Rich Dionne's Posts - TheatreFace

It Looks Like This is the End...

2013-08-16T13:58:31.000Z

I'm sitting in the house at the Dorset Theatre Festival as my crew finishes applying molding and other detail touches to the set for Clybourne Park, our last show of the season. This production was coproduced with Barrington Stage in Massachusetts, and as part of the cost-sharing discussion, we decided it would be smart to split the physical labor--have some of the set built by our shop here, and some built in the shop at Barrington.

There were a lot of reasons to split the construction; time, of course, being the biggest: it was pretty clear that neither shop would be able to successfully complete the build of the whole set in the time available. In order to keep the scope of the set intact, the construction would have to be split between the two groups. Additionally, we're a small shop, and while we do some things really well, detailed architectural work (moldings, custom windows and door casings, that kind of thing) are a little outside our wheelhouse. We simply don't have the tooling and skills to do that kind of work as well as I'd prefer. From photos of previous productions at Barrington stage, it was clear that their shop did; consequently, I strongly suggested that this work be completed in their shop. It just seemed to make more sense for materials to be built in the shop and by the people who'd complete it to the highest level of quality.

The set--a box set--is comprised of solid-color walls on the sides, a ceiling (yay for more ceilings!), a staircase upstage, and a coffered-panel wall upstage of the stairs. The upstage units--cofffered wall and stairs--were to be the same wood treatment as the architectural elements, and Jes, our charge, felt (and I agreed) that having one shop try and paint/stain some wood elements and another try and do the same with the rest, about 100 miles away, seemed...not so wise. It would be next to impossible to coordinate and be sure elements stayed in the same world. So...we agreed to have the wooden elements--trim, doors, casing, windows, stairs, and coffered wall built and finished by the Barrington shop, while we would complete the floor, flat-colored walls, and ceiling.

The elements we completed had their own amount of detail: the ceiling included soffets to allow for lighting positions over stage; the ends of the deck, walls, and ceiling were to look as if they were "cut through," revealing plaster, lath, studs, joists, and the like; the ceiling downstage was to support small walls to indicate upstairs/"attic" rooms. It was complicated detail work, but the kind of thing we can do well (and, frankly, I think we did.)

Most of you are probably feeling the same anxiety about building in two separate shops that I did: how do you make sure everything fits together as it should? Will the logic of load-in assembly match what you normally do? What if it doesn't all work? What if what shows up off the truck isn't of acceptable quality?

We wrestled with all of these questions, and decided with our Producing Director that we wouldn't be "responsible" for what came from Barrington, but that we would work as closely as we could with their TD and scenic charge to ensure things would go smoothly for load in and tech. And, for the most part, they did.

However, I personally learned that abdicating responsibility wasn't the best option to satisfy my sense of pride in my work. The material we received from Barrington was solid construction, and it mated with our pieces reasonably well. However, there were a lot of elements of these units that weren't built how I would have built them, and some of the working parts (there are doors, and some of the coffered panels must come off during an intermission shift) don't operate as nicely as I would prefer. Also, there was a fairly large communication error in terms of paint treatment, and all the wood-toned elements came out significantly darker than the team expected. Giving up responsibility for these elements was meant to absolve me from having to a) feel badly about them, and b) fix them. But, of course, that's not what happened--I did feel badly, and I did feel the need to fix them as best I could in the time I have.

In retrospect, abdicating responsibility was a cowards way of avoiding the question of authority. I teach my students that you can't be held responsible for something that you don't have authority to change, affect, or adjust. By saying I didn't want to be held responsible for the materials Barrington provided, I was really saying I felt uncomfortable being in a position of authority over the Barrington folks (and that I definitely didn't want to be under their authority). But that was cowardly. I should have insisted that their be one TD, one person in authority. We should have--as two companies, as part of the negotiation--determined that one or the other shop was "in charge"--generating drawings, being responsible for quality control and fit and finish, for communication with the designer and the director.

Things we learn when we do new things, right?

How to Build It (or, Drawing for the Shop You Have)

2013-08-09T18:34:56.000Z

I found myself staring at a designer drawing of a simple porch column the other day: about 14' tall, with a 3'-tall brick base and a tapered square profile above. I started drawing it, and then stopped. I was stuck--thinking about different views, different construction techniques, different material choices. It was a little frustrating, frankly, but not all that uncommon: I often find myself spending a lot of mental energy thinking about how to build a piece of scenery--even the seemingly simple pieces and small units. I'll draw a few lines of geometry in one view, then a few in another, and then stop and stare, maybe move on to something else.

This seeming procrastination used to drive me crazy. I use to kick myself, trying to figure out what was wrong with my head. Was I tired? Was I suffering a caffeine crash? Did I have a minor stroke to the spatial recognition centers of my brain?

Of course not. My Dad taught me many things, but one of the most important was to always trust my gut. I've learned to trust that when I find myself turning away from a drawing, that's my gut telling me I need to think more about what I'm doing. Sometimes that's because I've missed something--how a unit interfaces with another unit, how I need to rig it to fly, or whatever. Often, I've found, is that what I need to think about is not simply how to build it--but how my shop, the crew of people I have right now with the resources I have available, can build the unit.

For many units--typical walls and decks--there are a small handful of tried-and-true construction methods, and picking one is often a simple matter of considering time and money. But for more complex scenic units, figuring out how to achieve the effect the designer and director are asking for, within the parameters of time and money you have available, with the skill sets you have in the shop, can be...difficult. Consider a ceiling for a recent production of Barefoot in the Park here at Dorset Theatre Festival. The design of the production had two walls which met at an angle of about 80 degrees; the top of one of these walls rose from about 5' off the ground (where the two walls met) to a height of over 14'. Capping these two walls was a ceiling piece.

To have these units--the two walls and ceilings--meet with nice joints at the corners--what a friend of mine would say is with "good fit and finish"--would require some tricky compound mitres and bevels. Our shop is comprised of an experienced ATD, an experienced carpenter, and three interns with (relatively) little experience. This show by far included some of the most complicated scenic construction we'd attempted to date, with beveled flats that had mitered tops--but so far, the interns had not attempted any difficult compound joinery. Given that the intersection of these two walls and this ceiling were center stage--would likely be a big focal point of the visual picture--I was very anxious we not get to load in and have big gaps or overlaps that we would need to account for.

Like the porch column for our current show, I stared at that ceiling piece for a couple of days, trying to figure out why I couldn't figure out how to draw it. The reason, of course, was that I didn't know how to match the complexity of the construction required to meet the level of fit and finish I found acceptable with the level of skill and ability in the shop. I could draw those compound mitres easily. I could draw a collection of three flats that, in the CAD world on my laptop, fit together perfectly--like they were meant to go together. But I didn't have any confidence that, having drawn them, the shop would be able to achieve the level of accuracy and detail required to make those flats meet perfectly in the real world.

Let me be clear: I've got a great shop. But 3/5 of that shop is inexperienced and young. Not *bad*, just young. However, I believe, just like with my students and my son, it's important to set my shop up to succeed. Giving them construction tasks that are way beyond their ability to achieve successfully does nothing other than create frustrated carpenters who have to punt and often rebuild units once we arrive at load in. (For the record: I'm all for challenging my staff--they'll never get better if I don't--but I'm not interested in making more work for them during what is always the most time-intensive part of every show by giving them construction tasks they cannot complete correctly and will only have to fix at load-in.)

Perhaps it's clearer now why my brain sometimes declares a time-out when doing construction drawings for some scenic units: the need to fulfill a designer's vision sometimes collides pretty heavily with the need to draw construction tasks my shop can complete successfully. This usually means a lot more thinking about how to achieve the desires of the designer, because the methods available may be somewhat limited.

For the ceiling unit in Barefoot in the Park, the solution was deceptively simple: build the wall short enough that the ceiling could sit on top, and let the ceiling be wider than the opening and overhang the wall. This prevented the shop from having to struggle--probably unsuccessfully--with compound mitres while still achieving the designer's desired vision.

Sure; my solution seems like an obvious one. But it's easy to get tunneled-in on the designer's drawings--which, in this case, included elevations of the ceiling ending up against the wall, not over it--and lose sight of what your shop can easily accomplish. Being a good technical director, however, means finding achievable solutions to the challenges the designer poses. Often, this means keeping in mind what skills your staff has, and dreaming up creative methods of leveraging those skills to their advantage.

Oh boy...Another Oversized Crown Molding...

2013-08-02T12:15:35.000Z

Three quarters of the productions at Dorset Theatre Festival this summer have been architecturally-real box sets (not atypical for this company). One fairly standard feature for these kinds of sets is the oversized crown molding: typically the profile for molding like this is something like nine inches to a foot tall by six to nine inches wide, and features a couple of different curves and breaks to create shadow lines. Our three architecturally-real sets are no exception, all three have sported large crown molding--our last show, Clybourne Park, has some 120 linear feet of it.

Large crown molding like this is typically able to be constructed of built-up, off-the-shelf molding shapes. You take a piece of five-inch crown, for example, attach it to some 1x material, add a half round, maybe an interesting picture rail profile, then a cove or an ogee shape, and voila! Big crown molding.

A nice five-inch crown can run you something on the order of $3 per linear foot. Less if you go for less detail. You can probably pick up the half round and picture rail for about $1 per linear foot, the 1x for about the same. In other words, you can easily end up paying $6-$8 per linear foot for this stuff, depending on profiles and level of detail.

I can't pretend that that doesn't break my heart, every time.

Additionally, these built-up shapes weigh a lot--there's a lot of material in each linear foot, and not a few fasteners. I've never seen this stuff fall off a wall. But I've also never felt great about it hanging off a Lauan-covered flat with just a handful of fasteners between a beautiful piece of trim becoming a really heavy and loud crash.

We've been fortunate to have been able to work with an architectural shapes manufacturer who is local here in Vermont (I've used these folks before, for a production of Death of a Salesmen at the Weston Playhouse in 2010). They are able to make--usually within 24-48 hours--an exact version of the molding profile drawn by our designers out of expanded polystyrene foam. The advantage of this product is three-fold:

1) it weighs next to nothing: I could easily carry (provided I could get my arms around it!) the 15 8' lengths that will make up our 120 linear feet of crown molding, and not break a sweat,

2) it saves me time on the floor; if this firm is making my crown molding, I've got at least one more body back on the floor building something else instead of piecing the crown together out of various shapes,

3) it is pretty cheap: the crown for Clybourne Park is a mere $1.56 a linear foot; for that price I'm getting the exact shape my designer specified AND I'm getting an additional body back in the shop.

In other words, it's a no-brainer.

Expanded polystyrene is more commonly known as "bead-board"; this isn't the colored insulation foam you can pick up at the lumber yard, but rather the big brother to those inexpensive white beach coolers. I say big brother because the density of the foam is typically much higher than in those throw-away coolers, making the product stiffer and more resistant to dents and dings. However, expanded foam does present a few challenges to consider.

First, it's not a pretty paint surface. It has small voids and dimples. In the past, I've worked with charges who have applied various coatings to address this, including flex glue, scuplt-or-coat, a white-glue dope, and others. The charge at Dorset this year has used Aqua Resin in the past, so we are going with that product this time. This stuff isn't inexpensive, but only adds about $1 per linear foot to the total cost of the molding--still far less than a built-up shape would cost.

The coating serves another pretty useful purpose: expanded polystyrene, when used in building applications, typically needs to be enclosed in a more-fire-retardant barrier. These coatings encapsulate the foam, providing a layer of flame protection to the product as well as a sandable, paintable surface.

Expanded polystyrene foams also give off gasses that shouldn't be breathed when they are heated, so care must be given to work in well-ventilated areas and wear proper protection when working with these products--particularly when using power saws to cut them.

These risks, however, are manageable, and certainly, in my mind, don't outweigh the significant savings in time and labor that subcontracting out these large moldings provides. So far, we've been really happy with the results, and I don't expect things to be any different on Clybourne Park!

Wait...They'll be Barefoot? Or, A Show About Shoes

2013-07-26T12:37:30.000Z

Last weekend, during the load in of our production of Barefoot in the Park at Dorset Theatre Festival, the costume designer came up to the theatre and asked if she could slap some shoes down onto the stage floor to see how they sounded. The actors had been wearing their costume shoes in rehearsal, and as they sounded very load on the hardwood floor of the rehearsal room, there was some concern they'd be loud on stage as well. If they were going to be, this would probably mean a trip to the cobbler to have some rubber applied. (This was a big deal--we are in the wilds of Vermont, and the nearest cobbler is a couple of hours away.)

