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.
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