MORE Sarah-Jane Crowson & Paper Theatre/Theater

 MORE of visual artist Sarah-Jane Crowson's conversation
with FolkHeart Press about roles in fairytales and folk tales

Here are Sarah-Jane Crowson's complete responses to two question FolkHeart Press posed in the full blog, Changing Roles in Fairytales:

Q: You recently created Once (pantoum) an poetic anime to reflect the shifting landscape of fairytales and folk tales. What did this process reveal?

 A:  My work has always dealt with ideas of transformation. Collage as a medium lends itself to this because it involves working with sources and source material; literally cutting up images and re-imagining their meanings by using them in a different context. Such a non-binary nature allows multiple options to flourish, and fairytales, because they can blur lines between the non-human and human world, are equally full of possibility.

I was very aware of my source material and the possibility of how one can deliberately subvert or change meanings. This animation took text from John Ruskin’s ‘Sesame and Lilies’ and erased it, creating new work that gently subverted Ruskin’s anti-feminist messaging in the original lecture.

 Characters from that gender-focused animation crept into the more fairytale animation for ’Once’. The text, my own work, uses the rigid and repeating pantoum form to try to describe various fairytales, and initially focused on female roles. However, within this are also journeys in which the female character is constantly becoming lost and found and re-found. This subtle shifting of person within and without gender roles also played on another fairytale trope: the transformation of a person to a bird* and ideas of bird-beasts. Along the way, my own thoughts about gender in fairytales took me on its own journey.

 

Once (pantoum)

Her complete response to this question:

Q: Do you have a favorite modern fairytale? Has it been adapted to better reflect the evolution of gender roles?

 A:  Renee Vivien’s Prince Charming is one of my favourites, because it subverts the Prince Charming myth cleverly, whilst showing how to outwit/out-perform social expectations (while highlighting gender possibilities within the stereotypes). 

Who else? Well, Dina Goldstein’s ‘Fallen Princesses’ series is scathing in how it highlights that humanity is not about a kind of faux gender performance in the traditional depictions of ‘happily ever after’, for both Prince and Princess.

 I have ‘Gender-Swapped Fairy-tales’ on my book Wishlist. I’m hoping, like Zoe Brooks in The Guardian, that it will explode a few more of my unconscious biases about gender and about fairytale.

 

 About Paper Theatre/Theater 

Photo: By Kim Traynor - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26407342

 The paper theater was a 19th-century phenomenon, with occasional resurgences in popularity that still occur today as both traditional hand-crafted and digital stages. Rooted in Victorian theater, most included a stage front , scenery, actors, and a booklet with dialogue, scene setting for each act, and directions for the movements of the figures.

These small tabletop theaters constructed of printed paper attached to cardboard and mounted on  wooden frames were considered to be ideal entertainment and educational children’s’ toys — although adults also enjoyed the hours of imaginative performance they provided.

Sometimes created from fantasy, often the scenery and costumes were faithful representations of actual 19^th century stage productions, as depicted by sketch artists at the time or by professional theatrical designers.

The plays, adapted into small playbooks for children to recite, weren’t children’s stories but  melodramas and historical re-enactments. They were also renditions of celebrated authors, such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, and Hans Christian Anderson and operas (Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, etc.). Many countries developed their own paper theatre traditions: in England they were called juvenile drama, kindertheater in Germany, and teatrillo in Spain.