I'm officially registered for the spring quarter . . . for real finally.
I'm taking scene painting, lighting design, and a costume pattern drafting course from the Theater department, and I just registered today for an ecocritical theory course out of the English department. I'm also sitting in on the third theater history class, which covers the last century until now, but I'll only have to take tests--no papers and I guess no official grade either. The plan is to sign up for a Swahili course not for credit from the language center too. Sounds like a lot, but I'm not really working next quarter, and I'm finding myself with too much time on my hands this quarter. It's a little more expensive to take the language course that way, but it's worth it. I'm hoping to take another language as well before all is said and done. Maybe even brush up on my French and Spanish from undergrad. We'll see how I hold up.
My current set of classes - the CAD class, drawing and rendering, and contemporary tragedy will be done in just two weeks. It's really hard to believe that I'm so close to finishing another term in grad school! Two down, seven to go! And I love it!
Monday, February 23, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Sallying Forth...
These are the plays I've read this quarter:
Mouthful of Birds by Caryl Churchiil
Oedipus Rex
Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg
Phaedre by Racine
True Love by Charles Mee
King Lear
Lear by Edward Bond
The Revenger's Tragedy by Tournier (actually, probably by Middleton)
The Unnatural and Accidental Women by Marie Clements
Hedda Gabler by Ibsen
After Darwin by Timberlake Wertenbaker
And coming up are Fences by August Wilson, Soyinka's Death and the King's Horsemen, Sara Ruhl's retelling of Eurydice, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea by Cherrie Moraga, and Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. The last three are plays that the grad students in the class are teaching. I chose to use Vogel's play because I know it pretty well and because of all the plays I'm familiar with, it deals most clearly with tragic structure and mechanisms. As the class's focus is contemporary tragedy and whether or not such a form still exists, it seemed a good choice.
That class has been a wonderful journey. I've been pretty quiet during discussions, but I've learned so much about the progression of the structure of tragedy and what it means for a play to be "tragic". The latest question posed by Wertenbaker's play is whether or not tragedy exists in a post-Darwinian world. Does Darwin preclude the concept of tragedy? If there is no faith to be lost - no great binding force in society - and we are all, indeed, individuals striving to be the fittest, soundest organism in order to survive, and we are all doing what we reason to be the best way to survive... I'm not sure even where to take that thought quite yet, but Darwin throws a wrench into the works. Hegel suggests that we are all doing what we reason to be right, and that the closest thing we might come to tragedy is when two lines of reason - two great arguments (faith and evolution, for instance) - collide, one will overtake and subsume the other. This is through no real fault of the subsumed line of reason, other than it lost the battle. Unfortunately, this is all so new in my head that I'm not making any sense of things. Read After Darwin . . . you'll get it.
My other truly challenging class is painting and rendering. I was really frightened of watercolor - talk about irrational fears, right? I've just never had much luck with it. Turns out, I'm not terrible. I need a lot of practice, and the Louvre will not come knocking on my door, but I'm really getting there. I'm comfortable enough to actually think I can do renderings successfully as a designer, which is important - haha. As my advisor says, you need to be able to sketch quickly so that you don't have to say, oh, sure, let me model that up for you - give me a couple days. Anyway, it's going much more smoothly, and, if nothing else, I'm a bit more confident about what I can do.
Although I'm pretty distant from production in general, our next show, As You Like It, goes up in a couple of weeks, and my fellow MFA scene designer is having to put in a lot of extra hours so I've offered to help him in any way I can. Mostly, that means painting and texturing scenery at this point. I think the set will look really nice when we're finished, but there's still a long row to hoe.
And - I almost forgot - I'm designing a show that goes up in April! It's a grad student-directed show based on a Twilight Zone episode called "The Howling Man." (If you can't remember which one that is, someone posted it on YouTube. It's also on another video site with a name that I can't remember right now . . .) Anyway, I'm really excited, and I've already started doing some research. It'll be pretty small, but I think it will be fun too.
I guess that's about it for now. Next quarter is probably going to be a lighting design class, scene painting, and a costume pattern drafting class. I'm also going to audit a theater history class and a Swahili language class. I still need to put up those driving posts . . . someday I guess. Hopefully before I make the trip again!
