Rumpelstiltskin

A classroom guide for teachers

How do opera designers create visual ideas that amplify the important themes in a production?

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE:

Opera designers spend time reading the text of an opera to find clues about what the physical world might look like for their production. Then, they research their ideas to develop specific images that reflect a unifying idea for their production. Look at examples of the set designers’ research processes and images. This lesson gives students an opportunity to look at the designers’ process of making an image board for an opera.

OBJECTIVES:

Students will examine the process professional designers use to create a visual world for Rumpelstiltskin. They will then create an original visual concept for a familiar story.

PROCEDURE:

Launch:

Before reading a familiar story, ask students how they can tell where they are in a classroom at this moment. Create a list of things that say ‘classroom’. What words describe this particular classroom?

Ask students to abstract or distill the room using color, image, shape, texture and line. Encourage them to use their imaginations, but remind them that the goal is to convey this particular classroom. For example: how can a chalkboard be reduced to its most basic elements of color, shape and texture? How can the chalkboard be abstracted to another shape? Perhaps a chair made of chalkboard material? Perhaps the floor in the room becomes a chalkboard. What does this choice say about the classroom? Perhaps that we learn simply by walking into the room?

Students will discuss the previous process. Explain that they have just become a scenic designer. The scenic designer’s job is to abstract and distill a literal space into an artistic space that conveys a particular experience for an audience. Encourage students to keep that in mind as they re-visit a familiar story.

Guided Practice:

After students re-visit a familiar story, ask them to discuss important thematic ideas in the story. Prompt the students to identify images, colors, textures and shapes that came to mind as they read the story. For example; the design elements in The Three Little Pigs would be very different from S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. The themes have similarities, but the stories are extremely different, so each story suggests different colors, textures and shapes. Ask them to defend how these images support their ideas about the story.

Practice:

Allow students to work in small groups to create an image board representing their ideas about images, colors and shapes suggested by their story.

Remind students they are abstracting and distilling the themes from the story and turning them into visual ideas. Encourage them not to draw a picture of a space but respond to the themes with visual ideas. For example, if students respond to the darkness of the story, encourage them to explore that instead of making a sketch of a dark room.

Assessment

Have students share their image boards and explain how they used color, image, texture and shape to create a visual statement for their story.

Download the following document and look at the pages where Jane La Motte, our scenic designer, developed the set for Rumpelstiltskin.

Additional Material