Any tidbits on designing for dance specifically? SC My main observation about sound (or any kind of design) for dance is that the whole process works really well if you can set aside ego and work for the good of the piece. I know a lot of great designers and engineers who have gotten horribly frustrated about working six hours on a section of music or collage only to have it tossed out of the piece at the last minute. We're all frustrated by that from time to time, but dance is a really flexible and temporal art form; you can lose a lot of hard work easily, but you can also land on amazing results that you might not have imagined at the beginning of the process. That's what makes it so exciting and what keeps me coming back to it. DW I think the biggest pitfall that I've seen is when taking the step from designing for theater and finding yourself in a room with dancers is this sense that "now I don't have to worry about turning down the music for the text of a play" or "because it's just the dancers and music here's my big chance to blow it all out and not have to worry about answering to a director of a play and I can do what I want." So the process for a sound designer can easily and very quickly turn into a me/ego driven process. You don't have quite the same given restrictions aurally in dance that you do in the theater so the integrity of a design (if you're not careful) can become about all the cool things you can finally get to do, rather than stepping back and examining what role the design needs to play in the piece and letting the work be organic. We have the ability now with the technology and tools we have to basically do anything aurally we want, so the question of "is this the proper idea and is it working" can get lost in the "listen to this cool awesome amazing sound thing that I made." It's really, really important when you hear that voice in your head that says things to you like cool and awesome in reference to something you made that you have the ability to step back from the what you've created and listen and look at it with a critical eye. You have to be able to both create and critique and it's two different muscles. Make it, then step back and look and listen and ask the really hard questions about the effectiveness of the creation. 26 theatre design & technology w i n t e r 2011