I'm excited!
That huge - and ever growing - fantasy world in Minecraft that I've been helping build for years now is finally open for download!
Available on AstrophagyMC's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/astrophagymc
Apologies for not posting recently - there's been sickness in my house and little energy for writing. But today I saw this in the Washington Post and had to share!
In a list of the best small art museums in America, inevitably Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum was mentioned:
In Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” when one character calls for a toast, another objects: “This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that.” I feel the same about the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Its main building, designed by Louis Kahn, is the most beautiful museum building in America. The light, the proportions, the sense of space — there’s nothing quite like it. The collection is exquisite. Every work rewards close attention. The experience of spending a couple of hours there is very, very intense. Emotions inevitably arise — good luck keeping them at bay! — Sebastian Smee
It's been a very busy spring and summer - and I did not keep up with it at all in blogging! - so here's a grab bag of what-I-did-this-summer-ness:
And Wow! did I not blog a lot!
1) Let's start with listing the shows I worked on after Murrow: Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper for Echo Theatre at Dallas' Bath House Cultural Center, Herbitts, Wizards, and Borks! Oh My! at Pocket Sandwich Theatre, the musical Matilda for KWC, and Sherlock Holmes and the Elusive Ear at Stage West Theatre. I also acted as a mentor for their Design Apprenticeship Program, which involved three student designed in-house shows. So... lots.
2) Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper -
3) Sherlock Holmes and the Elusive Ear -
What a terrific assignment, to design Sherlock Holmes' legendary 221B Baker Street apartment! The script described red wallpaper... my version of his apartment played up red to the hilt.
One important note: this set will reappear for the next two years for sequels to the entertaining play so the design had to work for being struck and stored. One consequence is that, in the red wallpaper, a darker vertical stripe was added to help downplay vertical joints between flats, which we couldn't tape over or float out with drywall mud.
3) Matilda -
A big fun musical! With a big fun mostly-kid cast!
This is the only photo I have, mostly because I had to miss the final-final set dressing and the performances... because some one of those big fun mostly-kid cast (or crew or designers or...) shared their covid with me!
(A "light" case thank goodness, of the did I-swallow-broken-glass? variation of covid.)
Here are a few paint elevations:
Phew! I'll talk about Herbitts in the next post.
A fun new You Tube video from my buddy AstrophagyMC HERE
While coviding here at home for the last couple weeks (yeesh) I've been playing a lot of Minecraft. This vid doesn't show much of my work, but it does show the fun of the world our team has been working on, most lately on a city named Ptolith. And this particular build in the vid is the city's crown, the Time Temple. (The Biiiig circle at bottom left on this map.)
I've been... busy?
But I break my radio silence to share this very good video on Environmental Design. A phrase developed in game and theme park design, but very much what good theater set design and film production design also do. Enjoy! (And more posts more often coming soon.)
Trope Talk: Environmental Design
In aid of getting out the word about my new second edition of Alice Through the Proscenium I ended up just, y'know, ego-surfing... to see what pops on the internet when I type in my name or catchy phrases like "Clare DeVries theater book" and like that.
As one does.
In that surfing I found (like notes in a bottle) photos I'd never seen of a show I designed last spring for Tarrant College SE, The Volume of Smoke:
Finally! My second edition of Alice Through the Proscenium is for sale. (I'm still wrestling with distribution through Amazon etc. but the publisher is now, um, publishing.)
This updated and expanded edition adds a new Case Study, following the full process of Kitchen Dog Theater's production of Alabaster by Audrey Cefaly. I've also added information on topics I knew little about when writing the first edition, like all the various proscenium stage drapes or working with projections. This new version includes color photos so is a bit more expensive (sorry), but I'm keeping the older, skinnier, cheaper version alive for the desperately budget-pinched.
(One nice side effect of including a few color photos though is that now the hand-drawn color wheel illustration is in color! Woah!)
You can buy Alice 2 at the Lulu Publishing bookstore HERE.
Side note: On Monday I was very excited to receive from The Live Theatre League of Tarrant County an award for Design and Technical Excellence! Really pleased!
But, in introducing me, my introducer (another thrill, because it was the very distinguished Harry Parker, who said nice things) also told the world that Alice's second edition is OUT!
Addendum: In his introduction he urged the audience to buy it, saying, "It's funny and I learned things." Which, frankly, should be on the book's dust jacket... if it had a dust jacket...
The load-in for Murrow into the Dallas Opera's Hamon Hall was also the day of the total solar eclipse in Dallas.
Inside, we worked on unloading set materials, assembling the TD's cleverly pre-cut and labeled parts for the fabric frames and stretching muslin over them, trimming, touchup painting, and hanging the fabric panels.
Just after one o'clock we broke to go out and join the sun watchers outside.
The Arts District was interesting during the eclipse: there was a band and a small crowd of people on the lawn of the park. (I got the impression that most locals had been discouraged from gathering by all the warnings about terrible traffic etc.) But this was a happy, chattery small crowd. Little kids ran through the splash fountain. A trailer sold hamburgers (and a bar sold "Tequilla Sunrises" ha!).
