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2016 Saying Yes: Collaboration and Scenography of Man Equals Man deGroot, Anton deGroot, A. (2016). Saying Yes: Collaboration and Scenography of Man Equals Man (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27708 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3189 master thesis

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Saying Yes: Collaboration and Scenography of Man Equals Man

Anton deGroot

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN DRAMA

CALGARY, ALBERTA

MAY 2016

The following artist’s statement discusses the early inspirations, development, execution of, and reflections upon the scenographic treatment of Bertolt Brecht’s Man Equals Man, directed by

Tim Sutherland and produced by the University of Calgary in February of 2015. It details the processes of the set, lights, and properties design, with a focus on the director / scenographer relationship, and an examination of the outcomes.

ii Preface

It is critical that I mention something at the beginning of this artist’s statement to provide some important context for the reader. I tackled the majority of the writing of this piece in

September of 2015, some six months after the closing of Man Equals Man. I felt the need for reflection upon the process, and some time away to pursue some remarkable opportunities to grow as a scenographer. However, on July 30th 2015, the director of Man Equals Man, my chief collaborator on the project and dear friend, passed away suddenly and without warning due to a massive stroke. This death was a crippling blow to not only Tim’s friends and family, but to the theatre communities in Victoria and Wells, British Columbia, as well as here in Calgary, specifically at the University of Calgary in the School for Creative and Performing Arts.

The effect of this upon me personally cannot be understated. In the weeks between Tim’s death and the completion of this artist’s statement, there were dark moments, some lighter moments, moments filled with tears, and others spent in deep contemplation. At moments, I asked myself the question of whether or not I could complete this writing, both personally and objectively. To put it plainly: was I able to write at length about a process where the key to the entire thing was a relationship with a man who had just passed away. And further to this, could I do this objectively, and be able to examine the work and relationship critically without the worry of speaking ill of the dead.

I did come to an answer to this question. Simply: yes I can. I cannot imagine a greater act of injustice to Tim’s memory than to not give the kind of rigor this project deserves. So I have endeavored to ensure that this statement reflects as accurately as possible the process that Tim and I worked so hard at.

iii Man Equals Man is – at its core – a reflection upon what it is to be a person, an individual, a man. It takes the measure of a man, in this case the measure of Galy Gay, and finds him lacking; finds him guilty of abandoning himself, albeit through extreme coercion, and points the finger at a broken society that systematically breaks the backs of good men. Tim saw this in the play, loved the commentary, and lived and breathed this message throughout the entire process. And nothing – death or otherwise – can eclipse that for me.

In Tim, I saw a reflection of myself; who I could be a few steps into the future. He was everything I strive to be: a true collaborator, a true artist, and a remarkably kind human being.

While I would trade anything to have him back in my life, and I know that his death was a senseless, pointless tragedy, Tim’s sensibilities and generosity of spirit will live on in my work for as long as I make plays. What solace this brings to Tim’s friends, family, and even to myself may be so negligible in the face of this loss, but I know deep down that he would be proud.

iv Acknowledgements

I must acknowledge the remarkable team who rallied to make this production possible, especially given the unexpected circumstances that arose during the production: April Viczko,

Don Monty, Skylar Desjardins, Emma Slunt, Tim Sutherland, Muhammad Azri, Michael

Sinnott, Brian Kerby, Scott Freeman, Julia Wasilewski, Michael Luong, and Rebecca Flynn.

I would also like to thank the following for their support over the past two years: Pamela

Halstead, Patrick Du Wors, Patrick Finn, Barry Yzereef, G. Brian Smith, Penelope Farfan,

Jacqueline Dyment, Fasyali Fadzly bin Saipul Bahri, Jennifer Arsenault, my friends and family, and especially Laurel Green for her unending support.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge my dear friends/mentors Richard McDowell and Michael

Green from One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre, both of whom died unexpectedly during the process of Man Equals Man. These men have no equals. Their legacy will live on in my work; their thoughts, ideas, aesthetic and freakiness will continue to inspire me.

v Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to my dear friend and the director of Man Equals Man Tim Sutherland, who died unexpectedly on July 30th, 2015. The work we did together on this production taught me a great deal about myself as a scenographer, and about how to collaborate with a forceful thinker, a remarkable artist, and a generous human being. I owe him a great deal, and I cherish the time we had together.

vi Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Preface ...... iii Acknowledgements ...... v Dedication ...... vi Table of Contents ...... vii List of Tables ...... ix List of Figures and Illustrations ...... x Epigraph ...... xii

CHAPTER 1: STARTING POINTS ...... 1 1.1 Man Equals Man ...... 1 1.2 On Bertolt Brecht ...... 2 1.3 Early Discussions ...... 5

CHAPTER 2: SET DESIGN CONCEPT ...... 7 2.1 On Staging Ideas ...... 7 2.2 Ideas Evolving ...... 10 2.3 An Organizing Principle Is Revealed ...... 14 2.4 Razzle Dazzle ...... 16 2.5 Evolution ...... 19 2.6 Valleys, Peaks, and Table Surprise ...... 25

CHAPTER 3: LIGHTING DESIGN CONCEPT ...... 30 3.1 The Intruder and Jebat ...... 30 3.2 Early Ideas & System ...... 33 3.3 Colour Selection ...... 38 3.4 Cueing ...... 41

CHAPTER 4: COST & COMPRIMISE ...... 43

CHAPTER 5: EXECUTION ...... 51 5.1 Set ...... 51 Colour Palette ...... 54 And Then I Got Hit By a Car ...... 60 Paint Application ...... 61 5.2 Lights ...... 69 5.3 Properties ...... 73

CHAPTER 6: REFLECTION ON THE PROCESS ...... 78

ADDENDUM ...... 83

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 87

APPENDIX 1: FINAL PROPERTIES LIST ...... 88

vii APPENDIX 2: FINAL LIGHTING PLOT ...... 92

viii List of Tables

Table 1: Initial Budget ...... 45

Table 2: Man Equals Man Materials Costing ...... 46

Table 3: Paint Recipes (Approximate) ...... 59

ix List of Figures and Illustrations

Figure 1: The Set of Travels With My Aunt with Cast ...... 5

Figure 2: Otto Dix’s Scat Players (Die Skatspieler) ...... 11

Figure 3: Very Early Sketches ...... 12

Figure 4: Razzle Dazzle in Action ...... 17

Figure 5: An Important Sketch ...... 21

Figure 6: Black Card Model ...... 24

Figure 7: The Cast, Set and Light of The Intruder ...... 31

Figure 8: The Cast and Set of Jebat ...... 33

Figure 9: Focus Points ...... 34

Figure 10: Trusswork 2 Gobo ...... 36

Figure 11: Original Proscenium Position ...... 51

Figure 12: Adjusted Proscenium Position...... 52

Figure 13: The Complete Man Equals Man Model ...... 55

Figure 14: The Printed Swatches with Paint Tests ...... 57

Figure 15: My Complete Palette (plus white) Colours One through Six ...... 58

Figure 16: Floor Paint Design, based on Dazzle Camouflage ...... 62

Figure 17: Projections on Unfinished Paint ...... 64

Figure 18: Periaktoi Images: Telegraph Poles, Trees, Oil Derricks ...... 65

Figure 19: The Failed Vinyl Stencils ...... 66

Figure 19: Re-painting the Periaktos With Projector ...... 67

Figure 20: The Brecht Head and It’s Comprimise ...... 69

Figure 21: The Set in Pink ...... 70

Figure 22: The Set in Red ...... 71

Figure 23: Oversized Scissors ...... 73

x Figure 24: Oversized Beer Bottles ...... 74

Figure 25: Original Elephant Sketch ...... 76

Figure 26: Billy Hrumph Head (L) and Full Body (R) ...... 77

xi Epigraph

"Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable."

- R. Buckminster Fuller, architect

xii

CHAPTER 1: STARTING POINTS

1.1 Man Equals Man

Man Equals Man is summed up quite succinctly by its own subtitle: “The transformation of the porter Galy Gay in the military cantonment of Kilkoa during the year nineteen hundred and twenty five.” From this sentence alone we see that playwright Bertolt Brecht is examining war, identity and human malleability; each of these notions would have been weighing heavily in the psyche of a recently post-Great War Germany.

The play tells the story of four soldiers – Uriah, Jesse, Polly, and Jip – who, after an evening of alcoholic excess, break into, rob, and subsequently vandalize the Pagoda of the

Yellow God (which we later learn is dedicated to the worship of the Almighty Dollar). Realizing the gravity of their actions, the soldiers flee leaving Jip behind less they be discovered and punished. Now diminished to three, the soldiers encounter their new commanding officer - Sgt.

Charles “Bloody Five” Fairchild who informs them that it would be better off for them had they

“summarily shot one another in [their] mothers’ wombs than if [they] show up at roll call without

[their] fourth man” (Brecht 9). Reeling from this, and fearing for their lives, the three solders recruit Galy Gay – a man whom they observe to be incapable of saying no – to impersonate their missing comrade at roll call, and so buy them some time to return for Jip. Meanwhile, Jip has become imprisoned by the nefarious Wang – the head priest of the pagoda – having been tricked into participating in an elaborate ruse to extort money from thoughtless worshippers. The three solders return to Galy Gay, recruit him further to become Jip and so join their unit permanently.

Throughout the remainder of the play, the three soldiers – with the help of the Widow Begbick –

psychologically torture and destroy the kindly Galy Gay, reconstructing him into the soldier Jip and – perhaps inadvertently – into a weapon of mass destruction.

1.2 On Bertolt Brecht

It is impossible to deny the enormous gravity that Brecht carries in the theatrical cannon.

His contribution is undeniable; countless books, essays, theses, have been written about his life and work, and the impact upon art, theatre, and world culture. Therefore, any artist approaching the work of Bertolt Brecht needs to acknowledge this cultural weight, and they must make a decision on how to navigate it.

At the beginning of the process, my knowledge of Brecht’s theatre had been extremely limited. I had read Mother Courage and Her Children during my undergraduate degree, and I had seen a student production of Baal that did not leave a good first impression of Brecht’s stageability. I was initially worried that I would be expected to approach Man Equals Man in a

“Brechtian” style, and so be limited to how it was “supposed” to be done. This worry was further fed by initial discussions with the director as his desire was to “Do” Brecht. His thinking was that where else, other than a university, would he be able to actually pursue this kind of research practice. Therefore, initial conversations were less about how we would approach our production of Man Equals Man, and more about how we would approach our production of Brecht’s Man

Equals Man. The distinction is very subtle here, but without a doubt, this was a major fork in the process forward. Because we took the latter prong, it makes the decision I made somewhat perplexing in hindsight: the decision to essentially ignore the research and writing about Brecht's work and theories, and to ignore how others had done it before. My hope was to take a chance on this production, and approach the design the same way I would approach any play, be it modern,

classic, or entirely brand new. I chose to respond to the needs of the moment: to listen to the inspiration I felt and the needs of the director. This was in no way because I felt superior to the knowledge already accrued, or that my ideas would be hugely innovative or world changing, but rather just because I wanted to ground this production in collaboration rather than academia. To start fresh, dig in, and really play.

