- Hi, and welcome to the Creative Corner.

I'm Lauren and I'm an art teacher with Art for the Journey.

I am here to share some really cool stuff from the world of arts and culture.

Today in the Corner, we're telling stories, because who doesn't love a good story?

Artists all over the world and throughout time have used their creativity to share true and inventive stories with the world.

Visual artists like Faith Ringgold weave stories into their work for the viewer to interpret.

Playwrights like William Shakespeare have written tales that we're still telling 400 years later.

And musicians pour their heart and talent into memorable songs that speak to their experiences and the times they live in.

We're going to dig into some awesome performing arts activities a little later in the show.

But first I want to talk about what happens when visual artists and other types of creators work together.

(upbeat music) One of the more direct ways to tell a story through art is by making a storyboard.

A storyboard is a tool used to plan or map out a story through pictures.

It's especially useful for writers because, whether you're writing a book or a script for a movie, it helps to visualize the order of events in your narrative.

In other words, storyboarding helps us to visualize the beginning, middle and end of a story.

Making a storyboard is a lot like making a comic strip, because both typically use a series of pictures presented in a specific order with some words or captions to help the reader quickly understand the story.

I want you to think about a story from your life, maybe an important event, or a funny memory, and we're going to make our own storyboards.

Artists and writers use all kinds of different methods to create storyboards.

Some are hand drawn, some are drawn digitally on tablets, and others are computerized or made with photographs.

I'm going to draw my storyboard.

So I have a couple of pencils, some pens that I really like for drawing, and I'm going to grab a big piece of paper.

You can either follow along with me, or you can use whatever medium you want to make your storyboard.

Storyboards generally divide a story into different frames or boxes.

So my first step is to draw some squares on my paper.

You can draw your frames free hand or without a guide if you want, or you can trace something.

I just folded a piece of paper and cut it into a square and used that to make sure my frames were all the same size.

I love to draw pencil first because that way, if I make a mistake or if I want to change something, I can erase it.

For my storyboard, I'm going to use a story from when I was a kid.

When I was in about fourth grade, my best friend and I had matching winter coats.

They were puffy and warm and they had these fantastic fluffy hoods that we just loved with long, soft, fake fur that tickled our foreheads.

And of course we liked that they matched because we were twins.

So one snow day, we wore our matching coats outside to play.

We built a snowman, we had snowball fight, we did all the cool, fun things that you do in snow.

I wanted to be warm so we could go back out again.

So we put our coats in the dryer and we checked on them after a few minutes, and we realized that that was a bad idea because we had taken our coats with they're nice fluffy furry hoods and baked them.

So the hoods, the fur on the hoods had just curled up like crazy and shrunk and it looked nothing like it did at the beginning.

They looked really silly.

But we kept wearing them.

We still loved them because they still matched and we were best friends.

And so we still were our coats.

They just had really, really silly hoods after that.

So I'm going to draw that story because it's memorable, sticks in my memory as something that was funny and that was good.

The pictures in a storyboard are meant to be simple because you want someone to be able to look at it and figure out what the story is right away.

So I want to include the important characters in my story.

I want to include a little bit of information about the setting so people know where and when the story is taking place.

And I want to make sure that it's clear what the action is that's happening in the story.

Otherwise, I'm not going to include a whole lot of extra detail because I don't want to distract from the story itself.

I sometimes find that, if I'm trying to draw a straight line, especially a nice long one, it's actually easier if I draw faster.

If I go slowly, my hand wobbles a little bit and my line gets a little bit crooked.

But if I just go nice and fast, I have the nice straight lines.

When you're done with your storyboard, someone should be able to look at it and understand what the story is without you having to explain it to them.

Each frame of your storyboard should tell part of the beginning, the middle, or the end of the story that you're telling, and the pictures and whatever words you choose to include on the page should speak for themselves.

Storyboarding is a great tool if you're trying to write something like a short story, a play, or a movie.

It's also a great tool if you're trying to practice your drawing skills and you want to use a story and some characters in a setting that you already know.

But we're going to set all that aside now and look at some storytelling in action.

My friend, Danny Cackley is an actor and a fight choreographer in Washington, DC.

he's here on the Creative Corner today to talk to us about conflict in storytelling and what that looks like on the stage.

Welcome to the Creative Corner, Danny.

- Thanks, it's good to be here.

- Fight choreographer sounds very exciting and maybe a little intense.

What does that mean?

- If you think about any of the types of stories that you see, whether it's on TV, or in a movie, or on the stage at a theater, anytime that there is a moment of violence, a fight, a slap, even something as simple as a push or a stumble, those moments all require a special kind of storytelling, which we call stage combat or in movies and TV, it's sometimes called stunk work.