Mouthful of Birds by Caryl Churchiil
Oedipus Rex
Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg
Phaedre by Racine
True Love by Charles Mee
King Lear
Lear by Edward Bond
The Revenger's Tragedy by Tournier (actually, probably by Middleton)
The Unnatural and Accidental Women by Marie Clements
Hedda Gabler by Ibsen
After Darwin by Timberlake Wertenbaker
And coming up are Fences by August Wilson, Soyinka's Death and the King's Horsemen, Sara Ruhl's retelling of Eurydice, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea by Cherrie Moraga, and Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. The last three are plays that the grad students in the class are teaching. I chose to use Vogel's play because I know it pretty well and because of all the plays I'm familiar with, it deals most clearly with tragic structure and mechanisms. As the class's focus is contemporary tragedy and whether or not such a form still exists, it seemed a good choice.
That class has been a wonderful journey. I've been pretty quiet during discussions, but I've learned so much about the progression of the structure of tragedy and what it means for a play to be "tragic". The latest question posed by Wertenbaker's play is whether or not tragedy exists in a post-Darwinian world. Does Darwin preclude the concept of tragedy? If there is no faith to be lost - no great binding force in society - and we are all, indeed, individuals striving to be the fittest, soundest organism in order to survive, and we are all doing what we reason to be the best way to survive... I'm not sure even where to take that thought quite yet, but Darwin throws a wrench into the works. Hegel suggests that we are all doing what we reason to be right, and that the closest thing we might come to tragedy is when two lines of reason - two great arguments (faith and evolution, for instance) - collide, one will overtake and subsume the other. This is through no real fault of the subsumed line of reason, other than it lost the battle. Unfortunately, this is all so new in my head that I'm not making any sense of things. Read After Darwin . . . you'll get it.
My other truly challenging class is painting and rendering. I was really frightened of watercolor - talk about irrational fears, right? I've just never had much luck with it. Turns out, I'm not terrible. I need a lot of practice, and the Louvre will not come knocking on my door, but I'm really getting there. I'm comfortable enough to actually think I can do renderings successfully as a designer, which is important - haha. As my advisor says, you need to be able to sketch quickly so that you don't have to say, oh, sure, let me model that up for you - give me a couple days. Anyway, it's going much more smoothly, and, if nothing else, I'm a bit more confident about what I can do.
Although I'm pretty distant from production in general, our next show, As You Like It, goes up in a couple of weeks, and my fellow MFA scene designer is having to put in a lot of extra hours so I've offered to help him in any way I can. Mostly, that means painting and texturing scenery at this point. I think the set will look really nice when we're finished, but there's still a long row to hoe.
And - I almost forgot - I'm designing a show that goes up in April! It's a grad student-directed show based on a Twilight Zone episode called "The Howling Man." (If you can't remember which one that is, someone posted it on YouTube. It's also on another video site with a name that I can't remember right now . . .) Anyway, I'm really excited, and I've already started doing some research. It'll be pretty small, but I think it will be fun too.
I guess that's about it for now. Next quarter is probably going to be a lighting design class, scene painting, and a costume pattern drafting class. I'm also going to audit a theater history class and a Swahili language class. I still need to put up those driving posts . . . someday I guess. Hopefully before I make the trip again!
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The U of O
I just finished week three of my first quarter at the U of O! I can't believe how the time has flown. Things here are pretty good, but I'm still pretty poor and looking for work. I have a few leads in that department, but so far nothing has actually panned out. Classes are great. The drawing and painting class I'm taking is extremely challenging. Drawing is easier than I thought in some respects, but very much harder in others. My previous art training was not so in-depth and there wasn't much of it, so I'm really having to stretch myself in this class, but I've surprised myself a few times so far, and I hope to keep doing well. The coursework itself if pretty contained within the structure of the class, but this weekend we had a pretty significant homework assignment that I'm struggling with, but these are the challenges I wanted. I'm also taking a contemporary tragedy class, which is mostly reading and analysis. It's a big weekend for that class too, but I enjoy the reading and I really like the contemporary plays we've dealt with so far. The first was Mouthful of Birds by Caryl Churchill. I won't attempt to summarize or explain that one here. The second play was Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenburg and I loved it. The story was complex and moving, and really well put together. Of course, it's hard for me to read the plays and not design them as I go, but I try to at least get one reading in which I'm not trying to figure out what sort of space they're in. It's nice to be reminded that there are other reasons to read plays than to prep for a show.
This blog has been asleep for too long. I wish I were better at keeping up with it. Hopefully, I'll post some of my driving days on here. I'll probably pre-date them to line up with the dates of the days I drove, so they'll go up as if they were posted before this entry. I'll try to be a better blogger...
This blog has been asleep for too long. I wish I were better at keeping up with it. Hopefully, I'll post some of my driving days on here. I'll probably pre-date them to line up with the dates of the days I drove, so they'll go up as if they were posted before this entry. I'll try to be a better blogger...
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