The phantasmagorical paintings of early Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch offered fantastic visions of Heaven and Hell that not only thrived during the repressive Spanish Inquisition but have influenced generations of painters in the subsequent 500 years since his death, not to mention being important forerunners to the 20th century Surrealist movement. Yet while his highly-detailed, thematically rich tapestries — the most famous of which is the powerful triptych The Garden Of Earthly Delights — have beguiled people’s imaginations for centuries, there have not been many films or plays that have delved into the life of this stunning and original artist.
Romanian-born, Obie Award-winning director, playwright and visual artist Nic Ularu is one of the few who has braved the realm of Bosch with his recent historical drama at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Manhattan. Titled Hieronymus, the 75-minute production, which ran from Jan. 20-29, explored the painter’s tortured psyche and private life, including his sexually neglected wife, his apprentice, his Catholic detractors and his main benefactor, his wife’s father.
Heaven and Hell
“I’m a visual artist, and I was always fascinated by this guy who, out of the blue in the 15th century, created such an amazing portrayal of Heaven and Hell in a period where the Inquisition was chasing and hunting people for heresies,” Ularu told PLSN. “This guy was appreciated and the majority of his paintings are in Spain, the mother of the Inquisition. How was this possible? How was it possible to show this kind of nudity, to display these kinds of crazy images? I think one of the reasons I chose to write about him is that we know very few facts about his life. We know he was married to an older, rich woman, and because she was rich, he didn’t struggle to compromise with his painting. He was one of the few artists of the period that had the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do.”
Ularu echoed that freedom in his depiction of the famed artist. In speaking with a Bosch specialist living in the painter’s hometown of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, he was told that his interpretation of the man’s life was a valid point-of-view. Unlike many famous people who have had an extensive paper trail documenting their lives, not as much is known about Bosch, a fact which gave Ularu the chance to be “really free to invent and give meat to my characters without being afraid that somebody would say I was inventing people’s lives. But everything I did with the Inquisition and the relationship with his wife could be true.”
Originally scheduled and planned to be staged with 30 actors in a huge space in Romania at the National Theatre of Târgu Mure?, the show was postponed because of the recent economic downturn. Despite that setback, Ularu, now based in South Carolina, brought it to La MaMa for a stripped-down but still-mesmerizing production that included the artist’s recreated studio space and a wall-length scrim curtain often placed in front of the stage, on which trippy projections were displayed during disturbing dream sequences. Although the cast of six, singular scrim curtain and five puppets were a reduction from the originally planned cast of 30, three scrims and 11 puppets, Ularu and his troupe still created an engaging experience with their limited space and resources. The projections and puppets were key visual elements in the show.
“Because Bosch’s work is fantastic and totally crazy, I wanted to have those images that were haunting him come alive and haunt him on the stage,” said Ularu. “Because the space is so small at La MaMa, I didn’t have the depth I needed, and had to reduce some of the puppets from 3-D to 2-D silhouettes that I painted with some fluorescent lights,” which had to glow under black light. “The entire concept was to put together 2-D images from the projections on the scrim with the 3-D images that somehow sandwich between what was happening. I had to pull the scrim in and out rather than [use] a flying part that would take it off, so there were some technical difficulties to overcome. There was this carnal flower [puppet] with [Bosch’s wife] Alied and [his apprentice] Jared that was inspired by one of his paintings, and had those tentacles, and it was right in the corner of the room against the wall. I was supposed to have more of those things, but the space didn’t allow me to.”
Surreal Imagery
When it came to the projections, Ularu enlisted the aid of experimental filmmaker and animator Simon Tarr, a fellow colleague from the University of South Carolina. Tarr took figures from high resolution scans of famous Bosch works, many of which are available on museum websites, and floated them across the scrim in a disembodied, ghostly fashion.
