Environmental Design Proposal

The Team Venture group proposes to stage a scene at the Bonny Dunne Beach. We feel that the area is a beautiful and tranquil area with much scenic potential. We hope to perform a classic play, such as The Tempest, at an area where we can use the full potential of what is available to us. This way we can have the option of doing scenes in the water and on land. On May 15th around 2pm, the Team Venture group will all take a trip to Bonny Dunne Beach and use the materials found on location to create a set for our scene. We will use driftwood, rocks, shells, seaweed, and the sand as props and scenic design for our piece. Possibilities include making sand castles with the sand, thrones out of driftwood and rocks, and a makeshift proscenium arch out of driftwood and seaweed. Rather than de-installing our set, we will let the forces of nature slowly take it apart.


and its a damn good excuse to take a trip to the beach. :)

hows it sound? anything i should change?

Collage!!!

hey hey sooo yeah this is my super fabulous collage. Felt like it was about time to put it up

:)

Meetings

So people - the attendance at the meetings has been less than stellar. Please let us (by which I mean me or Carrie, preferably) know in advance if you aren't going to make it. If you've been out of the loop, it's at Stevenson Café on Wednesdays between 6:15 and whenever we feel like we're done with team business. I know this hasn't been ideal for everyone, but it's the only time that works for the majority.

- Z

Environmental Design

Hey everybody,

So, I was thinking that a cool place to do this would be that gutter that's next to the path from Theater Arts to Oakes. We could put barriers or sticks around it, or whatever, I just like that place. What was everyone else's ideas?

A Dream and A Design

In my dream, I sit shiva in the center of the cosmos as I mourn the death of nothingness. Around me the galaxy turns, radiant in its existence and life, and above me my nascent ears hear the voices of the death-gods as they decide how the universe must work.

A chattering voice speaks first with the clanking tones of bones – the Hopi Skeleton-Man. He claims dominion over his people and war for all eternity.

The reaper is cut short by the growl of a great cat. Nergal, the lion-headed war-prince of Babylon, challenges the Skeleton-Man, for his people will come first and achieve more greatness and glory, and thus it is he who should be the lord of war-deaths. I hear the animal rumble in his voice, but I cannot see anything but the gentle glow of the slowly spinning galactic disc.



The roaring lion is in turn cut short by Time’s first laugh. This Buddha is a jolly man, and his words both chide and enlighten. There is no need for death-gods to argue over war, he says. Time will provide us all with an eternity of souls. I wonder with my waking-mind why he is there, but the thought vanishes in a period of time that could either be a moment or an eon.

Silence falls over this infant infinity as Anubis, that jackal-headed arbiter, raises his hand. Behind him, always waiting, always hungry, the Bone-Eater stirs, but she cannot act yet. Anubis places the universe’s soul on his scales, and nods once at the balance of it. This newborn space is pure of heart.



So, says the All-Father from his place on high. Time begins now. Harvest ye the souls of your people. Maintain ye the balance. Odin has spoken.

My eyes now see the five gods floating above the galactic plane. The galaxy spins on, uncaring.

World on Stage notes

-Theater consists of many things that are what they seem. i.e. a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair
-what they are in the real world does not matter to a semiotician (semiology is a branch of pathology concerned with symptoms)
-art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life
-if art is a way of endowing the world with meaning, it is also a way of allowing the world to express itself
-it's the disease that interests a phenomenologist, not the germ that causes it or the stages of its progress
-macbeth could be reduced to a sign of a dagger with a red line through it but would then be somewhat inefficient of a story
-almost anything under the right sociological conditions can be "seen through" and pass into convention. I.e. real blood and violence in roman gladiator fights
-people dont like working clocks on stage because they take away the idea that theater isnt real
-vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given to me for being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of being from the inside-the fission at whose termination, and not before, i come back to myself
(this was said about painting, but is also a good description of the suspension of disbelief in theater)

A Priori Acoustics (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Noise)

I can't deny that I've spent a gorgeous afternoon in my room with the curtains drawn, listening to dead men through a dead medium. That's how I like to spend my time. Different strokes, right? I find that when I create a wall between me and reality, I can see reality better. Separation allows for objectivity, or maybe it's like Douglas Adams' Somebody Else's Problem Field - to wit, something that your brain filters out because it isn't your problem, and you only can catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of your eye.

Every sense is important, but some are undervalued. Theater is like sex, though - every sense must be utilized in order for the participants to find release. Mind you, I'd start wondering what I was doing as a sound designer if my work gave audience members orgasms (and I'd have a hell of a time explaining things to the cleaning staff), but I know there's a similar thing that sound can evoke without all that unnecessary stickiness.

Right now my ears are ringing with Lou Reed's ambivalence and feedback. Nobody else is home, so the turntable is cranked to a metaphorical 11 (except that the dial has no numbers at all, so I have to assign volume levels arbitrarily - "soft," "ow," "rock out," "42," "11," and "noise ordinance violation," in that order). It helps with inducing states of synesthesia. At my best, I can physically feel the sound, feel the shriek of the violin or the silk of Nico's voice, or see the spirals of color inherent to this nominally black angel. That, or I'm just having caffeine withdrawal.

Maybe I'm biased from working in radio, a purely aural medium, but sound doesn't get enough credit or attention in theater. The envelope there needs to be pushed, or ripped open, or run through a shredder and set on fire. It's not just music - although music is a crucial way in which people can experience aural transcendence - but the way that things in their entirety are heard and realized. Words are sound. Read this out loud, find the colors and the vibrancy in it that just don't exist as they sit static on your computer screen. Sounds are signs and symbols. Hell, thanks to sound designers from the 30s and 40s, everyone thinks that hoofbeets sound like two coconuts being banged together. This is of course a side effect from Foley sound design - a form of creating sound effects that usually has nothing whatsoever to do with what something sounds like and everything to do with what people think it sounds like; the sound of broken bones is made by snapping sticks of celery, and the aforementioned Monty Python bit, which made for a trope that was delightfully subverted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Sets tell an audience's eyes where they are, but sound tells it to the blind man, or the girl who forgot her glasses (or stubbornly didn't wear them because she thinks they make her look like a librarian), or to everyone during a blackout. Sound evokes primal reactions more than any other sense - that's why horror movies without the sound are just funny, or action movies dull, or why there's an entire business field centered around writing music for pornos. It is our duty in theater to both entertain and enlighten, and sound on its very own can achieve both of those, whether manifested as an LP or a Zen sutra.

I've opened my curtains now that the record is over. Now is the time to embrace the comparative silence - the other side of the aural coin. Yet even in the silence I hear windchimes, five kinds of birds, children, traffic, the wind and rain, my faucet dripping, the clicking of my keyboard and, underneath it all, my own heart beating. Eyes closed, I know exactly where I am and what my world is composed of.

And now I flip the record and coin and start it all over again.

(Next up: Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" and why pop music makes for great theater)