At first, this tactic worked well. Sutherland and I spent hours together discussing what the play meant to us, what was important, what “Brechtian” meant to him. I took a look at some photographs of previous productions of Brecht’s work and I quickly observed that often the direction was extremely presentational, with heightened expressions, and with an intensely theatrical look. This jived very much with what Sutherland was describing as being important to him, but as our chats went along, I found that I was having a hard time getting my head into the show. I began to really worry that my decision to respond and react to the needs of the immediate was a wrong path to take, but out of the blue I was given a single piece of advice that turned everything around.

It was a chance encounter with Professor Barry Yzereef. He uncharacteristically wandered into my office as if sent from the theatre gods. After a short non-work related chat, he asked how things were going. I told him honestly that I was having a harder time getting into this play than I had expected. And that it was the notion of “Doing” Brecht that was troubling me. He

Then distilled his thoughts on Brechtian theatre into one simple statement. I'll paraphrase:

“It’s easy. Brecht’s theatre is like children’s theatre: it is as if the

performers are a bunch of kids on stage, seeing their parents in the

audience, turning out to them to say: ‘hey look Mom! I'm in a

play! Look at my costume! Look at my set and my props!’”

Something clicked for me, in a way that the discussions with Sutherland had not. This moment was the key – it was my way into the production. The play was suddenly less about being solved, and more about being set free; it was ripe with playfulness and transformability.

What Sutherland had been saying all along made a great deal more sense. If we were to “Do”

Brecht, it meant that we would need to dig into a kind of presentational theatricality, and this notion was suddenly very exciting to me. Not only exciting, but familiar – my plays with the

Downstage Creation Ensemble in years previous were the seeds; Good Fences and In the Wake both hinged on transformative theatricality where the set was more than a set – it was an intrinsic part of the show: a character unto itself. Furthermore, my recent production of Travels With My

Aunt at Vertigo Theatre had been until that point my ultimate display of this transformative aesthetic, acknowledged even by multiple awards from the professional theatre community.

But these previous shows existed entirely within their own worlds; none of them possessed the sense of self-awareness that was the beating heart of Man Equals Man. And I saw this as my greatest challenge: to create a design that was transformative and surprising, all the while being entirely self-aware of its theatricality all the while never crossing the line into camp, cliché, and a string of parlour tricks.

Figure 1: The Set of Travels With My Aunt with Cast

1.3 Early Discussions

After our initial conversations and my fortunate visit from Dr. Yzereef, the relationship between Sutherland and I shifted slightly as we both needed time to digest and process where our show was headed. It was here that I discovered that Tim Sutherland as a director was completely and utterly hands off. What this means is that he chose not to “watch over my shoulder,” so to speak, as I created my work. He did not micro-manage, he did not give explicit direction about what scenery he required, nor attempt to guide my process by over-sharing what his vision of the scenography was.

Now in some cases, this might be a terrible combination – a hands-off director and a know-it-all designer – but in our case it worked extremely well. I feel that I owe so much of this

to Sutherland’s enormous knowledge base and research, not to mention his deep trust in my work. We had previously collaborated on his pre-thesis production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s

Intruder as a part of the 2014 Taking Flight Festival of Student Work at the University of

Calgary. During this process we were able to establish an understanding of each other’s aesthetic, as well as a shorthand for communicating ideas, and a clear sense of how to problem solve when any disagreements came up. We treated any disagreement not as an impasse, but rather as an opportunity to brainstorm and problem solve, knowing that as long as we listened to each other, a solution would present itself. When approaching any artistic venture, the central organizing principle I cling to can be summed up in the phrase: “the best idea wins.” While this is a tenet of devising processes (or at least it was within these processes that I learned this concept), I feel that approaching the making of theatre requires that the ego be left at the door, and that the established understanding is that collaboration is always at the core of the project.

This is how I choose to approach my work, and I have found that if I bring this mindset to a process that my collaborators usually make this agreement with me. With Sutherland, we understood that our collaboration would be the most important part of the process if the production was to be successful. Based on our previous work and friendship, he trusted me. And based on the same – as well as the singular vision he brought to the table, I trusted him as well.

I was ready to fully dig into the first portion in the process: the set.

CHAPTER 2: SET DESIGN CONCEPT

2.1 On Staging Ideas

I had the pleasure of reading Man Equals Man for the first time on the idyllic beaches of

Mexico: white sand, palm trees, and a margarita in hand. It has always been critical for me to make something special of the first read of a new script as I believe that a first read is like the first handshake when meeting someone new: if the handshake is bad, then it can sour every moment moving forward. So I couldn’t have asked for a better first read, though funnily enough, the beaches of Cancun couldn’t have been a further opposite to the world that surrounds the characters in Brecht’s play.

The world of the play is hot, but not the kind of heat that I enjoyed when first reading it.

There is a sickliness to that heat. A claustrophobia about it. There is muck and there is filth, both tread through by ugly black boots, hundreds of them, one by one. The world stinks, it is a cesspool upon which deep satire is played. The tension in this alone was exciting to me, although it really wasn’t until later that the fullness of this became clear to me. I connected immediately to the colours of this sickening heat: greens, yellows, violets. Reds and browns. I find it interesting now in retrospect that the final incarnation of the set was so deeply monochromatic despite an immediate impression of colour, but I will get to this later in the chapter.

Besides the heat, the sprawling world also struck me. While there was claustrophobia in the heat, the world was large, moving from a small home to the streets of the fictional Kilkoa, then both the interior and exterior of the Pagoda of the Yellow God, to the insides of Widow

Begbick’s train car, to the exterior of an army camp, and finally to the Tibetan mountains and a military fortress burning to the ground. A vast swathe of the world is shown in the play and the

challenge of fitting it all into the University Theatre pushed my initial thinking immediately towards simplicity of function before concept and art. I felt that no matter what the set looked like in the end, how it worked was going to be front and centre to the process. The space was going to need to be versatile, believable as both an exterior and interior, and extremely fluid: I knew that the director would need transitions to be quick and seamless so as not to get bogged down in moving from place to place. This was important to me as well. If the set needed to do anything, it needed to stay out of the way: it would need to facilitate the storytelling by not overcomplicating the visual picture and the movement from place to place. The story of Man

Equals Man is complicated enough.

Again, in retrospect, I find it very interesting how far the set came from these initial thoughts.

Finally, the most important first impression was one that I would return to throughout the process, and in the end, it would inform the theatricality of the final production, and lay the ground rules of how the story would be told. Before anything else as far as set went, I had a serious problem to solve in designing Man Equals Man, and that problem was called “Billy

Humph.”

In Scene 9 of the play, as a part of the scheme to erase Galy Gay and turn him into

Jeremiah Jip, the soldiers conceive of a plan to sell the young porter an elephant. This is critical to the plot, as – according to the play – buying an elephant is a criminal offense. This allows the soldiers to falsely try Galy Gay, sentence him to death, pretend to execute him, and so comple the destruction of his personality. Once the elephant is constructed, Uriah then introduces the

ramshackle creation to Galy Gay as “Billy Humph, champion of Bengal, elephant in Her

Majesty’s service” (Brecht 42). So the elephant is a keystone to the entire plan.

The only stage direction that indicates how the soldiers build the elephant is “They build an artificial elephant” (Brecht 40). Not a terribly helpful passage, but given that they are in the

Widow Begbick’s canteen – which earlier in the play is shown to contain all sorts of military paraphernalia, it follows that the elephant can be built out of this kind of material. It is clear that the elephant shouldn’t necessarily look perfectly real, just real enough in shape to confuse their victim.

This struck a chord with me, as the soldiers were not only resourceful in this action, but also incredibly theatrical. The vivid realness of having to create something from bits and pieces of material spoke directly to my aesthetic. Which led me to my very first artistic thought (as opposed to practical or sensory) about the play: If I can solve “Billy Humph,” I can solve Man

Equals Man.

Let’s break this down a bit. What I mean by ‘solve’ is literally the action of putting the elephant prop together on stage. The bits and pieces of it, whatever they may be, need to be present on stage, possibly even in earlier scenes of the play. Those bits then need to be assembled quickly and in plain view of the audience: the idea of the soldiers of the play creating the artifice of the deception, and the actors playing the characters creating the artifice of the prop cannot be separated from the action. Also, this act needs to be surprising to the audience. And it struck me just how useful this moment could be in terms of setting the rules of the play down

(despite it occurring after the intermission): if I could be inspired by the resourcefulness of the characters in the play and take this resourcefulness out of the fictional context of the play itself

and place it in the real world, and then use this to set the rules of how the actors interact with the set and props, then I will have come full circle and achieved something remarkable. The idea of this self-referential, cyclical inspiration was very exciting. It is almost a paradox, or at least a positive feedback cycle: use the actions of the characters to inform the theatrical rules of the world of the play, and so create the means through which the actors will portray the characters, and perform the actions of the characters that were the inspiration in the first place.

The line between performance and the real world began to grow thin, the actors and the characters were blurring with each other because of the actions they needed to perform. This fit so nicely into the story that Brecht had written, as the line between Galy Gay and the imposed personality of Jeremiah Jip was being blurred and then systematically deconstructed by the soldiers in the play.

I absolutely love this idea, but it is impossible to stage an idea. So I needed to continue working with something a bit more tangible.

2.2 Ideas Evolving

Beyond these initial impulses, an aesthetic that I found intriguing after the first few reads of the play was that of the German war painters, specifically the work of Otto Dix. I had only recently encountered the work of this artist in early 2015 while working on a project with Verb

Theatre called Of Fighting Age. The development of this show was centered around an exhibit called “Transformations” at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary that compared and contrasted the work of Dix and Canadian painter AY Jackson. While I found the paintings in this particular exhibit of little inspiration, it was the paintings that were NOT shown – the works that Dix is arguably better known for – that struck a chord with me.

For example, the painting shown here as Figure 2: Dix’s iconic Scat Players (Die

Skatspieler). There was something about this painting that reminded me wholy of Brecht’s play.

A grotesqueness in the quality of

the wounded soldiers depicted

therein; nothing is hidden from the

viewer – the pain and consequences

of war ripple out towards the

viewer. The transformation of these

men after the war appears as

irreperable to me as the

transformation of Galy Gay at the

end of the Play. I was also struck by

the boldness of the colours – they

were exactly in the palette I had

imagined when first reading the

play. Perhaps there was room in my

set for colours like these.

