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Library), contains over forty years' worth of plots, ground plans,
cue sheets, draftings, and more. In addition to production materials, the collection contains correspondence, interviews, hundreds of slides, and lesson materials from his courses at Yale
School of Drama. In addition to the catalog entries through the
OSU library, a detailed online finding aid is available through
the New York Public Library at http://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/danskelt.pdf.
A collection from a contemporary artist is a rare opportunity
to see the workings of professional designers of our own time.
Tony nominee and costume designer Toni-Leslie James has
boxes of costume bibles, designs, working scripts, and other
documents available at the TRI. They include her work on the
Broadway production of Angels in America (1993), among
many other designs for Broadway, the New York Shakespeare
Festival, major dance work, and television. Her costume bibles
are thorough and extensive with renderings, swatches, photos
of the actors, and more. Dig a little deeper and find photos of
the interviewees in Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles
or Savion Glover's costume measurements for Jelly's Last Jam.
The Tony Straiges collection, another valuable collection
from a contemporary designer, contains design materials and
renderings, including eighteen scale models, from this Tony
Award winning scene designer best known for his collaborations with Stephen Sondheim. The numerous dimensional models and maquettes in the TRI design holdings are challenging to
preserve and store, but may offer the most complete representation of the final product of a scene design.
Designers and technicians alike benefit from the Joel E.
Rubin Collection that contains materials from the history of
lighting design and technology-primarily materials from the
Kliegl Brothers Lighting Company, at one time the largest stage
lighting manufacturer in the world. The collection contains
documents that span the hundred-year history of the company.
It also includes two cases of hand-painted pose plastique slides
that were available for purchase through the Kliegl Brothers
catalog. A pose plastique was a popular and sometimes risqué
entertainment from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In it, a woman, often in a tight, flesh-colored body suit,
would pose on stage while a slide image was projected onto
her. Depending on the content of the slide, this would appear to
transform her into a famous statue, a fanciful creature, or any
number of other beings. The Joel E. Rubin Collection contains
not only the slides themselves, but the original hand-painted
designs for them and the sales lists from Kliegl.
The first major manufacturer of stock scenery in the country, and one of the largest of its time, was the Armbruster Scenic
Studios of Columbus, Ohio. Armbruster was also the first studio
to establish a mail-order business and supplied painted drops
and scenery to theatres across the Midwest and beyond. The
TRI's Armbruster Scenic Studio Collection includes hundreds
of sketches, renderings, maquettes, and even complete painted
drops showing every step in the design process.
Although a large portion of the design holdings in the
TRI are from domestic artists and companies, there are also
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outstanding examples of design collections from overseas.
The English designer Daphne Dare (1929-2000) designed
costumes extensively in the West End of London and at the
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where she eventually became head of design. She also designed for film and television, including costumes and monsters for the first two
years of the original BBC series Dr. Who. The majority of
the Daphne Dare Collection, over 1,100 designs, are now
available not only to researchers on site, but also to the
general public in a new searchable online database. The
collection also includes blueprints, clippings, notes, photographs, posters, and programs.
For more than a decade, the Department of Theatre at
OSU, along with the TRI, has fostered a strong relationship with
the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. One of the fruits of
this friendship is a robust collection of designs from artists in
the Czech Republic, a country whose influence on contemporary design for theatre extends far beyond the significant Prague
Quadrennial. This collection includes work, both canonical
and cutting-edge, from major artists including Jaroslav Malina,
František Tröster, Petr Matásek, and Jan Šteˇpánek. Additionally, an active exchange program has brought numerous Czech
designers to OSU to directly engage with the TRI, the Department
of Theatre, and the students. In most cases, these exchanges have
resulted in additional holdings to the ever-growing collection.
Central to the TRI's Czech collaboration is Joe Brandesky,
professor at OSU's Lima campus, who has participated in the
curating of numerous nationally-touring exhibitions of Czech
scenography including Metaphor and Irony: Czech Set and
Costume Design 1920-1999. Much of the artwork from these
exhibitions now calls the TRI its home.
Providing history and context to the Czech collection are
the papers of Jarka Burian (1927-2005), the leading English
language scholar on Czech theatre. After the invasion of Prague
in 1968, Burian returned to his ancestral home of the Czech Republic numerous times and wrote extensively on Czech theatre
and international design with a focus on the entanglements of the
political and artistic lives of Czech theatre practitioners. The vast
research, interview notes, and photos contained in these more
than thirty boxes are the foundation on which Burian built numerous articles and books including his definitive Modern Czech
Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a Nation (2000).
Having the privilege of exploring the archives of the TRI
is like digging in a gold mine, but cleaner. Every new folder
reveals a hidden gem, a personal note, a candid photograph,
an unseen treasure that exists only with the thing itself. The TRI
research fellowship makes it possible for anyone to experience
the excitement of discovery. More information, including an
on-line information form, is available at http://library.osu.edu/
find/collections/theatre-research-institute/tri-fellowship/. v
Brad Steinmetz is a designer of scenery, lighting,
projections, and objects. He is currently an instructor
of design in the department of theatre at The Ohio State
University. (www.bradsteinmetz.com)

http://www.nypl.org/sites/de http://library.osu.edu/ http://www.bradsteinmetz.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2011