Professor Perspective

World by Design highlights design elements that catch my eye. Today’s design elements are brought to you by Professor Perspective.

Since some professors like to wear bow ties, I will honor them by using the classic bow tie to show the basic perspective idea that what’s above the horizon line goes down to it as is recedes upstage away from the viewer, and what’s below the horizon line goes up to it. Many perspective vanishing points can be used this way.

 The multiple vanishing point possibilities makes this perspective form better for coming close to reality than the one-point perspective (train tracks and telephone poles receding in the distance)

 Just for reference, here’s the old one point perspective. This is very limiting!

A Few Performance Art Installations

Signatures was curated by Wits scenographer Jenni-Lee Crewe. Her students were the artists, and each had to create a piece involving their take on what performance art is today. I provided most of the lighting - there was one piece that defied lighting as it's performance was all smell and tactile work. One piece used large maps of differing translucencies and a ceiling of ever-changing map projections and post-it-notes to locate memories. My photos of that unfortunately did not come out. Three of the pieces were on the amphitheatre stage which shared the same setting, including a rectangle of glossy black on the floor. In one case it was a duck pond, and in another it was a barrier for the performance.

This piece involves heavy metal safes, white gloves, ear phones, and things inside the safes that you could look at and consider. The safes were presented on white pedestals with white fabric leading down to them from the ceiling.

There were seven of these safes, all presented as if they were in a gallery. Very audience-friendly.



Across the room from the safes was this cut-out tree with all the good and bad terms for "woman" painted on it. A woman in yellow sat underneath with a huge pile of lemons, eating lemons like they were going out of style.



At the end of the room was a room-sized box of paper with a doorway and a window and a moveable lighting instrument. Participants could draw or paint the outlines of their shadows. In some cases, outlines were enhanced with paint after being drawn in pencil. This could be viewed from above, through the door or window, and through the walls from outside since the walls were just thin paper.



Here is the artist outlining a particpant's shadow onto one of the walls as seen from the outside of the box.



One of the performances in the Amphitheatre used masks, and sound effects came from the actors. The glossy black rectangle was a fishing pond with ducks in it for this one.

One of the Amphitheatre performances used only the glossy back rectangle, with dance-like movements contained tightly by the rectangle. Notice, too, the rectangular mirrors in the upper right reflecting the activity.

In this third Amphitheatre performance art piece, the actor's movements were directed over a loudspeaker by someone in the lighting booth, who changed the procedure every performance.

In the final installation, the audience was invited to go outdoors to watch and hear the boys in blue commune with a blue-wrapped tree against the sodium vapour lights of the city.

I should add that if and when I can get other people's photos of the smells and the maps installations, I would love to post them here as well. I would also love to get a close-up of the masks used in the duck-pond performance. They were papier-mache masks, very lightweight.

"Saturday Night at The Palace" Opens!

First South African Production Opens!

(And we have a South African breakable glass recipe after many experiments!)

The cast and crew of "Saturday Night at the Palace".

     “Fulbright Scholar Heidi Hoffer has designed the scenery, lighting and costumes for the Wits Theatre production of “Saturday Night at the Palace”. The play, directed by Wits School of the Arts lecturer Greg Homann, is part of Wits’ South African Season. Performances continue Thursday August 12th at 3:00pm, and 7:30pm, and Friday August 13 at 7:30 pm.
     The play was written by South African playwright Paul Slabolepszy, who first staged it in 1982, appearing in the role of “Vince”. The play is a disturbing reminder of how a system can turn the most harmless of men into monsters. The playwright attended the opening night performance, and was highly complimentary of Hoffer’s stage design in particular, as well as the excellent performances of the Wits student actors.”

Forsie, played by Jeremy Richards and September, played by Thabo Kunetu, discuss smoking.

Well, now! It was absolutely fabulous for me (and of course the director, cast and crew) to meet playwright Paul Slabolepszy. It was very good to hear about the details he looks for, and he regaled us with his experiments in how to break the glass window in the door. Throughout the week before opening, many veteran South African theatergoers told me about seeing him in the role of “Vince” in the ‘80’s. "He was terribly convincing and even caused one audience member to leave the theatre throwing up."

September asks for the return of his keys to the Palace. Vince, played by James Reynolds, refuses.

September has been left handcuffed to the bike, with Vince dead, and Forsie gone.

Our evening audiences reacted to the racial slurs, the hatred, the ignorance, and the turnabout at the end with mostly a very educated understanding of its historic implications. The high-school matinee audience, however, were very amazed, very vocal, and nearly very angry with the treatment the character of “September” received at the hands of “Vince” and “Forsie”.

Marta

Simon

The Wits students who worked on the production were primarily “First-Years” supervised by two design assistants who are a “Third-Year" and a “Fourth-Year”. We worked evenings painting and building and making tray after tray of fake glass, trying to get the right brittleness. The design assistants provided necessary transport and financial and geographical acumen for finding props and supplies cheaply, as well as making the production fun to work on.