I was talking to A. Lee Viliesis, our costume shop manager, about this, and we got to talking about how feet--and footwear--are the place where technical directors and costumers typically intersect. Feet are where the actors' bodies most consistently meet the set; consequently, footwear, flooring, stairs, and ladders are all topics where it pays to work closely together. I thought it would be fun if we both wrote a little bit about our experiences with feet, and asked if she'd contribute a few thoughts about shoes from a costumer's perspective this week.

"Wait, they'll be barefoot?" Few realizations can fill me with as much foreboding as the moment--typically after the flooring treatment has been purchased, painted, and prepped for install--I hear someone mention offhandedly that an actor will be barefoot in a scene. In an ideal world, this wouldn't matter; we'd be finishing floors with materials and using techniques that have the same kind of smooth, splinter-less surface we are all accustomed to in our homes. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in summer theatre--such treatments would blow the budget. Usually, we are doing some version of Masonite, Lauan, or 1/4" plywood; these materials can often splinter, leaving actors hobbling with bits of floor stuck in their feet. Knowing an actor will be barefoot in advance, however, we can make decisions about material and about how we prep that material to minimize this hazard.

In other words, it pays to ask the costumer about the footwear. And not just when it comes to flooring and bare soles. Your designer has specified 1/4" gaps in those floor boards? Those stilettos the femme fatale is wearing have 1/4" spikes; that's a recipe for a broken ankle, or at the least a broken shoe. You've only got room for a ships ladder, not a full escape stair stage left? The actor whose costume specifies flip-flops is going to have a tough time. Grated flooring, slippery linoleum tiles, stairs with not-deep treads--all sorts of choices in the set can affect and be affected by footwear choices.

Lets be honest--most of the time, when we talk about costumes at production meetings, I tend to glaze over. I have no doubt costumers do the same when we starting talking scenery. But it behoove both shops to communicate about these areas where our worlds intersect. We can help, from the get-go, ensure that the designers get what they want, the director gets what he or she wants, and the actors stay safe.

A show about feet...

Considering that the name of the current show here at DTF is Barefoot in the Park, we have spent a great amount of time talking about shoes. There is always a lot to consider about footwear when doing a period show. The style and shape of shoes and accessories act as punctuation to a beautiful costume.

Sometimes the process can become incredibly frustrating for a Costumer. What is comfortable may not be right for the look, and adding four insoles to three different pair of shoes may use your entire budget. However, there are important reasons that Actors' Equity has special regulations regarding foot ware.

From the AEA LORT rule book:

"(1) The Theatre shall provide properly fitted footwear which, if for dancing, shall be new. All other footwear shall be clean, sanitary, and in good repair."

It can feel particularly exasperating though to witness an actress complain about wearing the perfect pair of heels because they are too high or too snug, then show up to an opening night party in stilettos that are at least six inches taller and two sizes smaller.

So here are five things you should remember next time you are ready to scream, when you've purchased every option Zappos has, and discarded each in turn.

1. It's not just walking.

Actors have a lot to do when they get on stage. It's not just about walking around: fights, dancing, jumping, running and prat falls are all normal things to expect when an actor is doing their job, not to mention all the moving around backstage in the dark. The average length of a show is two hours, and it may seem like a short about of time, but all those unusual movements are physically demanding. It should also be remembered that repeated wear from a strange movement will affect a shoe differently then normal everyday wear, so reinforcement may be required.

2. Standing at attention.

If you've ever spent time on your feet, you are well aware that standing can be even more painful then walking. Jobs in the rest of the world that require long periods of standing often have shock absorbing mats, or shoes that are built for function not fashion. We all scoff at nurses shoes, but all that cushion sure is comfy. While performing, actors may have to stand still for long periods of time, and even worse they have to ACT like nothing is bothering them.

3. The flamingo dance

Ladies, have you ever switched your shoes three or four times in front of the mirror while picking out your outfit? There is a comedian out there that calls the leg to leg back and forth the "flamingo dance." Actors often play an extended version of this game as they switch shoes and clothes through the course of a show. Sometimes this is helpful, as it means they are only wearing something for a few minutes before they change again. What it means in the long run, though, is that their bodies never have a chance to adapt to one pattern of movement before they are switching to another.

4. Going out on a ledge.

At least two moments in "Barefoot" require someone to walk out on a ledge in front of a giant skylight as if on the outside of the building. The last time this happens the character has just taken off his shoes and is actually running around barefoot. We needed something for him to slip on quickly that was secure and would aid him in crossing the unfinished plywood ledge, but still give the impression of being barefoot. This illustrates one of my last points; there is always a need for just something practical. This is why character shoes even exist, they serve the purpose of being practical and versatile.

5. My body is an instrument, it's also my paycheck.

I think the most important thing to remember is that what an actor does on stage is a craft that requires their entire body. So all the safety precautions that we can take on our end, helps them do what they do for as long as possible.

So with all of this taken into consideration what can you do to make sure that your actors aren't really barefoot?

Theater's number one skill... COMMUNICATION!

What we do is collaboration to the very end. So listen to an actor's concerns, ask the right questions, and don't be afraid to have a little push and shove with the actor so that you can both get what you need out of the costume.

Getting Over the Hump

2013-07-19T13:24:51.000Z

We are days away from our third changeover here at Dorset Theatre Festival, and after weeks of rain impeding our build progress (we have a pretty small shop, so we rely on the ability to build outside), we've suffered through a week of near-100-degree temps and daily heat advisories. Our only vehicle capable of picking up material of any size from the lumber yard is in the shop. We just finished a changeover not two weeks ago. And, people are getting tired, and cranky, and generally all-around exhausted.

Yep, it's the middle of the summer. We're officially in the hump zone of the season.

We are all feeling it. We're exhausted. More importantly, we all recognize that no matter how hard we work--and my crew has worked very hard this summer--the schedule of changeovers has meant that we're going to be behind going into this weekend. We rocked the first two shows: we were ready, all of our scenery was complete and tight; when we got to load in for both shows, everything was essentially plug-and-play. We carried scenery in, dropped it in place, and walked away.

That's not going to be quite as true for show three this weekend.

What happened? Frankly, reality happened. This isn't that uncommon at summer stock: we dream big, but rarely have the resources to effectively realize that dream. We also rarely have the opportunity to engage the design team in an effort to reduce the scope of a production to within our limitations of time or money--every day spent on that conversation means there's even less time to build the show. And this is the time of the summer when changeovers crash into each other because of the complexities of performance scheduling--which limits our available time-on-task.

We went into the changeover for the last show, The Whipping Man--a scant 12 days ago--having already spent a half-week building our third show, Barefoot in the Park. As we expected, however, we spent a good amount of last week on Whipping Man--between load-in and working with the artistic team to continue to tweak and adjust the design. Essentially, this has meant we've really only had about six or seven days to build Barefoot in the Park--and most of those days we've been plagued by debilitating heat, causing us to work more slowly and make more mistakes.

Plus, this crew has worked hard since they got here in early June.

All of the above may sound like an apology for why we won't be ready for load-in. Don't misunderstand: we'll be fine. There will be elements that aren't as completed as I would like going into load-in, but we'll be ready for technical rehearsals, and easily ready for previews and performances. Rather, my point is to point out that for all our effort as technical directors and technical managers to plan, to organize, to bring a project within the parameters of time and money--sometimes we are faced with situations that we can't change.

Learning to navigate these situations--when all of our attempts to control a project end up being less successful than we would have liked--is probably one of the hardest lessons to learn as a technical manager. As the deadline approaches, pressures build--the pressure to satisfy the expectations of the artistic team, and your boss; the pushback from the shop when you try and push them harder than they can reasonably work. It's easy--in fact, you'd be inhuman if you didn't--feel trapped by the situation. And when that happens, we start to respond emotionally: we get defensive; we get insecure; we get depressed, moody, angry. We lash out, or hide, or any combination of the two.

It's part of our responsibility as managers to lead even in times of extreme stress, even in times when it feels like we may have failed, may not get the job done. In this case, leading means staying engaged, staying calm and collected, maintaining an even-keel and working through each problem and situation, one step at a time. It also means remembering an all-too-important rule about project management (and life, to be honest): there's always a way. That way may involve compromises we might not otherwise have considered, or radical, outside-the-box thinking. But there's always a way.

So: keep an open mind. Be gentle to yourselves and your shop. Work hard, push through, but also accept the challenges that come your way as part of the process, and find the way.

Keep the Painters Happy!

2013-07-12T13:17:20.000Z

I was driving to the store with our scenic charge, Jes, yesterday to pick up some vinyl tile for our upcoming production of Barefoot in the Park, and lamenting that I had no idea what I was going to write this week. As a joke, she said, "well, you should just write about me!" Of course, she meant it as a joke, but it got me to thinking...

Any time I start working with a new shop, I lay down a few ground rules. Most are the basics: correct is better than quick, but slow isn't ok; ask questions if you don't understand; that kind of thing. I tell them that during changeovers, I hate hearing carpenters shouting "who's got a c-wrench" or watching them roam around looking for a screw gun, so they should all get tool belts because I don't have time to be waiting for people to find tools they should know they'll need. And then I lay down the most important: "Keep the painters happy."

Why is "keep the painters happy" the most important rule? Because they provide the icing on the cake. My work only looks good if their work looks good. Without their hard work, all we've got is raw wood, bare masonite, and ugly lauan. In most ways, my work is engineering; I'm just recreating the shapes and structures that a designer has already figured out. The painters, however, must be artists in their own right, providing the finishes and details that make rough construction come alive.

Keeping the painters happy doesn't mean bring them coffee and pastries, however. There are some simple rules to follow when working with the paint shop; they start with my work, but are the responsibility of the whole shop. I present to you, then,

Rich's Rules for the Care and Feeding of the Paint Shop

When planning the build, remember the following:
- Work should be done by tech, not opening
- After my work is done, the painters still have at least a couple of days of work and their work should be done by tech (so leave time for them to do it!)
Work with your charge to determine the best paint surfaces and materials. Don't make assumptions about any of your choices--partner with your charge on every material decision, so they can plan ahead for what's coming at them.
Develop a build schedule with your charge--some items they will need or want first because treatments involve multiple steps or long dry times, so endeavor to get those items to them earlier in the build if possible.
When constructing scenery, don't succumb to the temptation to say, "the painter can fix this." If you've made a mistake, fix it--don't pass your mistakes on to the paint shop. They already have their own work to do.
Remove all blemishes due to construction and fasteners. Fill screw holes and sand them smooth; fill and sand lauan seams; fill staple holes and hammer dings. Provide as clean and clear a surface as possible for the paint shop, so they can proceed more quickly to doing their job, which is to put a scenic treatment on the unit, not clean up after the scene shop.
There's almost always more carpenters in the scene shop than there are painters in the paint shop. Consequently, the scene shop should happily and willingly move scenic units around with the paint shop. More hands make lighter--and quicker--work.
Learn to back paint and base. Some charges don't ever want carpenters to touch a brush--and that's fine. But others will gladly accept the offer of a carpenter to throw down base paint or back paint when time gets tight. Freely offer, if the labor is available.
Learn to clean up your paint equipment. The number one reason charges don't want carpenters using paint tools? We're pigs. Learn to clean brushes and rollers properly; learn to clean out a roller tray, to properly cover paint cans, and to clean up after yourself as a painter.

The stress and pressure of regional and summer theatre can sometimes lead to departments hunkering down and worrying only about their own work and stress--and consequently hurting other departments' abilities to get their work done. Let's not succumb to this! Let's support each other; work actively toward making each other's work easier, not harder. Don't kick the stress down the calendar to the last people in the process--typically the painters.

Keep the painters happy! They make your work look good!

Building a Destroyed Ceiling

2013-07-05T12:00:00.000Z

I have written many times about how to build machines or how to put together control systems for various effects; I can't recall a time when I wrote about how to construct a particular visual effect. We have had a really cool element to tackle the last week at Dorset Theatre Festival that I really wanted to share. The set designer has called for a full ceiling in our production of The Whipping Man (yes, the backwards ceiling from last week!); she also has called for a chunk of that ceiling--about a 5' by 6' area--to look as thou the plaster has fallen and the lath behind it has broken, as if a Civil War-era cannonball flew through it.

