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Adapting a Dogma 95 film set design for the stage production of Festen in South Africa.

M. Tech. Entertainment Technology / Adapting popular motion pictures to theatre stage productions has been very popular in recent years. Some of the best examples are the motion picture productions The Lord of the Rings, Billy Elliot and The Colour Purple that were adapted to stage musical productions. This was the case with the original Danish film Festen or The Celebration that was adapted and staged as a theatre play with English text in London in 2004. Pertaining to Festen, the film was originally produced according to the Dogma 95 Principles - a set of principles that were specifically aimed at the film industry and totally differed from any known and applied film practices of the time. The main problem that scenic designers of later stage productions had to deal with when the film was adapted to a stage production was that these principles had a very specific influence on the stage designs for this specific production. For the staging of the play Festen by the Drama Department of Tshwane University in Pretoria the director and the designer not only decided to oppose the Dogma 95 Principles totally, they also decided to design a set in a Film Noir style. They further decided to stage the play with a Caucasian cast using the English text and a black cast using a Zulu text. This resulted in having a major influence on the final outcome of the production. The research question that has to be answered in this research project is "whether it is possible to adapt the design of a very specific type of film production that was originally governed by a set of specific principles for a stage production of the same play".

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:tut/oai:encore.tut.ac.za:d1001315
Date January 2013
CreatorsAlberts, Johan.
Source SetsSouth African National ETD Portal
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText
FormatPDF

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