DESIGN APPROACH

Venus tells the story of Sartje Baartman, a young woman from Southern Africa who was brought to London in 1810. Baartman’s ample backside was a feature considered desirable in her native society, but freakish to European eyes. Baartman was put on display and won fame as “The Venus Hottentot.” She was taken to Paris where she died at the age of 24. Naturalists in Paris performed a complete dissection, preserving her skeleton, her brain, and her sexual organs which were said to be unique. In death as in life, the body of the Hottentot Venus was put on display. She remained in the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle until April 2002 when her remains were returned to her native South Africa and buried with full national honors.

Suzan-Lori Parks creates theatricality out of this story in the way she manipulates structure. The story is told through a sequence of 31 scenes, the majority of which chronicle the life of the Venus. The scenes are short and quick. Parks frequently interrupts the flow of the story with scenes from a period drama For the Love of the Venus, which tells the tale of a young man’s infatuation with the image of the Hottentot Venus. There’s a distinct structure to the language. Its staccato and gives importance to the spaces between the words. Though the story happens in and around 1810, Parks uses contemporary language and rhythm, structuring the dialog almost as if it were hip hop.

Thematically, Parks juxtaposes these structures and the story of the Venus Hottentot in order to examine the structure of a society that treats a person as an object. The contemporary take on the historical subject suggests that we don’t need to look any further than Destiny’s Child, J.Lo, or Sir Mix-a-Lot to see that this is still going on.

Structure became the key to the design of the show. I wanted to incorporate a sense of visible structure that could carry through and tie together all of the scenes of the play in the same way Parks structures dialog to create unity. It seemed that in dealing with structure and multiple locations, changing the way we see the structure would be far more theatrical than many different pieces for each scene. Movement of structures across the stage seemed consistent with the flow of the dialog and would allow the most possibility for the lighting designer to alter the ways we see the space.

As the basis of the “structure,” I chose contemporary truss work. The director used a hip-hop number to open and close the show (consistent with the rhythm of Parks’ dialog), and I felt the truss would mirror that framing device with the added advantage of providing the lighting designer some extra positions to light the downstage edge of the stage. The truss motif carried through most of the scenic elements, even those which created the “period” feel of 1810. Ladder-like trusswork of varying heights were introduced to provide levels and places that a recurring “chorus of freaks” could climb. These pieces, combined with the three backdrops, were manipulated to create looks that ranged from open to confining as suited the mood scene by scene.

The play is structured around the image of the Venus. Without her the play has no meaning. It was important to keep the image of her present in some way as much as possible. The images on the backdrops are taken from historical drawings, most of which exaggerated her features to make her seem unnaturally freakish. Pedestals, platforms, cages and lazy susans were all used as ways of keeping the Venus on display.

© 2003 by Gion DeFrancesco