What a cool project! I'll admit I was a little concerned at first that a hole this big would weaken the integrity of this giant overhead piece of scenery, but that was easy enough to solve with some careful framing choices. In order to create the look, we built the hole up in layers, starting from the "plaster" and working our way backwards into the ceiling.

The outer layer is simply Lauan; when we built the flat, we left a large area--roughly 8'x8'--unframed, but covered with Lauan. This would be the area where the hole would be. Behind that, we glued 1/2" thick rigid insulation. The stuff we had available is the high R-value, metal-foil covered style. The foil was not exactly what we wanted, but the white foam inside was perfect--it breaks in interesting ways, and I like the texture of it.

Once the glue set up, our scenic artist cartooned the rough outline of the opening. Amanda, our carpenter, cut out a rough approximation of that shape--slightly smaller than was drawn. She proceeded then to make a series of straight relief cuts from her cut out outline to the cartooned one. Once she'd made a number of these cuts in an area, she proceeded to use a hammer to break the Lauan-and-foam "plaster" which came off in chunks. The result looked great.

Once this was done, Amanda applied the lath strips (which had been stained by our charge previously). Behind these, she attached 2x4 rafters which had also already been stained. After identifying some areas where more breakage should occur, Amanda scored the backs of the Lauan lath strips with a sharp knife and proceeded to break them out using a hammer and her hands.

I'm sure we will do some additional work to the unit once the designer sees it in the space, but I think it is a really great start on achieving a pretty cool visual effect! Words don't do the process nearly as much justice as photos, so check out the photo gallery below which documents Amanda's process.

Find more photos like this on TheatreFace

Handling Mistakes

2013-06-28T12:01:14.000Z

Yesterday, to quote a children's book, was a horrible, no good, very bad day. The set we are currently building at Dorset Theatre Festival is for a production of The Whipping Man, and features a large ceiling with a hole blown through it--as if from a cannonball strike. The shop has been working really well, and they've cranked out this scenery pretty quickly. I've been feeling quite good about our progress.

I was onstage yesterday, watching the painters apply texture to the ceiling flats, and something didn't look right. I started turning the piece around in my head, orienting it for load-in, and my skin went cold. Something was definitely wrong. I grabbed the drawings to confirm my fear; yep: the ceiling pieces--one about 12'x8', the other 16'x14'--had been faced upside down. To make matters worse, they had been *drawn* that way: I had messed up pretty big. Sometime, in the rush to generate drawings for the shop, I must have flipped the ceiling drawings over, then, not remembering I had done so, I flipped them again. (Undoubtedly, this happened on either side of one of those times I get called away from my computer, leaving me to forget the last thing I did one drawing. I really should learn to take notes...)

All told, we lost about a half day of shop labor. Not catastrophic, but no small thing. Worse, though: we cost the paint shop almost a full day of labor. This is personally devastating to me, as I pride myself on taking care of the paint shop, and doing everything I ca to make their jobs easier. And I hate when my mistakes mess up other people.

Still, though--mistakes happen. We are all human, and in the relatively quick pace of summer theatre, mistakes are inevitable. What's important is to remember how to handle them when they happen. Today, I have to confess that I didn't handle this mistake at my best.

I forgot yesterday that my team looks to me to know how we are doing. They look to me for confidence in their work, and in our progress. If I feel good about how we are doing, they'll generally feel good. If I look panicked, they'll be panicked. Knowing that, what did I do when I discovered my blunder? I panicked.

I cussed. I sweated. I stared back and forth between the drawing and the flat. My tone became clipped and short. I started barking direction. In short, I responded emotionally, when my team needed me to display confidence that this whole thing, while very unfortunate, wasn't the end of the world. Because it wasn't. Not really; my emotional response was not due to the effect of this mistake, but a function of my own expectations of myself and insecurity: I'd let my shop down--they were going to have to hustle to fix my mistake--and I'd seriously let the paint shop down--this was going to put them behind. I felt miserable, like a moron--not flipping the flat over and drawing it from the framing side is a rookie mistake, and I'm better than that. I was afraid that this would inspire doubt in the rest of my work.

The lesson here is to remember in every situation that responding from an emotional place rather than a rational one can sometimes be a big mistake--certainly, it was a bigger blunder this time than my drafting error. Fortunately, I have a rock star team this summer, and they recognized my gesticulations for what they were. I have some fences to mend this morning, to be sure, but I'm darn lucky to be working with the people I am working with this summer.

How to be an Intern

2013-06-21T13:19:49.000Z

One of my two shop interns has asked me the same question a number of different ways the past two weeks: "what is expected of me?" It seems like a simple question with an obvious answer--to those of us who've been working for a while. For the newcomer, the expectations and parameters can be blurry and intimidating. And, knowing what is expected of you is kind of fundamental to knowing how to perform.

So, without further introduction, and as a courtesy to all the new and soon-to-be-new interns out there, I present,

Rich's 5 Steps to Being a Great Intern

1. Work hard

This is a pretty obvious one, but probably the most important. Summer theatre is fun: you meet lots of new people; shared housing has an intense, summer-camp-like feel; late getting-to-know-each-other nights abound. But it's also hard work: most summer theatres walk a thin line of trying to do great art with no money and no time--which means work hours are going to be busy and intense. When you're an intern, it can seem like things are moving really fast (they are--it's fast for those of who've been doing it for a while, too!). Every hour in the shop is an essential one, so make sure your efforts count--keep working, keep pushing, and keep your energy up until the last dust pile is swept and the last trash can is emptied. Every task during the work day is an important one when you're doing as much as we try to do--so give each task, however minor or dull, your 100%.

2. Have a good attitude

We're going to do some great things. We're going to do some crappy things. We're going to do the same note 15 times, and never get it correct. We're going to repair scenery that gets chewed on and spit out at night. Door slams will break off slam strips; breaks will tear off of wagons--and we'll have to fix it. You may have to squiggle underneath a 1'-0" tall deck and play with the dust bunnies.

Yep--those jobs are all going to suck. They'll take time away from the other work we're doing, and you'll feel stressed, tired, overwhelmed; you'll want to be cranky at the actor that slams the door, at the assistant stage manager that locks the wagon, at the TD who's gotten a little too round-about-the-middle to squeeze under the deck himself. But don't be cranky: this is summer theatre! Recognize that these things are all part of the experience and part of the job, and though you don't have to like them, you have to accept them. And if you're going to have to do them anyway, isn't it more fun to do them with a smile, singing a cheesy song?

3. Learn something new every day

Your biggest job as an intern is to learn. You've taken your internship because it's an opportunity to experience a working-theatre, surrounded by experienced professionals, someplace different than your school. So many things to learn! So many new ways of doing things, new skills to pick up, new techniques to discover. Your teachers probably tell you that during your internship you should make a great impression, demonstrate your skills, show your boss why you should be hired back. All of those things are true (we'll talk more about that below); but you should worry less about showing off what you know and more about gaining a ridiculous amount of new knowledge that you can't get at your school. Make it a goal to learn at least one new thing every day, and be specific about it: write your Mom, or your cousin, or your professor, every day, and tell them what you learned. Or keep a journal. Whatever works.

4. Make connections

Most people get jobs because of who they know. Hard work, a great resume, a good degree--these are all good things; without them, however you get a job, you likely won't keep it. But getting that job is as much about who you know and who knows you than anything else.

It's hard to make connections at school. Your faculty are great networking opportunities, as are guest artists, but you'll work with the same people--or mostly, anyway--for four years. Your internship is a great opportunity to meet new people, make new connections. So introduce yourself to the set designer; find a good opportunity--not when you're working, or they're finishing notes, for example--to have a coffee with the costume designer; ask the lighting designer if they'd be willing to tell you how they got into theatre, what they love about it, what advice they have for a young professional. You'd be surprised how far a short conversation over lunch can take you.

5. Relax

Don't try so hard! Yes, work hard. Yes, learn new things, make connections, have a great attitude. But also, remember that we do this because we love it. There's a good chance that if you're giving up your summer to get paid next to nothing to work long days, it's because you are passionate about theatre. The same is true for the rest of us. So remember that: remember why you do theatre, what you love about your chosen career, and relish that. Remember that this is supposed to be fun!

The Intern Paradox

2013-06-14T12:59:29.000Z

We're deep into the load-in of our first show at Dorset Theatre Festival (a production of Theresa Rebeck's The Scene). As is often is the case, it's a bit of a push to make it to focus and tech, and I find myself a little tense, a little anxious, and expecting way to much of myself and my staff in too little time.

I've got a fantastic staff: my ATD, Aaron, is level-headed, talented, and hard-working. The staff carpenter, Amanda, is also very skilled, and both have great attitudes. In addition to these two staff members, I have two (and a half) interns in the shop, Bill, Ian, and Glenn. (I say Glenn is a half-intern because he's is a combination sound/carpentry intern, so sometimes we lose him to audio business.) They also have great attitudes and work hard. All of them have pulled figurative rabbits out of their hats as we've completed the first set in a mere 8 days or so of construction. (It's hard to believe our first day of actual work was last Wednesday!) I couldn't be happier with my shop this summer.

I had a moment yesterday, though, that I'm not entirely proud of: two of the interns were completing a task on stage--something I had assumed would happen pretty quickly--and it was taking them longer than I wanted. I snapped a bit at Amanda that I need things to be done quickly and done correctly. Which, of course, is true. But also a bit unfair. Why? Well, after all: Bill and Ian and Glenn are interns. They aren't staff. And as much as they perform like staff much of the time, I have to remember that they aren't--they are here to learn, to experience the fun of summer theatre, and to grow.

The Fair Labor Standards Act--the law which provides for a minimum wage and for overtime for certain categories of workers--has a specific definition for "intern" (a category not subject to minimum wage and overtime, as it is an educational opportunity, not employment). According to the U.S. Department of Labor website, that definition is as follows:

The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;
The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;
The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded;
The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and
The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

All six of these conditions must be met in order for the position to qualify as an internship.

It can be easy, in the crush of priorities, to want things to happen quickly; to feel the pressure to complete the job, and to be confounded by the speed at which a crew works. Interns complicate this situation, because we almost always want them to function like lesser-paid--sometimes "free"--labor. But they can't, and they shouldn't.

On days like yesterday, I have to remind myself of that fact: of the fact that interns are here for their benefit more than they are here for mine. It helps to remember, especially, the fourth condition of the definition of internship: "the employer...derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded." I try, during the crazy times, to almost repeat it as a mantra: "they're supposed to make it harder; they're supposed to make it harder..."

It's the intern paradox: we've got all these working bodies! They should be making it faster, better, easier! But that's faulty thinking: if I'm doing my job correctly--if I'm providing training opportunities for these interns--then they really should be making my job harder and slower. And that can be frustrating to be sure. But that's the way it should be.

CAD Basics

2013-06-07T13:04:25.000Z

I was inspired by Erich Friend's blog post, "A 400 HP Pencil," on CAD issues yesterday, and I thought I'd use this time to talk a little about my thoughts on using CAD most effectively.

First off: "CAD" does not refer to "AutoCAD." I recognize that there's something cool about shortening names and creating our own "insider lingo," but that's not where "CAD" comes from--it's not an abbreviation for a particular drafting application, but an acronym: "computer-assisted drafting." When I talk about CAD, though I may sometimes use application-specific terms and processes, I'm talking broadly about approaches and conventions that work equally well in any CAD environment--AutoCAD, Vectorworks, Rhino CAD, what have you. We can argue for days about which CAD application is "better," but there are a couple of truths about CAD software: 1) there are a number of applications available, and people use all of them, even in theatre; 2) each application has its own advantages and disadvantages. Consequently, 3) it's in everyone's best interest to adhere to some standards of practice that are cross-platform.

Erich points out some good practices: use blocks/symbols whenever possible; keep your entities in cohesive groups--as opposed to single lines--whenever possible; keep in mind the amount of detail required for your particular drawing so as to keep file sizes low. These are all essential to creating useful, useable drawings.

