SETC 2011 Atlanta

I'm in my office, FINALLY! really preparing to go. I am fighting the office printer to see if I can get some of my things done here rather than at Kinkos, but it does not look promising.

(I wanted to link to one of the pages, but Facebook's new photo viewing BS won't let me. WTF? Facebook. You are annoying.)

Anyway, SETC is going to be a crazy experience this year. I've entered two boards into the design competition: Oklahoma! and The Waiting Room. And signed up for Job Contact AND am presenting my winning paper on feminist design ideas. I'm not sure I'm going to have time to do any kind of workshops. :P Oh well. It should be fun, right?

Then I'll have 2 days off before USITT in Charlotte. Fortunately, I'm just going to USITT--no presentations, nothing. Hopefully I'll be able to enjoy it.

Wow, I thought I would have more to say, but, no. After the conference, I'll have plenty to say. :)

Being Better

Well, Pericles is open and good. We never managed to replace the noisy jack-chain in the bottom of the curtains that fly in and get moved about, but I think that the actors have been able to manipulate them in such a way to reduce noise. We tried all kinds of other ideas for the weights, but it was too last minute. If we'd thought about it earlier, perhaps before the chain pocket was created in the first place, we would have been better off.

While the opening of the show has been a relief, things feel less than awesome right now for me. I'm still waiting for a job to emerge and I'm struggling with some personal demons, while also diving head first into Orpheus Descending and preparing for SETC in Atlanta.

I ask myself, as we get closer and closer to graduation (just over 2 months at this point) what I'm doing and why. I felt a lot like this as I was leaving Grinnell, having been embroiled in nasty department politics and feeling generally burned out from four years of school. My time at Portland Stage really helped heal me and remind me of the passion that I'd followed into my college major. And now that I feel that I've found myself in this very familiar valley, I hope that whatever happens after May 6th will involve some more healing.

But what I have been trying to take away from the situation I find myself in is how I would do things differently. For instance, how will I be a better teacher and mentor? How can I keep students from being overwhelmed by academics at the detriment of their artistic development? How can I make the boring stuff, the red tape, the things that can't be gotten rid of be less important to the excitement of creating and collaborating and being involved in theatre?

I don't know that I have concrete answers as to what I would do, but I definitely can see the pitfalls. I had two lovely friends visit me this weekend and one asked me, where do you see yourself in five years. The honest/ideal answer is that in five years I'll be teaching. In five years I will be settling down with a family. But the reality is that I'm probably going to be teaching next year because that's the most tangible way that I can be employed. And while I won't have a lot of professional experience under my belt, I definitely plan on being the best theatre educator I can be, because I at least have a lot of experience in the system. And it's time to change it.

Pericles Tech

We're in tech! It's going slowly!
I'm going mad!

But here's a picture.



Or two...

Education vs. Efficiency

Design! Design! Design!
Read! Read! Read!
Prepare! Prepare! Prepare!
Draw! Draw! Draw!
Apply! Apply! Apply!
Blog! Blog! Blog!

I feel like there is a constant harping on all the things I have to do right now, including trying, trying, trying to keep up with writing. I apologize for not, really, but I feel like I might drop dead at any given moment. Which means, you guessed it, I'm about to head into tech. Sunday, in fact, will be Day #1 of Pericles tech... and we are running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to get ready. Today was both rewarding and infuriating. Rewarding because we started planking the main rake of the floor (which, without pictures, probably doesn't mean much to you, but soon). Infuriating because Education and Efficiency went head to head, and I'm not sure who won.

As an educational institution, theoretically we are supposed to be worried about educating the students who are serving Practicum hours in the shop. Thus, we (grad students, undergrad assistants, staff, faculty) are primarily supposed to oversee their work, offer guidance, and not just shove them out of the way to stand looking at us stupidly rather than wielding the tools themselves. So today we started planking the floor at approximately 2:30pm with two teams of undergraduate practicum students running the show (well, I was running it, but they were operating the tools and what-not). By 4:45pm, only about 1/3 of the rake was done and it had to be done by 6pm. It was a nightmare. I had the Technical Director, staff, and various other higher-ups breathing down my neck, but I was specifically instructed to be the Artistic Eye and not the labor. BUT! We were not making progress. We managed to get it done, finding a rhythm in what felt like the eleventh hour (and then our amazing Master Carpenter jumping in with his mad stapling skills) and finished by 6:15... but, as I said, it was infuriating.

At a certain point I felt like all I was doing was cracking the whip rather than paying attention to how the boards were being laid out in regards to color and staggering the seams. Though I feel like no major problems occurred, per se, I am left wondering why we allow this broken system to prevail.

In a carpenter's shop (where they are making actual things like furniture or what have you rather than useless things like scenic elements), young, unskilled workers spend time as merely hands cleaning up or holding tools (and observing). Why can't we do that in the educational theatre setting? Why isn't that considered a valid way to learn? Is it perhaps because many of our poor, unskilled slaves undergrads are forced into our scene (and costume) shops because of requirements, not interest? Thus, we must entice them to want to be there by giving them tools and letting them slow us down and screw things up (oh, you cannot imagine how many times I just had to let go of having a perfectly spaced out deck today...). This is a problem. It is a disservice, not just to the show (and design/designer) but to the students who are being entrusted with the responsibility to build things that they cannot. They get yelled at or they at least can tell when whomever they are disappointing is, in fact, disappointed. (I had one young man apologize profusely for his team's slow pace today, but really, who am I to get angry? They were doing the best that they knew how.)

It is irksome, and, as I may have said, we're behind. I feel stressed in a way that is unproductive. I can't do anything about where we're at and I know that someone higher up is going to complain, going into tech, about shit not being complete. And because I'm not someone who passes the buck or points fingers, I'm going to feel incredibly guilty and like I failed my own design. Urg.

Let's hope that by February 18th, when Pericles opens, it will all have been worth it.