Figure 2: Otto Dix’s Scat Players (Die Skatspieler)

More than all of this, it was the phrase “the theatre of war” that began to appear in my mind more and more. I had always found the phrase quite evocative, though understood that the definition had little to do with the kind of theatre I was used to working in, but rather it is “the entire land, sea and air area that may become or is directly involved in war operations.”

(Merriam-Webster.com) I decided to allow my imagination to grow from this and so asked the question of myself that William Shakespeare asked in the prologue of his war-play Henry V:

“May we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?”

(Pro.366-366). Of course in my case, it was not France that needed to be crammed into my theatre, but the vast landscape of a fictional India; and as my understanding of the play deepened, this fictional India was the only the beginning. This stage would have to contain images much closer to home.

Figure 3: Very Early Sketches

The first tangible piece of scenery that made itself clear was the need for a proscenium arch. There was something so interesting about this for both Sutherland and I; the inescapable theatricality of it reminded me of how I imagined the old French and German cabaret theatres of the early twentieth century. Flickering bulbs, velvet curtains, cigarette smoke curling up into the air. But we would need to smudge the ritziness of this image, ground it in the muck of our play.

Even in the earliest sketches (see Fig.3), a proscenium was present; and in every iteration of the design, this arch remained.

This posed a bit of a problem however, as the University Theatre, while technically a proscenium/thrust theatre, does not have an arch that is nearly as defined as we wanted it to be.

The performance space always imposes certain limitations on a creative process, immediately putting a frame around the show and forcing context on ideas no matter what developmental point they might be. I considered how staging our production in a more traditional proscenium theatre might work substantially better for our purposes, but spending too much time in this reverie during a process can be very detrimental. I prefer to frame any limitation as a point of inspiration; that is to say, an opportunity rather than an obstacle to overcome. Even if the perfect theatre for our production was not what we had access to, how could the apparent shortcomings be then used to our advantage? For example, a thrust pierces into the audience, breaking the wall of the picture frame. So the addition of a false proscenium arch within the architecture of the theatre could highlight the artifice of the playing, and in fact emphasize a more Brechtian staging. This spoke to Sutherland’s desire to “do” Brecht as previously discussed. But it also spoke to my desire to maintain an emotional connection to the story; I have always felt that one benefit of a thrust stage is that it is easier for the audience to connect to the performers simply

through proximity. Even audience members in the far back rows are more a part of the action as they are literally surrounding the performers on all sides.

After thinking this through, I felt that not only was the University Theatre functional for the artistic desires of both the director and myself, it was in fact very ideal. I felt that I was now within striking distance of a cohesive design concept, though the physical structure was still a bit far off.

2.3 An Organizing Principle Is Revealed

It was in a meeting on the afternoon of September 6th that the organizing principle was revealed, both by myself, as well as to the director Tim Sutherland. He said to me simply: “an organizing principle is the satire.” For him, the play was about a societal commentary on the world that Brecht was living in, filtered through the context of our current times. It was pointed out to me that the soldiers in the play rob a temple – albeit one that is corruptly run entirely for- profit – and the symbol of a god carried a greater weight for a mid-twentieth century audience. I was asked by Sutherland: what are the gods of today? In the world we live in, what are the means to attain power and wealth? What is the symbol of greed of the twenty-first century?

While I drew a blank at first, Sutherland had a very specific answer: oil. For him, oil was a symbol of the purest avarice. That is to say, the business of oil more so than the resource itself.

He saw a deep irresponsibility in the development of this resource, a destructive act that made a small group of men very rich. And for Sutherland, an opportunity to do this play in Alberta, a province that has built its entire twentieth-century economy on the production and exploitation of oil gave him such delight. He was very critical of the apparent dirtiness of this industry, and especially Alberta’s singular economic reliance on the development of this resource: the boom

and bust cycle that he had lived through again and again had offended his political beliefs his entire life. So putting oil at the centre of of his play was something he couldn’t resist. This is why satire was important to him. He saw this and an opportunity to point out parts of our own contemporary times that he had questions about, and to do so at the epicenter of an oil-rich province was exciting for him.

When he said this to me, it clicked immediately and so much of the beginnings of an overarching concept became very clear in my mind.

So how would we proceed with this, and how did this manifest in the scenography?

Certainly the iconography of big oil was easy to come to mind the oil derricks: the skyscrapers of downtown Calgary. We would need to tread the line between saying what we want, and at the same time, not beating the audience over the head by being completely obvious. Sutherland talked to me about the Brechtian concept of “gest,” which he explained as a fusion of the words

“gesture” and “gist;” moments of action that carried with them the full weight of our organizing principle of satire. He further explained that while this can be interpreted as a physical gesture, the “gest” or “gestic” nature could be imbued into physical objects and spaces. For example, an object that was used as currency could be extraordinarily large – a theatrical setting is the ideal place for something like this. In Man Equals Man – Galy Gay is paid for his services with cigars, bottles of beer, cucumbers, etc. These objects could be much larger than life – or highlighted in one way or another.

This was the central sense of theatricality that we decided to move forward with. And it was after this meeting that I felt I had the necessary direction to make some real decisions about how the set should be designed.

However, one thing that I flagged right away was my concern about how to clearly communicate these ideas to our future audiences. One of the central tenets that I have always stuck to in my work is that it is nigh-impossible to stage an idea, but rather the need is to facilitate the communication of the idea through the action on stage. If we drift too close to attempting to stage the idea, then we will lose our audiences in a mire of intellectualism and obscure symbols. So the gestic nature of the set and the central principle of satire will need to be tempered always by ensuring that nothing we do gets in the way of the audience’s understanding of the story. I felt very strongly that if an audience was going to care about ANY of the satire laced throughout the play (either by Brecht or by Sutherland and I) then they absolutely needed to understand Galy Gay’s journey, and the world that he lived in.

2.4 Razzle Dazzle

I first heard about the paint scheme known as "Razzle Dazzle" on the podcast 99%

Invisible, a weekly radio program about design and architecture, and – as their website describes

– "the 99% activity that shapes our world." (99percentinvisible.org) In the episode, producer

Roman Mars speaks with Roy R. Behrens, professor of graphic design and distinguished scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, about a specific type of camouflage used on ships during the first world war.

When you ask a person on the street about what camouflage is, it is more than likely that they will describe an object blending into its environment; think that wavy forest design on army fatigues in every Rambo film, or the current pixelated pattern used by the Canadian military today. Behrens calls this “background-matching,” or “high-similarity camouflage.” But when it comes to ships on the open seas, this kind of camouflage doesn't work. There are too many

variables - weather and time of day can drastically alter the colour of the sky and the water in a matter of minutes, leaving what was a difficult to see battleship suddenly very plain and clearly visible, and so vulnerable to attack. That is where “disruptive,” or “figure disruption camouflage” comes in.

Figure 4: Razzle Dazzle in Action

The artist Abbot H. Thayer’s early ideas about the evolution of high-similarity camouflage in animals (which he called “countershading”) can be traced forward in time as having influenced even today's modern military disguises. As a close observer of the natural world, he observed the ubiquitousness of natural camouflage in his 1909 book Concealing

Colouration in the Animal Kingdom. In it, he showed just how effective camouflage could be - both the disruptive and the counter-shading types of camouflage. Inspired directly by Thayer's work, as well as the 1890 work The Colours of Animals by zoologist Sir Edward Poulton, John

Graham Kerr - a professor of zoology himself at Glasgow University (1902-1935) - believed that these "principles of countershading and disruptive patterning might well have relevance for human warfare" (Forbes 85).

In 1914, Kerr began to make the case to authorities that a disruptive patterning might be most effective in hiding the British fleet. In his memorandum, he claimed that "to obliterate the strong shadows on the upper parts of a ship, [you must] pick out the deep shadows in brilliant white and greys smoothly in tone between these white-painted areas and the brightly lit areas painted in grey. Big guns should be grey on top shading to pure white beneath" (Forbes 87). He concludes with a strong a recommendation: "to destroy completely the continuity of outlines by splashes of white," and that doing so would "greatly increase the difficulty of accurate range finding" (Forbes 87).

The paint scheme that Kerr was suggesting would eventually be known unofficially as

Razzle Dazzle Camouflage.

Eventually, the British Admiralty tested and began to integrate Kerr's ideas, and between

March 1 and November 11 1918, a total of 1256 ships where camouflaged, both merchant and fighting ships. During this time, 96 ships were attacked and sunk, only 18 of which were camouflaged - all merchant ships. Not one fighter was sunk during this time (Forbes 97). The proof of the efficiency of the dazzle camouflage is, as they say, in the pudding.

But for me, and how this applies to Man Equals Man, is all in Kerr's final recommendation: "to destroy completely the continuity of outlines by splashes of white." Man

Equals Man is a play about a man being unmade and then made again. The lines between where

Galy Gay ends and where the new Jeremiah Jip begins are blurred. He never fades into the background, but his transformation is dazzling. When he appears transformed in the garb of a soldier, his wife claims that she cannot even recognize him, and this is not because of the clothing, but because he has become already difficult to distinguish from the other soldiers. This is the essence of Razzle Dazzle camouflage - not to hide but to confuse.

The proscenium arch was the first to receive the paint scheme. I felt that framing the action within this dazzle was incredibly appropriate. For Sutherland, the frame became yet another critical distancing device; and for me it became the central alienation device. As mentioned, I struggled with the Brechtian sense of critical distance and the quelling of emotion.

But the arch heightened the theatricality which set out the rules of the world clearly and so granted permission to the audience to fall more deeply into the moment. And the dazzle paint treatment became unexpectedly a central organizing principle for me: to stand out and blend in; to blur the lines that demarcate the end and beginning. While the intellectual side of the production grounded in Brechtian theory gave me considerable and constant pause, I was able use the image of the dazzled frame to give me leverage into the whole artistic process.

2.5 Evolution

The major theoretical elements were in place by late September: the presentation cabaret- esque style, the gestic principles of properties and scenery, and the Razzle Dazzle camouflage as a visual organizing principle. As for lighting, it was still early in the process, but I understood

already that they would be an important means with which to communicate the story, and would have to be in synch with the evolving set design in order to assist the transitions location to location. But as a whole, I had what I needed to proceed with the design as a whole, to assemble the scenography and visual language.

I knew that a structure was going to be needed to become, most prominently, Widow

Begbick’s train car, and the Pagoda of the Yellow God; both interior and exterior of each location.

