Animal Crackers

The end of the academic year is just over the next hill, and those of us who teach are steeling ourselves for the final push.

.....

I had several paragraphs of whining here, which I have deleted. How can I whine about the greatest job in the world!

It is opening night for our final production of the year, and this year it is The Glass Menagerie. It is an unusual choice for a major production in a program such as ours, because there are only four characters. Of course, everybody knows Tennessee Williams' somewhat autobiographical piece. It is heavily taught in classrooms because it has such relevance to personal development and frustration with family constraints and values. There is a huge amount of critical material and curriculum guidance for this piece available online.

Our production is really unusual in an attempt to realize Williams' stated intentions in a technical way. In our production the interior of the apartment is completely behind a white scrim, for which we had to install a separate truss proscenium frame. Text and images are superimposed upon the action in the apartment. Current lighting and projection technology makes it possible to do what it seems Williams had envisioned in writing the work. The action in the apartment appears clear but slightly hazy and distant, as if in memory or a dream, as Tom states. The original production abandoned the scrim and much of the projection because the technology wasn't up to the aesthetic in the 1940s.

For us this means a great deal of light control. There is hallation off the lighting instruments above and behind the scrim that casts a slight haze on it. Even the bright aisle lights are a problem. And there is a really tricky lighting problem in a candelabra scene. How do you light people behind the candelabra and cast their large shadows on the walls, without lighting the candelabra itself and casting its shadow? Our lighting designer did achieve it well.

In addition there are narration scenes on a fire escape outside the apartment, and access to the fire escape is from below, from our orchestra pit. Add the need for powerful equipment for bold enough projection and wireless mics for actors behind the scrim to be heard well in a large hall. It's easy to understand why most productions of this play are more simply realized.

....

Back to whining.

We always end the year with a major theater production such as this, which means the student work to be graded piles up while I focus on making the show happen well. Sadly, most feedback to the student at this point is moot - it won't be read because it has no future utility - except to argue a poor grade.

Meanwhile, the appeal of large blocks of potentially free time are a magnet for meetings and work groups.

There is little wonder we see commencement come around with mixed feelings.

Scenemaker
20 April 2012

Student Work and Tutorials

On this last day of spring break I'm gathering my resources to return to classes. It's been a busy quarter and I've had less time to post.

Our student-mounted productions transpired well. Lysistrata, Aristophanes' 5th Century BC anti-war comedy, played well. The play is still outrageous with prosthetic phalluses, costume jokes and bawdy gags that predated all Christian modesty. The show alternated with the musical A New Brain, very well sung and played. Each had its accommodations to the small 28'w x 18'd thrust playing space, but they worked, playing in rotating rep for three performances each.

Lysistrata was directed by a graduate student who had not directed before, but she pulled it together and learned a great deal. A busy area director was brought in for New Brain, which is all sung and was heavily rehearsed by the music director. It was good to see new student faces in these shows. A member of the shop staff designed the Acropolis facade for Lysistrata. I put a curtain in front of it for New Brain and the director provided projections.

We move now into Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie. A full-auditorium production, although we are limiting seating to the center section. The director is doing the play through a scrim, which means viewing angle is important. I found in researching the design that there is a tremendous amount of material about the play online, probably because it is a standard on many high school reading lists - right up there with Hamlet and MacBeth. I'm sure one analysis I read far exceeds the length of the play. We'll give the show a first-rate production, since with only 4 characters there can be such focus on acting (not that the 20 other acting majors are happy about that cast size). With a couple daytime performances and lots of school tickets, we can afford to pull out the stops.

Guys & Dolls setup

I spent my break updating tutorials and templates. I have developed them for things that my students need to engage and learn -- most requiring some sophistication with technology. There isn't enrollment or class time routinely to teach them well, but my production students require this background. These include templates for formatting a stage manager's production script, for an Excel lighting hookup and for Vectorworks CAD drawings in our theater, tutorials for common graphics applications and mechanical perspective drawing, and process manuals for stage management and designing lighting. [Find these at http://www.dirksdesigns.com/ddc/ald/tuts/index.html They are all my own copyright, but some rely upon the contributions of others. They are free to use, but please give credit.]

