Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2021 - 26

A Tabletop of Dioramas, July 30, 2018. | Photograph courtesy of Skye Strauss.

underneath. Hill warned that there might
be tell-tale gaps in the compositions
where an image or item had been moved,
leaving only adhesive residue and ragged
scraps of paper behind. The research
notebooks in the archive that prefaced
Mitchell's stage designs also pulled from
this vast collection. As long as they were
still in the attic, and Mitchell was still
working in the space, they were a part of
the circulatory system of the room. They,
too, might have been disassembled and
repurposed someday as he continued to
iterate.
On the tabletops throughout the attic
were three-dimensional versions of the
same kind of transitory collage meant
for Mitchell's eyes only. A diorama might
contain sepia-toned photographs mounted on card stock, cut out like paper dolls,
and placed in an elaborate proscenium
frame next to unidentified animal bones,
with all the pieces nestled into soft piles

of bleached-white sand against a paintwashed, blue-grey background. Each
box or bucket I peered into might be
filled with dried flowers, rapidly turning
to dust, or with sturdy toy soldiers, still
ready for battle. I was painfully aware
of the closeness of the space, worried
about knocking over a pile of books or
spilling the contents of a box. When he
was still there, taller than me and working in the same crammed space of the attic, Mitchell worked small by tending his
ideas in those black notebooks and model boxes until it was time to put the ideas
he developed to use in a bigger context.
When Mitchell began working on a
particular production, his ideas about
theme, color, and material contrast grew
from their nascent state in the attic into
stage sets, like the ones he designed for
Kneehigh's collectively created performances, and into the larger outdoor performances of WildWorks. According to

26 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | WINTER 2021

Hill, Mitchell " armed himself with ideas, "
before meeting with his collaborators,
so that " he'd laid a foundation of ideas "
that were all his own. In the Kneehigh
Cookbook, an online resource where
Kneehigh accumulates information about
their collective creation process, Mitchell
credits his love of model building with his
career in set design (Harvey and Mitchell,
" Interview, " 2017). Yet exactly how the
dioramas in the attic would evolve into
a design is not completely clear; they are
not traditional model boxes as much as
they are mood boards. Hill's theory is that
the way the 2D and 3D collages formed
and re-formed helped to keep Mitchell's
thoughts nimble, to maintain a " meandering stage of mind " in which the juxtapositions created were, in some ways, a
surprise even to the artist at work.
Kneehigh puppeteer Sarah Wright
had her own theory on how Mitchell
used the items in his collection: " It's

Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2021

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