Technical theatre reflection

In this chapter, technical theatre is a very complicated field. Unlike other subject that technical theatre has so many subtypes so it is easy to understand what I want to do in technical theatre but hard to expert at how to do well what I want. Furthermore, some techniques and instruments in technical theatre are too distant from our previous studies so sometimes the concept will be very obscure.

When we started our chapter at very first, I was asked to research the lighting part and do a presentation. So I looked up “stage lighting in theatre”. I found many sources that tell me about the concept of some elements in lighting, and they introduced the concept in a easy way. However, when they start to introduce the work that needs to be done in a lighting project, I got totally confused by those varied instruments. Each of them has a special use, obviously I would not have time to learn about everything. And the next thing coming was the lighting plot, a floor plan of the stage with unknown symbols. There was a huge gap between theory and the practice. I hope there was an example of a lighting project that tells me about all the process that the lighting designer has overcome during the whole process, then I would have a better understanding on how can I do one project myself.

In other people’s presentations, I found the same problem that I had as I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It was so hard to connect the practice and the theory. Another thing that is hard to carry out the designing for technical theatre is that no matter how huge is your memory of the knowledge, you always need to do tons of research when you start a new project. I feel it deeply when I tried to do the costume and makeup part for my project. To design the costumes for a story in a certain period, other than costume design, the designer need to go deep into the time period, and that is really hard to do because the designer’s profession is designing dress but not history. That is a very hard job that you can always see comments under historical series that “history amateurs” criticize some of the details on costume for not being “historical”.

Starting with “historical accuracy”, there is another problem: sometimes the “historical” setting does not has a good look as the artistic one. So the designer has to make decision to sacrifice the accuracy or the artistry, or to find a balance some where between these two extremes. That really depends on the need of the director: a historical drama or a comedy performance? 

In the aspect of stage or scenic design, I think we can do better if we have more resources.  Because the stage design requires relatively more practical research than theoretical research for that every stage and theatre are different. For example, the same setting may looks different when it is placed in another theatre. Our setting for Les Miserables which looks fine in black box could be a disaster in the theatre in Hartford. So I think if we want to be expert in that aspect, we should have a field trip to a local theatre workshop to do more research with the staging crews.

Another guessing of what other obstacles that theatre face in making the tech aspects work well with the theoretical vision of the show might be the whole technical job requires a big group of people to collaborate, misunderstandings are common in group communications. The designers cannot read the director’s mind to see what he really want, or there are other factors that hamper the vision becoming reality such like: expense, casting choices, stage limitation, etc. 

To conclude what part of technical theatre is hard to me, I will say the diversity of it really gave me a hard time to try to think of all perspectives and obviously I could not. But I did made progress in this process: find the source myself, teach my classmates, learn from my classmates, think of more possibilities.