My Theater Dance Card

Dance cards were a thing a lady used to have at a ball - a charming little booklet with an attached dainty gilded pencil to mark down promised dances and her gentlemanly partners.

 Dance card image courtesy of Wikimedia

I've always kept a scribbly, scabby version of a dance card myself, to remember what shows I've promised to design, for which theater group.

Well, I did until covid.

Today (while updating my theater how-to book Alice Through the Proscenium, watch for this new expanded! edition's publication date) I happened to need to refer back in time, to see what shows I was juggling in 2019-2020.  After I remembered that I had a little black book, found it, and blew off the dust, I saw... well, the perfect illustration of just exactly what covid did to the schedules of every theater artist.

Here's my dance card for 2018 and 2019:

Thirteen shows I designed in 2019, for eight different theaters.  In 2020 it was eleven shows, seven theaters, and an Off-Broadway showcase.

Here it is for 2020 and 2021:

Two real shows I designed that actually appeared on stage, one speculative hypnotism show that did not, a cancelation and... blankitude...

That's what covid was like for me and for most of us for those two years.

House Lights Up!

It begins...

The first meeting of Stage West's theater design apprenticeship isn't until Thursday, but I spent this morning setting up a Discord server to act as our classroom / treehouse.  Our first meeting will - thanks covid! - be virtual, so we'll get to use this treehouse immediately.  My fingers are crossed that this will be an easier, friendlier virtual venue than, say, Zoom.  (Don't we all hate Zoom meetings by now?) 

The photo above is from a Dallas Museum of Art show that I said I'd report back on... Too late now!  But I will just say that museums are one of the few outings right now that are, generally, less crowded and feel safer - go mid-week or early in the day if you can.  (Don't we all need to get out the house?)

BTW the architectural art exhibit "For a Dreamer of Houses" was fascinating.  You can get a good idea of it HERE virtually.  The neon house Rubber Pencil Devil by Alex da Corte was cool, but my favorite environment was Francisco Moreno's Chapel.  A wonderful, intricate, evocative neo-Romanesque barrel-vaulted chapel - of plywood - completely covered with graphics... as if a 12th century monastery chapel got anachronistic tattoos.  Some of them inked by Titian...

DMA show "For Dreamers of Houses" - photos by Clare Floyd DeVries 

Anyway, get out however you safely can and see stuff and learn stuff!

Even The Greats Goof

 Washing dishes today, I scrubbed at the cookie jar we keep on the top of the cabinets.  Being architects, our cookie jar is, of course, an architectural one... a white china replica of Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotunda.

I'd never noticed before - not while studying the drawings, not while visiting the building in Italy - but Palladio couldn't quiiiiite get enough headroom for his spiral stairs under his perfectly 4-way symmetrical roof design.  He had to cheat a bit.  

Look at the cookie jar roof!

Proof!  Proof, I tell you!  Even a genius struggles with getting the roof to  work!

Villa Rotunda cookie jar / model - with Fallen-Over Tower of Pisa beyond

I find it heartening to know that.

(Not that you can see his little oopsie in real life... and that's all that matters.  Remember that!)

 Happy New Year!

New year, new projects.  

Today I'm happily sitting down to try to figure out the shape of this set design mentorship I'm starting at Stage West.  (First meeting date has just been set, an hour ago, for January 20th.  It's real!  To quote Almost Famous "It's happening!")  

At the moment this all-important program outline is just a bare list of important dates and critical things-to-achieve...  The students - my students! - will observe two other shows in the making and be really involved with the play I'm designing, Into the Breeches!  The concrete result of this program (besides invaluable scenic knowledge, of course) should be developing their set design portfolios.

I guess we'll be meeting, in person or virtually, once a week or so, to do....

...something-that-I'll-figure-out-here-any-minute...

Though I do have ideas.  A few ideas.  Well, very MANY ideas.  So excited!