So that's what I do.

I teach stage combat and I choreograph, or design the stories of fake violence for theater.

I think that all stage combat and all fight choreography, in general, needs to be specifically advancing the story.

Storytelling is such an amazing part of all kinds of culture, and I think, in my opinion, keeping in mind that violence is never a good thing, but it can be something that is effective at telling a story.

Why is this fight happening?

Who are these people fighting?

Did they even have to fight?

Was there something that brought them to this point where fighting was the only option?

I think audiences, in general, have been interested and entertained by this type of action for hundreds and hundreds of years all over the world.

- How do you make sure that you're telling a really great story and that the combat or the fight that you're depicting is accurate and realistic and useful to the story while also keeping the actors or the stunt people safe?

- I'm glad you asked that, because safety is absolutely the number one thing that we have to keep in mind.

It's never anyone's goal to sacrifice safety for realism, for something that looks more realistic.

My job as a fight choreographer is to figure out ways to almost create the illusion or magic of an act of violence like somebody getting slapped, or like somebody getting, you know, stabbed with a sword.

And then the actors then have the communication and the control and the choreography just like in a dance that you might see on TikTok, or YouTube, or something, that choreography, those specific moves get practiced over and over and over again.

So I was interested in this, in this art form since I was young, since I was probably in middle school.

And I started actually by going to a fencing gym to do Olympic or competitive fencing.

But I was really interested in movies and really interested in plays as well.

And so I discovered that I would be able to combine those two things that I really love, which were just the excitement of sword fighting, and then the storytelling that goes on with a group of people, you know, an audience and an ensemble.

- How do you go from the very beginning where you read a scene in a script and it says, there's a fight, then the characters fight, to what we as an audience see at the end.

- The thing that I always start with is the characters, who these characters are.

Because it's no good if you're in a play or watching the play that takes place in someone's living room, and then all of a sudden, the two characters in the play start deciding that they are masters at a specific type of martial art when, for the entire play before that, they've been sitting and eating potato chips.

So I always start with the characters and I always start with the actors that I'm working with, talking to them about what boundaries they have, making sure that they trust you and that they trust each other.

Communication is the most important part of this art form.

One example that I come back to a lot is Shakespeare.

In a lot of his plays, there are no directions at all, no notes about, and then this person takes a sword and fights the other person.

It's just the words, they fight.

But there are other clues sometimes in the language.

And so those types of things also help a designer or a choreographer like me create a fight from start to finish.

- So it really is connected to the story in a lot of ways, if you were reading a play and then creating some of this choreography to be included in the physical performance of it.

It really starts with who are the characters, why are they motivated to fight one another, do they have any training for this or experience in the story of their character that's going to impact how they, how their bodies move and how they interact, and what are the plot points that led up to this, and why is this even happening?

And then how they can affect what happens next, because obviously, that's going to have a huge impact on how the story unfolds after that.

So it's really integrated and a part of the story.

When you're in a play and you're choreographing a fight, are you using real weapons?

Are your swords sharp?

How does that work?

- Great question.

No, swords should never, ever be sharp in a play, in a movie, in a TV show.

I don't think swords need to be sharp at all these days.

That does bring up a good question, because sometimes people ask me, are these real, when I hand them a sword, and I say, you should treat them as if they are.

For the audience to believe that you are in danger and that you are really fighting someone, you have to have respect for the weapon.

You have to believe that this could actually hurt someone.

And you know, the truth is if you make a mistake and you hit somebody too hard, you could hurt somebody, which is why practice and control and training is so important.

- So if somebody is interested in trying out some of these concepts or getting involved or learning about stage combat, or wanting to fence or anything that we've talked about... - I would definitely recommend looking at your local theater companies.

A lot of the times, they will have classes, whether that's after school or over the summer.

Sometimes the whole class won't be about stage combat, but you might have a guest artist or a guest workshop for one day, which can be really fun, because the more you practice, the more you learn.

- Awesome.

Those are great suggestions.

So I definitely want to learn more.

And instead of just getting on YouTube and watching some fight scenes from plays and going out and doing it myself, I'm going to spend that time and search the web for some classes and workshops and try and learn as much as I can.

We are going to watch a fight in which you were involved.

So tell us a little bit about the clip that we have here to show.

- Absolutely.

So this is a short clip of a rehearsal that I was in, and I put together the moves of this fight with a friend of mine.

And so you'll see two characters.

You'll see how we communicate with each other, how we take care of each other, and still tell a pretty exciting story, I think.

So in that clip, you saw us using swords and daggers.

So we had weapons in both hands.

And that is its own particular challenge because we're not always very good at using both of our hands, and that can be a really interesting way of telling the story as well, is where are the characters' weaknesses, where are they overconfident, where they arrogant?