Here is our final recipe for breakable glass. (In the play, the character of Vince smashes the window with September's knobkerrie.) We molded it in a cookie sheet that was about the size of an A-4 piece of paper. Please read directions before attempting this yourself. Firmed up sugar glass CAN cut your skin. Boiling sugar CAN splatter and severely burn your skin.

South African Breakable Glass

Old heavy-bottomed sauce pan or pot.

Cooking spray to use as a mold release

Cookie sheet or foil the size of the glass you need.

Waxed paper for cookie sheet (optional)

½ cup water

1.75 cups sugar

¼ tsp cream of tartar

1 tablespoon liquid glucose*

Directions: Boil the water and then add the other ingredients. Continuously stir. The boiling point is 220 degrees F. Continue to boil until it reaches about 300 degrees, or boils so furiously the bubbles appear to be more like foam. This should take another 10 minutes. Let boil without stirring for 5 – 15 more minutes. When the mixture feels thicker as you stir, pour into the prepared mold. The sugar mixture will seem to yellow as it thickens.

Drip a bit of sugar onto a plate to see if it gets firm as it cools. If the sugar mixture starts to get dark, it is past ready. Stir again, and pour immediately into the cooking sprayed cookie sheet. Let cool. We even put one in the freezer. Unmold by gently flexing the cookie sheet. You may also put down wax paper first before pouring and spray that with cooking oil, too

Bringing the sugar mixture to a boil.

(*Americans tend to use Thurston James’ recipe which involves white corn syrup. This syrup is difficult to find here in Jo’burg. When we used the same measurement of readily available golden syrup or glucose syrup, the “glass” was bendable and not firm.)

Re-purposing architectural and industrial elements for the musical “Ragtime”.

The design for PCPA Theaterfest’s Ragtime was huge. A small but influential part of the concept or inspiration was the use of bits of architectural and industrial elements. You can see some of these on the back wall in the picture below.

Ragtime designed by Heidi Hoffer.  The back wall upstage of the boys catching the baseball shows the concept in effect. Lighting Design by "Z" Jen Zornow and Costume Design by Misti Bradford.

The Musical Director was Callum Morris, Technical Director was Steve Henson (currently analyzing truss at Yale!), and the director of the show was Mark Booher.

We were interested in re-purposing elements for their texture, shape, and archetypal memory triggers. Every part of the scenery had a dash of this concept in its execution on stage. The industrial artifacts idea allowed certain (industrial-looking!) scene shifting devices to be seen and accepted as part of the overall design.

Displaced materials normally recycled and considered trash allowed the use of things like recycled plastic drink lids to become clapboard siding and fluorescent tube packing crate cardboard to become architectural molding on several of the units. 

Artists responsible for building the scenery, painting the scenery, and budgeting for the scenery all need information about these elements from the designer.

Typesetter's lead type case. Courtesy of http://wapedia.mobi/en/Movable_type?t=3

This included the original inspiration images of a typesetter’s lead type case, the Sky Cathedral by artist Louise Nevelson, the designer’s inspiration sketch, the AutoCAD drafting of elements, painter’s elevations of elements, etc. some of which are pictured below. Since the musical Ragtime occurs during the industrial age, it was fitting the design recycle old icons for use in setting the musical for today’s audiences.

Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art website http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=34071

The designer's inspiration sketch shows the architectural rolling units all grouped together center stage.

The central back wall is really six tall rolling walls, all clumped together in this photo. In the baseball scene photo earlier in this post, the walls are opened up across the back of the stage.

The AutoCAD front view of the expanded back wall. Blank boxes were filled by the theatre artists at PCPA following the "concept" with architectural and industrial elements.

The designer's paint elevation of one of the walls.

As I indicated in the first paragraph, this ecclectic typesetter's box collection of elements was just a small part of what the whole design covered. But it was the springboard and the inspiration from which we evolved our production. The world created was colorful (It's a musical!), elastic (Wide range of locations and moods!), and richly textured (Lights, projected patterns, choreography, and costume textiles really added!).

conscious environments

Welcome to the blog in which I explore designing and recognizing new worlds. All artists/creators help give one a vision of another world besides one's own. I am a stage designer--a scenographer-- and really familiar with designing the environment for a theatre piece. What intrigues me, though, is the conscious work involved in creating environments for other realities: some made-up and totally not realistic, and some so real it touches you in your heart. Environments are about the inhabiting people. Sometimes the environment is more real than real. Have you ever turned your eyes onto a moment at just the right time to catch power behind it? Have you ever said, " Wow! Did you see that?" Well, when someone creates a moment like that on purpose, they've designed a new world for you to experience. Sometimes it happens when you see a play, and sometimes it happens when you read a book or listen to music. You willingly disbelieve you are sitting in a dark auditorium and believe you are in the new world in front of you. You enter into the presented world. You cry, laugh, dance and in general carry on until the story ends. The theory is, that you have been changed in some way by the experience.