Platero and I is a project built around the eternal core of human life - our mortality. Death is at the heart of the book Platero and I that this costume design is adapted from. It is also at the heart of humanity, the beckoning shadow that calls upon us across time and space. Especially in these trying times of a global pandemic, talk of death surrounds us everywhere from the statistics in morning news to shadowy references exchanged over dinner. Inspired by these intimate confrontations of death that are now and forever will be an unchanging part of human existence, I wanted to convey a perception of death that doesn’t have to arouse panic and devastation. Instead, as the book illustrates, death and grief can expand the richness of our lives and be felt with dignity and grace.
Xin Qi
Project description
The Book Itself
Platero and I is a collection of prose poems written by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1956. This book is one of his most famous works, as well as the second most widely distributed Spanish-language work after Don Quixote. Though now popularised as a children’s book, Platero and I was intended for adults with a heavy, elegiac story arc.
The book contains 107 prose poems narrating (in first person) the experience of the author and his little donkey Platero as they recuperate in a small village in Moguer (in Andalusia province) from one spring to the next. This setting is also the author’s real hometown that he returned to, battling a severe return of depression brought on by his father’s death.
Central Themes
About Death
Regarding the book Platero and I, I hold the same view as Jiménez: it is suitable for people across the age range, not limited to children, but definitely including them. Regarding death, I always believe that knowing death and living life are not two contradictory modes of existence.
Young, old or in between, everyone should know death and dare to face it head-on, be aware and normalize its presence as an integral, natural process of all living beings; generations replacing generations in centuries after centuries.
Jiménez, who had suffered from depression throughout his life, wrote about death with surprisingly calming, even gentle lines that never characterise death as the terrifying horrific monster we imagine. The vague shape of death gradually becomes clearer and, in the end, the author forces a confrontation where the reader, like the “I” in the book, has to look into the eyes of death directly. As mentioned before, the tiny breadcrumbs of death sprinkled out in small episodes culminate in the death of the protagonist, whom the reader learns to love and gets attached to during the storytelling.
Jiménez shows that experience of death does not necessitate darkness, desperation, hopelessness and other unmentionable abominations. Death is not only to be associated with sin, punishment or revenge, always evoking imagery of blood and violence; but can also be a source of inner peace, inspiration and light. The spectator, the reader, the viewer can all see that death is quite literally Jiménez’s poetry.
So let us think of it not with bitterness and defeat, with no denials and flinching avoidance. Let us look at death with life.
The Rural Idyll：
Platero and I celebrates rural life with nature at the heart of its philosophy, so organic fabrics(cotton, wool...) are used to provide materials that are eco-friendly and ethically sourced. Organic fabrics add a rustic feel as well as demonstrate the harmony of the relationship between nature and humans. Nature gives back, feeds and clothes us. Instead of choosing synthetic materials with modern printing techniques that can give a stronger visual impact, I relied on printing and fabric manipulation to add texture, natural dyes to add soft gradients. The lining and patchwork sleeves are constructed from upcycled textiles, a sustainable practice that also allows for individual character in each of the costumes made as a formal rejection of consumerist culture that stifles personality and creativity.
Historical Archive: Spanish in 1890s~1920s
About the Stage and Acts Setting
The whole performance is divided into four acts according to the sequence of seasons in the book: spring, summer, autumn and winter. Based on the description of each season in the book, a dominant color is extracted for each season, with some graphic decorative patterns added according to its characteristics.
Winter, as the final act, also symbolizes that death may not be darkness, pain and unjust finality. The characters who had died in the previous three acts would come together and walk up the steps with roses at either side and go through the bright door at center stage.
1st Act: Rose Spring
" We seem to be in a large honeycomb of light, as if we were in the bosom of an immense, warm, burning rose."
Character 1: The Crazy Man (In Spring)
“Dressed in mourning , with my Nazarene beard and my narrow black hat, I must cut a stange figure rid ing Platero’s grey softness.”
Character 2: Platero (The Little Donkey)
"Platero is small, fluffy, soft; so soft on the outside that one would say he is all cotton, that he carries no bones. Only the jet-dark mirrors of his eyes are hard as two scarabs of black crystal.
I let him loose and he runs ro the meadow; warmly, hardly touching them, he brushes his nose against the tiny pink, sky-blue and golden yellow flowers......And he comes to me at a gay little trot as though he was laughing, I do not know within what fancy world of jingles."
