Jon Bausor’s design for the Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony.ĮM: So the two influence one another. I think about design in the same way I think about a piece of music: it’s structure, and it’s progression from a to b and the phrasing and the development of theme and motif that you see in composition. I saw this design and I went, “I want to be a theatre designer.”īut I still think music has had such an influential effect on me. I met all these amazing designers like John Napier and Bob Crowley and, the one that stuck with me, I met Ian McNeil briefly when he was doing An Inspector Calls. They basically took the piss out of me for a year and asked me to get everything from a glass hammer to a long weight, and I learnt how to build scenery. I arrived and got this job with a load of Lambeth chippies who all spoke proper London, and I was this posh looking boy from Oxford who didn’t know one end of a hammer from the other. I didn’t know that courses existed particularly, and it was pre-Google,but I saw an advert for a job in the Guardian for a scenic apprentice at this set builders called Victor Mara, which at the time were the oldest set builders in the West End. At two in the morning I was scrubbing off this red paint which I’d got all over this chequered marble floor, and suddenly was like, “This is amazing!” I had no idea how to actually build it, so then I had to get down and dirty and started building it and making it and painting it myself and in the process managed to get paint on a 16th century chapel floor. I saw in books that they made these models so I made this random scale model and started playing around with it like a doll’s house. But then I started reading books about it, and when I was at university a friend of mine asked me to design an opera. My tutor at the time, a guy called Brian Appleyard, said “You know, you should be a theatre designer.” I didn’t really know what a theatre designer did and I’d met one at the RSC who’d just cut all my hair off and made me cry. I didn’t want to be an actor, but that started this weird bug in me so that when I went to do a foundation course my paintings were always to do with the geometry of space, and I was interested in things like the golden section and proportion in painting. But I got quite fascinated by the weird, sloped stage and looking out onto this picture that I’d never seen before as a human being, which is just looking out into the darkness, and feeling this energy looking back at you. I almost fell asleep on stage, and I forgot to go to one show entirely. Oxford offered this choral scholarship which meant everything was paid for and unfortunately that decided it for me. I went with St Martins, and then after about a week I realised I was totally skint, and I couldn’t afford anything. I got a place at St Martins and at Oxford at the same time, one to do Art and one to do Music. I was more interested in art than music, but I wrestled with this all the way through my life up to the age of 20. My family are all musicians, so I trained as a musician from a young age, although in my heart of hearts I knew I didn’t want to be one. Jon Bausor: It was quite a roundabout route. Could you explain how you came to the theatre? Emily McMahon: In an interview you’ve explained that you came to theatre design by a kind of backward route.
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