Thursday, January 27, 2011

Where to begin 3: Developing the design

It all looks a bit more linear here than it is in life. When I start looking at visual research varies. Sometimes it depends on how long it has been since my last design. If I'm designing 4 or 5 shows a year, I have a lot of images and a lot resources spinning through my head, even if the shows were all very different. But when as much as 3 or 4 months pass between designs, I always am amazed how far I can get down an uninspired path because I haven't stopped to look at pictures. I can become mired in the problems of a new project rather quickly and fail to connect with any real inspiration. How far I get down that path determines how mundane and unsatisfying the design experience becomes.

It's easy to skip over the gestation period, particularly if the schedule is tight or I am handed the show and the requirements. Gestation often begins with memory of effective and perhaps inspired recent theater experiences. Going to the theater is important. It's a little expensive, but I manage to average a professional (LORT) show a month if I make a point of it. I do pay close attention to the work of the designers. It keeps me sharp about the standards of our profession, and I am always looking inside the choices that they make. It's important for me to see how the design works, which usually is unremarkable to the audience except as it experiences it.

I read a lot about a show. I keep a good personal library as a resource and I read much online. I read about the history of production and the reviews of those events. I dig into the author and sometimes other works by the author. I begin the internal and external research on the play and the author, and on the context of the play's creation. I read about the author's sources and I try to understand the play in the context of its creation as well as in the context of current times and circumstances. All of this enables me to contribute with some creative understanding in the conversation with the director about the play. To be sure, the director has deeper knowledge, but unless I am prepared, I risk having my work dictated.

Directors are allowed - even expected - to get out in front. I design more shows in a year than they direct, and their gestation period necessarily is longer. In some cases it is years, but rarely is it much less than 6 months before first rehearsal for the directors with whom I generally work. I try to connect early enough to find out when I have to be ready to talk about the show.

At some point, usually a Friday morning when I've cleared my calendar and have no pressing work responsibilities until Monday, I begin to work on the design idea. I've read the show, outlined the action, analyzed the themes and ideas of the play, and created a requirement list for the design. I usually have some direction regarding style. I even may have doodled around, but became frustrated with a lack of inspiration. It's time to look at pictures.

If I fail to invest time in looking at pictures, I'm never quite satisfied with my result. I look at lots of them. Books and clipping morgues and online collections. I have to develop a sense of the possibilities. What I look at includes, but is not limited to:

1. Other productions -- of other shows. This is particularly liberating. There are images of designs that I go back to repeatedly, because they inspire me and help me escape my easy answers. These help me envision the style and possible answers to the design challenge.

2. Books of artwork. Periods of painting and sculpture and architecture and fashion. Books of illustration and popular art. Here I find the form and shape, color, line and texture of the show.

3. Period detail. I usually find the unity of a show in the visual environment. Whenever possible, I visit a place and I take my own photos. I make use of online photographic resources, including much shared amateur photography. I also read about the place and the time of the play in whatever resources I can find.

From this research, I collect the most useful and evocative images and sketches, and share them with the director very early. I like to do this in person so I can explain the choice, but it does put the director on the spot. Suddenly she is confronted with something tangible and she knows I am reading her reaction. It often results in a bit of verbal dance. The director may try to be open to what is offered, but still must process it. It's unfair, but effective. In the end it is no different than helping an actor shape a character - a good director takes what is offered and through interaction in rehearsal leads the production into a unified intention.

After looking at a large number of images, it is time for me to sketch and thumbnail. This is the real search for the Way In. Doodles and diagrams and thumbnails. I sketch research for style and period line and detail. This can take days, and I must have a deadline to force decisions and choices.

If I'm lucky, I can get 3 or 4 ideas to show the director and costume designer. One will be my overworked original idea that is not really open for adjustment. Another will be a somewhat stripped down version that has practicality and more openness. Maybe I'll have an alternative idea as a weak second concept, and sometimes another concept that meets a strict budget limitation. Usually they are pencil sketches and diagrams, assisted with a lot of discussion and reference images. The lesser choices ofter are no more than doodles.