It's important to consider drafting conventions as well. Hopefully, if you're drafting at all, you understand something about basic drafting "rules": hidden lines represent edges behind the surface closes to the viewer and are shown as thin, dashed lines; hatches should be drawn with thin lines, while section boundaries should be drawn with thick lines, etc. These conventions were developed over years of practice and have become a kind of vocabulary and grammar for mechanical drawings--for giving meaning to lines on a page of vellum. Certainly, CAD provides for much more complexity and meaning in drawings, but forgetting these basic building blocks of meaning can lead to confusion and overly-complex drawings. So, finding a way to carry them into the digital drafting environment becomes essential.

USITT has been working on a draft of conventions for CAD--hopefully that will be released soon! Until that happens, though, here are some of my thoughts on translating conventional drafting grammar to the digital environment.

Line weight. Line weight is an invaluable way to impart information about the relative importance of the geometry you've drawn: thin lines are less important, thick lines are more. But line weight is not implemented well in most CAD programs. That's fine, though: in CAD, we have the advantage of using color, which hand draftspeople did not. But instead of using color haphazardly, consider using value to make less important lines fade into the background of your screen while making more important lines pop. For example: if you draw on a black background, as I do (which is shown to be better for eye strain, by the way), consider making all of the entities which should be thin lines a darker value of a particular color, all of the medium lines a medium value of that color, and all of the heavy lines a brighter value of that color. This will make the thin lines recede into the background and the heavy lines pop, just as they do on the page. Obviously, if your drawing is eventually going to be plotted, you'll need to ensure they also have traditional line weights assigned to them, but you can turn off the unsightly visual representation of line weights on the screen.

Color. Color is a wonderful thing in CAD. With color, we have a way to differentiate more than three types of lines in a drawing (thin, medium, heavy), and we can classify and organize more kinds of information. However, picking colors at random, or having wildly varying color schemes can be overwhelming and confusing to people using your drawing. Ideally, your company or corporation will have a drafting standard which defines which colors should be used for what kinds of information, but if they don't, think carefully about why and how to use color.

What kinds of classifications do you need to differentiate? Is it important to easily see material choices? Is it necessary to separate architecture from scenery from lighting information? Do you have multiple floors to consider? Use these classifications to determine how many different colors you need to use. (And then consider using values of those colors for line weights within each classification you've selected!)

Layers and Classes. Layers and classes are wonderful and painful things. Used effectively, they can provide clarity and organization to your drawing. Used haphazardly, they can be clunky, cumbersome, and confusing. If you only have layers to play with, consider creating groups of layers for each classification of information you determined was important when thinking about color; within each group, create a different layer for each type of "line" you'll need to create. For example, I tend to group information into the broad categories of "architecture," "set designer" (for the designer's original information), and "TD" (for my work); I create, for each of these categories, layers for thin lines; thin/hidden lines; thin/ceiling lines; heavy lines; medium-weight lines; dimensions/notes; and centerlines. Why so many layers? For starters, I can easily turn them on and off for clarity. More importantly, instead of having to remember to assign color and line weight attributes to each entity, I can assign those attributes to each layer, and then assign the entities to the layer. A quick glance at the layer bar will tell me what "kind" of entity I'm looking at if I'm ever lost.

In CAD programs that have classes, this can be simplified: simply create classes for line weight/line types and layers for the information categories you've decided are important. You should be able to assign attributes (color and line type) to these as well.

Consider, as well, the more complex possibilities that CAD programs offer: create standard text and dimensioning styles; use "saved views" and "layer sets" to switch quickly from one part of the drawing to another and to turn on or off specific groups of layers, and use hyperlinks within the drawing as ways for users to access them. Careful use of these kinds of features will enable users to use your drawing like they would a packet of blueline drawing from previous generations, making your drawings more accessible and more useful.

I tell student that we live on the cusp of major changes in the way drawings are created and used. With the proliferation of touchscreen handheld devices, it's not going to be long before paper drawings are obsolete, and our shops are working from drawings on tablets and screens. Indeed, there are some shops doing this already! Today's students need to be at the front edge of this change, and developing good drafting habits that make your CAD drawings usable as digital documents--as more than simply overpowered drafting tables, whose purpose is to create paper drawings--is fundamental.

A Murphy Bed?!

2013-05-31T12:30:00.000Z

I mentioned last week that one of the designs I'm building this summer incorporates a Murphy bed, and I've spent the last week working out how to make it happen. What's a Murphy bed, you ask? You've seen them; they were a staple of physical comedy for a while. A Murphy bed is simple a bed that folds down put of a wall of a cabinet.

Here's some footage of the great Charlie Chaplin wrestling with a Murphy bed from the film, "One A.M.":

http://youtu.be/FiIJDNe-pDI

Turns out that while Murphy beds aren't incredibly common, there is apparently still a strong market for them, and there are a number of companies that offer direct sales of Murphy bed kits and full bed sets. Most are designed inside cabinets that are secured to the wall of your home--negating the need for major renovation of the structure of your house--and the kits themselves are relatively inexpensive: about $300 for the mechanism (which leaves you to build the cabinet and bed on your own).

Create-a-bed (http://www.create-a-bed.com) and Hiddenbed (http://www.hiddenbedusa.com) are two sources if you're looking to make that extra bedroom or small studio apartment more flexible.

The major trick to a Murphy bed--and the source of most of the comedic hijinks--is the lift-assist mechanisms. Beds are heavy, and it would take a lot of effort for one person to fold one back into a wall or cabinet. (I imagine the idea would be even less common if you had to lift the full weight of a bed each time you opened or closed the thing!) To make it easier to handle the weight of the bed, these mechanisms incorporate either springs or pistons to help do the work. In essence, the concept isn't any different from those struts on the sides of a hatchback trunk lid--they help lift the heavy weight of the lid (and to hold it in place above your head); in the case of a Murphy bed, they help lift the bed up into its hidden position.

Here's the trick, though: those springs and pistons are carefully calibrated for the weight of a bed. This is to prevent people being sucked up into them the way we see in movies. (It's still a little funny to watch, even when you know it's coming!) So the question for us is this: do we put a real bed into the flats onstage and buy one of these kits? And that leads to more questions: Can the flats handle the weight and stresses involved in this? Do we want to wrestle with the weight of a real bed during load-in and strike? Do we risk buildings lightweight fake bed and put one of these kits on, hoping for the best? Or do we spend some time doing some force calculations, buy our own springs, and hope it works?

Those are the questions I'm wrestling with today. I'll need to make some kind of decision by lunch time. Stay tuned to hear what we decide to do.

Summer Theatre!

2013-05-24T14:25:06.000Z

It's that time of year again: I've been organizing and packing my life into a summer-sized, fit-in-the-car packages as I prepare to head off once more into the time-honored tradition of summer theatre. This year, I'll be headed back to beautiful Vermont to work as the technical director at Dorset Theatre Festival for about twelve weeks.

Summer theatre, for me, invokes both excitement and dread. Dread? Yep, I said it: I sometimes dread the summer theatre scene. Those are some long days, long weeks, long nights, away from home and my son. And, let's face it: I'm not as spry as I used to be!

But for all of that dread, summer theatre is still exciting. I get the chance to work with new designers, new directors, and new carpenters. Without fail, the designs call on me to do things I've never had to do before (I have to build a Murphy bed, for example, this summer--if you've done one and have advice, I'll take any you have to offer!). The artists often take shows in directions I wouldn't have considered. And, while I'm always proud of the work our students do at Purdue, it's always invigorating to watch and listen as real pros bring a playwright's words to life in front of me.

My hard students have all left already--one for a different theatre in Vermont, Weston Playhouse (where I've been the TD before), and the other to Utah Shakespeare. These will be invaluable experiences for them, as they see how their peers work and learn how to interact with professional designers and directors in environments where the stakes are much higher than they are at Purdue. I am looking forward to seeing how they grow over the next few weeks.

And, of course, there's the chance to make new theatre friends. I cherish the relationships I've developed over the years; we all come together in that adrenaline-charged rush to mount too many shows that are too big for too little money, and learn to trust each other--to depend on each other--to get the job done. I have gained so many colleagues whose opinions and skills I trust and value this way.

So, yes: there's a part of me that dreads the coming few months. I'll be exhausted come August. But for all of that, I'm excited about all the new stuff that will come into my life during that time.

Where are you headed this summer? What are your favorite memories of summer stock? Share that one horror story!

Undergraduate Courses

2013-05-17T12:35:21.000Z

Most of my teaching responsibilities since coming to Purdue have been at the graduate level. There are a lot of reasons for this, but suffice it to say that I have--much to my own chagrin, quite frankly--found my curricular development efforts directed at the MFA degree program, rather than at undergraduate course work. Recently, I received a bit of a promotion--from lecturer to assistant professor!--and with this change comes the opportunity to shift my focus to include undergraduate course work. Consequently, I've been spending the last few weeks thinking about our course offerings in scenery technology: what we currently teach, what we could teach, and what might make an appropriate course sequence at the undergraduate level.

One thing that has always bothered me about our undergraduate course offerings: a typical student would never make the final cut in the recruitment process for the graduate program. I'd be hard-pressed to suggest a student attend the same program for both an undergraduate and graduate degree--you need to learn from different teachers, and broaden your perspective--but no undergrad after completing the major in design and production here would stack up against students recruited from other programs. This has always seemed a little bit criminal, and now I have an opportunity--a mandate, really--to address this. One objective for an undergraduate course sequence in scenery technology, then, is to give students competitive experiences and learning.

I've also been struck, during my time at Purdue, at how few students walk into our scene shop with an interest in scenery construction and scenery technology. We are an engineering school--many of the students who attend Purdue have at least a passing interest in tinkering, creating, and exploring technology. Technical theatre is chock-full of technology--we are constantly applying the engineering and technology students are learning across campus, and doing so in what are often very non-traditional ways. And yet, for the most part, students on campus don't know it. It seems to me that offering more courses to undergraduate students--and, of course, marketing the heck out of them--may open up opportunities for more students to see what possibilities exist in theatre and entertainment technology for people interested in engineering fields.

Finally, it has always struck me as somehow problematic that many of us seem to believe that an MFA is required to go far in this field. Truthfully--and I'll catch hell for this, I'm sure--most of the material we teach to graduate students (here and at other institutions) is absolutely accessible to the typical undergraduate student. Certainly the theories, procedures, equations, and what not related to structural and mechanical design, automation and control systems, show control, arena rigging, and the like. These aren't areas out of reach for most undergraduate students. Indeed, I have often felt that my graduate courses could stretch students further if they'd had a little more preparation at the undergraduate level, in statics, physics of motion, data communications and basic electronics.

What I'm trying to develop, then, is a course sequence that addresses these concerns of mine: to create courses that prepare undergraduates to be competitive in the job market and in terms of graduate recruitment and that engage students like those at Purdue who often tend to have an interest in technology. I'm planning courses in microelectronics, physics of motion, statics analysis, entertainment control systems and show control, rigging, advanced wood working, metalworking, and more. These courses would be intensely hands-on and project based; the intention would be to lay a foundation of understanding in these areas, so that by the time they reach their final year they could enroll in graduate-level courses, which focus primarily on the technical design process, building on an understanding of statics, mechanical analysis, control systems, etc. to solve large-scale, real-world application problems.

I think this is exactly what we need at Purdue, and I think it can work. Of course--otherwise, I wouldn't do it. What do you think? If you're a student, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this idea--would you be interested in classes like these? If you're a teacher, are you teaching courses like this to undergraduates?

Sport Clips

2013-05-10T13:08:59.000Z

So I was getting my hair cut yesterday, and the place where I go I sport-themed, with a half-dozen televisions showing ESPN. (Don't judge! I like the hot towel wrap!) Now, while I enjoy watching a good football game or a day at the diamond, I'm not one of those people who avidly follows particular teams, players, coaches, or the like. It's just not something I've ever spent time on. So as the young woman was cutting my hair, I found myself listening to SportsCenter, marveling that there are people whose job it is to dissect players' stats, performance, history, and future.

Then I thought, we'd never have something like this for theatre. Somehow we've culturally elevated athletics to a place where people can watch television about the minutiae of college football or professional hockey all day long--but we have never raised the importance of the arts to the same level.