My first thought was to consider some of the most obvious theatre architecture of the past. If I was going to integrate a proscenium arch into the picture, what other pieces could be brought in? I didn’t care about mishmashes of time period, and cast my thoughts quite wide. I glanced through a few theatre books, but didn’t find anything that was quite solid enough as an architectural presence. I did a sketch where I drew a solid structure that could have doors and an upper level, and with a series of sliding panels that I imagined could be slid on and off by the performers, to create large pictures of the locations throughout the play.

Figure 5: An Important Sketch

With the panels we could create the pagoda – as abstractly or as literally as we wanted.

The side-to-side motion of the panels had the potential to give the staging a momentum, almost like the train on which much of the action was set. Or perhaps the panels need not be entirely opaque, relying on scenic paint to give the setting? Maybe it could be further abstracted?

I considered ancient Greek amphitheatres: they were a structure unto themselves. The architecture consisted of very specific elements, one of which was the skene building: a large piece of architecture that was used as the backdrop of all performances, with doors and an upper level. I did a small sketch to imagine how a façade based on this architecture might work in the

University Theatre behind the false proscenium, and I found it to be flat. It would restrict access to the stage for the performers (i.e.: exits and entrances) and I felt that it might be too static a

visual picture to allow the dynamism that I felt the staging would need. I did, however, quite like the weight that the building gave to the stage picture. It really grounded the image in my mind.

I continued to sketch, pulling the form of the building downstage into the space, collapsing it as much as I could. A cube wasn’t right: given the thrust stage and the audience around it, there would be substantial sightline issues. But a cube widened on the upstage side slightly into a trapezoid… That held something interesting.

This new shape struck me as correct for a few reasons. Firstly, it pushed the action forward a bit without closing off too much upstage space. This would allow an easier time blocking for Sutherland, as sightlines would no longer be a constant issue. Action could take place on top of it, in front, and on both sides.

The sketch shown in Figure 5 is the most important in the evolution of the set as it came to be. It shows the main elements of the set in a nearly full incarnation. It shows the trapezoidal shape of the central unit and its rough position in the space relative to the architectural stage opening: half upstage of the plaster line, pushing forward but not too far onto the thrust. The false proscenium is still present. It shows a stage floor, octagonal in shape and raised slightly. It shows three sets of doors: one on each side of the trapezoid and one on the front. The idea of a double-action door swing is first considered here. And finally, it shows a kind of skypiece or series of panels that populate the upstage area behind the main unit. I’d like to touch on the newest additions here.

I felt the need for a defined staging space; a floor treatment that would visually elevate the playing area and give a frame to the action on the floor in a similar way to the way the false proscenium was framing the stage as a whole. My first impulse was an octagonal shape. This

was for a few reasons. Firstly, the thrust part of the University Theatre is an almost perfect circle jutting forward from the plaster line. To my eye, an octagon fit best within the semi-circle. I considered giving a paint treatment to the full circle, but the softness of the curved lines didn’t work for me. The octagon fit perfectly in the circle and kept a hard-edged line that worked better visually.

The double-hinged doors came to mind as a way to both help completely transform the space, and solve some of the functional aspects of the play. When opened forward (hinged on the downstage side), the doors would close the space downstage, literally cutting off the upstage area from the thrust. This could be useful in creating the appearance of walls – both exterior and interior. One scene that came to mind here were when the four soldiers break in and ransack the

Pagoda of the Yellow God. Other interior scenes such as the Pagoda and the interior of

Begbick’s canteen were considered for this look. When opened back (hinged on the upstage side), the interior of the main unit would be revealed. Even though we would be closing off the upstage area somewhat, there is still an openness to this look. One scene that came to mind that would work for this was the exterior of Widow Begbick’s canteen. I added awnings to assist with the transformation. I also considered this look for the mountains of Tibet, the final striking image of the play.

Finally, the need for scenery in the upstage area was very clear. However, the function and form of this was not clear at all to me. A few options I considered were projection screens with the possibility of using images of war, a fictional India, and images of oil derricks, the mountains if Tibet, and a burning fortress. Eventually this imagery would evolve into four three- sided periaktoi. These ancient staging devices can be spun on their central axis to show three

different scenes. In the case of Man Equals Man the three scenes were rubber trees, oil derricks, and telegraph poles.

At this point, I brought these sketches to another meeting with Sutherland, a meeting that was both one of our shortest, approximately fifteen minutes long, and most productive. I presented to him the direction I was headed, and he was entirely on board. He asked a few questions, emphasized his need for the upstage images to be evocative yet simple, and we considered possible staging for a few scenes. He was able to see his play for the first time.

Figure 6: Black Card Model

2.6 Valleys, Peaks, and Table Surprise

This was the point in the process that I needed to move out of the sketchbook and towards a physical representation of my ideas. The weeks of incubation had been well invested since the next phase occurred extremely quickly. I did a little bit of drafting and then built a quarter inch black card model (Fig.6). I placed my scenery elements into a model box of the

University Theatre and the design took its first major leap into the real world. And I was liking what I was seeing.

I brought the small model I had built into a meeting with Sutherland; a meeting that was to be the only major conflict that we ever had. With preliminary design deadlines looming, and with this feeling of moving forward, I was very disappointed to hear that he was no longer happy with the direction we were headed. He explained to me that something he was looking for was more movement in the action of the play. This came as a shock to me as so much of what we had been discussing had remained the same for some time: the false proscenium, the large central unit. But now there was a feeling that things were too static, that I might need to go back to square one. I was crushed. I had no idea where it was coming from. I agreed with him that the set

I had proposed was indeed quite static but with many moving parts. I put forward a question about the “Brechtian” way, and what he was meaning by this. I was concerned that actively subverting the audience’s emotional connection to the material was senseless. I felt that creating art and collaborating as we had been doing was an emotional endeavour, and to deny this was quite offending to me. I was told then that this was his thesis project and essentially, I needed to get on board. I left the meeting very discouraged, that I was serving a vision that was no longer mine to participate in, and that the work I had done up to this point had been for naught.

It is important here to mention the importance of the director / designer relationship, and how it is the keystone to a successful production. There is inherent tension in this relationship, and when the relationship is healthy, this tension can engender remarkable creativity that can sustain a lifetime of artistic collaboration and work. On the other hand, if this tension is strained and communication breaks down, then the results can be a struggling production, stress that bleeds into personal lives, and poorly made art. Ultimately, this relationship grows out of mutual respect and a rigorous approach to the art making, and it is sustained through good communication.

This new unwanted tension between Sutherland and I did not last long. We met again shortly afterwards and we worked through both of our concerns. He was able to articulate to me what his worries were about the static set were. He felt that the direction we were headed was in fact just fine, but that we needed to continue to think through how the set could move the story forward through active staging, and continue to find ways to bring the set to life. Hearing this, I agreed completely and we were back on the same page.

That said, I had come up against another wall. I was struggling to fully understanding some of the conceptual ideas that Sutherland was working with. I fought hard, but I was having a very hard time figuring out how to animate this set.

It was at this point that I had the encounter with Dr. Barry Yzereef I described in Chapter

1, that in his opinion Brecht’s theatre was like children’s theatre and the performers were like kids wanting to put on a show. As I mentioned, this was a revelation, and my understanding of how we could tell this story opened up substantially. It was the combination of the wall I had run up to and the encounter with Dr. Yzereef that led to the final bits of the set design.

The idea of the periakos suddenly popped into my head. I had seen these stage devices used in other productions, and had always found them quite charming and functional. What drew me to them was that a periakoi could be animated, rotated slowly, quickly, without being seen, or in full view of the audience depending on the needs of the scene. I could model the structures on the already drafted vertical pieces of my false proscenium, and could place them in the stage picture very symmetrically. I designed six of them, retreating in perspective upstage. This would give the set both height and depth. I could hang a cyclorama along the back of the theatre, and then though lighting I could silhouette the whole stage picture and change its colour instantly.

The final piece of the puzzle had to do with the pagoda and the mountain fortress. And again, thanks to the challenge of animating the set and my new understanding of the concept, I knew how to do it.

Table surprise.

This needs context. In 2012, I designed a set for a production of a new play called Good

Fences. It was written by the Downstage Creation Ensemble, a group of which I am a part, and presented in the Big Secret Theatre during the playRITES festival at Alberta Theatre Projects.

The idea of the set was that all of the scenery came out of the set itself – a modular platform that came apart like an enormous three dimensional puzzle. Squares and triangles were lifted out of the set, eroding away the original image and used as various pieces of furniture in scenes. The one piece of furniture that was not one of these blocks was a piece that came to be lovingly called Table Surprise. A full-sized table was inset into the platform. When collapsed, it lay flush to the surface of the deck. Our audiences audibly reacted to the moment when the table first

appeared, and this remains one of my favorite surprises to have ever designed. So, to solve the problem with animating Man Equals Man, I stole from myself.

Two flats would be inset and lay flush to the deck on the top of the main unit. The furthest downstage would be the top of the pagoda, designed to look like an oil derrick. It would flip up and forward. A small circular hole would be cut into this as well, creating the window through which the priest Wang could spy upon the soldiers at the beginning of the play. The second flat would be the furthest upstage and flip back. On its underside would be painted a mountain range and walled city. This would be for the final scene of the play when the soldiers attack and destroy the Tibetan fortress. One final surprising reveal in a series of surprising reveals.

I brought this idea to Sutherland and he absolutely loved it. The addition of these flats and the periaktos achieved what he was lacking in the design. It allowed me to complete the design and include a series of playful tricks that spoke to how we wanted to tell the story of Man

Equals Man.

I find it most rewarding that the main progress and body of the design came out of true collaboration, even the moments of disagreement that pushed both Sutherland and I through to this final design that I was truly happy with. This is testament to the power of the tension in the director / designer relationship, and also very eye-opening to me: while I feel that even in the moments that the tension between us teetered on the negative, it was ultimately very productive to the process. With this in mind, and with an evolved understanding of how we were able to communicate with each other, I feel a great sense of loss at his death that he and I will never be able to collaborate again. Looking back, we clearly had a unique and powerful collaborative

relationship, one that could have produced a remarkable body of work over our lifetimes. It is a cruel joke that we were not able to do so.

CHAPTER 3: LIGHTING DESIGN CONCEPT

3.1 The Intruder and Jebat

I had two opportunities to prepare for designing lights for Man Equals Man, but in two very different ways. In the spring of 2014, I had the opportunity to practice the director/designer relationship with Sutherland that would be key to the success of our thesis production. And in the fall of the same year, I got a chance to design the lights for a show in the University Theatre:

Jebat by Hatta Azad Kahn, directed by fellow graduate student Fasyali Fadzly bin Saipul Bahri.

