How do theatre lighting designers decide what is 'the right light' for each moment of a production? What informs their choices? Why does the audience respond more strongly when the lighting feels 'right'? By interviewing nineteen prominent lighting designers and weaving their insights through his own narrative, Nick Moran aims to answer such questions. This book considers practice across different types of theatre, including opera, dance, musicals and drama. Rather than being a technical manual, it allows lighting designers to contribute contrasting and complementary ideas about how to approach lighting design. Moran argues that the best stage lighting is made with emotion, passion and soul, by creative artists willing to take risks. Includes interviews with: Neil Austin - Lucy Carter - Jon Clark - Natasha Chivers - Paule Constable - James Farncombe - Rick Fisher - Mark Henderson - David Howe - Michael Hulls - Mark Jonathan - Peter Mumford - Ben Ormerod - Bruno Poet - Paul Pyant - Nick Richings - Johanna Town - Hugh Vanstone - Katharine Williams

Automated Lighting: The Art and Science of Moving and Color-Changing Lights, Third Edition (formerly Automated Lighting: The Art and Science of Moving Light) continues to be the most trusted text for working and aspiring lighting professionals. Now in its third edition, it has been fully updated to reflect the vast changes in stage and studio luminairies-including LEDs, switch-mode power supplies, optics, networking, Ethernet-based protocols like Art-Net and sACN, wireless DMX, and much more. Its written in clear, easy-to-understand language and includes enough detailed information to benefit for the most experienced technicians, programmers, and designers. Additional content and resources are provided at the author's website www.automatedlighting.pro.

The Handbook of Stage Lighting is a journey of exploration into the heart of the fascinating world that paints pictures and tells stories with the most basic of all materials - light. In this comprehensive guide, authors Neil Fraser and Simon Bennison bring to a clear and persuasive text a shared expertise and an inspirational joy in their subject. From the simplest beginnings, it takes you through the workings of lighting design and provides the technical know-how required to function as an effective lighting designer. Topics include: the lighting designer's role; researching and interpreting the text; production styles, and the relationship between directors and designers; the theory of lighting: angle, shape, colour, movement, composition and finally, choosing, using and controlling lighting equipment.

The work of Augusto Boal has had a tremendous impact on contemporary theatre. This volume looks at the scope of Boal's career - from his early work as a playwright and director in Sao Paulo in the 1950s, to the development of his groundbreaking manifesto in the 1970s for a 'Theatre of the Oppressed'. Augusto Boal will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the role that theatre can play in stimulating social and personal change. This useful study combines:

• a biographical and historical overview of Boal's career as theatre practitioner and director
• in-depth analysis of Boal's classic text on radical theatre, The Theatre of the Oppressed
• exploration of training and production techniques
• practical guidance to Boal's workshop methods.

My Cue to Fight is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth examination of how the greatest playwright in the English language employed not only psychological brutality but also physical violence throughout his works. Written ideally for theatrical stage directors, fight directors, intimacy consultants, and actors as a technical scene-by-scene breakdown in staging combat during production of these plays, this publication is also for Shakespeare enthusiasts who want to learn more about the blood, sweat, and viscera hidden just underneath the poetry. A writer utilises violence, like song or dance, in moments where the story requires more than just words. But addressing how the violence will be staged tends either to be neglected or utterly gratuitous, both of which serve to separate the audience from the story and kill the whole venture. The answer rests in approaching violence the same way we do scenework. The plays of William Shakespeare seek to engage audiences with all of the characters' blood, tears, sweat, and guts. These works are not flowery poems meant to be mumbled in a classroom, or histrionically declaimed in frilly costumes. There is nothing light and fluffy about 'rape' and 'murder's rages', or 'carving' someone as a dish fit for the gods, or fighting till from one's bones one's 'flesh be hacked'. Making matters more complicated is the ambiguity and sometimes even complete lack of stage directions. Modern texts typically possess clear directions whenever violence is to occur in the action, but playscripts were quite different four centuries ago. Such denotations were both rare and inconsistent in Elizabethan and Jacobean printings. The potential violence we will examine is not appropriate for all productions or scene partners. We're here to question and inspire rather than provide catch-all solutions. Actors, directors, fight directors, and intimacy consultants must work together to find the most effective way for their production to communicate the playwright's story to the audience.