“A lot of what I try to capture or depict [in my own work] is a dreamlike state where you may wake up from a dream and might not be able to recall every part of what you dreamt, but you have an understanding of the feeling of what it meant and what was going on,” explained Tarr. “That approach that I take really meshed well with what Nic wanted with Hieronymus’ story. So much of his own work came from his own dreams, and a sort of direct line to the subconscious is something that I really try to go for a lot. It just fit very well with this particular play.”
Ularu said that the idea was to have the images representing the creatures isolated from their original context. He wanted the projection and puppet effects to have the feeling of a diorama; of a 3-D world of creatures blending in with the actors and the action onstage. He did not want to reproduce particular paintings but create a world of creatures that were haunting Bosch and his mind. The two 3-D puppets used onstage were made of foam and latex, and along with the 2-D puppet silhouettes, were inspired by Bosch creatures. Ularu extracted and Photoshop’ed some of those figures and gave them to Tarr.
Old-School and Lo-Fi
In discussing his animation, Tarr called it “more of a painterly compositing” which was all done with Adobe After Effects, “just really pretty old school. We had two projectors, one for the main scrim in the front and a smaller one for the back during a couple of the scenes. I usually perform the video live with the show, but for this it was all triggered through QLab, so when the appropriate scenes would come up they could have the whole thing set to go. I was new to QLab. I usually use much more fiddly programs, but this was much simpler.”
Tarr added that the animation played off of a MacBook Pro. “It was very lo-fi,” he declared. “It doesn’t take much to make really gorgeous stuff. The projector wasn’t even that bright, really, which turned out to be pretty good. It added to this weird, warm, fuzzy, dreamlike quality. I don’t know the exact model or throw of the projector they used, but because it was an older, less powerful projector it kind of worked well, especially with the luminous quality of the paintings.”
The filmmaker admitted that he felt nervous about having a giant scrim placed intermittently in front of the actors — in fact, it was manually pulled across for key scenes, then pulled back away again for others — because he thought that it would separate the actors psychically from the audience, “but the way that they retracted it as part of the show worked pretty well.”
Ularu had other plans for projection work in the show. In one scene, Bosch’s wife and his apprentice are in bed, which is a painted façade inspired by Death and the Miser. “The painting has this bed and a lot of animals,” recalled Ularu. “I had to do it in 2-D in order to make it work in the space as well. It was supposed to have projections with those fantastic animals and creatures on the bed and everything. We used two video projections, one from the front and one from the back, but it didn’t work well with the space. I did my best to compress this entire story into a small space, and it worked. But I can’t wait to do it with 30 actors on a huge stage with all the flying parts and all the elements together.”
When asked what the show will be like when he gets to stage it in Romania, Ulara offered many ideas. “The core of the play will be the same,” he stressed, “but, for example, the plague scene, when she undresses and has sex with the apprentice, will be in the front, and the entire stage will be populated with people looking almost like zombies dressed in gray white with blue light on them. They will be dragging corpses out of the houses and piling them on a chariot, which will be in the middle of the stage, and from the grid, there will be buckets with white powder that they are spreading on the corpses. This will be the background for the entire scene. I will work with students from the university theater in that town, and we will create the puppets that will be manipulated by four puppeteers. It will be different. This is a huge stage with depth. I will use three scrims with three different projections.”
Puppets and Projections
A highly notable aspect of the puppet work in the La MaMa show was that the puppets blended in nicely with the frontal projections. A walking 3-D puppet creature appeared to be part of the projections at first, but then it became apparent that it was separate. Interestingly enough, Tarr actually did not design his animation in conjunction with the onstage puppetry.
“Even though Nic wrote and directed the piece, he’s a masterful set designer, just incredible,” stated Tarr. “I had seen the puppets and knew that they were going to be going on in various parts of the show, but I didn’t actually see them working together until the tech rehearsal. I had known just from other work that he had done probably what it would feel like, and, given the inherent creepiness of the Hieronymus Bosch paintings, plus Nic’s propensity to have really imaginative and often disturbing visuals happening, it worked out really nicely in this case.”
