Dark Tower, White Horse is an original experimental theatre/musical production featuring two distinctive parts, with the first part, Dark Tower, taken place in a modern world, while the second part, White Horse, taken place in a "fantasy realm/mid-world." The characters, narrative and scenes are loosely based on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, and Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning. The plot is supported by Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Dadaism and surrealism will be the the feature of the two parts respectively.
Surrealism will be the focal study of White Horse. The reason behind it is that surrealists were occupied with the idea of the unconscious and their art was often inspired by dreams. When I was researching the dark tower, I found out that Browning claimed that the poem came to him in a dream, saying "I was conscious of no allegorical intention of writing it ... Childe Roland came upon me as a kind of dream." I found the link between dream imagery and unconsciousness very interesting, which led me to surrealism.
As White Horse itself is surrealism inspired, I want the visuals and designs to also reflect that. I gained ideas for character design from surrealist artists, such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna, etc. Surrealist works were also popular in the theatre back in time, and I want to pay a tribute to them. One of the key examples is "Theatre of Cruelty." Its founder, Antonin Artaud, wanted "audiences to find in the theatre not an area for escape from the world, but the realization of their worst nightmares and deepest fears." I feel like adopting this idea, but with a modern twist. I'll also look into 1930s burlesque fashion, carnival costumes as well as couture designers such as Guo Pei as fashion/shape references.
