Mondays are a day of meetings for me. We begin with design meetings for The Crucible, an opera version of the Arthur Miller play, that we are co-producing with the UNI School of Music. The production opens just four weeks after the beginning of winter semester, therefore the necessity to begin production this semester. Amy RohrBerg is designing the costumes, Leonard Curtis, the scenery, and Ron Koinzan, the lighting. Sandra Walden is directing and Rebecca Burkhardt is the musical director and conductor.
Two hours later, a design & production committee meeting. The design & production committee is made up of the faculty and staff in this area at Theatre UNI. Agenda items included a discussion of the Death of a Salesman meeting that we had yesterday afternoon with the guest designers and director, class preparations (the d&p committee is team teaching Theatrical Arts & Society this semester), budget updates (always a fun subject), and the alumni/faculty retrospective that will be on exhibit through the season in the Strayer-Wood Theatre lobby.
During the 4:00 p.m. production meeting for A Midsummer Night's Dream, the scenic/blocking challenge of getting Puck down to the stage from above was discussed at length. I don't want to give away too much so that's all I'll say about that. A child has been cast and met with Amy, the costume designer, for measurements earlier this afternoon. Midsummer is one of my favorite plays and I'm very excited about this production.
The day concluded with a STAGE Inc board meeting. STAGE Inc is the friends organization for Theatre UNI and the Department of Theatre. The board is a passionate group of people from the community who are always willing to help however they can. During this meeting, they offered to pay for a lunch time cook-out for the students on Wednesday during rep prep week. And I'm sure that we'll get some of the best cookies for the event as well.
Looking back at yesterday for a moment, the first design meeting for Death of a Salesman. The director Larry Paulsen, scenic designer Steve Gilliam and lighting designer Richard Devin arrived in town shortly after 3:30 p.m. and the production team met for almost three hours. What an exciting meeting! Larry shared his vision of the production and numerous research photos. I found his energy and enthusiasm for the project infectious and look forward to working with him.
As I'm writing this at nearly 10:30 p.m., I'm contemplating the fact that I've been working on my laptop computer now for over three hours. That in itself is not unusual. What is unusual is that I am now able to access my office computer from home. While it was wonderful to get some additional work completed this evening that I was unable to finish earlier in the day and really needed to. Yet I worry that I'll become even more of a workaholic now. Guess I'll find out.
Monday, October 1, 2007
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Team teaching? How does that work?
Several classes in the Department of Theatre are team taught. Usually this means that at least one faculty or staff member from the performance side and one from the design and production side are each assigned load to teach and deliver the course content together. For the Theatrical Arts & Society course that the Design and Production faculty and staff are teaching, we developed the syllabus together with a focus on our areas of expertise and interest. Throughout the semester, we are sometimes taking turns in the classroom lecturing on our particular topic and other times, delivering content together in the form of large group discussions. I find it a very exciting way to teach.
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