And there's a little bit of that in the clip we saw.

- [Lauren] Yeah, that makes for a good plot twist.

Just when you think everything, you understand where everything is going, we switch it up.

- We want to see excitement.

We want to see danger.

And that I think, is also kind of what fight choreography and stage combat can bring to plays, and to theater, and to movies, and TV shows, is that little extra spice of excitement.

- Sure, I think part of the reason we go to see plays or to watch movies or read books is because we want to experience things that don't happen in our everyday lives.

So I don't necessarily want to go out and get in a fight, but it's very exciting to watch someone who really knows what they're doing use their body in a way that contributes to a story, that I can be a part of without actually having to live it out.

- Absolutely.

And that's the thing I love about being an actor as well, is that I can be so many things.

I can have so many characters and so many stories that I would never get to do in my real life, but I can do them on the stage, and that is magic in and of itself.

- Danny, thank you so much for being here with us today and for sharing your experience as an actor and a fight choreographer.

I learned a lot and I'm sure that everybody at home learned all kinds of new, cool, exciting stuff too.

- Thank you so much for having me.

This was so much fun.

I hope everybody has a great rest of your day.

- If you've ever been a part of a performance, whether it's writing skits at home, dancing in a competition or recital, or participating in a play, you know that there's a lot that goes into creating the magic that the audience sees.

In addition to preparing for action sequences like Danny does, there's a set to build, costumes to design.

There are lines and moves to memorize, and timing to get just right.

Well, starting in the late 1700, a fun new trend started to take all of these elaborate elements of theater and apply them to something a little quieter.

As a matter of fact, to participate in this new form of performance called tableau vivant, you'd have to be completely silent and frozen still.

(crickets chirping) Tableau vivant means living picture in French and refers to a person or a group of people staging silent, motionless scenes for an audience.

The trend started as sort of a party game to entertain guests at parties and became wildly popular, especially, between about the 1830s and the 1920s.

Groups of actors would use costumes, makeup, lighting, and props, poses, and facial expressions to create incredibly detailed replicas of famous works of art, or would stage scenes from well-known stories like folklore and popular literature.

Sometimes the scenes were accompanied by music or poetry and often a large wooden frame constructed around the stage so the actors really looked like they were in a painting.

When modern photography was invented in the 1830s, tableaux vivants became a perfect subject.

So performer stage them not only at fancy parties and on stage at theaters, but also in front of cameras that would capture their artistry on film.

Our creative challenge today is to create a tableau vivant inspired by a work of art.

I've enlisted a little bit of help for this project, and our chosen work of art involves a little bit of messy makeup.

So we're going to take this one outside.

Our goal for this tableau vivant was to transform Alex as much as possible into The Old Guitarist from the painting using the supplies we had at home.

We pulled out some old clothes that didn't fit anymore and used those to create his costume.

The only pants we had that we were willing to sacrifice were green, and we obviously needed blue ones.

So I mixed up some acrylic paint and try to imitate the colors from the painting.

Picasso used a lot of different shades of blue in this piece, and it turns out this one has a little bit of green in it.

So I added some yellow to my blues to make it a little greener, along with a little bit of black and white to make the color more dull and gray.

Notice that we painted Alex's costume first so it would have time to dry before he picked up any props and got into his tableau pose.

We didn't have any face paint, so I use blue eyeshadow and some makeup brushes to transform Alex's face, neck, and shoulder.

I wanted to make Alex look specifically like the man in the picture, not just make his face generically blue.

So I started by looking closely at Picasso's figure and trying to imitate the contrast between the light areas and the dark shadows.

I used a couple of different shades of blue and kept adjusting and adding as I went along.

I definitely didn't get it all perfect the first time, so thankfully, Alex was patient.

Art snippet: in art talk, a strong contrast between light and dark in a work of visual art is called chiaroscuro.

We lightened up Alex's hair and beard with some baby powder, though we ended up finding something that worked even better.

After some final touches on the stage makeup, Alex smothered his hair and beard and shaving cream to match the bright white of the figure in the painting.

We worked together to get his pose just right as much as possible since Picasso's figure has extra long limbs that bend at pretty challenging angles.

And then Alex held the tableau vivant while I captured it on film.

What do you think?

How did we do?

(cheering and applauding) (gentle guitar music) - Oh, hey, didn't see you there.

- Hey, how you doing today?

- I'm feeling a little bit blue, but in a good way.

- Yeah, you look a little blue, but in a good way.

- Thank you.

- You're welcome.

Everybody, this is my brother, Alex.

Alex has sportingly agreed to participate in today's activity about tableaux vivants.

He has chosen a painting by Pablo Picasso called The Old Guitarist.

