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Signs In The Play Poop ! By Chong Tze Chien

1043 Words5 Pages

Poop! by Chong Tze Chien is a full-length play that follows the trajectory of Emily’s life, a young girl who struggles to cope with cancer and life after her father’s suicide. It touches on topics of death, grief, loss, the afterlife and moving on through the eyes of a child and the surviving members of the family. Produced at the Victoria Theatre, Poop! includes elements of black light theatre in its staging of the play. In this essay, I will discuss the semiotics in the performance of Poop!; how different elements of theatre – such as lighting and props – are employed to create signs in order to convey thematic concerns of the play. The scope of this essay will focus on two types of signs in semiotics – icon and symbol.
Esslin states that “[all] dramatic performance is basically iconic: every moment of dramatic action is a …show more content…

are iconic and symbolic signs. Black light theatre is used to manipulate what the audience can see. For black light theatre, the parts in black ‘disappear’ from the human eye because it is against a black background. In Poop!, characters, with the exception of the father, wear bright colours so as to stand out against the black background, becoming clearly visible to the audience. Puppeteers and the father are dressed in black, with the latter’s face painted white. This gives the illusion of the father’s head floating in the air, disembodied, and also hides the puppeteers from view: they manipulate items so that it appears that clothes are worn by invisible people, and items such as leaves and plastic bags drift aimlessly across the stage. With their unearthly quality due to being able to float in the air without visible human intervention, these illusions serve to convey the idea of ghosts and spirits, giving the play a surreal quality that symbolises the afterlife. With this surreal quality, the audience can visually relate the father’s appearances as ghostly and indicative of his state of

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