Luckily the clouds broke for the totality which was breathtakingly strange. Once I looked away from that black disc moon with white WHITE light ring around it, I could see all the little lighting usually washed out by daylight... the hamburger truck was a beacon - a lighthouse! - and all the lights inside lobbies or offices glowed amazingly ... then quickly faded from view as the sun uncovered. Strange and beautiful.
I found this musing on Socrates' old advice today... It's surprisingly hard to "know thyself."
From an article by Maria Popova at The Marginalian HERE :
“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be — a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.”
The article goes on to say:
"Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons."
As often, thanks to artist/writer Austin Kleon for bringing this to my attention!
(Following the chain of references starting from Kleon, through E. E. Cummings, led me eventually to this quote from Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney: “being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”
What's been going on? Well, I've been crazy busy designing and drawing several shows and mentoring a talented group of early-career scenic designers. I don't feel free to post those designs yet (I like audiences to be surprised), but two of them are seemingly very simple, mostly screens to play on with light and images, but one is Sherlock Holmes' famous 221B Baker Street apartment, and another is the musical Matilda.
Links to earlier blog posts on Matilda HERE and HERE from when I visited NYC, saw the show on Broadway, and was lucky enough to hear its Tony-winning set designer, Rob Howell, talk about it.
It can be interesting to see how creative people do their thing.
Today Austin Kleon's e-newsletter introduced me to rapper Eminem's obsessive, crazy-hoarder-looking notetaking... and I felt a rush of sympathy and understanding, for I too scribble notes. (Less impactful ones, noted.)
From Kleon to Jillian Hess's piece in Noted HERE, to a film clip with Eminem and Anderson Cooper (in this 60 Minutes clip at 1:11 HERE)... This is a poet who is obsessed with rhyming and works out his lyrics painstakingly by ear and by hand on scattered bits of paper that he stores in boxes.
We should all be doing this!
Not the scribbled rhymes for us maybe, but the dedicated working out, ruminating, scribbling, and saving. This is where much of the good stuff that bubbles up in us can be found again later when we need it.
Eminem calls his thought-storage "stacking ammo."
I've been spending a lot of time over the last few years - since covid began - working with an international group of Minecraft builders, building what started out as a single Elven city and is now more of an... entire continent.
This is the most recent work, the start of a new city, Saelengard (with it's adjacent port). The community is built on the edges of a vast natural salt formation, a snowflake-like geological sort of tide-flat whose delicate landscape we're trying to respect and celebrate.
Anyway, an interesting design challenge!
Hard to do well.
But watch this great tree-making video by Hey Pete! that one of my set design students found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTw-OdMxHYg
(I'm in love with the circle-leaf tree canopies. Magic.)
At yesterday's student charrette (which went well!) we did a lot of talking and the question of how to make good stone or brick walls onstage came up.
My usual technique is to hand carve the mortar joints from sheet foam, using a snap-blade knife extended out a bit too far (be careful!) so it has a bit of flexibility to it. Then layers of paint.
Here's an example starting with white, pebbley-textured polystyrene:
Okay, there are the models we build to explain a theater set... and then there are Miniatures.
Which may be a whole 'nother thing. Look at these by Mylyn Nguyen!
After some misadventure, I finally got my hands on the proof copy of the second edition of my theater set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium. (Catching the FedEx guy just as he was about to leave the package on the door mat - In The Rain.)
Woohoo!
It's not bad. Of course there's something funny about the spine, several images need higher rez scans, and one needs to be redrawn to have more legible lettering, but on the whole pretty good. It has a nice heft. And the cover is so so glossy.
Coming soon...
Meanwhile, this Spring's Apprenticeship Program has begun at Stage West Theatre. Yesterday we met for the first time... a very promising and accomplished group! I'm looking forward to this program. More to come...
Since I last blogged?
What can I say? It was a busy Fall and I didn't blog. Even once.
But instead of a super-fund-sized data dump of what I did do instead, let's just jump to today as I prep for the start of Stage West Theatre's Apprenticeship Program. Tomorrow I meet my set design students. Pretty exciting!
Along with get-to-know-yous and handing off the script for their next day-long design charrette, we'll also visit the set for Stage West's next production, Margorie Prime. All I know about this at the moment is that it's designed by Stage West's talented Allen Dean, who previously painted the drops for my To The Breeches! (Which I actually DID blog about HERE.) And I just found a cool little post showing him actually painting them HERE.
The upcoming design charrette?
Based on a darkish musical version of Little Red Riding Hood that I totally made up.
Definitions on the internet mostly stress the collaborative nature it can have, when disparate members of a design team and the client all brainstorm together. Usually there's a passing mention of the pressure-cooker ambiance of this affair: one room, a single limited chunk of time, and the creation of a real product at the end of that time.
I like that version.
But this ain't that. Because my first architectural design professor went to the E'cole des Beaux-Artes - in an ancient age when charrettes involved a tumbril-like cart that carried away your (individual) work to its doom - I think of charrettes as the pressure-cooker part. A short intense effort in design. We'll certainly work on collaboration. Theater is very collaborative! But this day will be about learning to be fast and free-wheeling. To learn to trust your gut.
This first design will be developed farther - may even be discarded later - but those first reactions to the text and first design impulses are uniquely valuable.
Not to mention the survival value of speed!
HERE is a link to a discussion of last year's Three Little Pigs charrette.
