In a tableau in which the children practice math, a boy points at a bulletin board with simple equations pinned to it higgledy-piggledy; in his enthusiasm, he almost seems to be vibrating.
Next, he returns to the rehearsal tent to stage the prologue to "WillmS" -- a tableau in which the dying Shakespeare lies on a ramp, covered with an enormous rug, while his wife, daughters and lawyer hover nearby.
As one of the boys puts it: "Do you want us to be thoughtful or do you want us to be smart?" Ian Forrest's revival emphasises the cult of Hector, commencing with a tableau in which the boys surround Peter Rylands's charismatic pedagogue like princelings in a Renaissance court.
And running throughout, in illustration of the Homeric theme of wandering, is a series of tableaux in which parka-clad figures stand in snowbound Alaskan settings.
The Illuminations consist of a series of theatrical tableaux in which Rimbaud creates a primitive fantasy world, an imaginary universe complete with its own mythology, its own quasi-divine beings, its own cities, all depicted in kaleidoscopic images that have the vividness of hallucinations.
The predominantly free-verse poems of that volume, influenced by Italian painting, offer up a set of allegorical tableaux in which Eve appears as a primal poet symbolizing universal values.
If you look beneath the kinky surface, you will come upon many more conventional domestic tableaux, in which a lot of us feel left out of the action, resigned as we are to our no longer ardent desires even as our fantasy lives are constantly stoked and stimulated by media images.
It begins with a wordless tableau in which a man (Miao Tien), his face sagging with misery, walks into a room and slumps into a chair, exhaling doleful plumes of smoke from his cigarettes.
Here, one encountered riveting tensions in artworks such as Khalil Rabah's 2010 fiercely political The United States of Palestine Islands, featuring a big image of an American aircraft carrier planted with crops grown in the Gaza strip; and Walid Raad's surreal tableaux in which one views a war-damaged wall through the frame of a perfectly executed facade.
The underlying technique is based on characterisations of satisfiability through infinite (cyclic) tableaux in which branches have an inner thread structure mirroring the regeneration of least and greatest fixpoint constructs in the infinite.
Her mixture of photography, sculpture and drawing can come on like tableaux in which each separate piece plays a conversational part.
