Portrait of the Artist

This year, my third at Trevor, about my 10th year doing professional indie theatre in NYC as a Designer, I have been contemplating my role as an artist. How do I define myself by my creative choices? What is it that drives me to create, either in design or directing or education? What is my portrait as an artist? And as a result, what does my process and my work say about me?

PBS Peter and the Wolf - animation

March 26th PBS aired the animation special of Peter and the Wolf. I missed it, but here's a short clip online you can watch. I really want to order a copy of the broadcast. This took 5 yrs to create.

PBS Great Performances Wolf Trap Dance

PBS.org shows:
GREAT PERFORMANCES
Dance in America: Wolf Trap's Face of Americaabout site specific dance/choreography

This is an amazing presentation with truly magnificent dance works highlighted

Please check this out for visual beauty and creativity as well as the excellent choreographic work!

Constructivist Design and Biomechanical Movement

1913 - 1930 Russian Constructivist Movement - Moscow under the artistist/designer, Vladimir Tatlin and significantly influenced by sculptor/designers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner

The movement developed in reaction to post-Russian Bolshevik Revolution and alluded to technological advancements of the age. The industrial age was beginning to prosper and man, industry, and machine were beginning to become related as one. The simplest forms of geometric shapes chunked together to comprise the whole composition of which the audience must derive the meaning from its parts is the basis of the Russian Constructivist Movement.

Precisely composed, they favored the basic shapes of squares, rectangles, circles and triangles. In using modern forms and industrial materials, the concept was to show the machine in the modern world and its triumph over nature and how man was a product of the machine or a part of it.

1920s Meyerhold influenced the development of experimental dramatic art in his artistic endeavors know as BIOMECHANICS. Under his acting technique, man became machine and learned to use his body to enhance the emotional "point of excitability" in drama.

Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy....Movement is the most powerful means of theatrical expression...

- Vsevolod Meyerhold

Meyerhold theorized about how to bring the actor to a, “point of excitability,” so that a theatrical stimulus would elicit a reflexive movement response in the actor.

The biomechanical system of acting, starting from a series of devices designed to develop the ability to control one’s body within the stage space in the most advantageous manner, leads one to the most complex questions of acting technique, problems concerning the coordination of movement, words, the capacity to control one’s emotions, one’s excitability in performance. The emotional state of the actor, his temperament, his excitability, the emotional sympathy between the actor as artist and the imaginative process of the character he is performing - all of these are fundamental elements in the complex system of biomechanics.

- Vsevolod Meyerhold

See More at:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/biomechanActing.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/tv.html&h=276&w=379&sz=26&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=7YsILwzJv1RXOM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=123&prev=/images%3Fq%3DConstructivist%2BSet%2BDesign%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Lighting for Dance

Jean Rosenthal (1912-1969), frequently referred to as the mother of dance lighting technique, she transformed the traditional theater lighting technique and positions into a workable dance light plot. She dramatically enhanced dance productions with her creative concepts. She wrote in 1969 about traditional ballet lighting at that time period, post WWII:

Ballet was expected to be pink and pretty. The systems for lighting it were inflexible. Equipment, standard in European opera houses, consisted of first-pipe positions, a boom or tormentor, one left and one right. Supplemental lights were borderlights and strips of light above or on the sides, simply hauled in, one to twenty of them, at four feet to six or seven feet. There were a couple of what we privately called "belly-button crosslights." (Actually, they hit the crotch.) So the first ten feet of the stage was lit for visibility and available for change of color -- blue for Swan Lake, pink for Les Biches. After that there was just scenery light, flat and without depth or mood.

My system required fixed booms along the side at every entrance as a basis for flexibility and for lighting the whole stage. That made the ballets look different, which roused the ire of the European choreographers. (The Magic of Light. 1972. pg. 117-118)

See more about DANCE LIGHTING and why it's different at:
http://www.northern.edu/wild/LiteDes/dance.htm

Also check out this choreographer's work - it has some really amazing lighting captured in the photos (which is difficult to do with accuracy):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/terosaarinen/sets/72157602876536358/

or http://www.terosaarinen.com/ see under WORKS