The Book is Back!

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.)

The cover for the upcoming second edition - copyrighted, obviously

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...

Oops - It's Been How Long?

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.

A gotta-be Public Domain image from an ancient version of the story

So... what even IS a design charrette?

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.