Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, The Royal Ballet

Trespass, 2012

For all the collaborators working on Trespass the starting point very much focussed around Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger's ideas for the design. 'Titian's late paintings made a big impact on a lot o people of my generation at art school in the 1980's'. He explains:

The Dead of Actaeon struck us then as particularly modern in things like the rudimentarily drawn shrub in the foreground and in its unfinished nature. For Trespass I've really been thinking about Diana and Actaeon and The Dead of Actaeon; in particular the mirroring of the two figures and how Diana's gesture at the perception of Actaeon's gaze is exactly the same gesture of Actaeon as he's transformed into a stag. That was a jumping off point to the ballet.  

Titian portrays Diana wearing a crescent moon and I ran with the idea of her as a moon goddess. I began to think about the moon and the fact that it had been a thing of beauty and mystery through the ages. But then I got to think about the Apollo space missions and how we quickly went from a sense of wonder to playing golf shots on its surface. It seemed a defilement of sorts, so my idea of trespass was a combination of a mythical thing and a very human technology. 

You can find further information about Trespass on The National Gallery website.