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 awardfor 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...
Not sure what to do with this blog. It's dedicated to theater set design, with off-shoots into literature and other arts, but not much theater is happening nowadays.
Hence the loooong pause between posts.
To be honest, I've felt depressed and unproductive much of this past year. A weird, difficult year. (Mine has been easier than for many - for which I'm thankful.) But my Blog, like myself, lost its impetus.
What to do? Not sure. For now, I'll just write when - like today - something nudges me.
So here a few theater design adjacent thoughts:
1) The controversy about that Nazi-symbol-shaped stage at CPAC.
I think the design was deliberate. As a set designer I know coincidences happen (I once designed a perfectly innocent sofa one reviewer saw as... something less innocent, ha!). But I don't believe it here. Two reasons: first, the awkward "sandtrap" drop offs the stage shape created were a hazard for people on stage and an extra expense... why? Second and decisive to me, that triangle of red carpet upstage center was what turned the stage shape into the drawn-in-blue-carpet symbol. That was deliberate. If that bit of red carpet was accidental then why on earth, once the design was questioned, wasn't it replaced with blue? Quick, easy, defuses the resemblance. The hotel should have insisted. The CPAC organizers should have insisted. THE DESIGNER should have insisted. I, myself, would have painted that triangle blue myself once I realized!
2) My own recent non-Nazi design energies have been going into a Minecraft city building project, Illias, The Alabaster Citadel. You can see videos HERE at Astrophagy MC on You Tube.
It's been a real designer-sanity-saver, a great pleasure, and an unexpected bit of human-contact in my otherwise hermit-y daily life. Here are a few snapshots...
Various neighborhoods where I've been building (above) and a secret grotto (below):
All images courtesy of Astro and his shaders. I appreciate him letting me play in his sandbox!
3) Otherwise? I'm sketching on a potential hypnosis show and a real life basement remodel and beach house. Slow progress - mostly mood induced, honestly. Though Texas' Deep Freeze slowed everyone down. (Strangely hard to draw in an unpowered, below freezing studio. Who'd a' guessed?)
4) But Spring is coming! The power is back on. My pipes didn't burst. The pandemic is... well, improving from terrible and vaccines are now a thing. Hope for improvement! (If our idiot governor's repeal of all covid control measures doesn't ruin that hope. Seriously?)
With this outward improvement my mood too is brightening. I'll plant tomatoes again - those were entertaining. I'll start to drawing a little faster and when my "What's The Point?" meter resets, I'll start in again on the revisions and expansions to my set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium. (Meanwhile the First Ed. is available HERE at Lulu.com.)
5) Also meanwhile, lunch is still a nice thing and I'm going to go eat mine in the sunshine.
Sunday quiet... The pace is slow around here today. There is, actually, a little theater stuff going on, mainly getting contact information and questions answered that will help in the expansion of my set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium. A little progress there. Plus an out-of-the-blue idea on another book that's been simmering awhile. (I'm going to have to develop illustrations waaaay outside my comfort zone. Probably good for me.) Otherwise I've been spending some time in Minecraft, developing a new community out in the far northeastern Coral Sea. (I may call it Coralton.) It's a series of coral towers rising from the seabed into the air, where they open up into gardens and dwelling places. The trick to building in coral is that coral blocks must be in contact with water on at least one face... or they die. Dead coral turns gray. These towers are vibrantly red, or yellow, or blue! (Because I've hidden water inside every wall and column. Trickier than it sounds!
Coralton's towers
You can see the lineup of Coralton's towers here: Red Coral Tower has the biggest garden and living quarters, Blue Tower is really just a sort of gazebo on the path linking it to Yellow Tower, and the Magenta Pavilion is still developing.
Below is the undersea view of Red Tower - it's Dining Hall is at left.
And here's it's upper, above-water levels... at sunset.
All that red coral is still red only because hidden water keeps it alive. So far I haven't seen anyone else building with live coral on Reddit or You Tube or wherever...