Foam Patterning and Construction Techniques: Turning 2D Designs into 3D Shapes explains how to create your theatrical prop, puppet, or costume design using the unique and tricky medium of foam. Step-by-step instructions, photographs, and explanations illustrate how to translate your design from paper to reality by creating custom "skin" patterns, followed by creation of a foam mockup. The book details how to bring your project to life with varied finishing techniques, including using fur and fabric coverings and dying and painting foam. Numerous supplies, tools, and safety procedures and protocols are also covered.

Winner of Best Performance Design and Scenography Publication Award, Prague Quadrennial 2019 This beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance. Finding associations between contemporary practices and historical manifestations, costume is explored in six thematic chapters, examining the transformative ritual of costuming; choruses as reflective of society; the grotesque, transgressive costume; the female sublime as emancipation; costume as sculptural art in motion; and the here-and-now as history. Viewing the material costume as a crucial aspect in the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history. These range from ancient Greece to modern experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the 'fashion plays' to contemporary Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance. Revealing the relationship between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global as well as an Anglo and Eurocentric perspective, this book shows costume's ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders. Through it, we come to question the extent to which the material costume actually co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life in the temporary space of the performance. With a contribution by Melissa Trimingham, University of Kent, UK

"Production Design: Architects of the Screen" explores the role of the production designer through a historical overview that maps out landmark film and television designs. From the familiar environs of the soap opera to the elaborate and disorientating "Velvet Goldmine" and the hyper-realism of "Trainspotting," production design is integral to understanding moving-image text, with the emergence of themes, motifs and colors offering clues to unravel plot, character and underlying concepts. In considering the importance of physical space in the creation of a filmed environment, the book investigates questions of authenticity in detail, props, colors and materials. The design codes of period drama are examined and contrasted with more playful productions of the past, and the creation of distinctive contemporary looks are discussed through the use of key examples ranging from musicals of the 1930s to cult films of the 1990s. The book also includes interviews with leading production designers.

"This richly illustrated volume explores the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection... includes a thorough glossary and bibliography" Apollo "The essays and commentaries here provide valuable documentation and insights into the designs, their genesis, and the extent of this astonishing period in theatrical history" The Financial Times Masterpieces of Russian Stage Design 1880-1930 examines the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection of stage design, in turn outlining the history of modern Russian art: one of the most important interludes within the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century. Unique in size, scope, and composition, the collection is unequalled; artists include celebrities such as Bakst, Benois, Goncharova, Larionov, Malevich, Popova, Rodchenko, and Tatlin as well as less familiar names such as Anisfeld, Lissim, Remisoff, and Soudeikine. This volume (the first of a two-part set) includes over 200 colour illustrations of selected designs as well as an introduction, interview, indices (to artists, theatre companies, and primary productions), a glossary of terms, and a comprehensive bibliography for the visual and performing arts in Russia. From Neo-Nationalism and Symbolism through Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism to Constructivism and Socialist Realism, Masterpieces of Russian Stage Design guides the reader through the movements, styles, productions and projects that attracted many of Russia's early twentieth-century artists to the stage. The companion volume, Encyclopedia of Russian Stage Design ISBN: 9781851497195 (to be published in 2013), is the catalogue raisonne of the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection.

'Backing into the Spotlight is a hilarious and an unashamedly non-PC memoir . . . Now in his eighth decade, Whitehall is a fine raconteur, gloriously unreconstructed and still deeply suspicious of modernity' Daily Mail Standing in front of a full-length mirror in my dressing room at ITV studios, waiting to go on to the set of Backchat, I had a brief conversation with my reflection. 'Michael, what the f*** do you think you're doing?' Theatrical agent Michael Whitehall spent a career pushing others into the spotlight. He had been involved behind the scenes with the careers of many prominent actors, including Colin Firth, Richard Griffiths, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tom Courtenay, Ian Ogilvy, Judi Dench, Edward Fox, Michael Fassbender, Angela Thorne and Nigel Havers. But then, much to his surprise, his son Jack becomes a successful comedian and actor and decides that his new comedy partner should be his father. Whitehall Snr. finds himself reluctantly appearing on stage and then television, cast as the archetypal grumpy old man and thrust, in his early seventies, into a whole new career in front of the camera. Minor fame comes at a sedate pace: one of the highlights being a record GBP300,000 win for charity with Jack on Channel 4's The Million Pound Drop. In this enchanting memoir Whitehall looks back on his life, from growing up in suburban London in the 1940s and '50s with his saintly father and social climbing-mother, who coined the phrase 'a la carte' to describe people who were posher than she was and whose company she craved, to falling into a career as a successful theatrical agent and producer. As he says, 'Actors can be egotistical, greedy and vain, but they're not half as bad as agents and producers.' Charming, gossipy and above all very funny, Backing Into The Spotlight is no ordinary show business memoir.