Alex, why did you pick this painting to become?

- Yeah, well, The Old Guitarist has been close to my heart ever since I was a child.

I remember the first time I saw this painting, I could identify with it.

You know, obviously, he plays guitar.

I play guitar.

He has a beard.

I wanted a beard, and now I have a beard.

(overlapping discussion) Now, I have two beards.

(speaking faintly) So yeah, I mean, I could just, I could relate to the painting, and you know, I never knew that I would be the painting, but it's been really enjoyable to go through this experience.

- Good, I'm glad.

You're covered in all kinds of stuff right now.

We used a bunch of different stuff to transform Alex into The Old Guitarist.

So we use a little bit of acrylic paint just on his clothes, not on his body, because it's not very good for your skin, doesn't let your skin breathe.

I got a little bit on.

That's just a casualty, but we'll wash it off as soon as we go inside.

So that's what this stuff is for.

And then we used makeup for his face to transform him into something a little more blue.

This painting is from a what's called Picasso's Blue Period, where he went through a phase of making monochromatic paintings that were all based around different shades of the color blue.

And then we used some shaving cream to give him even more than the beard he's always wanted, give him a little extra beard, and some baby powder to lighten up his skin a little bit.

- It was an interesting process to go through.

But yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed it.

I've never transformed this way before, and just to look at myself in the photo you took, that photograph is going to last forever now.

I mean, this was a lot.

This has taken several hours of preparation and cringing and posing in different positions.

But it was well worth it.

I'm really glad we had that experience together.

I'm really glad that I've got that photo to make me smile for the rest of my life.

- Yeah, that's a good point.

It was a really fun experience to try and recreate a story, or a moment of the story that Picasso was telling with his painting.

But also now, we have a really fun story that we get to tell and we'll have pictures to remember them by.

- High five.

- High five.

Do you feel like once you got into the costume and the makeup and the pose of The Old Guitarist, you could understand maybe what he's feeling, the subject of his painting, or you think he's feeling, what he's experiencing?

- That's actually, it's a really interesting question.

And it was, you know, when we started to shoot, once we had finished making me up and painting my pants and putting the shaving cream all over my hair and it was time to be the man, you know, I really tried to channel as much energy as I could, from what I had interpreted from this over the years.

I mean, literally, the body position that this guy looks like he's in in such a natural way requires so much tension.

And I was under tension the entire time.

And it's interesting that the way that I needed to take on tension to physically represent this man is likely the type of tension that Picasso was feeling when he painted this man, the type of tension that this man was feeling.

It would be interesting to do a happy painting.

- Yeah, I was just thinking it'd be really different to do something where it's more exuberant and active, where you had to stretch your body out and make it bigger, and take up more space instead of sort of being a little more introspective and a little more closed in and having body language that's very closed and tense, like you said.

- Right.

- Any tips for anybody who wants to try this at home?

- Yeah, I mean, I'd say, you know, just go for it.

If you're going to do this, go all the way.

- Well, Alex, is there anything else you want to say?

- Yeah, I wanted to mention that it actually really blew my mind how much fun this project was.

- Yeah, I think we really blew this one out of the water.

(laughing) Storytelling and creativity are at the heart of the tableau vivant.

Alex and I had a lot of fun turning him into Pablo Picasso's Old Guitarist.

It took teamwork and a lot of attention to detail to find just the right costume pieces, some inventive makeup, and the perfect place to stage our tableau.

I think we also have a deeper understanding of Picasso's work of art after spending so much time looking really closely at the expressive colors, the shadows, and the body language of the figure in the painting.

Acting out a tableau vivant allows you to step into a character or a personality that's a little bit outside of your everyday self.

I think that's part of why they were so popular in the 1800s when people's roles in societies were really rigidly defined, especially, for women and people of color.

Being part of a tableau allows us to step into new roles, see things from a different perspective, and maybe even feel a little bit connected to the characters or the artists whose work we're portraying.

At its core, it's an exciting way to look at a great work of art, get a little theatrical, and share its story.

The American author, Edith Wharton, said that tableaux vivants could give magic glimpses of the boundary world between facts and imagination.

So go ahead, make yourself a costume and make a little magic.

If you need some inspiration, you can always find great books about art at your local library, or you can look at free online image collections on museum websites like the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Have fun, enjoy the process, and I'll see you back here next time on the creative Corner.

The mission of Art for the Journey is to overcome barriers and transform lives through creating art.

Every day, Art for the Journey provides art programs designed to promote wellbeing for children and adults in underserved communities.

We believe art heals.

Hundreds of volunteers and support from the community make our work possible.

To learn more about Art for the Journey, visit our website at www.artforthejourney.org.

(upbeat music)