During the Taking Flight Festival of Student Work in the spring of 2014, Sutherland and

I were first able to collaborate fully on a production. We had earlier worked together in our graduate classes, including DRAMA 607: Director / Designer and the Mis-En-Scene, a class dedicated to developing a shared language between artists. But having a chance to truly dig into a show together was critical in developing a sense of trust that would be key to our development of Man Equals Man. Our show was The Intruder by Maurice Maeterlink, a one-act play that couldn’t have been more different than Man Equals Man.

The Intruder (Fig. 7) is a one-act play that takes place in a single room over a truncated six hours. It is the story of an old man awaiting to hear the fate of his daughter and newborn grandchild. Throughout the short play, the old man, who is blind, thinks he hears mysterious footsteps moving throughout the house, and finally in the room of the ailing daughter. At the end, the clock strikes midnight and the baby begins to cry. The Sister of Mercy enters and announces that the child’s mother has died. Sutherland’s treatment of this play was to be a study in atmosphere, and I readily acquiesced this direction.

Figure 7: The Cast, Set and Light of The Intruder

The production was a little gem of a show, moody and – at moments – quite terrifying.

The set I designed was a small, raised and raked platform covered in rugs. This gave a feeling of confinement, further adding pressure to the situation. But it was the lighting that was the most important design element, and it was here that Sutherland and I were really able to really play.

A few things that I took from this process: firstly, Sutherland and I shared a love of saturated colours and deep shadows. He understood the language of light as a mood-setter and storyteller. Only occasionally did he ask me to brighten the actors, and he wasn’t afraid to allow their faces to fall into shadow when a strong theatrical moment could be sculpted. For myself, I found great success in strong directionality of light: picking specific key light sources (the

fireplace, the lamp, etc.) and sculpting the rest of the states around them. I also found success in the timing of lighting cues; long and imperceptible shifts could heighten the mood moment to moment. This is a technique that I have been experimenting with for years, but rarely have I found as much success as I did with The Intruder.

For Jebat, I had the chance to work for the first time in the University Theatre, and get a glimpse at what works and what does not. The house plot, designed by Steve Isom, was a tried and true plot with as few kinks in it as possible. It consists of a twenty-one area system, with each area consisting of a warm forty-five-degree light from stage right, a cool 45 degree light from stage left, a steep front light, and a semi-steep back light. Outside the specific areas, there are two-colour side lights, top lights with a variety of colours on a scroller, and a front gobo texture wash. With a few colour changes, some added specials, and focus-area adjustments to accommodate designer Jennifer Arsenault’s set, the plot for Jebat remained essentially unchanged.

I found the show to be quite successful. And process wise, I re-drafted the entire system and so checked each instrument’s math to see why they worked in the positions they were placed.

The learning I did here was integral to my success on Man Equals Man, and has changed my lighting design process entirely for the better. When approaching a new space, requesting a draft of a house plot system or a previous designer’s work in that space, I can gain insight quickly into the geometry of the space and it’s useful lighting positions.

Figure 8: The Cast and Set of Jebat

3.2 Early Ideas & System

My initial ideas for the lighting design were much more practical than artistic, at least at first. My main intention was to ensure that the performers were visible, and that the many locations were distinct enough from each other to ensure that the movement of the play was clear.

But as the set evolved and my understanding of Sutherland’s direction became even clearer, the potential function of lights grew bigger in my mind. The potential with animating the set, and using the lights as the vehicle to help tell the story really came to the forefront of my

thinking. So in designing the plot, I attempted to strike a balance between keeping it simple so that the actors would be clearly visible, yet have enough variety so that we could easy place and re-place the scenes we were in, and to have enough lights to provide a few theatrical tricks and looks to heighten the scene when required.

Figure 9: Focus Points

The lighting system was made up of seventeen specific focus point areas that covered the entire stage – fifteen of which were on the lower deck, and two of which were on top of the main

unit (Fig. 9). And each of the areas had the following lights focused on them to create the system.

1. General Wash Stage Right. A light coming down at forty-five degrees

from stage right of centre. All lights from stage right were warm in colour.

2. General Wash Stage Left. A light coming down at forty-five degrees from

stage left of centre. All lights from stage right were cool in colour.

3. Steep Fronts. These lights came down from zero degrees of centre, and

had no colour filter. A steep angle, as opposed to a shallow angle, does not

fully light an actor’s face, but gives some amount of shadow on the face,

falling down from the eyes. It is not as severe as a top light.

4. Scroller Tops. A light coming down from immediately above the focus

point, with a scroller accessory attached giving up to sixteen different

colour options. The focus of these lights are quite specific, as the

instruments I used were ellipsoidal and therefore able to be focused tightly

to each area.

5. Cool Tops. A deeply saturated cool gel. The instrument I used for these

tops had Fresnel lenses – these lenses don’t allow for a tight focus to the

area, but rather throw a much softer and less contained beam. These allow

for excellent blending between areas.

6. Gobo Breakup Back. These lights came steeply from behind each area,

and were fitted with a Rosco 77228 Gobo: “Trusswork 2” (Figure 10).

Back lights in no way light the actors’ faces and instead are for

emphasizing the form of the performers. I chose to use a gobo breakup to

further obscure the performers, allowing the actors to move in and out of

the light without their faces being seen. I chose this particular gobo

because of its similarity to the Razzle Dazzle camouflage paint treatment

the set was to receive. My hope was to create the illusion that the Razzle

Dazzle was leaping up off the stage floor and onto the actors bodies.

Figure 10: Trusswork 2 Gobo

7. Stage Right Sides. A saturated warm colour temperature sidelight that was

used to pick up the form of the performers. These would be used for

moments of heightened reality.

8. Stage Left Sides. A saturated cool colour temperature sidelight that was

used to pick up the form of the performers.

In addition to these eight points of the lighting system, I added a series of specials – lights that were more often singularly purposed for moments that the production needed:

1. Aisle Lights. For entrances made from the audience.

2. Proscenium Breakup. A textured gobo breakup tightly focused on the

entirety of the front of the false proscenium.

3. Moving Lights. I used four iCue moving mirrors and three Studio Spot

moving lights. The iCues were excellent as spotlights, and I used them

quite often. I never once found a use for the Studio Spots, and while they

were hung, I never cued them into the show.

4. Floor Stand Lights. These lights were placed on the floor and were

potentially used for moments of very heightened reality. The placement of

these lights were both facing the set, and within the main unit facing the

audience. In the end, all the floor lights were cut due to light spill and

blinding the audience.

5. Periaktoi Fronts. Lights focused tightly on the four periaktos.

6. Misc. Specials: bullet holes, doors, the pagoda (front and back), and the

mountain (front and back).

A complete lighting plot can be found in the Appendix of this document.

3.3 Colour Selection

I made a choice to push my colour selection a bit farther than I had with Jebat, although I made sure to reuse a few looks that I found very effective. What I mean by farther is tending towards a more saturated colour selection, but making sure that the colours could still be blended to a versatile white. I did this for two main reasons: firstly, brighter colours on stage tend to push the theatricality of the given moments, allowing for a heightening of reality that could both distance the audience from the reality of a given moment in a Brechtian way, and affect the audience on a deeper, more emotional level as I find colour does. My second reason was extremely practical. Because the story sprawls through quite a few different locations, and because of the relative static nature of the set, having a very strong indicator of place would be key in communicating the plot to the audience. The indicator in this case could be colour. For example, every time we returned to the Pagoda of the Yellow God, I could use push the light towards yellow and green. Every time we returned to Widow Begbick’s canteen, we could land it in a more pinkish light. This could help the audience come along for the ride with us quickly.

I used exclusively Rosco brand gels, as this is a brand I am very familiar with. For the forty-five degree front lights, I picked Rosco 02 (Bastard Amber) and Rosco 66 (Cool Blue) for the warm and cool wash respectively. This is a shade more saturated than I would have tended towards in other plots. My usual go-to colours are Rosco 08 (Pale Gold) and Rosco 53 (Pale

Lavender) for front lights. They blend very well to white when put onstage, and provide a decent variety of colour temperature in that white depending on the intensity each light is running at.

My hope in choosing two colours that were somewhat more saturated was that I could keep a

good blend of white, I had much further to swing in terms of saturation from cool to warm, and could give a lighting state a much heightened look if needed.

For the steep front, I kept it at an open white, adding only a Rosco 119 frost gel to help blend the areas. This was one of the things that I learned from lighting Jebat, and I found these fronts to be very effective in filling out the stage picture, and allowing the actors faces to be easily visible.

For the side lights, I opted for a Rosco 67 (Light Sky Blue) and a Rosco 27 (Medium

Red): a bright primary blue and a deeply saturated red. Rosco 27 is not a colour that I have seen used all that often; it is a one shade darker than it’s very commonly used neighbour Rosco 26

(Light Red), a bright primary red. But for these side lights, I needed something different. As side lights are used often for lighting the form and movement rather than for general visibility, soaking the actors in a deeply saturated colour from one side, and a brighter primary blue from the other could provide some great options for some highly theatrical moments.

For top light I had a variety of options. Firstly, I used a set of scrollers. These are accessories attached to the front of a lighting instrument, and have a long sheet of different gel colours that can be controlled from the lighting console and change to one of up to sixteen different colours: a versatile option that can be used in almost every scene. I also used a very saturated blue: Rosco 85 (Deep Blue), a filter that has only a 3% transmission – which is to say that it blocks out 97% of the light. A colour this dark had the potential to be very effective, especially given the amount of white in the set and floor paint treatment. I felt that this could be excellent for transitions, as well as a deep colour for the coolness of the exterior scenes.

For the cyclorama at the back of the set, I used the three primary light colours – red green and blue – in order to mix to the secondary colours of amber, cyan and magenta, giving me wide spectrum to choose from.

The final colour I’ll mention here is the colour I used for the back breakups. I used Rosco

60 (No Colour Blue), and of all the colours I picked, this is the one that I regret. My reasoning behind using this colour was to allow the texture of the gobo to be easily seen, and for the texture to be visible when other lights were on stage. Not to mention the business of the paint treatment on the floor, the light breakup could be lost quite easily. In the end, I found that the name of this gel lived up to its name – No Colour Blue. The colour added very little to the stage picture, and ended up muddying the image substantially. I used these breakups quite a lot less than I would have liked because I was never able to get them to look any good.

In retrospect, I feel that my lighting choices were for the most part very safe. There is a trap that can be fallen into, where one can fall back onto the technical side of this kind of design.

A generic plot can be assembled very easily based on only the measurements of a space, and this plot can be used to light any number of plays. The problem with this trap is that an innovative design, true ingenious scenography, is not required to be simply functional. These plots tend to be very symmetrical, use unremarkable colour choices, and could be described as dull. The balance here is tight: a show could be very easily ruined if innovation is not well thought through, leaving no time to physically rehang a plot if the experimental work does not function. I have realized that it is essential to know what does in fact work in lighting design before pushing boundaries and breaking conventions.

I feel that my plot for Man Equals Man was, in the end, a “proof of concept” plot. The plotting is not overly experimental, and I did indeed fall back on the work I learned adapting the house plot for Jebat. I didn’t take any risks where I was mostly certain of the results. I think that this was for one reason: I didn’t want to fail my director.

The success of any show I work on is important to me, but given that my director was a fellow graduate student and his MFA thesis was hinging on this production as well. I wanted to ensure the success of the show for his sake as well as mine. So I made the decision early on to play it safe, to use techniques I knew would work, and only experiment when I knew it would work out. And the show was successful. Both Sutherland and I were pleased.

But the concept I was proving, in retrospect, is that I have a strong understanding of the basic tenets of lighting design. I feel that after the work I did on Man Equals Man, my next production – my next experiment – will begin to push what I know about the field and begin to truly execute my own aesthetic, to find my artistic voice.

3.4 Cueing

I am only going to touch briefly on the cueing process in this section, as I will discuss the cueing process more in depth in the Execution section of this document (Chapter 5). I created an initial cue sheet before heading into the cueing sessions, responding to the needs of the script and the two complete runs of the play I had seen in rehearsal. This cue sheet did evolve over the course of the tech weeks, as our understanding of the play continued to evolve in the space. My preliminary cue sheet predicted approximately 70 cues, by the end of the process we sat at 113 cues in total.

Cueing is a much more situational-based process, and there is only a certain amount of preplanning that is possible when it comes to putting together the lighting cues. The reason is this: lighting design for the theatre is at its base almost entirely theoretical. The elements of design – knowing your instruments, picking positions, choosing colour, imagining looks, and pre-cueing – are only the tip of the iceberg.

Unlike in set, sound or costume design, it is rarely possible to execute the lighting design until the few days before the production is set to open, and at this point, it is nearly impossible to make large sweeping changes to the work. And unlike in other design discipline’s, a light designer is unable to check the work ahead of time; a set or costume designer can visit the carpentry shop or wardrobe department and inspect the progress of the set’s construction or the fit of a garment on an actor, and so flag and solve any potential problems that may arise. A sound designer can build and listen to the cues ahead of time, and the adjustments once the sound is moved into the performance venue can be very minimal. Light design is far less tangible this way. It exists only in a designer’s imagination until after the set is installed, the lights are hung, focused, and turned on.

This is why the technical side, the pre-planning side, of the lighting design is so critical.

Only once this work is completed with rigor and precision is it possible to create the true art of light on stage.

CHAPTER 4: COST & COMPRIMISE

The spirit of a theatre of all people was a key to the success of this production. Tim

Sutherland had a way of inviting his entire cast, design team, and production staff onto his level.

A hierarchical structure was simply not what he needed to have in order to do his job: this was evident in all of our discussions, but as well with all of the interactions we had with the staff.

While this is a way of working that I have always tried to bring into a process, having a director take the lead on this engendered a kind of calm throughout the entire process. No issue was beyond solving. No problem could ever sink our ship. Tim believed that, as did I. And it was our early understanding of this that built the foundation for everything that happened on the production side of the show.

I knew full well that the set I submitted would be over budget. This is not an uncommon occurrence; I would much rather submit something that is big and bold, that speaks to the design concept in its entirety and find ways to pull back if required by budgetary restriction. I believe that there is a substantially lower chance of sacrificing the vision as a whole doing it this way than asking for less in the first place.

That said, when approaching a budget meeting, it is crucial that the designer go in with a few concessions in his or her back pocket, as well as being open to hearing the suggestions that the technical staff and production manager have to offer. They have a much better understanding of the materials and costs, as well as tried and true cost-cutting measures that designers may not know. Stage designers can often get carried away with the art of the play, and what might appear as something very simple, material and labour costs can quickly escalate which almost always leads to the need to redraw, rethink and redesign. A smart designer will always have a sense of

material costs in the back of his or her mind when creating (especially once they have begun drafting the technical drawings). But if the starting point of the design is the budget and not the art, then the result can often be limp and unimaginative scenography.

Production managers, technical staff: these people can make or break a production. And the one controllable aspect of this relationship is communication. The key to avoiding conflict is simple: the production staff should be treated as collaborators rather than adversaries there to ruin your vision. This can be the mistake of an inexperienced designer, and this has the potential to lead to frustration and time loss. In fact, it is in budget meetings that some remarkable creativity can be found, when limitations are pushed against, and new and exciting methods of staging are devised. It is the technicians that will make or break the design: the designers can dream up the idea, but the technicians have to bring it into being.

All of this said, however, as described, I have a tendency to dream big. I would much rather put something impossible forward, see what we can make happen, and go from there.

In the case of the set for Man Equals Man, I received an email from production manager

Don Monty that began with this: “So the costing is in – YIKES!”; albeit an inauspicious start to the conversation, but not entirely unexpected given the scale of the submitted preliminary design.

So to give context to this next section, I would like to include two tables – the first is the initial budget for the show, and the second the initial set materials costing breakdown.

Table 1: Initial Budget

CATEGORY ALLOCATION SET $3,000.00 PROPERTIES $1,500.00 COSTUMES $3,000.00 HAIR, WIGS, MAKEUP $250.00 TECH (LIGHT, SOUND, OTHER) $500.00 STAGE MANAGEMENT $25.00 DIRECTOR/DESIGNER PREP $25.00 MISCELLANEOUS $700.00 TOTALS $9,000.00

Table 2: Man Equals Man Materials Costing

¾ ½ ¼ ¼ ⅛ ¼ dowe pip COST / ITEM ply 2x6 2x4 1x4 ply. ply. luan luan Maso. l e UNIT .

UPPER 6 6 12 160 $650.70 PLATFORM

LOWER 6 6 160 $410.70 PLATFORM

WALLS 16 256 $451.34

LADDERS 1 56 $21.84

CENTRE 4 32 $110.40 DOORS

SL / SL DOORS 6 120 $244.80

LADDERS 2 140 145 $219.25

PAGODA 2 2 $80.00 SURPRISE

MNT. SURPRISE 2 4 $113.00

MAIN 20 20 114 $1,093.46 PLATFORM

$461.57 FALSE PROSC. 1 10 6 6

PERIAKTOI 6 1 45 1240 120 $2,197.35

ESCAPE STAIRS 8 3 $337.10

BAR / PRAYER 4 $94.00 BOX

AMMO BOXES 18 $423.00

PALANQUIN 2 6 $71.90

SUBTOTAL 49 42 1 32 51 47 320 556 1532 145 126 $6,980.41

ELECTRICAL $1,160.00

PAINT $1.200.00

TOTAL $9,340.41

As you can see in Table 2, the materials cost was more than triple the allocated budget, and was slightly more than the entire budget for the show including lighting and costumes. I had anticipated some amount of overages, but this was more than I could have imagined. I immediately understood Monty’s “YIKES,” and began to assemble a list of potential concessions and cutbacks in order of most preferable to cut to least preferable to cut:

1. Cut the electrics from the proscenium arch. This would include the ring of lights

around the edge of the arch, but NOT the lights inside the MAN=MAN sign. I would

be able to use light (gobos, etc.) to get the same idea.

2. Cut two of the six periaktos. With a spacing adjustment, it is possible to achieve a

similar look to the set, both in the depth and the height.

3. Reduce the width of the remaining four periaktos to 24” from 30”. The extra six

inches – while matching the width of the false proscenium – wouldn’t be missed

given their positions upstage. Furthermore, this would bring the size into a more

traditional building material width, saving about a third in the facing (luan).

4. Cut the interior platform. Replace this with a step. This would in no way affect the

aesthetic, but would need to be noted as it could be a safety issue for the performers

in the dark.

5. Re-examine the escape stairs. What would it take to use stock stairs that provided

both the unusual height of the platform, as well as the accessibility of the split

staircase.

6. Ammunition crates. Reduce the number from twenty units to four units. Then pull

from stock and build upon / paint existing boxes. Also, see if it is possible to shuffle

some of the cost of these built crates from out of the set budget and move it into the

properties budget.

7. Finally: if we have not achieved the budget at this point, I would be willing to

sacrifice the raised lower octagonal platform from 12” to 1/8” – using a standard

Masonite floor to make up the space. This would also reduce the height of the main

centre unit from 9’ at its lowest point to 8’ at its lowest point, so bringing it into a

more standard building material size.

If at this point we were not able to meet the budgetary constraints, it would begin to affect the conceptual design of the production, and a much lengthier redesign would be needed.

Concessions are critical, but when we discuss artistic integrity, there are also lines that must be drawn.

Upon sitting down at the meeting, I made it exceptionally clear that I was willing and game to “play ball” with everyone involved. I wanted to make sure that we all got off on the right foot, and it was clear that this little effort made a difference; the room became relaxed, and any tension that may have been anticipated was snuffed out. Present at the meeting was

Sutherland and Monty, as well as carpenter Scott Freeman who would be building the entire set,

Julia Wasilewski, the props master, and wardrobe head Lisa Roberts.

Monty informed us that we had received an extra $5000 from the department that had occasionally been kept for the third show of the season, the slot which we occupied, and that the bulk of this fund had traditionally been earmarked for additional costume building labour and

materials. But given the scale of the set, we needed to see whether any of this could be used in there instead of in wardrobe. To this, I was informed of a conversation that had occurred between

Monty, Roberts, and costume designer, April Viczko. An agreement had been reached that allowed for a bulk of this extra fund to be used on set materials. But even with that amount, we were still overbudget. So we would have to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

I began the conversation with a question to Monty and Freeman: Do you see any areas of the proposed design that can be immediately addressed based on your knowledge of how the set will be built? Freeman answered this by pointing out a few areas where material could be saved if we reduced the sizes in order to use stock building sizes. Most prominently, the six periaktos were surprisingly a very heavy expense. As I had anticipated, the reducing the width from 30” to

24” would save a great deal – much more than I even expected; the estimation was that doing this alone would reduce the cost from $2,197.35 to approximately $1,500. He pointed out a few other instances where this would save, none of which affected the design, and all of which I approved of and thanked him for.

Once we had completed this portion of the discussion, it was my turn to begin offering concessions. I started at the top of my list and made my way through, stopping at each point to discuss and see how much would be reduced in the cost. Unfortunately, I had to concede all of the seven points in order to meet budget. Fortunately, we did not need to go beyond that; one concession was made by Monty – in order to meet me at my final and seventh point, he was willing to use and cut a stack of department-owned Masonite that had traditionally been used uncut as a floor covering. He made sure that I was alright with the condition of this material – it had been painted, repainted, and generally treated quite hard and so was rough and full of texture

that a coat of paint wouldn’t cover up. I assured him that it was fine as my paint scheme was quite busy and the more beaten up the floor looked, the more it would add to the rough and tumble world Sutherland and I were creating.

With this point agreed upon, Monty approved the design at an estimated total of $7400.

In short: we had a show.

CHAPTER 5: EXECUTION

5.1 Set

For the majority of the execution of the set, the work went well and without incident. I found that the design I put into place and which was approved in our budgeting meetings to be taken care of with minimal follow-up questions. During the build and the installation, I was present and available (with one notable exception – which I will discuss later on), and I felt fully supported by the staff, and was confident in their ability to get the work done. This did not mean that I didn’t consistently checked in with them (which I most certainly did) but the clarity of my drawings communicated my needs quite well. There were a few instances where the set build and installation process did not go according to plan; I will discuss them in this chapter.

False Proscenium Position

Figure 11: Original Proscenium Position

Early in the process, Monty and the Technical Coordinator, Brian Kerby, noted for me that the position of the false proscenium needed to be adjusted by approximately 2’6” upstage in order to brace and fasten the piece at the top to the existing theatre architecture. They apologized for not noticing it earlier, which I felt was really no problem. I gave the go-ahead and asked if they needed an updated ground plan. The said no, and they could make the adjustment themselves easily enough, and would let me know if the position appeared to have any issues. I agreed to this change, and left the drawings as submitted.

Figure 12: Adjusted Proscenium Position

Weeks later, I was called into the University Theatre because there was a problem. The new position of the false proscenium did not take into account the existing architecture; a curved piece of facing that I had taken into account in the original position now dipped down in front of the top of the piece, partially cutting off the MAN=MAN lighted sign. I could see clearly now

even in its original position, there was a serious sightline issue. While I had initially taken into account the curve by picking a height that would butt nicely into this architecture, as well as making sure the top was just below the lighting grid, I had not taken into consideration the size of the lighting instruments themselves; they would completely obscure the lettered sign for well over two-thirds of the audience. So this problem with the new position of the false proscenium was an enormous blessing in disguise, as I was able to solve this sightline issue.

After explaining the problem to me, Monty asked what I wanted to do about it. My initial impulse was simple: shorten it. Literally cutting a few inches off the bottom of the pillars. But I thought that this would be a very large job, and it might be difficult to persuade the staff to fix something that I saw as entirely my own fault. This appears petty, but given the scale and budget constraints I was working with, I don’t think it was unreasonable to receive some resistance on this matter. Instead of offering this however, I asked the crew what they felt our best course of action was. Carpenter Scott Freeman suggested cutting it down by six or eight inches, and said that it was very doable with the time he had left. I agreed, and then asked to cut it down by a whole twelve inches. I came in the next day and the work was done and the proscenium was in place. It was the first real glimpse of the set as a whole in its correct place. I was very pleased.

Pleased or not, my only concern with lowering the false proscenium was this: the column bases that I had drawn in were meant to be consistent on the base of the proscenium, as well as the four pariaktos. This base was drawn at thirty-six inches high, and a half inch thick on three of the four sides of each of these pieces. The purpose was purely aesthetic, a slightly more solid looking foundation, so now the front two bases would be twenty-four inches high, while the rest remained at thirty-six inches. This detail was one of the few that I deeply regret not attending to

in one way or another. Unfortunately, I cannot give an explanation for why I didn’t; maybe it was my self-doubt about asking for yet more correction, or rather it was something I just kept putting off imagining that I would eventually get to it “later.” But regardless of the reason, I do regret not dealing with this detail. Whether this bothered anyone else at all – be it director Tim

Sutherland or any audience member, I’ll never know as it was never brought up.

Colour Palette

After a great deal of thought and discussion with Sutherland, I decided that the colour palette of the set – the entire set – be greyscale. I had considered it for some time, having seen some images of Dazzle camouflage in various tones from beiges to browns and greens to blacks.

There was something intriguing to me about the monochromatic though; it struck me that the play, though inciting in me images of full of rich colours, was dealing with both pure dichotomy and a spectrum of change. In the first instance, Man Equals Man deals with the ideas of us and them, me and you, war and peace, life and death. That is on the outside. On the inside however, it explores the nuances of these seemingly hard opposites, and explores the many shades of grey between. For example, though the disgraced soldiers are attempting to completely change the porter Galy Gay into the warrior Jeremiah Jip – one to the other – Galy Gay spends the majority of the play in between, swinging one moment closer to his former self, and at others (especially when profit is involved) much closer to Jip before finally taking on the persona of their lost comrade. Brecht seems to discuss the very nature of identity here, and considers whether the lines between one person and another actually blur.

The clearest way for me to come into harmony with this in my visual world was in terms of literal shades of grey. Colour is emotional and complicated. I wanted this to be very simple

and clear. Not only that, but the colour palette of the costumes lived in a very militaristic place – greens and khakis and browns. These colours would seem bright and vivid against the black and white background, and pop the characters out of the visual image. When I explained this to him,

Sutherland heartily agreed.

To prove my concept to myself however, I built a model, complete with the greyscale paint job. Seeing it in three dimensions was striking and very exciting to both Sutherland and I.

Figure 13: The Complete Man Equals Man Model

Based on the colours of the model I had built, I picked out the colours present in the

Dazzle design. I sampled them and build a swatch sheet in Photoshop, which I printed at the same high resolution that I had printed the paint for the model. With this in hand, I went into the paint shop and began to make recipes.

There is one consideration that I did not make at the time that I have realized now in retrospect. Computer based art programs like Photoshop deal with an entirely different colour wheel than we are dealing with in paint. The colours on a screen are light: the three primary colours of light and pigment aren’t the same. Photoshop uses a CMYK colour wheel – the three secondary light colours of cyan, magenta and yellow with the addition of key (black). The pigment colour wheel is based in the primaries of red, yellow and blue. Even when printed, which is the light colour translated into printer ink, it is still very difficult to reconcile the two colour wheels, and so difficult to use the recipes of a colour based on light for colours based in pigment. I would have saved myself some time in the paint studio had I realized this, earlier on, and will in future projects start with paint rather than Photoshop.

In the model I built, there were eight grey tones plus white. I knew that a few of these tones only appeared once or twice in the pattern, so to simplify a bit, I decided to mix up six tones of grey plus white. I would become very familiar these colours over the weeks to come.

My plan was to begin with a medium shade of grey, one that could be lightened or darkened to achieve the tones I had decided upon. And it was critical that this grey be versatile; it needed to be vivid and alive. What I mean by this is that I was thinking of my future self in this moment, the lighting designer. In my experience, greys made from black and white are often dead when put under stage light. That is to say they can suck up the light and not reflect back any subtones

of colour, leaving the completed stage picture dull and lackluster. With this in mind, I decided to use as little black as possible in the recipes. The way I planned to avoid this was to mix two complimentary colours together to create the grey, as opposed to mixing only black and white.

Figure 14: The Printed Swatches with Paint Tests

Figure 15: My Complete Palette (plus white) Colours One through Six

Unfortunately, this didn’t work as easily as I had hoped. The tones I managed to create with these complimentary colours were almost too colourful, and often bordered on a brackish brown. My first attempt used the Rosco Scenic Paint colours Deep Red and Chrome Oxide

Green. I chose these two paint colours to being with for two reasons: the depth of the colour in each, and (practically speaking) they were actually present in the University of Calgary’s limited paint stock. My hope was that with these two deep, complimentary colours I could create a vivid grey that could be the base of the entire colour palette. I had already begun to build the colour palette for my lighting plot, and I felt that some of the colours (specifically Rosco 27, Rosco 60 and Rosco 80) would reflect the undertones of this green and red paint very vividly.

I attempted adding some white to this to lighten, and then a tiny bit of black, but neither came close to what I was looking for. So I shifted gears, and began to be a bit more deliberate about the mixing. And because the result bordered on brown rather than grey, it appeared that a black pigment would have to be used after all.

My first success was the colour that would eventually be called Number Five (you can see it second last in Figure 15). The Rosco Scenic Paint ingredients were as follows:

1. White – 1/4 of the full amount. 2. Ultramarine Blue – 1/4 of the full amount. 3. Burnt Umber – 1/8 of the full amount. 4. Black – 1/8 of the full amount. The resulting cool grey matched well to my palette, and I decided that this would serve as the base coat for the entire set, including the floor. It would also be the base of half of the colours. Colour Six was white with Colour Five added, and Colour Four was Colour Five with

Burnt Umber added. With some further experimentation, and keeping within these colours for the most part, I completed the recipes for the full palette, as listed in Table 3. The entire set would be painted from the seven colours.

Table 3: Paint Recipes (Approximate)

Paint # Black Burnt Umber Ultramarine Blue Deep Red White Paint # 1 100% 2 12.5% 12.5% 12.5% 12.5% 25% 3 10% 30% 30% 30% 4 25% 5 – 75% 5 12.5% 12.5% 25% 50% 6 50% 5 – 50% 7 100%

With the paint palette complete, I was ready to begin the process of actually applying the paint to the set.

And Then I Got Hit By a Car

It was shortly after I had completed the colour palette and in the days leading up to the application of the paint that my partner Laurel Green and I were struck by a vehicle while walking home one evening. I bring this up only because it drastically altered how the paint application process was to begin.

My injuries were minimal in comparison to my partner’s. I received slight injury to my left knee, but she was incapacitated. It was crucial that I stay with her and assist in our mutual healing. This was the first time in my career where I put everything on hold – the phrase “it’s just a show” was told to me, and I was assured by everyone I spoke to that everything would be taken care of, and get done while I took the necessary time.

Despite all this, I was immediately worried about how the painting would proceed given the fact I was slotted to do it by myself with one helper whom I hadn’t explained the process to yet.

I was shown an enormous breadth of support and generosity by the staff and students of the University of Calgary during this difficult time. Everyone stepped up – from my advisor to my assistant – and this got done efficiently and on time. In a way, I wonder how things might have gone different had I not been injured, and if I would have found the same support and success. I believe that I would, although I don’t know whether or not I would have felt comfortable asking for it. I will not go as far as to say that this accident was a blessing in

disguise – it wasn’t even a little bit – but the circumstances played out in a way that truly contributed to the overall success of the process. I owe this to my team, and to my advanced planning.

I want to be very clear about this notion of advanced planning. I could never have predicted that this accident was to occur, and that I would be absent from the production for any amount of time. While advanced planning has always been important to me, I have often attributed this importance to time management. Working professionally, I am often forced to be designing more than one show at a time in order to make ends meet financially, and planning my design in advance is a critical part to the success of any show. But in this case, the need to plan and communicate my design has taken on a deeply intimate meaning for me given the situation that came up. Had I not been clear in my designs, rigorous in my drafting, and specific in my model building and paint elevations, I believe that the show’s final result would have been substantially different. My assistant, supervisor, and team of volunteers were able to pick up immediately where I left off, and at no point did work on the production halt. What could have been a disaster ended up being a remarkable success and a deeply moving learning experience for me. Moving forward in my career, I expect to not only continue with my advanced planning and communication skills, but continue to hone them.