That's not entirely true--there are places, like this site, that focus entirely on the art and craft of theatre. An acting alumna of Purdue's acting program, Dawn Glover, has been vigorously blogging about the west-coast theatre scene on Facebook (you can find her posts at http://www.facebook.com/TheatricaThnerd). I'm sure there are others out there.

But a discussion of the arts has never risen in popular consciousness to the same level as athletics has. But I wonder: ESPN was a pretty big gamble at the time it was launched; there wasn't any evidence that 24 hours of sports coverage would be profitable--that people would watch. Who can say if a 24-hour theatre and arts channel wouldn't work? I'm not talking IFC or early A&E; I'm talking on the same model as ESPN.

SportsCenter, as far as I understand it, is a one-hour show presented on a loop all day. I imagine that there are probably three or four tapings to keep up with new information throughout the day. In the evenings, sporting events are shown. So here's my proposal: a one hour show all about theatre. We get high-profile theatre reviewers on, and experienced directors, designers, playwrights, performers, and technicians; we give them five-minute segments throughout the hour. Start the hour with highlights of plays from around the country--cutting-edge directorial choices, interesting uses of materials, powerful acting moments. Then we move into shorter segments where our collection of talking heads analyzes productions and--more importantly--the theatre professionals working on those productions: "Rich Dionne's use of data communication technology continues to expand; his recent production of Johnny Goes to Orlando saw six individual wired networks, each with as many as four subsets. This is crazy, Jean! He keeps adding more gear to his control rigs, but if he keeps pushing the boundaries this way, no ones going to be able to afford what he's doing!" (Okay--that was a stretch. But you get the idea.)

Why couldn't this work? Why couldn't we raise the level of cultural dialog in this country by leveraging a packaging and delivery model that has been proven? I am not at all suggesting that we resort to the kind of hyped-up attention to particular athletes choices of footwear and whatnot that sometimes fills athletics discussions. But we could use the same format to present cogent, thoughtful, and compelling discussions about our art and how we do it. By doing so, maybe we educate the general public about how to talk about what we do--instead of arguing why we are relevant, we start by assuming it from the get-go and provide a framework and vocabulary for understanding our relevance.

Who's with me?

Linking it all together

2013-05-03T12:30:00.000Z

It is important to me that the final projects on my upper-tier classes do a few things as the culminating work in the class. They should:

Incorporate as many concepts, procedures, techniques, and processes as possible
Require students to integrate these concepts in ways similar to the ways they would need to be integrated in "the real world"
Present as close to a "real world" technical design process as possible, including a client/director/designer/producer who may ask for more than is possible with the given resources, or design requirements that evolve as the project progresses
Be tangible--in as much as is possible, be a project that students actually complete and present to each other and the public.

Coming up with a project that fulfilled these requirements for my show networking class this semester was tricky. There weren't any productions in our season specifically requiring the integration of lighting, sound, scenery automation and/or video into a single control network. How then, to come up with a show networking project that was tangible and presentable?

Then I remembered a trip to the local children's museum with my son, and had a revelation: interactive museum exhibits have lighting, sound, automated movement, and video--all interacting transparently to the user. This was perfect! I would present myself as a curator for a children's museum exhibit, and their project would be to create the control system for the exhibit.

The initial project asked for six stations, all based on simple physics of motion concepts: force to accelerate a mass, to overcome friction, lifting force, torque to accelerate a mass, to overcome friction, and lifting torque. Each station would have video, audio, movement, and lighting events; the entire room would have lighting and audio events based on user entry and exit; the number of people entering the exhibit would be tracked, as would the amount of time people spent at each station.

Over the course of five weeks, students developed a network design for the exhibit and an installation calendar. They quickly determined that given the available resources of their time and equipment for creating interactive machines, that they'd only realistically be able to complete four stations; in consultation with the client, they settled on three for thematic reasons: force to accelerate a mass, to overcome friction, and the lifting force. And the they put it together.

Each machine used simple limit switches, analog-controllable pneumatic regulators, pneumatic directional control valves, pneumatic cylinders, and PLCs for control, which communicated with a Mac G5 over a serial (RS-232) connection. The Mac G5 at each station was running Cycling74's Max/MSP software, which enabled two-way serial communication with the PLC. Each Mac also ran QLab audio/video playback software, which was triggered by Max/MSP over a virtual MIDI connection. Two stations used iPads with custom TouchOSC interfaces providing touchscreen controls to users of each exhibit; these communicated to Max/MSP via UDP over a closed wireless network. Additionally, a fourth Mac G5 was running another instance of Max/MSP; this instance tracked exhibit usage and "turned on" the room at the start of the day (via TCP over IP), playing ambient music (via QLab and virtual MIDI), and turning on exhibit lighting (via MIDI Show Control and an Obsession II lighting console).

Though students also created the interactive machines, in order to keep the bulk of their time focused on the show networking aspects of the project, they we encouraged to keep these machines as simple as possible. Additionally, I took on the role of creating all of the video and audio assets, again, to keep students' focus on the networking and control system aspects of the project.

Students presented the exhibit in our black box theatre this past Tuesday, to about two dozen students and faculty who perused the exhibit throughout the day. All in all, I thought it was an amazing project--the students demonstrated knowledge of many concepts, including serial communication, MIDI and MIDI Show Control, UDP, TCP, IP, wired and wireless Ethernet, system architecture, control heirarchies, time-based and event-based cueing, and more. They demonstrated understanding of multiple processes, including building Ethernet networks (wired and wireless, setting up static IP addresses), setting up MIDI connections and serial connections, programming Max/MSP for serial, MIDI, TCP/IP and UDP/IP communication, troubleshooting, and others.

Photos in the album below:

Find more photos like this on TheatreFace

End of Semester Evaluations

2013-04-26T12:28:02.000Z

It's that time of the year again: end of semester evaluations. At the end of each semester, my design and production colleagues and I all get together for a couple of hours and take time to share our experiences with each others' graduate students over the last 16 weeks. Ideally, this is an opportunity to celebrate the many good experiences while discussing those times when we've perceived opportunities for growth and development.

I'll confess that I approach these meetings with a pretty even mixture of trepidation and enthusiasm. I absolutely respect and depend upon my colleagues' reflections of their time with my students--they each have a perspective I don't, and often see facets of a student's development that I can't see, and hearing their thoughts helps me create a fuller image of my students' development. On the other hand, there have been times when we--myself included--have "jumped on the bandwagon" and shared our particular story of a student's challenges and failures, leading to an overwhelming conversation about the opportunities that particular student faces. Make no mistake, these conversations all come from a place of wanting to ensure that we all have a clear and full picture of each student's progress and development; however, it is always easier to hear an overwhelming number of stories about a student's successes than it is to hear one about their failures.

Every few years, for me, the stakes get a little higher in these evaluation conversations because I have students who are completing the program. I am typically very excited to hear my colleagues relate conversations about these students--they've grown, and blossomed, and if I've done my job, they have become colleagues more than students. I suspect that this will be true again, this year, as we discuss the third-year student who is graduating. These moments are a great opportunity to reflect on how far a student has developed.

One of the things that strikes me whenever we talk about student progress--whether in formal evaluations, or in off-the-cuff conversations in the hallway--is how easy it is to forget that our students all typically start in a similar place, and inevitably have to make the same journey of growth over the time they are with us. I typically hear all the same things when strong grads leave the program: most of these comments boil down to a concern that the students who have been in the shadow of these departing "heroes" won't be able to fill the more experienced grad's shoes.

In Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Spock's trainee crew is suddenly thrust into service to answer a distress call. Admiral Kirk, on board the Enterprise for an inspection tour, asks Spock how these green recruits will handle themselves if things go badly. "As anyone," Spock replies, "each with their own abilities." (At least, it goes something like that.) This is true of our students, too: each one is different, each with their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses; and when asked to step up when an older grad leaves, they will--in their own way, with their own strengths and weaknesses. The trick, for us as faculty, is to remember that these strengths are of course very different than those of the folks who are moving on; the weaknesses are different as well. This means things will be different--processes will change, things that went smoothly in the past will be rougher. But things that have gone roughly may suddenly go much better, too. It's our job to find a way to embrace and accept these changes as part of each students' progress--to celebrate their strengths, to help build and develop their weaknesses.

That's why we do this, right? Isn't that why we teach? Sure--it can sometimes feel like we're starting over--like, "didn't we already teach this?"--but that's because we are starting over. Each student has to take a similar journey from less knowledge and experience to greater, and it's our job to guide them along--and this means we're taking the same journey with them every time. It can be frustrating at times, and exhausting, and sometimes it can feel like nothing is getting better. But it helps to remember that in just a few years we'll be talking about how these students have grown into colleagues, and fretting over how the next batch will fill their shoes.

Flying Solo

2013-04-19T13:47:15.000Z

We've had an explosion of student-driven workshops over the past year at Purdue. It has been truly amazing to see so many young theatre artists exploring their craft, trying out new things, and generally being excited about our art, and I'm proud to say we've been fairly successful at making room for these projects that are not part of our main production season.

However, as one might imagine, these workshops create inevitable tensions; the greatest of these center around supervision, safety and security in workshop spaces. Consequently, I've spent a lot of time thinking about students "flying solo."

It's trite to say it, but when I was in school--when many of you were in school, too, I imagine--it was a different time. My instructors didn't think anything about putting a saw in my hand and saying, "go to it." Of course, I received some initial training on tools I was using, but the over-arching mentality was, "you only learn it by doing it." We climbed straight ladders without cages forty feet to loading galleries. We'd never heard of fall-arrest harnesses. We simply did our business--all of 18 years old--and had fun doing it.

It is a different time, however. I was listening to a recent NPR report about "grain walkers" or "silo walkers"--high school students hired to climb into silos and "walk down the corn" inside. Apparently, corn kernels get stuck together and stick to the sides of the silo; this corn needs to be scraped off the sides and pushed down to the bottom. Unfortunately, if someone's not careful, it's relatively easy to sink into the corn and get crushed to death. There are a greater number of deaths from this kind of work--deaths of teenagers--than you might imagine. And these are mostly because of bad training and improper use of safety equipment (if any is used at all).

Deaths from "walking down the corn" are horrible--as are any workplace deaths. But these kinds of incidents also have an impact on other industries: over time, OSHA regulations become more strict, oversight becomes tighter, lawsuits and litigation begin to loom more prominently. And so we find ourselves having to think about how safe is it to let a 20-year-old student use a table saw unsupervised (and recognize the collision of that question with the fact that I *routinely* used the table saw unsupervised at that age).

My teachers were correct: the only good way to learn to use the table saw is to use it. Students only become comfortable--and, frankly, safe--in a scene shop by working in a scene shop. And sometimes, the only route they have to doing so is through student-driven workshops. A student that I couldn't drag into the shop in their first year of school, could easily find themselves wanting to build scenery for this exciting workshop production of Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) they are working on during their senior year. So, for me, it's important to find a way to make sure they can follow that passion and become comfortable and safe in the shop.

But wanting to work in the shop--having passion--doesn't make you safe. It doesn't protect you from yourself, or from making dangerous mistakes with equipment that is, frankly, very dangerous. Sometimes I think we forget that you can, indeed, lose your hand on the bandsaw; you can go blind from the welder; you can cause serious damage to skin and lungs using some of the chemicals we use in the shop. So, obviously, there needs to be some training, some oversight, to keep students safe--to teach proper practices, to step in with timely advice and guidance.

To address this--to make our shops both more accessible and keep them "safe" at the same time--we're trying something new at Purdue: we're going to open the shop for a limited number of evening hours during the week. One of our graduate assistants in the shop will work in the evenings on the show currently in production with a work study student. (No one will be in the shop alone.) Students working on workshop productions can use these evening hours to work in the shop while there is someone with more experience available and "around." Students will still only be permitted to use tools on which they have been trained, and we'll be keeping a log indicating which students have been trained on what tools. While comprehensive training will be available through specific courses we teach, we are leaving room for some students to be trained on a more a la carte basis--trained on specific tools as they need them.

I don't expect this to be a silver bullet solution--it won't solve everything, and, of course, it will have ramifications on our regular season build process, some of which we won't discover until we're in the moment--but I think it's a good start.

How do you resolve the issue of providing a "safe space" for early-career technicians to fly solo? What happens at your school, university, training center?

Community experiences

2013-04-05T12:52:01.000Z

I don't often get to see shows as an audience member. West Lafayette, Indiana isn't exactly a hot bed of theatrical activity, and getting out of town for a show can be tough with my job and also being the parent of a five-year-old. Certainly, I see many productions--but mostly they are shows I'm affiliated with, and mostly it is during tech, previews, and openings.

I had the chance to go be a "typical audience member" last night, and I'm so thrilled I took the opportunity. I tell my students all the time that one of the reasons I love what I do is the idea of shared experiences, communal storytelling, and community-building--that at its most basic level, theatre is about experiencing stories together with our friends, neighbors, colleagues, and families. Last night, I got to experience that again first-hand.

My friend Tina Stafford--an amazing actor, singer, and fabulous person all-around--is in Bloomington, Indiana, performing he lead role in "Next to Normal" at Cardinal Stage Company, and since I don't get to see her very often, I travelled the two hours last night to watch her perform and to catch up with her. I got there just before the house opened, and consequently had the opportunity to watch as patrons entered the auditorium.

It was a mid-week, mid-run performance, but a sold-out one. The house probably only seats about 150 people, but there were no no-shows: every seat was packed. And there was a palpable excitement in the air; people were excited about the show, that much was clear.

But I realized, pretty quickly, that what I felt in the air was more than excitement about the show. People were waving to each other from across the auditorium as they walked in. Groups of people clustered at the edge of the stage, talking to each other. Hugs were shared; "How are you?" was asked over and over as people reconnected around me.

Couples--some straight, some not--were holding hands with partners or were standing with hands on their partners backs. Some were young, like the twenty-somethings sitting next to me, while some were older, like the couple in their sixties in front of me. A mother had sat behind me with her two young teenage sons (both of whom were a little unhappy about seeing a play before the show started!).

The show started 5 minutes late because the audience wouldn't stop talking to each other. Normally, backstage, this drives me a little nuts; there's a feeling that the audience needs to quiet down so we can get this important event started. But I realized--or, rather, remembered--that this is the whole point of the event, of why we do what we do: to bring communities together. At intermission, groups clustered again-some talking about the show, some talking about their families, or their work, or other parts of their lives. It didn't matter, I realized, if they were talking about the quality of the production, or the--very serious--issues raised in the play; they were talking and connecting with each other in ways they might not have otherwise had the not seen the play. And, again, removed from the typical backstage tensions, I realized that the fact that intermission ran long was a good sign that the production was doing what it was supposed to.

It is so easy to get caught up in our own preconceptions about what we do. I think we sometimes want our work to be important in ways that is analogous to what others do, especially working here at a Big Ten Research institution. But our productions aren't like discovering a new cancer treatment or inventing a more efficient solar panel; our measure of success should be as much about whether we brought our community together each night as it is about whether we have produced a ground-breaking, never-before-seen piece of art.

Go see a show this week. But watch the audience. See how they respond to the performance, to each other. Remember why we tell stories, live, to a group. It's a kind of magic.

OSI Layering: or, putting data on the road

2013-03-29T13:51:47.000Z

Throughout this semester in my Show Networks and Show Control class, we've tried to connect concepts we've been discussing back to the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) layering scheme, which is a model of communication systems that breaks these systems into modular functional building blocks. Hammered out in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the OSI layering scheme provides a complex framework for communication systems; each of the seven functional layers describes a specific set of "duties" within the communications process, for which protocols, devices, and specifications are "responsible." The upper-most layer, "application," is closest to conveying human meaning, and represents the resources for applications that present communicated data to the user, while the lowest, "physical," represents the physical connection details between and amongst devices.

All of this is deliberately vague and difficult to pin down--and, quite frankly, most protocols, devices, and specifications span more than one layer, or only comprise a portion of a defined layer. Which, unfortunately, makes all of this kind of hard to teach. As we've been talking about these concepts--and relating them to specific network designs--it has been helpful to connect them with a model of shuttling material around from point to point that many of my students are very familiar with: road shows.

Consider the seven layers: application, presentation, session, transport, network, data link, and physical. John Huntington's Show Networks and Control Systems provides a nice set of definitions for these layers, which I will shamelessly quote here:

7-Application

The application layer, the "highest" layer in OSI, is where the meaning of the data resides, and this layer presents resources for application programs run by users. The application layer includes resources for transferring files, messages, or even electronic mail.

6-Presentation

The presentation layer is responsible for presenting the raw data to the application layer; file and data transformation and translation are the responsibility of this layer, allowing different applications access to the same network. Encryption might be included in this layer as well.

5-Session

The session layer is responsible for managing and synchronizing the overall network conversation, or "session."

4-Transport

The transport layer is responsible for ensuring reliable end-to-end transfer of the data; multiplexing is one of the transport layer's responsibilities, as it error handling.

3-Network

The network layer is the traffic control center for the network; it determines how a particular message can be routed and where it will be sent.

2-Data Link

The data link layer packages raw data for transport; it is responsible for error detection, framing, start and stop bits, and so on.

1-Physical

The physical layer is the "lowest" layer of OSI, and defines the nuts and bolts (or bits and volts) of the network, including bit timing, data rate, interface voltage, mark and space values, connectors, and so on. The physical layer has no intelligence about what kind of data is being sent; data is simply treated as raw bits.

Ok. Great. John's definitions are simple, straightforward, and clear. Except, if you have no prior experience with networking, it is hard to connect these concepts to anything "tangible." Consider a touring show, however: a touring show, much like a communications network, has to get material from one venue to another. Though it is often transparent to the rest of us, there are a number of things that have to be considered to make a road show get on the road successfully:

Someone has to consider the trucks that are going to carry the materials: how many? what size? diesel or unleaded? You can consider this the physical layer.
Someone has to consider how the materials are being put on the truck: are they just piled in willy-nilly, or will materials be packaged into wheeled carts, bins, and cases? How big will these cases be? How much can they safely weigh? How do they get packed on the trucks? This is a lot like the data link layer.
Someone needs to consider how the trucks get from one venue to another, and where they are going. Some large productions will have two sets of travelling materials, leap frogging each other from venue to venue. Someone has to make sure the right truck gets to the right venue using the right route. This person would be functioning in the network layer.
Someone has to ensure that the items coming off the trucks are the same things that went on the trucks, confirm that all the items that went on the truck come off the truck, and that they come off in the same condition that they went on. (Transport.)
Someone has to manage the pack and unpack of materials in each venue. (Session.)
Someone has to sort all the materials coming off the truck and shuttle it to the appropriate part of the venue, so that sound cases don't end up in dressing rooms, and wardrobe materials don't somehow get to the grid. (Presentation.)
Someone has to know, in each discipline, what to do with all the stuff in all the road cases; how do these materials get put together to make the sound portion, or lighting portion, or costuming of the show work? (Application.)

Obviously, these analogies are imperfect, but they provide access to the concepts for students more familiar with road cases than with Cat 5e cables. It becomes easier when discussing, for example, TCP/IP, to say that IP is like the person how determines the truck route and that TCP is like the person responsible for the pack and unpack at each venue, and for ensuring that what went on the truck comes off the truck.

As networking becomes more and more an integral part of what we do as technicians, are students are going to have to be conversant in many of these concepts which are intangible and probably pretty alien to them. Finding connections with things they readily recognize is going to be key as we train students for the next generation of entertainment technology.

USITT Tech Expo

2013-03-22T12:20:28.000Z

I've been at the USITT conference since Tuesday morning, and, as always, there's a lot of really cool stuff on the Expo floor, and a lot of informative sessions to attend. I've spent most of my time--less by design and more by happenstance--at the Tech Expo booth, showing off my students' work on the Medea RibbonLift project I've discussed previously. (I probably should have realized the attraction of being able to ride the lift--it was pretty much a non-stop parade of people yesterday!)

Between demonstrations, I had the opportunity to take a look at some of the other projects on display, and I'm glad that I did. I love the new products as much as the next person; I enjoy learning from my colleagues in sessions; but seeing the innovative, outside-the-box solutions to technical challenges on display at the Tech Expo really gets my juices flowing. It reminds me that anything is possible; that we are an industry of dreamers, seeking new ways to share stories, which sometimes requires us to think up new ways to solve problems.

One of the Tech Expo entries is an amazing collision of puppetry and video technology. A bunraku puppet was designed with an oversized head; inside the head is a battery-powered pics projector, projecting onto the face of the puppet (which is clear plastic, molded in the shape of a face). The projector is connected to a camera mounted on a bike helmet which the puppeteer wears. The puppeteer's facial expressions are projected and mapped onto the puppets face, and because the camera is mounted to the helmet on their head, it stays fixed on their face while they move around operating the puppet. Very cool, very ingenious.

Another entry addresses the issue of locking casters on wagons. We've all tried wagon brakes and cane bolts; many of us have used pneumatic bladders to raise and lower casters. A while ago, I wrote about pneumatically-driven brake feet. This design utilizes a specialty caster apparently used on gallery carts on airlines; these casters have kingpins that are also buttons--when depressed, they shift a locking mechanism that prevents the wheels from moving. This technical designer used these casters as a starting point, then mounted small-diameter, short-throw pancake cylinders to actuate the locking mechanism. Because the mechanism requires relatively low force and little air volume to actuate, and because nothing is actually lifted from or pressed into the floor, this design solves three of the major design issues of typical pneumatic solutions: the hissing of air release when shifting units; the need for a large reservoir of compressed air; the awkward lifting/sinking of units as brakes/wheels are engaged and disengaged. Genius!

A third exciting entry is for a panoramic drop. If you can imagine, this designer created what is essentially a long painted drop on an over-sized color scroller mechanism. The drop is rolled up on one spool, and is rolled onto another on the other side of the stage as it turns. A simple series of wheels across the top of the stage pinches the top of the drop, holding it up and maintaining tension.

There are more, or course: a sword that can appear to impale an actor; a cool moon box with the ability to show phases of the moon; embedded LEDs in a costume design; a confetti launcher; a compensating pulley rig for tracked and flown scenery.

As always, the genius of my colleagues astounds and inspires me. Stop by Tech Expo and be reinvigorated.

53rd Annual USITT Conference

2013-03-15T12:26:02.000Z

I'm gearing up for next week's USITT Conference in Milwaukee! As I mentioned last week, our RibbonLift project was put on a truck and is on its way to the Tech Expo; our booth display (check us put at table 376!) is packed and ready, and I've been looking over the sessions list to start planning my days. (And, of course, made way too many tentative plans to catch up with way too many people to actually see everyone I want to see and actually spend any quality time with them!)

The session list at any conference can be overwhelming--what is important. What is worth my time, what if I miss something? So, without further ado, I present Rich Dionne's List of Sessions That You Should Attend (even though some conflict with each other, making it impossible to see them all unless you're a Time Lord).

Wednesday:
Rockwell Automation Tour (1:00-4:00)
You'll Shoot Your Eye Out (recommended firearm practices (1:00-2:15)
Safety Information Resources (2:30-4:00)
Alternative Career Paths: Engineering (4:30-5:45)

Thursday:
Creating a Safety Culture (9:30-10:45)
Inspecting Your Rigging System (1:00-2:30)
Automation Safety: Beyond the E-stop (2:45-4:00)

Friday:
Safety Audit vs Safety Inspection (with our very own Erich Friend!) 8:00-9:15
Electronics Basics (1:00-2:30)
Safety and Health Programs in Academic and Regional Theatres (2:45-4:30)
Orchestra Pits, Edge Protection, and Other Fall Issues (5:30-6:45)

Saturday:
Introduction to Networks (11:00-12:30)
Automation Lab Toys (with yours truly!) (11:00-12:30)
Arduino Super Session (2:00-4:45)

You can't see everything, of course--and this is only a small portion of the sessions offered. But see as much as you can, and soak in all of it. And stop by our table or our display at Tech Expo and say hi!

Raspberry Pi

2013-03-08T20:09:45.000Z

Ok, so it's a little early to celebrate Pi day, sure. But I suspect next week I'll be blogging about our preparation for the USITT conference in Milwaukee (we put our RibbonLift project on a truck yesterday so it could begin its journey to the frozen north and the Tech Expo--check out our students' work there), so I figured I'd start the 3.14 celebrations early and talk about another kind of Pi pun, the Raspberry Pi project.

