Pericles or How I Learned to Stitch

As promised, an entire blog post dedicated to my design of Shakespeare's lesser known play, Pericles, at Shady Shakespeare this summer.

The summary of the story is that King Pericles goes on a journey to find a wife and ends up visiting all kinds of strange lands. The director for this show, Shady's resident dramaturg, had been working on the concept of Pericles being set in space rather than the Mediterranean for seven years, and finally it came to fruition in this production. Each land Pericles encounters represented  a sci-fi/cult-classic/other planet from many well-known movies and TV shows, from Flash Gordon to Star Wars to Mortal Kombat.

I became the Costume Designer for this show after the concept had been fleshed out in design meetings. And while I did create the sketches and make some artistic decisions, I cannot take credit for much of the over-arching concept of what lands would be represented and by whom. The whole thing was an adventure that rivaled the epic story Shakespeare wrote.

Pericles' home planet of Tyre was that of the venerable Star Wars Jedis. He wore the many-layered Jedi tunic, obi, shoulder armor, and robe. And his most trusted advisers were modeled after very iconic Jedis from the many movies.

He visits the land of Ming the Merciless as well as a Klingon planet.

As you can see, the costumes were the most important part of telling the story of where Pericles journeyed--the scenery was a unit set and had only a few elements that changed.

Perhaps my and the audience's favorite part of the entire show was the lightsaber fight.

Yes.

Lightsaber.

Fight.

Each Knight was a different kind of sci-fi character, much decided by the actor themselves.

From Left to Right we have: A Tron-ish, Mandolorian-ish fighter; A White Samurai; A Darth Maul-ish Character; A Matrix-inspired Fighter; & Our lady fighter in a bit of goth mixed with Tron.

I'll leave you with one more image that needs no explanation.

Please visit my website for more!

The project was eventful and hard. The performance space was in the Sanborn County Park in Saratoga, and so everything was remote and out of the way. I'm sure I shouldn't assume all summer stock Shakespeare will be like this, but I don't know if this kind of work is really for me. In the end I did 10 loads of laundry and took pounds of dry cleaning to the cleaners.... Can't wait to put this all behind me.

Radio Silence Over

You know how it is, you put something off for so long that getting back to it becomes harder and harder. Especially as a blogger, where do I begin in the time that I've been away. How long do I push the rewind button?

So much has happened.

I finished up the drop I last wrote about and never got any kind of production photos.

I supervised the costumes for Broadway By the Bay's The Marvelous Wonderettes and taught children at Pied Piper Players's inaugural summer camp.

Teaching children about theatre is the most rewarding, and I had my first experience working with a child with Asberger's. It was a challenge, but I felt very good about how everything went.

This is the cast and staff of Charlotte's Web. I love this picture of everyone and you can see the awesome backdrop the kids designed and painted!

And our small but mighty cast of How to Eat Like a Child. You can't see it here, but they also designed and painted two legs. This was a great group.

Possibly the most exciting bit of work I did this summer was a design for Pericles at Shady Shakespeare Theatre Company. I have some great images from that show and will be uploading them in a blog post all their own.

So, this summer was a success in the freelancing world, although I nearly dropped dead the week that Pericles was teching and we were finishing up the second session of camp. I've got some fun projects on the horizon, most notably working on BBBay's A Chorus Line and a few actual designs. I'm also going to try to get back to blogging. No more excuses because we're all caught up!

Oh, also of note: Working on my biggest design yet: My wedding!!!

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.

It's a Busy Time

I want to write so many things, but I fear my brain isn't really awake this early in the morning.

I have been hard at work getting Pericles going and, hopefully, finished. We go into tech in 2 weeks. I will admit I've been a bit lax about it, trying to let the other students involved (like my Props Master & Paint Charge) be, well, in charge. But I think we're going to have step up our game. The show is deceptively complex. The two rakes, large wheel and fabric make it seem like there's not much going on. But this show is going to be about the details. A Shakespearean Odyssey, Pericles visits at least 5 different locales during the course of the action, and we've got to make the audience believe with props and furniture (and costumes) that we've gone somewhere new despite the lack of scenic shift. Hopefully it will all come out nicely as this is my last scenic design in my foreseen future.

I'm also in the midst of the design process for Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams. I am, shock! amaze!, designing the costumes for the show and having a good time trying to infuse them with meaning and character. Below are my thumbnails for Lady, the main character. She has these three costumes and then we see her 2 other times in her nightgown/robe. The idea is that she begins in a drab, unflattering dress (much like the other characters in the town) as she has been forced to conform to the societal norms of this small-town (aka Hell). But as she blossoms under the attentions of Val (the wandering drifter) and attempts to recapture her father's wine garden, her silhouette becomes more rounded and fanciful. She becomes more feminine and womanly and happy, despite her possibly unhappy demise.




The other character that I thought I'd share is the Conjure Man, to me the most interesting character and costume. He is the only Black character in the show, despite the script being infused with racial themes. The history of conjuring and conjure men is a part of Black spirituality and religion that traveled with them from Africa and became infused with the Christian and Native American beliefs and religions they were exposed to. Thus, I have tried to layer upon the Black body (which itself has social and racial implications) notions of the Native American and Colonial influences, making the Conjure Man not of this world, something apart, and yet very much influenced by it. We are still working out the details of his coat (does it make him too attached to civilization?) but this is really close to what you're going to see, I figure.



Other than the two shows, I am working on my 3 presentations for SETC. I have the two shows that I am competing with: Oklahoma! and The Waiting Room. And then I'll be presenting my paper on Feminist Design as well. (And doing Job Contact, which is a crazy free-for-all of talking to potential employers). I have a feeling that my SETC is going to be jam-packed! And it is in only 4 weeks!

On that note, I'm going to go do some more work. Or yoga. Perhaps I'll do some yoga to start the day off right.