Inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), this scenographic project explores how materiality can become a dramaturgical language. Rather than illustrating the narrative of the twenty-one poems, this project translates the work’s psychological instability, fragmentation and shifting emotional states into a spatial and material environment.

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Developed in relation to the Young Vic Theatre in London, this project experiments with metal, water, transparency and light. Folded and distorted metallic surfaces form an unstable landscape around the human figure, while water produces reflections that continuously unsettle the boundary between object and image, presence and disappearance.

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Here, materials are not simply used to construct scenery. Their weight, surface, reflection, fragility and transformation actively shape the theatrical experience. Water becomes a material expression of Pierrot’s uncertain fate, while metal produces a landscape that appears simultaneously solid, fluid and unstable.

 

Credits: Storytelling by Jing Wang Thomas, Presented at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama