Blood Wedding

We were tasked with adapting the play Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca. We were allowed to choose any setting in the world, past or present.

I chose to set my adaptation of Blood Wedding in 1527 in the Inca Empire. I set it near Ollantaytambo, in the Andes mountains. I chose this period because I wanted to focus on an older, non-western setting. I specifically chose the Inca Empire because of their amazing textiles and design work. During my initial research, I came across many beautiful examples of intricate and lovingly crafted fabric patterns that caught my eye. 

I wanted to base my visual style off of the production design from Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters by Eiko Ishioka. I adored the reality based sets of Yukio Mishima’s life contrasted with the more stripped down stylized sets of his adapted stories. I wanted to isolate my sets in time and space to make my adaptation of Blood Wedding feel otherworldly and uneasy. 

We were asked to adapt one scene of our choosing, as well as a forest scene from the third act of the play. I chose to adapt Act 1 scene 3 for my main set, as this offered a good chance for me to create both an interior and an exterior. I created the Bride’s house to have a sense of isolation from the outside world both on the exterior, and on the interior. 

The house is far up on a hill so the family can overlook their land. The blank space in the interior is used to represent the apprehension between characters during the scene. 

For my forest scene, I wanted to incorporate the idea of quipus into the landscape. Quipus are a record keeping system that was used in the Inca Empire to keep track of family genealogy (among other numerical things). The artist Cecilia Vicuña has created large installations of quipus which hang from the ceiling and dwarf its viewers. For a real production, I would want to work with her to create the “trees” in the forest. 

For my character designs of The Moon and Death characters, I took inspiration from the artist Paolo Puck. Paolo Puck creates oversized, expressive, and grotesque masks out of felt. He plays with scale, and incorporates the masks into more human proportioned costume design. I felt that his work was otherworldly and perfectly expressive to represent the characters. For a real production, I would want to work with him to create the oversized masks for Mama Killa and Supay (or The Moon and Death).