Saturday, May 3, 2008

King of Capri Throne

For the King of Capri Junior School performance, Mrs. Richter requested that we make her a "spaghetti throne". Initially we thought this wouldn't be so difficult, but this was mainly because we hadn't started to build it yet. Our initial design was a basic wooden chair with wooden "side skirts" that pasta pieces could be glued onto. It then had a fan of makeshift uncooked spaghetti pieces of around 1.5 metres long to fan the back of the chair to add extravagence. The chair would then be accompanied by a pillow made of meatballs to represent sauce.

This idea however, had to be changed because of the problem of actually finding a wooden chair. So instead we tried doing the same or a similar idea to the wooden boxes we use in the drama room. We placed a white sheet over the boxes and began glueing the pasta pieces, donated by the ...over-generous... Sodexho company, onto the sheet. We tried a small section of the sheet and gave it a few minutes for the glue to dry. Once we moved the sheet even a tiny bit, all the pieces began to fall off. This idea had to be scrapped.

Another idea came from using one of the existing chairs in the drama room, which, much to Adrian's dissapointment, looked remarkebly throne-like already. We decided to simply use coiled up (or messy) rope to represent cooked spaghetti. 89 euros worth of rope was bought from Obi by Dr. Riley and we began experimenting with the spaghetti. We first just placed the spaghetti randomly over the chair. It looked like spaghetti, thank god! However... the pattern on the chair looked somewhat odd, and it definitly did not look extravagent. So we decided that it was probably best to place a sheet over the chair and then apply the spaghetti.

We experimented with various colours, orange, beige, black, white. The black and the orange made the rope stand out the most, but they also just made it look like rope, rather than spaghetti. By adding "sauce and meatballs", which was created by putting polystyrene balls from Obi in a red sheet This made the spaghetti on the white and beige sheets stand out more, and begin to actually resemble spaghetti on a plate. We decided also to ditch the randomly-placed idea and positioned the spaghetti as it would come on your plate if you just ordered it. We decided upon the white, solely because Dr. Riley said we weren't allowed to use the beige sheet. We stood back and admired our throne.

However, there really was something missing; extravagence. It looked surprisingly much like a chair, with spaghetti on it. We needed to create a royal look. Golden polystyrene balls were recomended by Dr. Riley, to be placed in key places on the chair. This was a good start but I knew it was missing something... The King in the script is surrounded by wealth and material items. His chair had to be the centre of the room. So, to make his chair look more like a centre-piece, I suggested we frame it with a giant knife and fork. This idea went down very well, and we set to work looking for scrap bits of cardboard to cut out our over-sized utensils. Luckily the Hausmeister was able to spare us a more than adequate piece of card. We began drawing the outline of the fork and then class was over. So that's what we have so far! Below is the final chair without the golden balls and Besteck.

1 comment:

jmriley said...

it was YOUR brilliant idea to add the knife and fork. I shall never forget your expression of I know what it needs but I don't want the extra work that it would take! But it was absolutely the right finishing touch. Pure genius!