Valeria Pacchiani

"This biennial Prize, the most important of its kind in the UK, brings together the best of emerging designers with professional theatre, dance and opera companies."

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“A Passage to India” is a novel from E.M. Forster and adapted to theatre by Simon Dormandy. It is written in a way to be mystical with the idea that India is intangible, mysterious and cannot be rationally explained.

 

In my design process, the scenography is not a set but an environment translating this atmosphere. With carefully chosen materials, the visual answer is in the essence, translating it into enigmatic and abstract shapes representing a passage to something unknown, an impossible and frustrated friendship between Fielding and Aziz, an India in search of an identity.

 

The clay has been chosen as it changes states as the actors do. Dull and fragile on a side and hostile and imposing on the other. The Clay is also related to the notion of earth, divine nature, to Indian bricks manufactures, to the muddy Ganges. The abstract shapes have finger prints illustrating the Indian nature dominated by the British.