From the authors of the successful Grand-Guignol and London's Grand Guignol - also published by UEP - this book includes translations of a further eleven plays, adding significantly to the repertoire of Grand-Guignol plays available in the English language. The emphasis in the translation and adaptation of these plays is once again to foreground the performability of the scripts within a modern context - making Performing Grand-Guignol an ideal acting guide. Hand and Wilson have acquired extremely rare acting copies of plays which have never been published and scripts that were published in the early years of the twentieth century but have not been published since - even in French. Includes plays written by, or adapted from, such notable writers as Octave Mirbeau, Gaston Leroux and St John Ervine as well as examples by Grand-Guignol stalwarts Rene Berton and Andre de Lorde. Also included is the 1920s London translation of Blind Man's Buff written by Charles Hellem and Pol d'Estoc and banned by the Lord Chamberlain. A brief history of the Parisian theatre is also included, for the benefit of readers who have not read the previous books.

In this newly revised second edition, veteran stage designers and technical directors Dennis Dorn and Mark Shanda introduce industry-standard drafting and designing practices with step-by-step discussions, illustrations, worksheets, and problems to help students develop and refine drafting and other related skills needed for entertainment set production work. By incorporating the foundational principles of both hand- and computer-drafting approaches throughout the entire book, the authors illustrate how to create clear and detailed drawings that advance the production process.
Early chapters focus on the basics of geometric constructions, orthographic techniques, soft-line sketching applications, lettering, and dimensioning. Later chapters discuss real-life applications of production drawing and ancillary skills such as time and material estimation and shop-drawing nomenclature. Two chapters detail a series of design and shop drawings required to mount a specific design project, providing a guided path through both phases of the design/construction process. Most chapters conclude with one or more worksheets or problems that provide readers with an opportunity to test their understanding of the material presented.
The authors' discussion of universal CAD principles throughout the manuscript provides a valuable foundation that can be used in any computer-based design, regardless of the software. Dorn and Shanda treat the computer as another drawing tool, like the pencil or T-square, but one that can help a knowledgeable drafter potentially increase personal productivity and accuracy when compared to traditional hand-drafting techniques.
Drafting for the Theatre, second edition assembles in one book all the principal types of drawings, techniques, and conventional wisdom necessary for the production of scenic drafting, design, and shop drawings. It is richly illustrated with numerous production examples and is fully indexed to assist students and technicians in finding important information. It is structured to support a college-level course in drafting, but will also serve as a handy reference for the working theatre professional.

This study sees the nineteenth century supernatural as a significant context for cinema's first years. The book takes up the familiar notion of cinema as a "ghostly," "spectral" or "haunted" medium and asks what made such association possible. Examining the history of the projected image and supernatural displays, psychical research and telepathy, spirit photography and X-rays, the skeletons of the danse macabre and the ghostly spaces of the mind, it uncovers many lost and fascinating connections. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema locates film's spectral affinities within a history stretching back to the beginning of screen practice and forward to the digital era. In addition to examining the use of supernatural themes by pioneering filmmakers like Georges Melies and George Albert Smith, it also engages with the representations of cinema's ghostly past in Guy Maddin's recent online project Seances (2016). It is ideal for those interested in the history of cinema, the study of the supernatural and the pre-history of the horror film.

