Every picture tells a story and the story it tells comes from the delicate interaction between its creator and its viewer. SAVAC, Toronto in collaboration with AKA Gallery, Saskatoon recently brought their perspective on two seemly opposing pictures vivaciously to life in Double Date.

Double Date is the encounter of two paintings: The Lady Excusing Her Love Bites as Cat Scratches (India 17th century) and Jean-Honore Fragonard’s The Swing (France 1767). The theme of seduction is timelessly relevant and crosses both cultures.

SAVAC and AKA’s artists dramatically applied the art of tableau vivant to create living representations of both paintings. The tableau form invites the audience to collaborate with the performers to create interactive stories that add to our analysis of the originals. This is the power and seduction of Double Date. While the paintings themselves are static and frozen in a single frame of time, the tableau vivant brings the paintings to life. Each performer then must give flesh to their selected character. No longer stagnant, they move. Each movement must reveal something of that character’s nature.

Who are the seducers and who the seduced?

The audience wants this question answered, but as we are in the midst of the tableau, we become as much a part of the painting as the performers. The challenge is to choose whether to stand back and frame the picture or to move into the picture and become part of the story. Added to this challenge are the interactions between the two paintings themselves.

The staging of Double Date breaks apart the opposing elements of each painting. The Swing’s youth is now separated through space from the sensual lady rising skyward on her swing, each cornered in their own bower. Between the two spaces hangs suspended the lady’s thrown shoe, as enticing as a sprig of mistletoe.

Cross-cornered are the opposing elements of The Lady Excusing Her Love Bites as Cat Scratches. Krishna stands in his garden while his consort Radha dissembles in her rooms. Between these two lovers meanders the cat. Sleek and sensual, the cat moves at will throughout the stage, attempting to engage and distract both audience and characters.

And so symbols of desire surround us.

As audience we watch the paintings shift and change. We react and respond. Move towards the action and participate in the story or shy away to stand on the edge and act as passive witnesses.

The characters catch our eye. By turns they strut, stroke and stare with longing or perhaps with disdain. Story upon story is revealed with every movement, and no eye can catch them all; and so, none can know the truth of any story. We are constantly seduced and deceived.

And it is all great theatre. Here is an ever-evolving story that asks us, as audience, to be co-creators of meaning for these two paintings and to reflect on what their story reveals to us about ourselves and the power of seduction. We are invited to not just view the paintings, but to step into their frames and risk being seduced.