with.  That seemed to do the trick, but the rams' pen smelled more like a bordello than a barn!

    So now calm has been restored to the  rams, and we wait  to see if the ewes are going to have lambs in April.  Keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for babies in the Spring!

Satisfactions

   There are large projects we all undertake, which, when completed, provide great satisfaction - whether we did the job ourselves, or facilitated its completion.  For example:  re-roofing our house.  It had to be done.  We were the lucky winners in the game of homeowner's roulette who HAD to  put a completely new roof on.  There were three layers of shingles on this place, including the original cedar shingles from 1920.  We know the date, because when he was stripping the house, our roofer found a shingle with the original builder's writing on it, including the date of his work.   For nearly two weeks we had this loveliness to look at, before it was complete.

    There are other, simpler things that I am finding to be small gifts.  Yesterday we broke down the temporary pen in the barn, where we were holding the ewe we were not breeding this year.  The hay that she had used as bedding, etc, was fairly compact, even though it was just over a month of her staying there.  The act of cleaning that out and spreading it on the garden area, and seeing the barn returned to more order is one of the little gifts of farming.  There is so much we cannot control, but these little things we can, and there is satisfaction.  

Temporary holding pen for Rosie - baling twine has so many uses!

     It seems we have made it a habit of doing holiday walks on the farm. That is when we are all relieved, temporarily, of our responsibilities to jobs, school, and "have tos" and we can just be.  The day or two after Christmas was warm, and sunny, and after chores, we all took a ramble through the fields to the high pasture, then into Fangorn Forest, and the day was perfect.  I found some lichen patches to experiment with - making a leaf envelope to carry it home in.  

The dogs got a nice romp in, and we were all able to soak up some sunshine, so rare here in the winter.

the "Gate Photo" a new tradition!

 There were moments of doing nothing - just sitting, warmed in the sunshine, not worrying about whether there would be burrs in our sweaters, or ticks on the dogs. This is one of the greatest "little" satisfactions.  The ability to let go of the worrying, the concerns, the stress, and just BE.

Shopping Christmas Eve.

     I am not a shopper - let's establish that from the start.  I go to a store with a list, a plan, and a desire to leave as soon as possible. You will never catch me near a mall on Black Friday or the weekend following it.
   I do, however, love to shop on Christmas Eve.  There is a different feeling the day before the gifting frenzy takes place.  Everyone is a bit more:  more friendly, more helpful, more sheepish at the lateness of their endeavors, more willing to go out of their way to  lend a hand.  It is what I think we should be doing all the time, but I often do not see it until right before Christmas.
    Examples:  my husband and I went to the  Walmart this morning at 8 a.m.  I was in the  fabric section (big surprise!) looking for some thread, and an elderly gentleman with a completely empty cart was looking lost.  He caught my eye and asked for help locating stick on letters to  put his grandkids' names on a go-cart.  His wife had sent him and he had no idea where to start.  I suggested the craft aisle and  the aisle with mailboxes.  Another lady added that the scrap booking aisle might have them.  He smiled and thanked us and he felt better, we felt better, and the day had a good start.
     We ran to the local bookstore, only to find it was not yet open, and as we turned away, debating about buying coffee next door, the owner of the shop popped his head out and told us he was now open.  He had seen us through the window and rushed over to open a few minutes early.  Cynics might say he just wanted a sale, but I think he was being a good person.
     Later, taking the kids to a different store, we saw a lady who made my 5'3" look tall, trying to find the right size thermal underwear for her 93 year old dad.  All she could find were extra tall, XXL, all too big.  My daughter spend 10 minutes dragging display boxes off the shelf that was over this woman's head, helping her find the right size.  There were smiles, a little background on her chilly dad, and more good feelings.
     So Merry Christmas to all of you.  Remember why we celebrate.  Give your loved ones that little extra bit of your time and attention.  Life is precious, people are good and we can all spread joy, even by doing little things like holding a box, or opening a shop early.    Much love to you all!

The Hopeful Farmer: Eating Snowy

    Ding! Dong! The rooster is dead!  Snowy, the wicked rooster, who terrorized my children and plucked half of the hens naked, is now history.  Right around Thanksgiving we decided it was time.  We had the time and  a tutorial from  Youtube, so what more did we need?

    To start with, we needed to catch him.  Snowy was a pretty smart bird.  My husband almost caught him with a snare, twice,  but the darn thing escaped.  Trying to go into the  run and actually catch him outright would have meant much bloodshed on our part - and I will admit, I was scared of that rooster!  In the process of trying to  catch him, both Snowy and one of the hens escaped the run.  Now shooing the hen back into the  run was easy.  Snowy was free and he was going to stay that way.  He ducked under the car, and literally crawled to the other side. I never knew chickens could crawl!  My husband grabbed an old blanket out of the car and began chasing the  bird around the barnyard.  That is when it got funny.  The rooster  squeezed through the fence - Drew had to go over it.  He  flew, and ran as Drew chased.  Eventually, the blanket won, and the bird was strung up  in the shed.
     There are many ways to actually kill a chicken.  Drew slit its throat. We are not certain we did this correctly, because it took an awfully  long time for the  rooster to bleed out.   It was getting dark, so we took him home for the processing.
   It got more silly as we tried to  scald him for plucking, and the  bird did not fit in the pot.  We got a larger pot, more water, and a computer, and things got going.  With Drew  doing the actual work, and me reading the steps off the laptop, it was eventually done.   I would read a step, "Okay, you are supposed to scrape out the lungs"  and Drew would respond with, "What do the lungs look like?"  I would show him the photos and he would search for the proper looking things to remove.  It was a weird experience, probably best done in the daylight, not by patio lights in the cold of winter, but the deed was done.
     When he was  ready for cooking, that bird was a 5 1/2 pounder!  He became Coq au Vin, and he was delicious.
     Now, the hens are getting their feathers back.  We can open the coop or go into the run without arming ourselves with shovel or rake.  I do not care how pretty they are, the new rule is:  no more roosters!

Don't mess with dad, or he might put you in the soup pot!