A design tech portfolio showcases a theatre designer/technician's most prized accomplishments in stage design, lighting, costuming, or makeup. The ability to make a winning portfolio is essential to getting into choice colleges, obtaining scholarships, and getting new jobs in the field. Unfortunately the process can become time consuming and challenging if you don't know where to start. Show Case offers students, teachers, and aspiring professionals the information they need to know to create, maintain, and show off their portfolio. This fully revised second edition features new and expanded chapters that explore current and innovative approaches to creating a design-tech portfolio, including branding, social networking, and traditional and interactive e-portfolios. This comprehensive guide also covers planning and developing details such as page layout, content variety, aesthetic sequencing, marketing, personal presentation, and next steps. Each chapter features introductions, samples, and lists of "Do's and Don'ts" provided by experienced professionals in the different design/tech fields. Portfolios featured are from an incredible cast of contributors at different stages of their careers, including recent graduate students, officers of renowned organizations and international theater artists, and art directors representing narrative artists in the allied fields of film, TV, and other media. This book is designed as a reference guide, workbook, and an inspirational tool, assisting designers/technicians in the process of developing a showcase that can be used to apply for graduate school, to pursue new jobs in the field, and for career marketing purposes.

This is the first major collection of critical responses to performance lighting and includes contributions from award-winning lighting designers, researchers and artists. Showcasing recent examples of work - with case studies of lighting practices in Britain, Europe, the US and China - combined with theoretical and analytical approaches to practice, this will enrich your understanding of the role and potential of light in performance and related creative practices. This volume explores three core themes and provides a framework for thinking through the role of light in performance: 1. Experience - considers both the audience's experience of light and the ways in which light influences the experience of performers 2. Creativity - examines both the creative, performative capacities of light in performance, as well as the creative practices of lighting designers 3. Meaning - offers an expanded view of performance aesthetics by examining the capacity of light to influence and generate meaning within performance. The case studies are drawn from a wide-array of lighting practice, including: Jennifer Tipton on the role of light as a structural language in performance; Jesper Kongshaug on the lighting of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens; Lucy Carter on her work in installation and dance; Psyche Chui on the productive fusion of Western lighting techniques with contemporary Chinese opera; Katharine Williams on the role of light in feminist political theatre made by RashDash; and Paule Constable on storytelling with light in a range of productions, including War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Angels in America.

This urgent and provocative study explores contemporary Shakespeare performance to bring a sense of theatre as technology into view. Rather than merely using technologies, the theatre's distinctively intermedial character is essential to its complex technicity; the changing function of gesture and costume, of written documents in the making of performance, of light and sound, and of the interplay of live and recorded acting complicate the sense of theatre as a medium. In a series of probing discussions, Worthen interrogates the interaction of live and mediated acting onstage, the impact of written media from the handwritten scroll to the small-screen app in acting as a techne, the work of Original Practices as an interactive modern theatre technology, the economies of theatrical immersion, and the consequences of an emerging algorithmic theatre, providing a richly theoretical reading of the stakes of theatre as an always-emerging technology.

This book uses digital media theory to explore contemporary understandings of expanded scenography as spatial practice. It surveys and analyses a selection of ground-breaking, experimental digital media performances that comprise a genealogy spanning the last 30 years, in order to show how the arrival of digital technologies has profoundly transformed performance practice. Performances are selected based on their ability to elicit the unique specificities of digital media in new and original ways, thereby exposing both the richness and shortcomings of digital culture. O'Dwyer argues that contemporary scenography is largely propelled by and dependent on digital technologies and represents a rich, fertile domain, where unbridled creativity can explore new techniques and challenge the limits of knowledge. The 30-year genealogy includes works by Troika Ranch, Stelarc, Klaus Obermaier, Chunky Move, Onion Lab and Blast Theory. In addition to applying a broad scope of performance analysis and aesthetic theory, the work includes artists' interviews and opinions. The volume opens important aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political themes in order to highlight the impact of digital technologies on scenographic practice and the blossoming of experimental interdisciplinarity. Ultimately, the book is an exploration of how evolutionary leaps in technology contribute to how humans think, act, make work, engage one another, and therefore construct meaning and identity.

Wig Making and Styling: A Complete Guide for Theatre and Film, Second Edition is the one-stop shop for the knowledge and skills you need to create and style wigs. Covering the basics, from styling tools to creating beards, it ramps up to advanced techniques for making, measuring, coloring, and cutting wigs from any time period. Whether you're a student or a professional, you'll find yourself prepared for a career as a skilled wig designer with tips on altering existing wigs, multiple approaches to solving wig-making problems, and industry best practices.