Don't know what Raspberry Pi is? It's a computer the size of a credit card.

Really. Don't laugh: you hold one whenever you text somebody these days, or when you view TheatreFace on your phone. The Raspberry Pi project simply makes computing hardware this size accessible; for $35 you can buy a Linux-based computer on a board the size of a credit card (more or less), with USB, HDMI, video/audio, Ethernet, and SDCard ports. Hook up your peripherals, install some software, and you've got a reasonably powerful computer capable of handling many tasks. Sure, these things aren't going to be Call of Duty playstations, or your new digital audio workstation. But they can handle most basic computing tasks.

More importantly, as far as I can tell, is that devices like the Raspberry Pi open up so many exciting possibilities in the world of electronics for theatre. What keeps a Pi from becoming a small lighting console? Very little beyond some programming, a USB-DMX dongle, and some time. A Pi could become a sound playback device. Or a simple computer for building and playing back motion control cues. These are some of the ideas we're beginning to kick around here for an as-yet-undefined undergraduate theatre electronics/computing class. Wouldn't it be cool to finish a course with a final project that lets you walk away with your own tiny light board?

Frankly, these ideas are old ideas--they reflect my own experiences and background and, frankly, age. I'm out of touch. The real ideas are the ones our students will be coming up with. We live in an era when we regularly hold in our hands more computing power than Neil Armstrong had at his command when landing on the moon. We don't need another light board in theatre; we need new devices, new effects, new results of the collision of electronics, computing, and artistic expression. Theatre of tomorrow will have wearable electronics and controllers; CNC rapid-prototyping technology and 3D printers creating newly-devised rehearsal props on-the-fly in the wings or in rehearsal; interactive performances spanning continents (did you see this performance of Barenaked Ladies with Chris Hadfield, astronaut on the International Space Station?).

Raspberry Pis (pies?) may not be the hardware that will drive that innovation. Nor may Arduinos, or Parallaxes, or any of the other hack-a-day electronics equipment available at your local electronics shop. However, the students who learn to play with electronics using these devices--the same way many of us learned to play on reel-to-reel or two-scene presets, or in the scene shop or the costume shop--those students will be the ones driving the future, developing new and innovative performance technologies that connect with the audiences of tomorrow. We owe it to those future artists--and to the artform--to find ways to explore these technologies, to embrace them, to open pathways for innovation, exploration, and experimentation.

Celebrate Pi day. Buy a $35, credit-card-sized computer, and do something new with it!

What will you do for your summer vacation?

2013-03-01T12:00:00.000Z

It's about 11:00 at night, and I'm sitting here waiting for the Director of Education from the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, who will be doing a recruitment seminar with our students tomorrow for his theatre's Summer Professional Training Program. Brian is a first-class director and educator, and he's a good friend of mine. It's always a pleasure to spend time with him, and I love watching him work with our students.

Summer theatre internships are a staple of our profession; the act of "paying your dues" by working long days in a community of others equally passionate about the art we love goes back decades or more. The intense pressure of mounting many shows in too little time, working with and watching experienced professionals practice their craft, was an important crucible in many of our careers.

Summer internships in theatre get mixed reviews these days. Ideas of fair wages and return on investment get blurred together by a generation of students trained to think about careers instead of experiences; jobs instead of vocations. Now, don't get me wrong: I think that some summer internship experiences can be exploitative; I think some summer theatre production models leverage the excitement of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young people to produce a lot of work very quickly for very little money--sometimes to the cost of highly dangerous work places.

But the summer theatre experience is still an important one. Many of our students have only the narrowest conception of what "theatre" is, demonstrated to them by their high school drama teacher (or English teacher, or whomever was tasked with directing the Spring musical each year) in a limited time with limited resources, usually. For many students, theatre is Wicked on Broadway; they don't realize theatre is also August, Osage County, or a store-front production of Road, or a new rock-music adaptation of Twelfth Night. Good summer theatre experiences open young peoples' eyes to a larger world of theatre--what good art can be and do for audiences, for performers, for designers and technicians.

A good summer theatre experience will be exhausting, of course. And, sure, you're unlikely to make any money (indeed, you'll probably lose money). You'll do things you didn't know you could; didn't know you'd like; still don't like after doing it. But a good summer theatre experience should leave you feeling like your skull cracked open and the world came pouring in. You should walk away from a good summer theatre experience having met peers from across the country who share your passions and challenge your weaknesses; you should have great stories to tell about hanging around after tech discussing color choices with an experienced lighting designer, or painting a drop with a fabulous set designer and learning new lining techniques.

Many students I talk to shy away from the summer theatre internship--because of money, usually. I encourage them all to take a chance--you only have one time in your life when you can afford to work for nothing doing something you love for a summer--if it feels hard to do at 18, 19, or 20, imagine the challenge it poses when your 30, 40, or 50, with a mortgage and kids in school and all the rest of the real-life adult pressures. Pick the right place, and you'll have an incomparable experience that will inform and inspire your career for years or decades after.

Teaching Leadership

2013-02-22T12:00:00.000Z

If you don't know by now that I like to play games, you haven't been reading this blog long enough. I love games. I am, by all accounts, a gamer. (Well, without the carpal tunnel, Mountain Dew, and HotPockets.) Games are fun; games stretch my brain; games take me away from the daily grind and also teach me new things all the time.

I was at one of the local game stores this week playing a table-top tactics game when my friend Jeff asked me if I'd ever heard of a game called Artemis. I told him I hadn't, and he informed me it was a "bridge simulator." I couldn't quite figure out what this meant--I couldn't figure out why my friend would be excited about a game that simulated forces on the structural members of a bridge. Of course, that's not what he meant at all, as he clarified for me shortly.

By "bridge," he meant "starship bridge." The game is a simulator for up to six people, each of whom take on the responsibilities of members of the archetypal exploration starship a la Star Trek: helmsman, weapons officer, science officer, communications officer, entering officer, and captain. "Cool." I thought. But then he explained further: each member of the team plays on their own computer, and only sees the information related to their specialty; the engineering officer has no idea what is happening in communications; the helmsman has no connection to what's happening with the science officer. Each member of the bridge crew can only communicate with the captain, not with each other. And, of course, the captain has to make decisions based on the input he gets from each of his officers.

More cool.

One of the hardest lessons to teach my TD students is how to be leaders. We can read about it, we can talk about it in class; until you're doing it, though, you can't really understand. And finding opportunities to mentor a student in real time as they function as a leader can be tough.

I like to use strikes for this purpose. Our TDs have to come up with an explicit and detailed strike plan, including grouping staff into teams with individual team leaders. During the strike, I watch how the TD in charge of the call interacts with the teams and the overall process. A good leader focuses on the big picture--are we running on time, where are our labor bottlenecks, what are the things we didn't plan for, etc.; a good leader relies on their team leaders to achieve specific objectives within given parameters (usually of time and space, during a strike); a good leader will shift team objectives based on work flow, time, and other influences.

Most TD students have a hard time with this; all of their previous experience has been as a team member, or, if they are lucky, as a team leader, in previous work calls here or in their earlier careers. This involves a different set of skills, and different working practices. Typically, student TDs will find themselves getting bogged down in task work, or in micromanaging one or two team leaders, oblivious to the increasing chaos and disorder of the overall strike project around them. (This is usually when I take their tools away, hand them a clipboard, and say--stop doing and start looking!)

Strikes only happen a handful of times each semester. Typically, a grad student is only heading a strike call once or twice each semester; additionally, strike calls are relatively short--at most about four hours. Consequently, the time to learn how to be a leader is limited.

But what if they could practice being a leader--being a captain? What the team is trying to accomplish is--to a degree--less important than learning how to lead the team to accomplish a goal: how to focus on the big picture, how to bring together widely disparate views and projects together to create a whole, how to communicate with team leaders, how to empower them to make decisions and not micromanage them. If Artemis works how the literature says it does, this game (at a mere $40 for six seats!) could be a perfect simulator for experiencing, practicing, and examining leadership skills outside of the limited constraints of a strike.

Has anybody played this game? Anybody willing to take it for a spin and let us know how it goes?

Candles on Stage

2013-02-15T16:00:00.000Z

TheatreFace user Michael--a lighting designer working on a production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie--posted this question about live flame and candles on stage earlier this week. His conundrum is a common one: how do we define what is "necessary" for telling the story of a production, and how do we achieve those "necessities" when they might be counter to accepted practice or--more importantly--local, state, or federal regulations?

If you've been reading along with me, you know how I feel about the technical design process, and that I stress with students that the fundamental place to start in tackling any design problem is with a design specification: what are we trying to accomplish, and what are our parameters for accomplishing it? Reading between the lines of Michael's post, one can find some of the key elements that he (and his team) feel are important for the final moment of the play.

Laura's face needs to be lit as if by candles.
Those candles need to go out together, as it blown out by her with Tom's line "Blow out your candles, Laura."
There can't be real flame (because, obviously, we don't want Michael fired!).
Any electric/electronic solution must be:
- Easy for the actor to manipulate
- Relatively inexpensive
- Something he can get through his University's purchasing program, if possible

Michael has already taken us past what can be the primary stumbling block for solving this kind of issue: instead of stating unequivocally that there must be real candles, he's described for us the effect that we must create. This makes any solution easier to discover. There are a number of ways we can create this effect:

Rosco's Candelabra
A candelabra with Rosco's Flicker Candles
City Theatrical's "Flicker Candle Kit"
Evil Mad Scientist's Flicker LEDs
A candelabra with non-flickering electric candles
A cleverly-concealed footlight and non-lit candles
Low side-light and non-lit candles
A warm special around Laura, and non-lit candles

Each of these solutions, when compared against the requirements Michael listed, falls short in some manner: Rosco's Candelabra, Flicker Candles, and City Theatrical's Flicker Candle Kit are all not-inexpensive; Evil Mad Scientist's LEDs, while inexpensive, will require some time-on-task to provide a battery power supply, easy-off-switch, and installation; the non-lighted candle solutions will require a level of suspension of disbelief with which, presumably, the director will be unhappy.

Unfortunately, no solution is the perfect solution--however much we might want it to be otherwise. Every option to solve a particular design problem will require some amount of balanced compromise amongst the triumvirate of time, money, and quality. Michael, based on our conversation, appears to have decided that while he can't spend a lot of money, he probably has the time to deal with installing and prototyping the flickering LED solution. (Michael, if you're reading this, post photos and let us know how it worked out!)

There's another issue, buried inside this discussion, of course: fire onstage. Michael has found an acceptable work-around to having live flame in this instance. But what if he couldn't? Or, what if local regulations made it illegal to smoke on stage, and he were producing a Noel Coward play? How do you deal with this situations?

Unfortunately, waiting until the production that requires a friendly code-enforcement operator to worry about these kinds of issues usually means you're too late. Theatre--especially at the academic, community, and smaller-regional/summer stock level has played the game of, "it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission game," for long enough that most enforcement officers assume from the outset that we operate in an unsafe manner, thumbing our noses at regulations, codes, and laws. (In some cases, unfortunately, that reputation is well-deserved...) As a result, enforcement officers tend to be less willing to be flexible.

In truth, however, most enforcement officers are allowed some flexibility in interpretation, and, like all of us, would rather be accommodating than be the bad guy--at least as long as they don't feel they are being taken advantage of. Consequently, it pays huge dividends to start working with your code enforcement officials now--start talking about fire safety plans, ask for fire extinguisher training, inquire about safe workplace signage. Develop a relationship that makes clear your (and your theatre's) commitment to safety and adherence to regulations. Having set up a relationship together, you can approach the relevant officers at the start of the production process when those sketchy things like cigarettes, person-lifts, and live flame come up. Usually, your demonstrated commitment to safety, coupled with an appeal for assistance in making an effect happen in the safest way possible, will result in a smoother process for developing an effect that pleases the director, the designers, keeps the actors and crew safe, and makes your enforcement officials feel good about a) helping you toe the line of regulations, and b) helping you create magic on stage.

Building a person lift

2013-02-08T12:30:00.000Z

Tomorrow we begin tech rehearsals for Purdue's production of Medea. This show is exciting for a number of reasons: it's the first directing graduate student terminal project in a decade; conceptually, it is interesting because the director has worked with a composer to turn much of the choral parts into music, played by a band onstage and by the actors; the sound engineering student has had the opportunity to bring in a significant rental package to supplement our in-house PA, including line arrays, two dual 18" subs, and more. Most exciting for me, however, is the lift effect at the end of the play.