As happens, some of my former students, many who intended only to be actors, have found their way into positions where they need to return to these materials.

When you teach in a largely liberal arts based program, you understand two things (at least): 1) There are so many legitimate program requirements there is little room for both exploration and concentration. 2) Almost everybody is an actor until they learn their opportunities, affinities and limitations. By the time they comprehend them they have missed the chance to develop with depth as a designer and/or technician at the university. Often they find their way later into production work, often in the schools, and too often make it up as they go.

In New England there also is a lot of community theater, much parent-supported high school theater, and numerous people involved who "took a course in college." There also are English (and math) teachers pressed into guiding productions for competition who never had a production course. Beyond that, some former students discover after they leave us that they prefer the opportunities for creative contribution in production work, and they want information and guidance they missed or need to review.

There are books, but they're usually too general, and who goes there any more? I post my materials for all these folks.

Scenemaker
11 March 2012

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

Designer Library 5: Illustrators 29

Illustrators: Society of Illustrators 29th Annual of American Illustration. Society of Illustrators, Watson-Guptill Publications. New York (1988) Or any of the subsequent annual volumes.

My last choice of five books I have found most valuable for design is the annual of prize-winning illustration by the American Society of Illustrators, now up to the 52nd annual. These quality print editions on coated stock are not inexpensive, but well worth the $45 from the Society of Illustrators. Times, styles and artists evolve and change, but this 25-year-old 1988 book and my 12-year-old Illustrators 40 seem to be the most thumbed. I find that prowling these collections of prize winning publication art are a useful step in resolving a design.

As designers we find inspiration and sources wherever we can. The reading of a script and its visual interpretation is influenced by its context in the life of the moment. We have our own history with the script and its story, and with many associations already made. We also have a context for the new production that has a cluster of requirements of varying importance. Those requirements are both tangible and aesthetic, both limiting and freeing. And somehow our design must arise within these boundaries of production practice to meet the aesthetic goals.

There are highly imaginative, creative artists whose original brains may reach and grasp fully original possibilities. My sense is that it doesn't come as easily as it appears for most of us. Lightning strikes the prepared mind, to mangle a metaphor, and such collections as the Illustrators Annual are about possibilities. We can see the work of other artists who have found imaginative and artistically profound ways of vividly communicating the ideas of the text through imagery and art.

Fine art also has its value for inspiration, as does architecture and film and other art forms. Historic, geographic and other factual material is critical in developing a design for any production, but it is the art forms that shape an artistic attitude, and deliberately and creatively embody ideas in sensual terms. Illustration is an art of intentional statement.

The Illustrators Annual is over 600 pages of prize-winning illustration divided into sections for book, editorial, and advertising publication. In addition there are hall-of-fame tributes to important illustrators that place the current work in a stylistic context, and there are agencies showing work by their artists and illustrators. It's all in high quality full color art print.

The Annual is a wealth of stylistic ideas. Color qualities and combinations. Stylistic approaches to line and shape. Visual senses of texture. Any and all forms of abstraction. Fresh ideas of balance and proportion. Ways to illustrate particular objects and people. Qualities of mood and tension in imagery. Evocation of our experiences with other illustration and art forms. And so on.

These images typically seek to communicate more literal concepts than high art does. This work intends to create a strong, specific connection to the viewer's references and imagination. In many cases, these are literally the scene designs for the text. They illustrate an object or idea by implying a narrative about it.

Every illustration image is incomplete. It challenges viewers to substantiate the idea through their own experience. Every image provokes a question about its subject, while conveying intensive clues to the way one is expected to respond. Many illustrations tell a fragment of a story that the viewer is led to complete. Even what appears to be pure design is full of narrative impulse. Illustration design builds upon a wide world of associations - with real and fictional experiences, with demons and fears, with aspirational identities, with intrigue and suspense, or with beauty and life.