Stage Lighting: The Fundamentals is written specifically for introductory stage lighting courses. The book begins with an examination of the nature of light, perception, and color, then leads into a conversation of stage lighting equipment and technicians. Lamps, luminaries, controls/dimming, and electricity form the basis of these chapters. The book also provides a detailed explanation and overview of the lighting design process for the theatre and several other traditional forms of entertainment. Finally, the book explores a variety of additional areas where lighting designers can find related future employment, such as concert and corporate lighting, themed design, architectural and landscape lighting, and computer animation. New for this edition: enlarged full-color illustrations, photographs, light plots and examples of lighting design; updated information on LED lighting and equipment; expanded discussion of the practical use of color as a designer; expanded discussion of psychological/perceptual effects of color; new discussion of color mixing through light sources that make use of additive mixing; expanded discussion of industry professions; expanded discussion and illustrations relating to photometrics; expanded discussion and examples of control protocols and new equipment; and updated designer profiles along with the addition of still more designer profiles.

Theatre as Human Action is the ideal textbook to introduce students to the various aspects of theatre, especially for those who may have little or no theatergoing experience. Seven diverse plays are described to the reader from the start, and then returned to throughout the book so that students can better understand the concepts being discussed. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of theatre are explored, from the classical definition of theatre to today's most avant-garde theatre activities. Types of plays, the elements of drama, and theatre criticism are presented, as well as detailed descriptions of the different jobs in theatre, such as actor, playwright, director, designer, producer, choreographer, and more. The book concludes with a look at where and how theatre is evolving in America and the latest changes and innovations today. This fourth edition has been greatly expanded and updated, including: The introduction of four new plays-Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Fences; Angels in America; and Hadestown-in addition to Macbeth, You Can't Take It With You, and Hamilton A discussion of the rise of social media in raising awareness and replacing traditional review outlets An entirely new, enhanced section on diversity and inclusion in theatre An updated selection of playwrights featured, including Terrence McNally, Lynn Nottage, Tony Kushner, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, to better reflect the diversity of those writing for the theatre today. Featuring full-color photographs, updated learning guides, and suggested topics for discussion and research, the fourth edition of Theatre as Human Action is an invaluable resource to introduce students to the world of theatre.

This book is a collection of essays that capture the artistic voices at play during a staging process. Situating familiar practices such as reimagining, reenactment and recreation alongside the related and often intersecting processes of transmission, translation and transformation, it features deep insights into selected dances from directors, performers, and close associates of choreographers. The breadth of practice on offer illustrates the capacity of dance as a medium to adapt successfully to diverse approaches and, further, that there is a growing appetite amongst audiences for seeing dances from the near and far past. This study spans a century, from Rudolf Laban's Dancing Drumstick (1913) to Robert Cohan's Sigh (2015), and examines works by Mary Wigman, Madge Atkinson (Natural Movement), Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, Yvonne Rainer and Rosemary Butcher, an eclectic mix that crosses time and borders.

An inclusive history of the professionalization of American scenic design The figure of the American theatrical scenic designer first emerged in the early twentieth century. As productions moved away from standardized, painted scenery and toward individualized scenic design, the demand for talented new designers grew. Within decades, scenic designers reinvented themselves as professional artists. They ran their own studios, proudly displayed their names on Broadway playbills, and even appeared in magazine and television profiles. American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism tells the history of the field through the figures, institutions, and movements that helped create and shape the profession. Taking a unique sociological approach, theatre scholar David Bisaha examines the work that designers performed outside of theatrical productions. He shows how figures such as Lee Simonson, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, and Donald Oenslager constructed a freelance, professional identity for scenic designers by working within their labor union (United Scenic Artists Local 829), generating self-promotional press, building university curricula, and volunteering in wartime service. However, while new institutions provided autonomy and intellectual property rights for many, women, queer, and Black designers were not always welcome to join the organizations that protected freelance designers' interests. Among others, Aline Bernstein, Emeline Roche, Perry Watkins, Peggy Clark, and James Reynolds were excluded from professional groups because of their identities. They nonetheless established themselves among the most successful designers of their time. Their stories expand the history of American scenic design by showing how professionalism won designers substantial benefits, yet also created legacies of exclusion with which American theatre is still reckoning.

Teaching Introduction to Theatrical Design is a week-by-week guide that helps instructors who are new to teaching design, teaching outside of their fields of expertise, or looking for better ways to integrate and encourage non-designers in the design classroom. This book provides a syllabus to teach foundational theatrical design by illustrating process and application of the principals of design in costumes, sets, lights, and sound.