It's come to this - not only do I only know what day of the week this is because yesterday was Garbage Day, but I can't find my calendar. When did I even look at it last? (Walking in the neighborhood across the street I saw a whole row of recliner / movie chairs set out on the curb. Either to be hauled away as trash... or to comfortably watch The Trash Truck Show, the biggest excitement in our stuck-at-home lives right now.) Projects in progress are progressing... I finally escaped from rewriting Chapters 5 and 6 of the second edition of Alice Through the Proscenium (I'd been trapped there for days, adding material, but mostly trying to impose order and logic.) Chapter 7 is not fighting back as hard... so far. The imaginary beach house is spawning imaginary additions and gardens. Feel very satisfied to have located the imaginary rain collection tank (for imaginary rain) so neatly. Next, I will imagine imaginary decorative and Rube Goldbergian downspouts, gargoyles, gutters, strainers, water-dumpers, and completely unnecessary spinny, twirly, wind-socky, weathervane-y, rain-gage-y accoutrements for it. I want a crazy water contraption / sculpture! With a side of sea food, please. Basically, a marine life version of these crazy birds at Houston's The Orange Show.
The Orange Show - photos by G. DeVries
Aren't they great? No imaginary castles to map at the moment, but a friend's very real garden needs mapping. That'll be fun! (Almost as much fun as those wild birds.)
Boy This thing just keeps on going, doesn't it? It's the Energizer Bunny of Home Alone(ish) Pandemics. So what's been going on here at Studio Seclusion? Continuing work on the second edition of my Alice set design book. My momentum is increasing... Several new illustrations, including this one, for a section talking about theater soft goods like this cut-drop:
(I like that I managed to work into that sketch both Tenniel's famous image of Alice pulling back a curtain AND his rose-painting card. (Five of Spades was always literally painting scenery - roses - so he wasalways a scenic painter.) Currently hacking at a study model of a beach house. Still doing worksheets of various Social Security filing strategies. Still cooking, eating, watching tomatoes grow. Watching - Friday Night - Kitchen Dog Theater's online production of 62 coronavirus 1-minute plays. Very interesting. The plays varied, some sad or angry, many worried, some funny. Most striking to me were the plays about the late mother's recipe... what soup did it use? Never thought someone saying "Cream of Celery Soup" would tear me up. The one played by two roaches (played with glee by two of KD's best actors) was very funny. Most memorable line of the night was, "I never thought the apocalypse would be so domesticated." Me neither. We did have one out-of-house experience, a trip to officially observe a fire station under construction (gloves, masks, hard hats) and a trip to the fancy grocery store (where the hard hat might have been a comfort - shopping is so weird now). At the construction site there were huge bilingual signs commanding you to have your temperature taken and to wear masks etc. - plus a clever hand-washing station - but only a few of the sparse Saturday work crew seemed to be bothering with all that. At the fancy grocery store the metered line for entry was a block long, masks were mandatory, and grocery staff saw to it that rules were followed. We bought a bag of mussels, so dinner was those mussels with a yellow curry sauce and good bread and possibly the perfect wine. Very tasty. On the reading front, I just got a copy through the mail of Sarah Ruhl's 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write. Just started dipping into them, but so far it's both thoughtful and funny. I got to design a couple of her plays: In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) and Stage Kiss. Both turned out well, but Vibrator is the one I'm most happy with.
In the Other Room (or the Vibrator Play) at Kitchen Dog Theater
Here's a close up of the inglenook area:
In the Other Room... I sure do like details...
I like detail. On the how-to side, those bricks were all carved by hand (by me) with a flexible snap-blade knife into sheets of stiff, fine-grained foam (not that expanded polystyrene beer cooler stuff). On into the week ahead...
Mostly recovered from my funk of yesterday. It is no coincidence that today I am wearing my happiest yellow socks! (Okay, okay, but yellow socks can't hurt. Sometimes any mood enhancing measures that can be used should be used, whether that's pizza for dinner, favorite shirts, or upbeat music. 29 days of this weird hermit-life is a loooong time.) Thank goodness the sun is out today.
Public domain image, modified... he's probably wearing yellow socks too
Another hour of professional continuing education - this time on Building Envelopes. Plus several productive hours updating my set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium. I guess Today's Lesson Is: Keep Going... I should embroider it on a sampler.
Well, today I made some real progress on my theater set design book, Alice Through the Proscenium, Second Edition. (Doesn't that sound official?) Today I was explaining the rigging and soft goods of proscenium theaters... a subject I knew even less about back when I first wrote Alice. I know more now, but still remarkably few of my shows have been for proscenium theaters! Today I also repainted the goat weather vane I used for Kitchen Dog Theater's Alabaster. (The photo background is a little impromptu, just some foamcore board held behind it.)