The real conversation ensues. It's usually a careful dance about ideas and intentions and practicality for key action and moments. Not infrequently, I am still missing the director's core aesthetic commitment. I learn a great deal at this stage, because the director now can be clear about what can work and what cannot. I find out what the real requirements are, and the relative importance of different ones. It always requires me to go back to the sketch pad, but with the advantage of clear information. Now I can create a preliminary ground plan and scenic sketch. I have found that a design that is not challenged by the director is not one of my stronger designs, because the director does not use it particularly well.

Meeting these criteria is never a simple task. Some matters are purely practical - how can that character get from here to there? Others may be larger and more difficult, not the least of which are my own aesthetic criteria for the design. But solving these more practical considerations is light work compared to the struggle to settle on a design aesthetic I like in the first place.

Then on to the final sketch and/or model and discussions with the shop regarding budget and timetable, trimming where necessary. The visionary design work is done. It's time to move on to the practicalities and the shop drawings. Sometimes I even get around to a final scenic sketch, but directors usually prefer the model.

That's what my design experience is like.

Scenemaker
January 21, 2011

Friday, January 21, 2011

Where to begin 2: Making the list

In the first entry, I tried to think about the circumstances of designing a show. Next is a gestation period before actually beginning to work on the design itself.

My best designs and design experiences have happened when I've given the play a thoughtful reading very early, 6 months or more before the design is due. Then the "ism" discussion can happen with the director. Kind of like that show but more of a feel of this show. Did you see X? What did you think? Have you seen the new exhibit at the ICA? I was watching Y on TV a month ago, and I really liked the sense of (space, time, era, line, shadow, texture, spirit, anger, joy, etc.). Et cetera. This often involves exchanges of references, articles and images with the director. This is the practice of what is sometimes called "organizing" whereby these exchanges help the participants imagine the same possibilities.

Sometimes things have to move much more quickly. Even in the regular season the time frame is tighter and conversations are more deliberate, more specific. The show has been selected, and there are reasons for the choice. There's less time for this give-and-take. The calendar drives the schedule and the director gets to set the tone by herself. That's still a good experience if the rapport is good, the director leads well and is open to suggestions. In that situation, the discussion usually moves directly to style and statement.

This can be exciting if I'm prepared. Usually, there is an early hint, "I'm thinking period" or "think 'Blue Angel'" or "go blackbox minimal". There also usually is a shared knowledge of contextual circumstances that influence a choice - the times, the talent, the artistic environment, an opportunity to work with certain people, a connection to current events. But when we talk, I MUST have done my own analysis of the script or it won't be a discussion. It will be a specification, and I'll be embarrassed.

Then what? I think this is where design approaches diverge. It also will tend to vary by show. For me it is two more readings: one through the lens of the discussion with the director, and one for the scenic action outline. I put some effort into that outline. I make it very specific, because it becomes the basis for a requirements list.

As we work on a show, we are constantly building a fragmented requirements list - what the action requires, and what the stage effect should be. But I wasn't writing it down in any systematic way, leading to omissions, unchallenged compromises and missed opportunities.

It took me a long time to get around to the fact that life is so much easier if you actually create a written requirements list. I wasn't taught this and I don't know if anybody but me teaches this. I picked it up as a necessity for lighting design, after working with architects on renovation projects. I teach it now, but students rarely want to write it out.

Scenemaker
January 21, 2011

Next: Creating the design.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Where to begin 1: The circumstances

I wonder how other stage designers begin working on a show - a design. I teach a nice linear process that nobody uses - the students or myself. I have a career of designs behind me and I'm still looking for the magic bullet of insight. We all have shows of which we are proud, and some we list only to show the breadth of our work.

I think anybody that has worked for a while has a certain collection of rituals for teasing out the show. When I ask some other designers, I usually get a kind embarrassed mumble about reading and researching and sketching.

This is the first of three (or more) entries on how the design collaboration works for me. I welcome any comment.

However we go about designing a show, the beginning phase usually comes down to working out a requirements list of some sort, and then coming to terms with the amount of work the director already has done. That varies greatly with the production circumstances.

