Uncommon Clay essays

Uncommon Clay essays Uncommon Clay was devised and directed by Jeanine Thompson. I saw the 8:00 PM at the Thuber Theatre. This play purpose was to relate to others the hardships and ordeals that Camille Claudel had dealt with from her child hood all the way up to her containment in a psychiatric asylum. As the play opens, an old woman who is Camille in her old age, which is referred to as the Current Camille, greets us. She begins to tell a story beginning when she was at the age of 17 and moving right up to where she is admitted into an insane asylum. Along the way Camille reveals to the audience; the happiness, hardships, betrayal, and emptiness that she goes through during her life. In this play, there are many artistic influences presented. Three that stood out were from Antonin Artaud, The Bread and Puppet Theatre, and Bertolt Brecht. Artuads purpose was to create a theatre that shared and involved the audiences reactions and emotions. This is shown during Camilles struggle with her love affair with Rodin and how it transforms into a bitter illusion of betrayal and insanity. Artaud wanted to connect mind, body, and spirit. Jeanine Thompson is doing just that with Camilles sculptors. Her mind creates these sculptors, which evokes a spirit. Bread and Puppet Theatre is seen with Camilles loss of spirit. She displays this when she destroys most of her work. Her hands into the sculptures transformed her spirit. She was so afraid of her art being stolen or commercialized she had lost her spirit. Her sculptures had life and movement in them, which displays the Puppet part of this theatre. Had her art told a story by the way she positioned the body parts, such as the seen where she keeps going behind Rodin's back and adjusting the model. She wants the model a certain way with her arms in to relate a feeling of tension, which is part of the conventions of the Bread and Puppet Theatre. Finally see a lot of B...