I have, for as long as I can remember, had morbid fascinations with curio artefact's which would explain my love of the Victorian age with there automata, taxidermy, conjuring and magic shows, contraptions and hidden fetishes.....My favourite of all is locks and cogs - engineering at its finest and if its employed into puzzles then so much the better...All I can say is if one gets a chance to return to the Science Museum in London to see there interlocking devices again it would be heaven.
And so.......
It was delightful to see an announcement on the Truro College website for a production called
Wunderkammer:
‘Wunderkammer’ fuses both satirical and downright absurd comedy, physical theatre and puppetry alongside perception changing philosophical theory to tell this psychological tragicomedy, a moving yet humorous story.'
By former A-level student Jimmy Addy from the Wild Oak theatre company that was started with his fellow college acquaintance Alan Neve. The title of said production is pulled from, I believe, the 'Cabinet of Curiosities'
| The 'Cabinet of Curiosities' was originally a personal collection of things of wonder (the cabinets were also referred to as Wunderkammer - or Cabinet of Wonders).These cabinets reached the peak of their popularity in the 17th Century; they were the personal and often idiosyncratic collections of individual, wealthy owners and contained both natural and man-made objects:   | |
| The main function of cabinets was to provoke a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer; in many ways they represented a world-view that valued the 'wonder' in an artefact much more than the need to analyse and classify that artefact. There were not yet universal systems of scientific classification and each collection sported its own unique organisational structure. The specimens in one corner of the Anatomical Museum in Leiden were grouped by type of defect. Sitting side by side were "separate pickling jars containing two-tailed lizards, doubled apples, conjoined Siamese twin infants, forked carrots, and a two-headed cat." The cabinets displayed their owners' notions of Art (man-made artefacts), Science (natural artefacts) and Spirituality (sense of wonder at God's works) in a physical form. [http://www.middlestreet.org/cabinet/whatisa.htm] Two of my particular favourite takes on this area of interest is of cause Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop and Stephen King's Needful Things. There is also a blog link opposite to a few weirdly exquisite objects if you dare..... Wunderkammer is on in the Mylor Theatre, Truro Campus, next Wednesday 19th June at 7pm | |
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