This is the world of the stage and the province of the drama. Illustration is a frozen moment of theater - an artful expression of drama. Theater is the history, present and future of the moment. Illustration is an abstraction of an entire story that theater plays out in time. It is a rich resource for theater. We are in the same business.
___________________

I hope this list of best books has been of interest. Upon reflection when writing, I noted that they are older than they seem to me. I'm not sure if it is meaningful - the list isn't intended to be limiting. Perhaps this list suggests and argues that there are books of value and that it continues to be worthwhile to have resources in hand, not only on a screen.

Scenemaker
November 24, 2011
Happy Thanksgiving

Designer Library 4: Contemporary Stage Design

My fourth of five selections as an influential design book is Contemporary Stage Design USA published in 1975 by the Theatre Institute of the United States, Inc. It was edited by Elizabeth Burdick, Peggy Hansen and Brenda Zanger. As of this writing it is available used from Amazon.com. Two other collections have been published: American Set Design by Arnold Aronson (1985) and American Set Design 2 by Ronn Smith (1991). These also are valuable and include extensive interviews with the designers. I find myself returning most to the 1975 publication for inspiraton.

Creative juices are stimulated by seeing the possible. The challenge is to explore the possible in order to shape an end that seems to have an inevitability. Given the circumstances, the conditions and the requirements of a production, the "inevitable" design is the most artistically satisfying result. Once one becomes invested in a design it takes on a life of its own. The task is to prod it along and keep it on track. In the end it really wants to have a kind of unique perfection.

As a goal this approach has merit, but it can be a liability for divergent thinking. It asks for the logical result of dramatic connections, not the most interesting and provocative result, so the challenge is to provoke divergent thinking in exploring the possible. Looking at the designs of others can challenge an artist to consider the problems in different ways and imagine provocative alternatives.

In my own design experience, I need to see a way out of narrow ideas that feel easy and unimaginative. I'm always looking for a better answer. An imaginative possibility. A clever expression. Something arising from a different impulse. There are many creativity exercises one can use to explore approaches and unlock the expression of a play. I do use a few techniques to break out of conventional thinking but they can be time-consuming and can extend the incubation period beyond the calendar limit. A reasonable supplement for me is to look at excellent published production designs by others of all kinds of plays.

There were a couple books of designs put out by the International Theatre Institute that I had made a habit of consulting in the college libraries where I taught, including Stage Design Throughout the World Since 1960 by Rene Hainaux, and an older collection since 1935. These volumes of artful approaches to dramatic texts remain invaluable for exploring exciting and different visual ideas for designs. They helped me resist my tendency to design like a housing contractor rather than an artist. I started recognizing metaphor and cleverness in design, and my work became more conscious and focused.

Eventually, I began to find a few books of interesting new designs that I could afford and didn't have to keep rechecking from the library. One of the first in my collection and most influential is Contemporary Stage Design U.S.A. It is 140 pages of designs selected by the Institute, supported by 10 essays by designers. It remains a primary inspiration resource and the most frequently thumbed of the design collections I have since acquired. I recommend it highly.

Designer Library 3: Pecktal

This is the third in a series of entries on books that I have found most valuable in my scenic design practice and teaching. I must point out that these are not necessarily the best, most current resources, but they have been quite valuable to me. I believe they are worth consideration by others.

Designing and Painting for the Theater was written by Lynn Pektal in the early 1970s, and covers a lot of territory. Pektal was a designer and scenic painter in New York, and he also wrote a book on drawing in the 1990s. The books use a similar approach of framing the detailed discussion of practices with interviews with working designers. Some people find the Designing and Drawing book more helpful and it does have rich resources for design, but the earlier Designing and Painting text remains a more useful reference text for me. As a designer who also must build and paint my shows, I found Pektal's book to be a godsend before the internet. It remains a rich resource, regardless of the effect of changed technologies and more readily available information. One can find inexpensive used editions on Amazon.