Some of my most gratifying experiences have been spending up to a year talking with a director about a show. With that time frame, the director is not a long distance out in front of you with ideas. It also helps if you both have a commitment to making it a special experience.

Although I work in an academic environment, that kind of development time is a luxury. You can get the calendar time, but you still have many intervening preoccupations unrelated to the show or to theater, and you may not be able to do the homework to keep up with the director.

The second-best experience is working early with a director with whom you are in sympathy. Some of my best work has been with a director whose approach to shows and concepts of performance fit well with the kind of theater I like to make. Regardless, if those factors aren't true, then I have to pretend they are.

I have a different relationship with a design that is handed to me by the director. Usually it arises from the director's focus on how to achieve certain moments or effects. A few directors just want to do the script from the acting edition - not very gratifying work for me.

If the director does have a vision to which she is committed, my job is to develop that. It is so much better than me playing "guess what will work." In the end, it is much easier for me and the show can be tightly choreographed. But I'm less enthusiastic about being relegated to set decorator.

The question is, when and how do you connect with the director? It's a very busy world we live in and they can't always wait for me. I've had to learn to think two or three shows ahead - six months to a year, and start asking questions early. It does require multi-tasking and having multiple designs in development at the same time.

I can realize a design in 4 to 6 weeks from first discussions, but in that circumstance, the director has already made conceptual commitments when we start. That's the summer theater approach and I believe that it usually encourages conventional ideas. It's not the kind of theater I prefer to do.

scenemaker
January 14, 2011

Next: "Making the List"

Personal and Cultural Intersections

I think it is normal to be astonished at how our lives intersect with others over time. The famous seven degrees of separation proves to be no exaggeration, and I am always surprised by encounters with people who know the same people and places I do. As a native of western Kansas (yes, "western" is a significant descriptor), I found the world to be quite large and indifferent to my origin when I left it. I expected that to be true, but sometimes I've been surprised.

In a field like academic theater, we are rarely separated by more than one or two degrees. We make a point in connecting the dots of relationships - it's important for getting work, and we frequently comment on how small our community is. We all have stories of incidental encounters with people from our theatrical pasts. Sometimes they can be very surprising.

I was sitting near several colleagues from other schools waiting for a performance to start at our New England regional American College Theater Festival a couple of years ago. A friend pointed out that the woman sitting next to me, a collegial acquaintance for a decade and a well known theater faculty member at a major private university, had attended the University of Kansas about the same time I did. We actually passed each other by about a summer at KU, but she also attended Wichita State University. I said I had, too.

What year? It was while Richard Wellsbacher headed the undergraduate program there, about 1970. Really? Were you in any shows? Yes, I was only going part time, but I did do a show. Was it Hamlet? Yes, it was - how would you know? What did you play - was it Claudius? Yes. Well, I was your wife!

How had I not recognized her? I finally remembered that I didn't look at her very much the whole time we did that show. I was older - later 20s, and she was maybe 19. It was the second year into my marriage, and she was drop-dead gorgeous - and still is. But I am flattered and embarrassed that she remembered me better. (I am known for some habitual obliviousness.)

This was perhaps the most profound and surprising intersection of current and past lives for me. On the east coast I have had many encounters with people who have been the same places and knew the same people that I had known in the midwest, but in a slightly different time frame. One expects occasionally to meet a former graduate school classmate through professional connections. It truly is an instant bond, because we both know then what a small world our industry is.

When you come from a place like Kansas, you believe that you're somehow behind the curve and out of the mainstream. You feel like what you do doesn't matter all that much to the rest of the country. But it's a familiar world, you know how people interact, and you feel just a little intimidated by those political and media centers on the coasts. More populous and commercially significant cities in the interior have a powerful regional identity, but the coastal megalopoli are the ultimate cultural arbiters.

Now I are one. And what we felt in the heartland actually is true. When you live in the coastal centers, you don't think much about the Midwest, and when something interesting comes from there, you're a little surprised. You have a strong feeling that the values are different. The notorious red and blue divide really does exist in the lives of people.

