Most evocatively, the video gives us staged re-creations of Caravaggio paintings, beautifully capturing his luminous canvases so that it sometimes takes a moment to realize that the tableaus consist of performers, not paint.
Blasco's routine method of capturing each of the vintage tableaus consists of sourcing authentic, retro photographs from flea markets and her family, and revamping the snapshots with an injection of the interesting and the unexpected.
Ecological messages also underpin Mark Dion's "Habitat Group" (2004), a tableaux vivant consisting of a bunch of plastic bird decoys and outdoor roughage covered in tar to simulate the effects of an oil spillage.
A tableau usually consists of a number of card piles.
Among these is the Representación del nacimiento de Nuestro Señor ("Scenes of the Birth of Our Lord"), written at the request of his sister, an abbess, and consisting of a series of dramatic tableaux recounting the birth of Christ.
So, for example, the first such tableau ("A Sad Revelation") consists of a three-page-long variation on the epic's famous ending: here Odysseus returns home to a Penelope who waited only twelve years, instead of the canonical twenty, before marrying a man who has been courting her.
When we met a day after the furor of opening night, Bailey explained that "Exhibit B" consists of 13 tableaux-vivants, each featuring one or two performers standing absolutely still, whose only instructions are to never break eye contact with the audience.
When we met a day after the furore of opening night Bailey explained that "Exhibit B" consists of 13 tableaux-vivants, each featuring one or two performers standing absolutely still, whose only instructions are to never break eye contact with the audience.
Their applause-winning specialty (not evidently feminine) consists of acrobatic feats and tableaus.