Before the late 1970s, if you worked elsewhere than in the few theater-rich cities, your access to information about production practice was quite limited. A handful of theater production programs in universities outside of the northeast, such as Carnegie-Mellon, Illinois, Iowa, Texas and USC taught what was needed to feed the commercial theater, but most practice had not evolved much since the 1930s and 40s. The artistry was a practice of the trades and was still passed on largely through apprenticeship. Scenic practices began to evolve quickly with the explosion of technologies and materials in the last decades of the 20th Century, and the trades began to lose their exclusive grip on how things were done. Entertainment technologies evolved and expanded into whole new worlds of working practice. More people began to work between and among the components of the entertainment industry: theater, film, television, and trade shows. But the basic structure of the traditional practices and techniques continued to guide the work in the theater.

Pektal's book is over-written in places, with a lot of detail in the interviews with designers on some arcane aspects of practice as applied to particular productions. But most usefully, the book is filled with real cookbook detail on design and painting practice for the stage. Some of those practices have been affected by the computer revolution and digital technology, but many have not. It also is illustrated heavily with scores of images of drops, designs, settings, and scenic practice. In fact, the illustrations are invaluable for understanding the expectations and qualities of the practices and techniques. The images of designs are very useful as examples and models of design practice.

Where Payne (Scenographic Imagination) goes into detail on analysis and how to think about the setting, Pecktal is very much concerned with the application and practice. Each chapter concludes with an interview conversaton with one of the major designers of the late 20th Century American theater - Mielziner, Smith, Edwards, Lee, Oenslager, Bay and others. These interviews are not as insightful as one might expect, but informative nevertheless, attending to the specifics of scenic and design practices and the experiences of the designers.

The first two chapters deal with the basic ground of New York theater design practice. They run through the fundamentals of starting out, and the working world of the designer. The third chapter on developing the design is mostly about the steps and the artifacts - the drawings and models. It is helpful to see what is expected as union practice. Chapter 4 is concerned with the theatrical scenic studio. It attends to the various jobs and the activities of the designer in working between the studio and the production.

At this point, the book becomes a catalog or reference work for a wide variety of scenic processes and practice. Chapter 5 is drawing the scenery - in full scale, and chapter 6 is on scenic painting techniques, only some of which have been superceded by changing technology. Chapter 7 is about paints, binders and equipment. Eight is about backdrops and fabrics, nine is on decks and furniture, and ten is on sculptured scenery and the materials that can been used to create the sculpted effects. Developments in materials and the economics of shop operation have modified some of the practices, but the underlying principles and artistry remain.

Pecktal's book is no substitute for thorough apprenticeship with a working scenic studio, but it does its best to lay out what has been adopted broadly by commercial studios and other theater scenic production environments. Without a doubt, the book is most valuable because of it's extensive illustration and intention as a reference manual for scenic practices. It also is very useful in understanding just what the professional theatrical environment expects as a matter of course.

Some of the practices in this text are becoming dated as digital technologies are developing. Other environments are doing large scale fabrication and applying newer answers and efficiencies as the technologies evolve. Yet we continue to rely on many traditional practices where there is no economy of scale, and these approaches are very useful to know and be able to apply. This book is a solid reference resource.

Scenemaker
November 10, 2011

Designer Library 2: Payne

This is the second in a series of entries about my most valuable books for scene design. One of the most useful books on how to design is Darwin Reid Payne's The Scenographic Imagination. I have the 1981 edition, but Amazon lists a 1993 third edition. The book is an expansion and development of his 1974 Design for the Stage: First Steps. Payne was chair of theater at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and he wrote several books on scene design and model-making. There have been displays of his exquisite scenic model work at USITT conferences. I have never met him.