From New England, the midwest is a vast kind of open country that takes a long time to get across, has few people except in clusters like Kansas City and St. Louis and Minneapolis and Cleveland and Dallas, and little happens there of any importance to the coasts.

Except maybe in Chicago. Chicago is just a coastal city on a lake.

For people in the main corridors and media centers - Boston to Washington, San Francisco to San Diego - there is a particular political, social and economic reality, and a certain picture of America that truly is different from the rest of the country. These media-rich regions have their own insulated and self-reinforced view of the world, largely unaffected by what happens in the interior - except in national elections.

That's why it is important for me to get out of New England/New York once or twice a year, whether to visit family or attend a conference. I'm always pleased to get back, but I feel it does help me keep a more honest perspective.

scenemaker
January 7, 2011

Theater design and other things

I was prompted to begin this blog after I came away from another theater performance with another letdown from expectations. I was left again to wonder how much it is a changed aesthetic and how much is just me. I'm just beginning to get that if you live and work long enough, the aesthetic will change.

I began studying theater seriously in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and had to learn that theater was not a display case of a contrived realistic world. I passed through the crisis of letting go of my precious attachment to an egotistical realism, and I learned to love the heady, intellectually mysterious theater that grew out of the radicalism of the 60s and 70s - The Becks and Grotowski and Chaikin and Schechner and all. Of course, the everyday world of bourgeois theater was nothing like that (and still isn't). But there were experimental forays into improvisation, and the study of acting and directing found richer conceptual - and more exciting - foundations. The stage became a world, not of Aristotelean imitation, but of creating something richly new in each production.

Eventually I found my way into design exclusively and took another degree. I found great satisfaction in developing the perfect gestural expression of the work - or at least as far as I could get under the circumstances of production. It also gave outlet to the kind of focus on craft in which sculptors and painters are so invested. But in my mind that expression is never just a real space or even realism. It must be, indeed, gestural and expressive, and provocative and a little surprising. It is never television on stage. Like most of my contemporaries, my heroes were John Conklin, Ming Cho Lee and early Eugene Lee.

How sad it is for me to realize that my most profound and inspiring touchstones are 30 years in the past. We could hardly call that avant-garde today. We seem to have gone through and come out the other side where an aesthetic eclecticism can be seen within the dominant realism. (Well, I know what I mean by that.)

In attending regional theater in the Boston area I see that one answer is a kind of hyperealism. We take functional realism and surround it with something really extravagant. Eugene Lee's Sweeney Todd may have led the way on that. Many designs seem to involve a hubris of cinematic detail that can be pulled into the scene, and then set it off in a conceptual space. Or we'll see the indoors and the outdoors and the neighbor's house and down the street - but the actors never leave the living room.

There's more to be said. I'm thinking of my experience in the 80s seeing Performance Group's LSD in New York, and the old Mobius performance art events in Boston, and Julie Taymor's King Stag at ART. And I just saw ART's The Blue Flower, which is somewhat interesting, but not as conceptually challenging as it pretends to be.

So, I start this blog with a couple of propositions and a number of questions to consider.

The first proposition, verifialble or not, is that live theater matters, and that it has it's own function and aesthetic that is separate from film and video. The second is that design matters, and that it is critically relevant to the meaning and statement of the production. That said, some questions are:
-What are the marks in evolution of scenic and production styles?
-What are the necessary conditions for being artistically exciting today?
-How does scenic style serve as the interlocutor between the conceptual world of the play and the time-bound aesthetic sensibility of the audience?
-Who are the most exciting designers today and why?
-What are the aesthetic themes and production practices of the avant-garde in scenic design?

I also expect to consider matters of theatrical production practice, professional practice, career conditions, the larger artworld, and the world of higher education. And other earth-shattering things.

I hope to write weekly, and I'll be appreciative of thoughtful responses. My thinking is clarified in the act of writing and ideas are strengthened through the collaborative jurying process of critique. As this goes forward, I encourage comments and responses, and thoughtful provocation. Whenever you stumble upon these words.

scenemaker
December 24, 2010