Vanessa

Directors and Designers Summary

In the article "Directors and Designers" Pamela Howard talks about the actual roles of directors and designers and how that contrasts with the ideal roles. She starts off the article with a bold statement saying how "the excitement that should be in theatres is found only in baseball parks, arenas, stadiums, and racecourses" (p. 25). This leads into the different roles people take in order to make a play exciting. It logically includes the director and designer working together as one to become a single creator of the work. In the early 1980s, Howard spoke about how hardly any designers were also directors, except for Philip Prowse and the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. They discovered their own style of theatre, they produced plays that could only be seen in Britain, and brought in daring actors and young designers right out of college. The main ideas in the article show two people or groups coming together to make a form of theatre more enjoyable. Howard spoke of the directors and designers in terms of royalty. She said that the director was the master while the designers were the servants. In her opinion, however, directors need to find a new direction in order to end the master servant relationship. Whether it was Prowse and the Glasgow Theatre or Vladimir Mayakovsky and the director Frantisek Zelenka, Howard showed the teamwork and power that needs to be shared in order for a play to recieve the excitement it should from the audience.
-Vanessa Parga

Sofie's collage

Behind the Screen Door Summary

Doors are oft used objects in plays or shows which people often take for granted. Used in today's sitcoms as well as the dramas of the ancient times, doors represent a divide or barrier of some sort, between the known and the unknown. Doors block off a chaos which cannot be seen by the audience, yet they are so easily penetrated by the forces outside. Doors are important because a major part of theater is the constant entrances and exits by different characters. They can represent a beginning and an end, as well as a flow of new information to the audience. Theater can be seen as a door to the inner human soul, and doors on stage can emulate this idea. Every time a door is swung open, an infinite number of possibilities can be brought to the forefront of a play.
However doors were not always used on stage in drams. The first recorded use of a door in drama was around 460 BC in The Oresteia. Before The Oresteia was produced and the use of doors was made part of theater, the Greeks, on the Acropolis, introduced and brought characters on stage gradually. Using the rolling hills behind the stage, the Greeks had characters walk onto stage using long processions. The audience would see this, and to ease the long and tedious walk, the Greeks would have a narrator introduce the character while they made their way to the stage. It may have worked, but it took away the surprise, and the audience knew which characters were going to be on stage long before the character actually got there.
When doors were introduced, the rhythm of dramatic theater was drastically changed. Characters could enter and exit a set quickly, bringing surprise to the stage. Doors also allowed playwrights to accomplish things which they did not feel could be realistically portrayed in front of an audience. One such example is the act of murder. In Agamemnon, a door is used to conceal a murder. The audience cannot see the act, but hear the screams and flailing of the actor behind the door. The door leaves the imagination of the audience to fill in the gaps of what happened, a thought more horrific than could actually be portrayed by live actors.
Doors represent a threshold which belongs to neither side it governs. Still, passing through a door can represent many things, such as a dangerous act. Roland Barthes notes that in theater, characters who leave through a door often leave to their death. The potential of a door's usage is unlimited, yet doors are becoming more and more uncommon in live theater. The plays today without doors can have no definite end and leave the audience no feeling of finality. In television, doors are used to relate to the audience, to show that the setting shown in the black screen is similar to the one in which we live. In this way, today's television doors represent doors, while theater's doors represent a barrier to the unknown.

-Chris

Justin

Chris

Vincent

Miyou

If You Seek Sofie... (An Ode to the Founders)

So this is how we roll:
Original to this group are only six people
Formed together like under a church steeple.
In this union we've got the one and only Sophie
Even starting small, we know we'll get that trophy.

Everywhere we go, we know that we look good
Now that Justin's in the group, doing lighting like one should.
Giving us ideas of how a set should look is V-Wong
Sketching and forming concepts, we know he'll never be wrong.
Tracing? Ridiculous, because we have a real artist
Recognize Vanessa please, or you're not the smartest.
Our organization is the tops, because we've got Miyou
Managing the stage like vacation in Rio.

For photography, we've got Chris seeing objects through the lens
Observing things on our set, which sets the latest trends.
Under this introduction, you'll notice something missing
No director listed. Wonder what we're thinking?
Directing this crew of many talented persons

Produces a situation which we know can only worsen
Everyone in this group is accountable for each other
Acknowledging group members like a sister or a brother.
Combined altogether, we are known through to Nairobi
Eternally true to ourselves, and asking “Where's Sofie?”

Manifesto

What we stand for:

We are a league of random thought persons
Because an apple a day, is seven apples a week
And we make sets that aesthetically please.
We drink milk because it makes our bones strong.
But don't tase me bro!
Because you can pick your friends and your nose, but you can't pick your friends' nose.
And all the boys and all the girls are begging to if you seek Amy.
Because the words that come out of our mouthes flow like poetry,
And the setting is set, and the set is watching the sunset.
The rest is still unwritten.
The message is sent.

Manifesto

Is on the way and should be brought for the viewing for all those whom are interested in knowing "where's sofie?"