Finding the Edge

I have the annual pleasure to work with my theater design and production students at the American College Theater Festival for our region. The ACTF is a 4-day festival of theater work in college and university theater programs held at a university in each of 8 regions. We're fortunate to have a geographically small region in New England, though I sometimes wonder what we trade for such travel convenience. We took a dozen students, supported by institutional grants.

My acting and directing colleagues spent a lot of time watching and coaching performers through their acting competitions while I spent a day in the room of design displays. I listen to critiques of student work - particularly my own students - but otherwise I hang out, talking about the displays and the work with other faculty, while balancing a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other. It's my time to assess what we're teaching and what my students are achieving in relation to other programs.

My students did well enough for their experience and I hope they will be energized for more opportunities in the design and technical crafts, stage management and other production activities. There was excellent work on the tables and it is such a help for our students to see the character of the programs and the work of other schools. We'll hope for a bit more engagement, a bit more energy toward making their own educations competitive. My design and tech students often come home more focused and energized.

I'm both proud and a little embarrassed to say I was around in the early days of the ACTF, back in the 1970s. In that more precarious time I once slept in my car to attend. I have participated almost annually since, sometimes with a participating production.

The learning at the festival is important. In Kansas and Nebraska things like theater - the academic and serious kind - were a good deal further apart than in more urban parts of the country. A few places, like my University of Kansas and the University of Iowa were consolidating the avant-garde and new scholarship on performance. They participated actively in the national conversation that grew with the work of the National Endowment. But unless you lived right there, it was a long drive. That annual ACTF gathering of theater faculty, students, and guest artists was critical in knitting together the study of the practice of a highly fragmented art form. Typical academic conferences are about anything but practice.

The art of it all is critical, but commercial theater design organizations have a strong orientation toward technology, and that is a continually moving target. They use anything that will make them competitive. They increasingly meld the work of related art forms and incorporate every cost-efficient practice they can. Designers, technicians, and managers are moving among many modes of live and recorded entertainment, all with their own special conditions. The practice of one influences the practice and the artistic perspective of others as artists and technicians move among the modes.

Hand-drawn work documents once had a focus on energy, art, clarity, and acceptable accuracy. Clarity, accuracy, speed and distribution have won out over expressiveness in production communication - it mostly exists in my sketchbooks and quick diagrams. The technology allows greater precision, greater detail, more repetition, more distribution and more capacity for collaboration. I still move a pencil on a page to shape ideas, but it all moves quickly to the computer. Younger designers may make that move earlier than I do. I still decorate my doodles.

The festival work I've seen in the last decade or so seems much less adventurous than it once did. There are times of change - pregnant events, evolving aesthetics and reactions to reactions. This is not that time. We seem to feel we have a handle on it.

After years of edginess, there may be a sense of "that's been done." Today's edges seem calculated and stylish. For our students in today's culture there is great pressure to earn, and that narrows the conversation. Commercial competence and versatility is required. If that's a trend it's a sure sign that the edge has moved on.

I'm always looking for the edge. Of what, I'm not really sure. It's out there, everywhere. Wayne Gretzky had the right idea. I'll just keep trying to skate to where the puck is going to be.

03 Feb 2012
Scenemaker