Sunday in the Park with George

Video & Projection Design for Musical Theatre

Sunday in the Park with George imagines the life and artistic journey of the Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and, over a century later, his great grandson, George. The musical, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a modern masterpiece, elegantly and heartbreakingly probes the depths of humanity, creativity, and connection. This new production imagines a modern museum as a palimpsest upon which the 19th Century Island of La Grande Jatte and Seurat’s striking visual language is written. The juxtaposition of permanence and ephemerality brings into focus the universal artistic struggle to both be accepted by and transcend the finite boundaries of the art institution.

The video and projection design, rooted in Seurat’s own long-term creative process, realized the gradual creation of his famous painting, Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, over the course of Act One. The video is drawn upon and transforms the scenography, beginning with a real time sketch of the eventual painting, and progressively moving through pencil, conte crayon, and finally Seurat’s well-known Pointillist brush vocabulary. Act Two moves the action to the early 1980s, where the design articulates the early and rudimentary experimental installation vocabularies of lasers and lights and collides contemporary artistic image-making technologies like photography with Seurat’s hand drawn and hand painted works.