Character 3:Darbon
"Darbon, Platero’s doctor, is as large as a piebald ox, as red as a watermelon. . . . . . But he is tender like a child with Platero and if he sees a flower or a tiny bird, he gives a sudden laugh, opening the whole of his mouth in long sustained laughter, which always ends in tears.
Then, calm once more, he looks toward the old cemetery for a long time:
“My little girl, my poor little girl. . . . . . ” "
Character4~6: The Three Old Women
“They must coming from the beach or from the mountains. Look. One is blind and the other two are lead ing her by the arms.
They are gypsies. Blackened, sweaty d irty, lost in the dust with midday sun, a thin, vigorous beauty still accompaines them, like a dry
and hard memory.”
Character7: The Consumptive Girl
"Platero would walk slowly as if knowing that he was carrying on his back a fragile lily of delicate crystal.
. . . . . .The little girl, dressed in her pure habit of the virgin of Montemayor with red bows, and transfigured by fever and hope, looked like an angel crossing the town on her way to the southern heavens. "
Character8: The Boy And The Water
"Lying on the ground he has his hand under the live stream, and the water builds on the palm of his hand a tremulous palace of freshness and grace which his black eyes contemplate in ecstasy.
He talks to himself, sniffles, scratches here and there among his rags with the other hand. The palace, always the same yet always new fades at time."
2nd Act: Scarlet Summer
“The low rockroses’s thickets from a constellation with their large, musty flowers, roses of smoke.
. . . . . . Watermelons which open their scarlet and pink frost. . . . . ."
Character10: The Crazy Man (In Summer)
Character11: Sarito
"He had run away from Sevilla to try bullfighting in the villages, and was now coming from Niebla, on foot, hungry and penniless, a bullfighter cape twice flung over his shoulder.
Sarito, not daring to caress me, was petting Platero, who was walking about eating grapes, while looking at me with a noble gaze. . ."
Character12: The Apricot Boy
“The Boy, a little man, dwarfish and trimmed, smaller than his ‘cordobes’ hat, enters suddenly with his folksy, fantastic heart which gives him folk songs and baudy songs. . . . . .”
Character13: The Little Girl
“ The little girl was Platero’s joy. As soon as he would see her toward hin among the lilacs, with her tiny white dress and rice hat, calling him coyly:” Platero, Plateriiillo!
During the long days when the little girl was sailing in her white crib, down the river, towards death, no one remembered Platero. ”
Character13: The Shepherd
"On the hill which the mauve hour is turning dark and frightful, the little shepherd boy, black against the green sunset crystal, is playing his flute under the trembling of Venus."
3rd Act: Golden Autumn
“The wind is so sharp, so straight that they are all lying parallel to each other, pointing the South...
On both sides of the wide, humid path, the yellow trees, light up vividly our brisk walk like soft bonfires of clear gold...
Character14: The Crazy Man (In Autumn)
Character15: Antonia
“As I talked to her Antonia blushes all over, her blush burning the freckles surrounding with ingenuity the mischief or her grey eyes.
Then she burst out laughing, suddenly, against a tree. . . . . ."
Character16: Lipiani
"Lipiani swaggers his bland flesh in the tight and brown plaid suit which earlier belonged Boria, smiling between his large black and gey beard, thinking of the upcoming big meal under the pine tree."
Character17: Pinito
“His head down and stumbling, along the walls of the old cemetery, towards the old Windmill, his rent-free cave, near dead dogs, heaps of rubbish, and the company of strange beggars.
‘. . . . . . More stupid than Pinito! . . . . .That one. . . . . . !’
The poor man dies, according to Macaria, after getting drunk in the house of Las Colillas, in the ditch of the castle. . . . . . ”
Character18: Leon
“Yes, it is Leon, already dressed and perfumed for the night music, with his plaid jacket, his boots of white linen and black patent leather, his hanging handkerchief of green silk, and under his arm, his shining cymbals."
4th Act: Blue Winter
“Look at this rose; it holds within another rose of water. . . . . . the new shining flower fall from it,"
“God is in his crystal palace.”
Character19: The Crazy Man (In Winter)
Character20: Platero's Soul
"By noon Platero was dead. His little belly, all of cotton, had swallowed up like a globe, and his legs, rigid and faded, were lifted towards the sky. His curly hair looked like the moth-eaten flax of old dolls which falls, at the touch of a caress, in a sadness of dust. . . . . . "
Physical Costumes
// (Antonia & The Crazy Man in Winter)
Xin Qi