This isn't a slick, commercial textbook on design. Payne writes with a kind of personal volubility about his processes in designing for the stage. Some chapters feel as if they were drawn from a collection of lectures for a design class, which gives the writing a more personal feel than just "the way it is done." Parts of the text are a bit self-conscious and over-written, with some steps or ideas getting more or less emphasis and space than their significance, but the book does have a lot to say. I came into contact with Payne's first book when I was working on my MFA. I have found this expanded text on scenography most useful to re-read when I'm stuck in a design. When I can't find my way into the play, or maybe I have a design but it doesn't rise to art.

The text of Scenographic Imagination takes an expansive view of the scenographer and her contribution to the production. If there's a fault with the text it is that it ignores the reality of working with a director. It focuses entirely on ways of thinking about the dramatic text and designing for expression of those ideas. I have always argued that a designer needs to be able to think like a director - and perhaps have directed a little. This text is about thinking like a director about the imagery and action. Each chapter concludes with a brief commentary by a significant director or designer.

Payne puts value in the terms and titles we use, referring throughout to the scenic designer as the scenographic artist. It's a little self-conscious, but it works in emphasizing the overall artistic responsibility of the role, expanding beyond the concept of the designer as background painter. There are chapters on The Scenographic Artist, The Scenograher and the Physical Stage, Communication through Scenographics, The Scenographer and the Written Text, Creative Research in the Theater, and The Scenographic Vision Employed.

The first chapter on The Scenographic Artist deals with the attitude and education a scenographer needs and the reasons for it. The second chapter deals with more than just the physical space - it also discusses the place of the scenographer in the production process. Payne lays out his arguments about the meaning of scenic space and its semiotic and symbolic values, which he builds on in later chapters. The arguments are clear and well presented, and they seem to be knit together in a comprehensive philosophy. Payne's use of the term scenographer here really applies to the scenic designer. In the international theater community scenography involves lighting and sometimes costume as well as scenery .

Payne's third chapter is about communicating a design. He begins with a rationale for graphic art training for the designer and discusses an ideal studio space (generally pre-computer). He stresses training in drawing and identifies the various sketches, diagrams, drawings and draftings that are inherently part of he design process. It is clear that he expects a designer to know how to do these things, and there is some sense he is covering required ground. He describes the concepts of perspective in the theater and how they apply to the design. There also is an essay on design portfolio standards.

Chapter 4 is how to analyze a text for design, and my copy is well-marked and well thumbed. This section is an invaluable discussion about how to find the ideas, recognize the intentions of the playwright and support those through stage imagery. He writes about the physical and spatial expressions implied by the text. Here the designer has to direct the play in his imagination, thinking deeply about dramatic moments and the best way to present then scenically. For this Payne analyzes Gounod's Faust. He discusses clues to thinking about and understanding the action, leading to a design that, in effect, directs the staging of the play. One might object to Payne confusing the roles of director and designer, but that is why you have communication between them. As a designer I find directors vary greatly in how much "base" they like to work with. Some want to own all the ideas, others are more open to a designer's contribution.

Chapter 5 is about Creative Research in the Theater. Payne begins with a bit of a rant, and I think rightfully. There is an extensive discussion about how to look at and see the world as a designer. He discusses internal and external research questions, and he describes a process of feeding creative ideas. He concludes with how to compile personal research resources for designers.

In Chapter 6, The Scenographic Vision Employed, Payne lays out his approach to design. These 60 pages are the most significant chapter in the book as he steps through the analysis of moments, and he explores what the scenic environment does to participate in telling the story and all of it's rich connections and content. Here Payne implicates the designer as a director of the play by means of enabling the action and suggesting meaning.

As near as I can tell, this is one of those unique texts that exists in a kind of middle ground. It is not a beginning design text. It gives excellent discussion of how to think about design, and good discussion of design practices that you should consider. While it is theoretical, it is about how to find and apply that theory. I have pulled it out many times when a design doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Next, my favorite scenic how-to book.

Scenemaker
November 4