Goat on a hill weather vane from the play Alabaster
Well, if you've heard me sometimes complain about being too busy and not home enough... the pandemic has fixed that! Dallas County has closed all bars and restaurants (except for take out) and, naturally, all large gatherings... which means theaters are shut. Very tough. So here I am with an empty drawing board. Sorta. Besides doing taxes and all the many, many chores that I have been putting off forever, and really getting into the major rewrite and expansion of my set design book Alice Through the Proscenium (there will be Case Studies, very cool!) I've been doing a bit of stocking-up-the-pantry shopping, and a few sketches for a friend's D&D campaign: The Silver Chain. See the pretty map of the castle?
D&D Castle Wyvern - copyright reserved to the artist and Dungeon Master.
I wish I had wise words to share about the crazy, scary state of the world right now. But all I have is a determination to stay as calm and as usefully busy as possible, to get in touch with friends and family, to enjoy things - spring! imaginary maps! books! jokes with loved ones! Anyway. And to help where I can, though I am in lock-down, even if it's only with bad jokes or maps or donations to food banks.
This afternoon from 1:00 to 3:00 I'm giving a workshop on theater set design at Tarrant County College NE (that's in Hurst). Open to students and public.
Rhythm –Architecture is kin to music because both use rhythm.Imagine a colonnade: a classical colonnade would have equally spaced columns.In Baroque architecture, like in Baroque music, things get more complicated. Why not jazz columns?Any repeated element sets up rhythms.Play with them.
Proportion – What if a chair was three times too big?Or too small?Proportion is relative size.Alice was out of proportion with the White Rabbit’s house when she expanded until her arm…
“An arm, you goose!Who ever saw one that size?
Why it fills the whole window!”
Alice was differently out of proportion when she shrank and floated on gallons of her own large scale tears through a crack under a now-enormous door.
Exaggerated or minimized proportion can be used for emphasis or comic effect.Make the over-sized villain hunch over that mini piano!Put the thin, tall, leggy wingchair next to the short, squatty toad-green one.And remember that different stages require different sizes of scenery and furniture – to suit their different sizes, heights, and viewing distances.
A more subtle version of proportion is that of size, shape, and style.If you’re designing an 18th century house, it better have 18th century sized windows in proper proportion for its wall.Victorian windows are quite different.Notice the ratio of opening to solid wall – modern architecture may be glassy, medieval is mostly wall. 5.2Look carefully at sizes and shapes of architectural elements like doors and windows and at the heights of wainscoting or furniture.In some eras furniture was tall, in others, as low slung as an Art Deco chaise lounge.
It's been a while, but here's a new excerpt from my theater set design book Alice Through the Proscenium, from the "Design Elements" chapter:
Line – A strong horizon line, maybe, or the stripes of columns or floor.Lines are straight or curved, vertical, horizontal, or diagonal.Every edge of the set creates a line you need to understand.Composition.One thing to beware is a diagonal across the stage which pulls the audience’s eyes back to… what?A nasty sucking void?Or the family refrigerator-shrine?
Pattern – That black and white checkered floor, that plaid sofa.Control it.Strong pattern distracts.Or becomes a joke as in The Invisible Circus, where the performer wore a tapestry coat and blended with the tapestry wall… until he moved.Play games with pattern: establish a black and white grid like a checkered marble floor, then turn a few squares into puzzle pieces or ducks.
Rainmaker Advertising held an interesting lunch seminar recently on how to create web-content. (Like this.)
The secrets of SEO and Cloud words and Tags and other arcana were demystified. It seems the way to Attract Traffic and Clicks and Stuff... is it just flat write things worth reading. No escape from hard work, huh? Along with the resident Rainmaker expert was a very interesting speaker, Joseph Crisalli, who is a writer of historical novels and a blogger at StalkingtheBelleEpoque.com. For me, it was really useful to hear an author talking about using the internet to promote his books. The old Author's Platform... all those blogs, articles, interviews on Oprah needed to shill a few books. More work than writing the book, frankly.
Oh! BTW I have now sold my first copy of Alice Through the Proscenium overseas! My book, you know. In Great Britain. It sounds so swanky: "I have foreign sale." It'll sound all the better when I sell another:
"Foreign Sales!" Should have made that one book a two-fer deal, huh?
