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.

A Design Charrette

Today's the big day for my Stage West theater set design students - a full day design charrette for a made-up-by-me show:

Pretty sure this is out of copyright as it was published in 1918

Three Little Pigs – the Musical (the Outline)

Not a kid version.  (Less Disney, more Brothers Grimm, with cheeky references to Into the Woods, The Wizard of Oz, and This Old House.)  The danger and violence feel real and the ending – cooking and eating the Wolf – is triumph, retribution and tragedy. 

 Imagine being a Pig... This is home-invasion!  A monster beseiges a disjointed family that has to come together as true brothers to save themselves.  Imagine being a Wolf... with Wife and hungry Pups to feed at home. 

 Set in the timeless ever-present of fairytales or hunger and homelessness.

Scene 1 – The Woods 

The Wolf’s place.  Dark.  Dangerous.  Hungry.

 (Throughout the play the Wolf narrates –cynical, amusing, ruthless.  Sometimes he is joined by a chorus of  Woodland Creatures, an ensemble of cute(ish) dancing / acrobatic critters: Deer, Raccoon, Rabbit, Squirrel, Owl, and that obnoxious Happiness Bluebird.  They’re all terrified of the Wolf - except for Owl, because it takes a predator to understand a predator.  While Squirrel and Rabbit don’t trust Owl.  TheWoodlanders also sing as Wolf’s Wife and his litter of Pups.)

 Scene 2 – A Road Through the Woods

An inhospitable No-Pigs’-Land.  The Pigs have been kicked out of their nest, er, sty by their Mother Pig, who can’t stand the brothers’ arguing, jealousy, and laziness a moment longer.  Also there’s no food.  So she kicked them out into a hostile and hungry world.

Scene 3 – Traveling  (Dance tribute to Oz ending with throwing apples.)

Scene 4 – A Clearing at the Edge of the Woods.  There are apple trees, remnants of an old orchard, and a feral vegetable garden that still yields a few carrots and potatoes and such.  The tumbled ruins of the old farmstead are almost back to woodland, but there are bricks and sticks and, if the meadow grass is cut with that rusty sythe, there could be straw.

Scene 5 – Same Clearing, building is started.  (Big dance number, a flavor of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.)

Scene 6 – Same Clearing, the House of Straw is complete, then blown away. 

(The hit single “Huff n’ Puff” in its first iteration, repeated for each house.)

Scene 7 – Same Clearing, the House of Sticks is complete, then blown away

Scene 8 – Same Clearing, The House of Bricks is complete and smoke comes from its brick chimney.  First Wolf attack. 

Scene 9 – Same Clearing, Full Moon. (Wolf’s and Mrs. Wolf’s big duet.) 

Scene 10 – House of Bricks Exterior/Interior, roaring fire and boiling soup pot.  Second Wolf attack.

Scene 11 – Same Interior, Dinner!  (Stupendous dance number) 

(It’s macabre, but the Wolf, who narrated throughout the story, narrates again now – his talking head on a plate on the feasting table.  He sings that, without him,  Wolf’s Wife will have to send the Pups out into the world... hungry.  The play ends when a Pig puts an apple in Wolf’s mouth to shut him up.) 

That's the synopsis.  The students will try to come up with designs that solve the problems it presents in a black box theater.  (Notice the big one yet?  That transition from Woods to Clearing?)  (Well, and also the built-in problem of building and blowing-away piggie houses on stage in the audience's full view.)

So, the idea of a charrette is to sit down and thrash out an initial design.  I've read definitions online that define it as including input from others (not just the designer) and, in my experience, this can be true.  (Architect Charles Moore, a noted and unusually collaborative collaborator once responded to citizen phone calls!)  But to me, the all-at-a-single-sitting is the defining aspect.  It's a way to force-march through the design process.  And the time pressure and presence of others also struggling with the problem that adds oomph! to your thinking.  

The students are about a 1/2 hour into it - just starting to grasp the difficulties.  We'll see what they've got in 5 1/2 more hours.  (5 1/2 hours minus pizza time.)

A little extra tidbit: I discovered that the name "charrette" comes from the French name for the cart that rolled around the Ecole de Beaux Arts, collecting student architects' work.  The work would be taken away to be judged... just like the tumbril taking prisoners to the guillotine, or so my old French professor explained.

No tumbril today!