When we moved into our (now not-so-) new building in 2005, we purchased two RibbonLifts. These are a version of telescoping mast-lifts with very compact bases. They have sat unused in our storage since that time. When Mike, the director, indicated he was looking for a way to create the effect of Medea "rising to heaven in a chariot," our scene shop manager suggested we look at using one of these for the effect.

The RibbonLift mast is topped with an 18"x18" plate. Nothing else. Obviously, there is nothing safe about having an actor stand on top of this plate and be lifted 15 feet in the air. My MFA technical direction student working on the project did a lot of research into fall arrest systems, and quickly determined that there was no foolproof way to keep the actress safe using such systems, given the fact that she would be at varying heights, all below 18'. So I had her do some research into how other people accomplished similar effects.

She found an awesome video interview with the actress who played Elphelba in a production of Wicked, in which she showed off the lift effect where the witch is lifted high in the air. For this effect, the actress stands on a tiny platform attached to what is essentially a cherry picker. Attached to the platform is a short post and two arms that grip her waist; if these arms aren't engaged, the system won't lift her up.

We decided this was something we could accomplish, and so began discussing designs with our University safety people. The final design incorporates a number of safety systems. First, and most importantly, is the e-stop system. We are using a 24vdc signal distributed in series through three normally-closed mushroom e-stop buttons (one at the operator station, one on the other side of the stage, and one in the booth) that control a relay which kills power to the lift. This is completely independent of the control system; however, the control system reverts to an idle state when it senses a loss of power to the lift.

In addition to hard lower and upper limits that kill power to the lift when safe extremes of travel are reached (also independent of the control system), additional limits switches have been incorporated to trip at less extreme limits which effect only the control system. Also, the actress must be belted into the left platform, and the system will not operate if it does not sense that the belt is latched. Additionally, a momentary-contact switch is installed on the mast at the base of the actor's back; if this switch is not depressed, the lift cannot move in the up direction.

The operator controls include velocity settings for both up and down movement and the ability to set a travel-to position . Additionally, the operator station includes jog controls that allow for the operator to move the lift manually. (The up jog control requires the seatbelt and deadman to be engaged; the down control does not require either, on the assumption that if either fails, it is important to be able to get the actor down.)

We have been discussing "what if" scenarios with the director and stage manager, and will be rehearsing what to do of there's a fault in the system, or the actress doesn't feel safe, or she can't be belted in correctly, or whatever. We will be going over preshow and postshow checklists, and training the actor who gives visual confirmation that the actor is belted in to the lift (additional confirmation beyond the automation system). Later in the week, we will--unannounced--decide that "something" has gone wrong, and give the performers and crew a chance to practice what to do within the context of a love performance.

I'm really proud of the work our students have done on this project; it's very complicated and they've designed a robust system that both accomplishes the design requirements and is incredibly safe, which is what we should always aspire to.

Teaching Philosophy

2013-02-01T18:03:11.000Z

For a recent project in which I'm participating, I was asked to write up a statement of my teaching philosophy. Regular readers will know I have a lot to say on the subject of teaching, so I thought, "piece of cake." Wow, was I wrong!

Developing a concise, one page statement about how I approach teaching was difficult, mostly because I see teaching as a complicated endeavor. Trying to distill a plethora of theories about cognitive development, instructional design, and the typical students needs into a few paragraphs proved a little overwhelming--quite frankly, I hid from the assignment for a long time, putting it off for as long as possible. Once I finally tackled the assignment, however, I felt I was able to come up with something pretty solid, that reflects my views on learning and teaching pretty accurately.

Getting there was as much due to me writing down my thoughts as it was to reading a number of example statements of teaching philosophy. So, in the event any one of you might have to develop one of these, I thought I'd share mine--you know, paying it back, kind of, for all those examples I read over the last two weeks or so.

I believe that the most effective learning happens in context; learners acquire more information—and retain it better—when that information is situated within a larger schema. Specifically in the field of technical production for theatre, that schema typically means application: how will the learner apply this information to a situation they may have encountered or might reasonably expect to encounter in the future?

I believe that there are three different categories of information that learners must acquire within any knowledge domain. The first comprises declarative information—for example, how data is transmitted electrically along a wire, the different categorizations of lumber available in the United States, or the accepted symbols for theatrical drafting. The second category of information is procedural information—for example, a method for drawing arcs on a drafting table, the process for stitching on a button, or a series of steps for troubleshooting an electrical problem in a control system. The third category comprises cognitive approaches: methods for assessing particular problems and for determining how and when to apply declarative and procedural information. Successful learners are those students who recognize the need to apply a particular cognitive approach, drawing upon declarative information and mental models, and to follow specific methods and procedures to master a challenge. Successful learning environments provide students the opportunities to exercise all three of these types of skills together, in application contexts that resemble “real-world” scenarios.

I believe, consequently, that the instructor’s responsibility is multifaceted. First, instructors must present each of these types of information—declarative information, procedural information, and cognitive approaches—and to connect that information to previous knowledge and familiar contexts. Second, instructors must create a learning environment that also challenges students to combine these interrelated skills—where learners must deploy a cognitive approach that draws upon procedural and declarative information required for understanding of the knowledge domain. Third, instructors must structure the learning environment such that the complexity of the challenges increases while instructional support decreases over time. Fourth, instructors must situate each challenge within a larger context such that the stakes remain high; through this process, learners increase both their self-confidence and their autonomy while consistently relating learning to real-world applications.

Finally, I believe that instructors must instill the recognition that learning continues beyond the classroom. No single course, sequence of courses, or completed degree program will provide learners the opportunity to learn everything about a particular knowledge domain. Instructors must inspire learners with a passion for extending their knowledge, for exploring new avenues, new approaches, new knowledge domains. Instructors should empower learners to believe they can engage in new knowledge domains on their own, to believe they can make connections between cognitive approaches they have mastered and problem-situations they’ve never seen before.

Ropes, Bodies, and Physics

2013-01-25T15:05:02.000Z

This week, I tried something I'd never done before, but was always interested in doing: rock climbing. Purdue's recreational sports center debuted a new climbing facility last semester, and I finally took the plunge this week and started climbing.

True confessions: first, I'm not very good yet (I've climbed exactly twice!). Second, I'm pretty afraid of heights. (I know, I know! A theatre technician afraid of heights?! I don't like them, but I get over it when I have to for my job.) So all of this is pretty far outside my comfort zone. Maybe that's why I started thinking about the ways climbing overlaps with much of what we do in theatre--as a way to feel less uncomfortable. Regardless of the reason, I have been thinking about what I have been learning in terms of what we do on stage, and I am fascinated by the connections.

My first realization? I've been belaying for years--just not in harness, not with a belay device, and not--obviously--for people. But as I was doing it, I found myself falling into some familiar body-memory motions. The physicality was not terribly different from hoisting or guiding scenery with a bull rope, especially when you holding it in place for a rigger: the rope often goes under your foot, non-dominant hand on the live end of the rope, and dominant on the dead end. Your foot becomes--in some ways--like a belay device, helping to brake the load.

And, of course, there's the rope. We've got our hands on ropes all the time, and I was surprised by how familiar grasping, holding, and pulling that belay rope felt. Ropes have been friends for a long time--the only new information for me was the figure-eight knot; but that came pretty easily--after all, knots have been friends of mine for a long time as well.

Finally, the physics involved is kind of our bread and butter, right? Static loads, dynamic loads, resultant forces along diagonal vectors. I found myself thinking about the differences between keeping my side of the belay rope (as a belayer) mostly vertical vs. moving away from the wall, keeping my side of the rope more at an angle. Basic physics, right? Say the climber is 180#, and is 20 feet in the air. If I'm standing 10' from the wall, the length of my side of the belay rope is going to be the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose legs are 20' and 10', or about 22.4'. The rule of similar triangle tells us that if my climber sits in their harness--i.e., does not impart a dynamic load of any kind, but simple lets the rope hold their weight--their 180# will feel like 201.25# on my side of the belay rope. However, if I move closer to the wall--at a distance of 5'--the load I'll feel will get closer to the weight of the climber: 185#.

Gravity is pulling the belayer straight down; the rope will pull the belayer up but also toward the wall. Indeed, only 180# of force will be pulling up (the forces form the same right triangle as above); only about 90# of force will be pulling the belayer toward the wall. A 180# belayer who can resist 90# of pull toward the wall will be just fine. A 150# belayer, however, would appear to have problems, at least mathematically. So how is it that I can watch belayers that are clearly much lighter than their climbers successfully belay?

The analysis above only deals with a particular moment of time. If we imagine our 180# climber and our 150# belayer (standing 10' from the wall), the analysis is true for the instant the climber rests on the rope. Almost immediately, the belayer will be pulled off the ground and simultaneously swing toward the wall. This swing shortens the length of the belay rope, bringing the load on the belay rope closer to the weight of the climber for every second the belayer is moving closer to the wall, bringing the differential of the load on the ropes closer to the differential of their weight, or 30#.

Okay. So the belayer has swung into the wall, and the differential is only 30#. That should still be enough to lift the belayer off the floor, right? Well, yes. Except for the fact that there's friction in the system. The belay rope passes over a belay bar or other device; because of this, the rope can only travel so fast. The friction may not be large; but even a small decrease in the possible rate of acceleration of the rope reduces the amount of force imparted to the belayer. (A low-friction belay bar would mean that the belayer would, indeed, come up off the ground!)

Obviously, things get more complicated when a climber falls because the dynamic load of the fall imparts a--potentially significantly--higher load on the belay rope. But the basic physics remains the same: we can calculate the load using vector math and similar triangles and (if we knew the coefficient of friction on the belay device) basic principles of friction of a rope around an object. In most cases, if the weight differential between the climber and the belayer isn't significant, everything should work out just fine. :)

Maybe taking your students to a climbing wall to look at the physics of falling wouldn't be a bad idea. I plan to take mine!

To Automate, or Not To Automate

2013-01-11T15:16:38.000Z

Every few years I teach a course in show control and networking; this Spring, that time has come around again. One of the assumptions we make in the course is that show control is good, that there are good reasons to automate scenery, lighting, sound, video, pyro, etc., and that there are equally compelling reasons to coordinate the automation of these disciplines electronically. To be sure, there are compelling reasons: precision, repeatability, and safety concerns, among others. But we only brush against a conversation about why we might not want to implement a show control network--because, I mean, why would we want to undercut the rationale for taking the class?

Don't get me wrong; I am passionately excited about the material in this class. To explore building networks of coordinated interfaces and playback devices; to develop methods to let the scenery automation system communicate with the lighting console and vice-versa--come on! That's a sic-if geek's dream! But the writer in me, the young kid inside that feel in love with the idea of people onstage telling a story just to me, right in front of me--that guy has questions about the differences amongst live performance, themed-entertainment rides, and cinema--differences that appear to me to be bounded by the very notion of precision and repeatability.

Isn't that one of the key differences between theatre and cinema? In theatre the unexpected can happen; timing can be felt, the "moment" exploited to connect in new and different ways with the audience. You can attend multiple performances of the same production, and though the broad strokes will be the same each time, the nuances will differ, depending on the audience, the performers, the humidity, whatever. This is the converse of cinema--film is static; once it is edited, it is complete, and repeatable. You can watch the Hobbit in Lafayette, IN one week, then see it again a week later in Saginaw, MI, and see the same show. That's part of the thrill of themed entertainment rides: you know what you're going to get each time you ride it--but you can embrace a state of suspended belief and pretend you don't know that you're going to be shocked and terrified by the monster leaping to at you around the next bend.

I encourage my students to remember that as technical designers, their primary responsibility is to realize the vision of the artists involved in a production to the best of their ability; we have a little mantra: "we are not the art police." But, when considering a show control implementation (for a traditional production, certainly) I can't help but feel an obligation to ask how such an implementation serves the storytelling. Does precision and repeatability take away more from the experience than it adds to it?

I don't think there are any pat answers to this; as my students will tell you, one of my favorite answers to questions in class is, "well, it depends." I think that is true of this question as well. But I do believe its a question we have to ask about any automation of a theatrical production.