Surrealist qualities in initial design

The concept idea I had of the giant revolving castle - juxtaposing traditional architectural castle qualities with those of a lion in my eyes breathes the essence and styles of the surrealist genre with its elements of fantasy, imaginativeness and the unreal being applied to well distinguished objects.

The French poet, André Brenton, is known as the “Pope of Surrealism.” Brenton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto to describe how he wanted to combine the conscious and subconscious into a new “absolute reality” (de la Croix 708). He first used the word surrealism to describe work found to be a “fusion of elements of fantasy with elements of the modern world to form a kind of superior reality.” He also described it as “spontaneous writing” (Surrealism 4166-67). I feel what Brenton is saying here supports the clarification of ideas used to distinguished the style of the surrealist genre.



Man Ray (an American painter) admired the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and made a series of photographs, inspired by Ingres's languorous nudes, of the model Kiki in a turban. Painting the f-holes of a stringed instrument onto the photographic print and then rephotographing the print, Man Ray altered what was originally a classical nude. He also added the title Le Violon d'Ingres, a French idiom that means "hobby." The transformation of Kiki's body into a musical instrument with the crude addition of a few brushstrokes makes this a humorous image, but her armless form is also disturbing to contemplate. The title seems to suggest that, while playing the violin was Ingres's hobby, toying with Kiki was a pastime of Man Ray. The picture maintains a tension between objectification and appreciation of the female form.

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/surrealism/Origins-of-Surrealism.html

This sense of juxtaposing two objects gives the subject meaning visually - this is what I intend to portray by creating the castle through a visual array of the Lion (also to communicate the Lion's ownership in the same instance). Also the rose bush being a large feature, translated as the lion's furry tail end (just how the surrealists played with objects in their art). The forest where the father and his servant ride through near the being of the play; the idea to make this surreal by creating the trees and forest shrubbery using lion tails would keep the whole design within the surrealist genre.

Side track research...

Surrealist theatre
Antonin Artaud, one of the original Surrealists, rejected the majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical experience. He thought that rational discourse comprised "falsehood and illusion." Theorising a new theatrical form that would be immediate and direct, that would link the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event, Artaud created the Theatre of Cruelty, in which emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams.[10][11]

The other major theatre practitioner to have experimented with surrealism in the theatre is the Spanish playwright and director Federico García Lorca, particularly in his plays The Public (1930), When Five Years Pass (1931), and Play Without a Title (1935). Other surrealist plays include Aragon's Backs to the Wall (1925) and Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928).[12] Gertrude Stein's opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) has also been described as "American Surrealism," though it is also related to a theatrical form of cubism.[13]