Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2008 - 32

by Michael Millar, a technical consultant who advances national
tours for LA TheaterWorks reveals. "Some theater spaces can
be the enemy of your show. Sometimes we have to design for
the worst possible house on the tour, or create a "B" version of
the show to accommodate those spaces."
A hallmark of designing for the theater is designing for
transitions in the real time of a performance. The narrative cannot stop while the scenery, costumes or lights set up the next
scene. Indeed, in some shows the real spectacle is the dance
of sets, props and crew backstage. Smooth, timely transitions
from one scene to another are a crucial element of immersion
and rhythm. During the nineteenth century, audiences patiently
sat thru scenery changing intervals, but contemporary practice
urges a much faster pace with a drive to eliminate actual black
outs between scenes. This puts more of an emphasis on transitions-or eliminating them-than before.
The pacing of stories has also sped up, as writers are
increasingly influenced more by the rhythm of film or television stories. Scenes are often shorter and jump locations in
cinematic tradition. Directors, sensitive to dwindling audience
attention spans, will sometimes telescope scenes to imitate the
split screen effect of film, staging two scenes simultaneously
with dialogue pausing for the audience to observe both at once.
The increasing pace of theater is perhaps one reason unit sets
or stages with a series of small playing areas such as slip stages,
revolves, wagons or hydraulically moved units are increasingly
popular methods of telling stories.
Just as automated scenery motion is influenced by the
shrinking stage crew, the number of roles an actor may play
within a script increases as producers reduce the number of
actor contracts per production. A classic script calling for
over twenty roles could have been played by twenty actors in
a resident company. That same script today may be performed
by fewer than a dozen actors, each playing multiple roles. As
actors play multiple characters they require more complete
costumes and wigs to transform from role to role, and more
complex and frequent back stage changes.
And, as scenic transitions speed up, so do the pace of those
more elaborate costume changes. This increases the need for
crew members and garment durability. Marcy Froelich recalls
that when Evita came to New York for its Broadway run "they
had bought real 1940s rayon dresses for the dancers. Within
the first week the garments were shredding, and the costume
shop had to copy the dress style in new fabric to withstand the
vigorous movement."

technologY: performance sUpport or performer?
Designers for live performance must now include a new
set of decisions in storytelling. They must wrestle with the impact of incorporating technology or not-in this particular
story, will technology be a hidden helper or part of the visual
aesthetic itself? As a hidden helper, technology can make transitions go faster and smoother by providing hard ware and soft
ware to increase efficiency. But technology itself may come to

the forefront becoming a vital part of the story itself.
One group who has embraced technology for its story
telling abilities is the Builders Association, a New York-based
performance and media company dedicated to exploiting the
richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. Their show Super Vision, first performed in
2005, explores the surveillance data we create on ourselves as
we move through our daily routine. Described as a "Cross Media Performance," performers interact with live feeds and computer generated images. (See fig. 6.) Acting with and behind a
movable set of scrims resembling Japanese shoji screens, the
character is superimposed with the data he has generated, illustrating the way our trail of daily transactions become central
to our personal identities.
At first glance the stage resembles an old fashioned wingand-drop set with screens to accommodate projections. However, a bank of computers and technicians at the base of the
stage are not only in plain sight, but also an integral part of the
play's message. (See fig. 7.)
In this scene, a New York woman talks with her Grandmother in India via webcam. The audience can simultaneously
watch the actor playing the grandmother below the stage at a
computer, and the live feed of Grandmother on the stage computer monitor. The actor playing the grand daughter is onstage,
but her face is also incorporated in the stage computer monitor
that stands in for their ability to communicate. At every turn,

Figure 6. Superimposed Data Trail. SuperVision by The Builders
Association and dbox. Director, Marianne Weems; Set and Costume
Design, Stewart Laing; Lighting Design, Jennifer Tipton and Allen Hahn;
Video Design, Peter Flaherty; Virtual Design by Dbox; Sound Design and
Music, Dan Dobson.

S P R I N G

2008

theatre

design

technology

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2008