Tuesday, June 2, 2009

My computer (yes, a PC) died again yesterday. That's the 4th time in 3 weeks. My Norton antivirus expired or stopped working for some reason about 3 weeks ago, and ever since I downloaded McAfee Antivirus on my computer 3 weeks ago, its been having problems. And there's no other Antivirus that I can get, because my computer can't install anything else (the guys at ResNet already tried) for some reason.

Go Macs.

Kevin

Meeting Today

There is a meeting today, Tuesday 6/2, at Joe's at 2 PM. We will be finishing up our preparation for our stage design.

Be there.

TA10 Final Exam Topics

- Theater Company Hierarchy & Static categories (Howard)
- Metapatterns (Volk)
- The door (Aronson)
- Image versus Sign (States)
- Spectacle/Media (Aronson)
- Metaphor (Borges)
- George Tsypin’s use of steel and glass (Aronson)
- The ideograph (Taymor)
- The double image: showing off the mechanics(Taymor)
- Space in space (Svoboda)
- The formal theater (Robert Wilson)
- Anti-illusionistic design (Appia)
- Color projection color recession
- 1.2.3. point perspective
- Complementary colors
- Forced perspective
- light and shadow:
1) specular
2) specular-edge transfer
3) shadow-edge transfer
4) shadow.

- Motivated lighting: Identifying the source
- Elevation Section and Plan
- Ecstatic truth (Herzog)
- Theater of the oppressed (Boal)
- Collaboration
- Ishioka’s creed: revolutionary, original, timeless
- Foreman’s set design (Aronson)

Feel free to add information. :)

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Here are the pictures of our first day of the Live Design meetings.
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Pictures from our next session will be posted Tuesday night, enjoy =D.

-Alex

Preliminary Live Design meeting

That went well. :) Basic sequence of events planned out, acted out. Pictures to follow as soon as Alex gets home and uploads them.

New meeting time - TUESDAY 2PM AT JOE'S, AND FROM THERE TO THE QUARRY WHERE WE WILL FURTHER REFINE OUR SEQUENCE OF ACTIONS
(If you follow the path past Joe's and past the stairs that lead to the Merrill bus stop, you'll see signs for the Quarry up and to the left. If not, people around you should be able to give you directions, or just call Boyd.)

WE ARE STILL MEETING ON WEDNESDAY.

We may or may not recruit Mark's girlfriend to help us with lighting (since we're at a disadvantage, being half the size of other groups, and my suggestion of hiring workers from outside the hardware store to help us was summarily vetoed). Her name is Holly, she's nice.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language: Reading Notes

- Since its beginnings, theater has always used technology to dazzle and mystify the audience.
- Since the early-mid twentieth century, video and projections have been used; sometimes as a gimmick, sometimes as a replacement for a backdrop.
- Projections and moving images do not work on stage, they distract the audience, they don’t have the same scenographic vocabulary.
- Theater “tricks” the audience by making the signified the signifier; a human represents another human, a chair represents a chair.
- When an audience sits in a theater, they realize that they are supposed to perceive the stage as what it represents, not what it really is.
- When something like a video is projected on stage, it disrupts the audience’s perception of the stage.
- Another issue is that the audience perceives the stage and actors as part of “here and now.” It’s being performed live, the sets are moving and changing, etc. But when an image is projected, while it still exists in the “here and now” it still also exists in the past. It’s been pre-made, pre-recorded.


To comment on the reading:

I saw a production of Hamlet where the ghost of Hamlet's father was used as a projection of some sort of otherworldly mist, and I thought it worked surprisingly well. The again, the author did say there were exceptions.


-Mark Escobedo

Aronson's Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language? Notes

- projected scenery, especially film/video, do not work onstage
- projections and images are innately different from the stage, so employing both is simply overwhelming and confusing
- this clash between theater and media involve physiological, psychological, and philosophical reasons
- theater is the only art form to use objects to signify the same object (human = another human, chair = chair, etc)
- we have an intrinsic understanding that we reside in time and space
- this understanding carries over to what is perceived onstage
- projected images derail this sense of time & space producing a separate world on stage
- images, being static, are subject to the angle at which they are viewed (so no single person in the audience sees the same thing)
- photographs while in the present represent something historical, whereas the stage is wholly present and something we can touch
- there is also a spatial dislocation between stage and projected images
- the stage frames each scene much like a painting does
- when a player leaves the stage, our imagination fills in what happened to them
- cinema and projections conflict with the frame onstage and puts into question figure and ground
- images (especially moving ones) cause confusion and dislocation: the projection is seen as the figure and the stage as the ground
- since projections are framed, we perceive them as boundless; the stage, on the other hand, is apparently confined and finite
- moving images also force a competition of focus between it and the actors
- projections have no permanence since it is only light and shadow
- there are cases of contemporary media and theater working together such as the Wooster Group's productions
- as Aristotle warned, spectacle is "the least artistic" aspect of theater