Paint Application

The prospect of approaching the painting of my set was from the very beginning an enormously daunting thought. Even when I was first dreaming up the concept of the Razzle

Dazzle paint scheme – which had become the central image of the show – I was forced to consider if I should pare back in the design, and so sacrifice at least a portion of the visual image

due to the sheer amount of hours it would take to get the job done, or to design the show I wanted, and through caution to the wind and believe that I could complete the painting on time.

In my true fashion, I decided to design the show I wanted, come what may. But it was a real moment of doubt that passed over me in early January where a good portion of the set nearly ended up black.

Figure 16: Floor Paint Design, based on Dazzle Camouflage

A bit of context as to why this was such a pressing matter. I am not a scenic painter. My experience had at that point been limited to a single university scene painting class that I had taken in the fall of 2013, which came to only twelve three-hour sessions of practice. The responsibility of painting the entire set was left to me and whoever I could get to volunteer their time. This clearly worried me, as I did not feel at the time that I had the experience myself to even lead a team. All of this said, I did my absolute best to make it simple for myself, while not losing in the aesthetic department.

Once I was able to return to work after the accident, I came back to a fully painted floor.

In my absence and under the direction of my supervisor, this work had been completed. I met with my assistant, who had been critical in this process as well, and discussed what had been learned from this process. To get it done, the floor had been gridded out, then points marked out, and tape lines lain out. Then each colour, starting from lightest to darkest, had been applied. I asked that my assistant then take point on showing me how to best approach the rest of the set painting.

We began this to mixed success. After priming everything with the base coat (Paint

Colour #5) the process of gridding out, marking, and taping was arduous, especially the smaller sections of the proscenium arch. And time was of the essence, as we were hurtling towards the set install date, and once the arch was up, it would be extremely difficult to paint, and I worried that we would in fact have to rethink the complexity of the image.

One thing that I did learn from the less-than-successful gridding of the smaller pieces was that the complexity of the image was not only a challenge, but rather worked to our advantage as well. The tape lines created a perfectly straight lines, and it really didn’t matter at all how precise

we were. That sounds strange, I’ll elaborate. If I had a rough idea where the lines began and ended on the structure, I could hand draw them very quickly in by hand, then mark what colour number each section was. Once that was done, I could run the tape line from point to point, paint, and repeat. The taping would actually cancel out the rough, imprecise sketching of the pattern.

So rather than gridding and drawing on the lines, I used a data projector. We were able to throw the images I had already built on Photoshop for the model, expand them, and place them wherever they needed to be on the physical structure of the set.

Figure 17: Projections on Unfinished Paint

We were able to layout and then paint the entirety of the set in a fraction of the amount of time I had worried about it taking. It turned out to be incredibly easy. And as we progressed, we got better and faster at it. The whole process felt like an enormous paint-by-number project. In fact, that’s exactly what it became.

The periaktos appeared at first to be another problem. The complexity of the images was daunting, and it was suggested to me early on (before my discovery of using the projector) that we create stencils: one for each colour (other than the base) that could be cut, then lain upon a completed periaktoi, a have the paint rolled on. Allow the paint to dry, place the second stencil, repeat, and so on. One trade off, however, was that the images would have to be simplified somewhat, and the variety of the images scaled back so that the same stencil set could be used on each of the four units. Despite this, the technique appeared at the outset to be a terrific time and labour-saving idea, so I gave the go- ahead.

Figure 18: Periaktoi Images: Telegraph Poles, Trees, Oil Derricks

While I was away after the accident, the majority of these stencils were cut. I had sent the images (Figure 19) to the props master Julia Wasilewski, and she had been cutting them out of some leftover scraps to vinyl flooring. She had done a remarkable job; the images I had drawn were not simple. But I discovered once I had completed painting the rest of the set that these stencils were completely unusable. I’ll be clear though, not because of Wasilewski’s construction of them.

Figure 19: The Failed Vinyl Stencils

The complexity of the images caused the vinyl of the stencils to warp. They would not stay flat. We made on attempt to lay them out and roll on some paint, but it was a complete disaster. The image was unclear, paint got everywhere, and we had to hand paint the lines around the blotches of paint anyways, so it became very clear that the amount of time it was going to take was not available to us. Also, the wet paint on the vinyl did not dry as quickly as the paint on the wood, so it made an enormous mess of the test-periakoi, so much so that we had to paint over it. In short order, I threw the stencils away and opted to use the projector technique that we had used to such success with the rest of the set. Not only was I able to keep the variety of the

images I had wished for in the first place, we were able to get them done in a day, which would have been impossible to do with the stencils.

Figure 19: Re-painting the Periaktos With Projector

A stencil was made for one other portion of the set: the column base that was to be used for the proscenium and the periaktos. This particular design is one that I was most proud of, and it was the image that both Sutherland and I agreed was the most potent, relevant to our production, and Brechtian. Literally.

The image came to be called the Brecht Head. It was a famous photo of Bertolt Brecht that I had traced and re-drawn, then coloured to meet our greyscale scheme. This head was set

inside a globe being held up by Atlas. Having Brecht right on stage was for Sutherland the ultimate Brechtian image, philosophically speaking. And for me, it was that as well to be sure, but also something more. It was my own bit of self-referential satire, though making fun of ourselves and Sutherland’s desire to stage the play as Brecht would have in his time. Had it been

Brecht’s head alone, it wouldn’t have been nearly far enough. That I placed it in a globe upon the ever-suffering Atlas’ shoulders, it was my way of saying that we as theatre makers have a tendency to get carried away in technique, style, and what came before.

While I will never claim that we should ignore the foundational works of the theatrical cannon, and I fully recognize that anything we do or create is built upon the backs of greats like

Brecht, this image was a reminder that we should always ask the questions “why here, why now?” How is the work we are doing relevant to the world we are creating it in? What do I personally have to say through this work?

We have the opportunity to contextualize and re-contextualize the theatre we make, with grateful acknowledgement to the minds that came before us. That is the theatre I wish to make, and fight to do so in every production. This image, the Brecht Head, was my way of putting myself in the work, and of reconciling the feelings that I had much earlier in the process – those about not wishing to not deny the audience of an emotional entry point, the few points where

Sutherland and I had disagreed.

When I explained all of this to Sutherland. While he could have taken this as a direct dig at his research, he chose to see it in the way that I saw it. With great humour.

Unfortunately, the inclusion of this image at the base of the pillars was cut due to lack of time. It was replaced with a more banal, albeit functional, design (Fig.20).

Other than the setbacks discussed here, the set construction, painting and installation came together quite well.

Figure 20: The Brecht Head and Its Compromise

5.2 Lights

The execution of the lighting design went very well. The amount of cues grew from an initial 70 or so cues as mentioned in Chapter 3, to a total of 113 cues. This was to respond to a few shifts in the action as the staging was adapted to the performance venue, further isolating of the action, and subtle internal cues. This is a normal process, and not something I had need to

worry about. The majority of the cues I had planned on were all kept, and the advance work in the pre-cueing sessions paid off.

About those pre-cueing sessions: I received a total of six extra hours in cueing time ahead of the actors hitting the stage. This time came from my being able to complete the lighting focus ahead of schedule. I think that this was a direct result of having focused in the University Theatre for the production of Jebat earlier in the season. My goal was to have a first draft of all of the lighting cues in place before we got into technical rehearsals proper, so as not to waste our limited time building all the looks from scratch. It is much more effective to adapt the look of cues as we go than it is to build from nothing. I was able to achieve this goal in the additional cueing time I received.

Figure 21: The Set in Pink

A few things that I noticed: firstly, the pinks, reds and blues worked particularly well on the set, whereas yellows and greens did not. The outdoor scenes were lit in blue, and the white of the set really popped nicely. The reason for this I believe is because of the Ultra Marine Blue that was in so much of the greys. This paint was a major ingredient of Colour Number Five, which was the base coat for everything, and the basis of which many of the other greys were built from.

This seemed to reflect back in the light, and the set asserted itself vividly in the space. Also, the lighter greys and white in contrast to the black looked very good. My impulse about not using black in the paint mixes had been completely disproven, and I was glad of the learning that had been made during the painting process.

Figure 22: The Set in Red

The reds and pinks seemed to work so well likely because they are complimentary to the blue in the grey mixes. While the blue light was reflected back, the reds and pinks seemed to make the paint treatment vibrate; this was especially effective as the pinks were used in the interior of Widow Begbick’s canteen scenes when the energy needed to be very high, and reds were used especially at the end once Galy Gay’s transformation was complete and he was in the midst of a particularly horrific act of violence – the destruction of an entire mountain fortress. In this scene, the set seemed to seethe, and the composition of the complete scenography contributed vividly to the audience’s experience.

In the interior scenes of the Pagoda of the Yellow God and the scene of Galy Gay’s fake funeral and ultimate transformation, I used yellow and green respectively. I spent a lot of time tweaking them in our tech time, but in the end I was never really happy with them. They seemed muddy and undefined. The yellow and green light seemed to flatten the paint treatment, and in no way helped the khaki and army green colours of the costumes.

One final observation about the lighting is about isolation. I found that despite the relatively small focus areas – seventeen in all as mentioned – I had a hard time isolating the areas of the stage, and found that the scenes tended to start looking a lot alike. In part, I think that this was due to the staging, all of the scenes tended to use all of the space. Given that that there were twenty-two cast members, that was an inevitability. Had I considered this, I would have cut down the number of light areas, and used more texture, and direction to help differentiate the scenes, and maybe pushed the use of colour a bit further.

All in all, the lighting process went well, with only a few places where things could have been improved upon.

5.3 Properties

There were many, many props required for Man Equals Man. From small hand props like beer bottles and cucumbers, to larger pieces like a World War I era machine gun to a limp body rolled up in a carpet, we ran the gamut and pushed the props department to its limit. For a complete list of properties, please refer to the appendix of this document.

As discussed earlier, Sutherland was keen on approaching some of the properties from what he called a gestic angle: choosing objects that had were out of proportion and a noticeable step outside of a realistic world in order draw attention to themselves. For him, this was about the objects that represented money, and critical points along Galy Gay’s transformation. So props like the beer bottles and cigars, which were traded in return for Galy Gay’s early participation in the ruse, to the scissors, which were used to cut off the porter’s moustache and so show his complete willingness to complete the transformation.

Figure 23: Oversized Scissors

In the instance of the beer bottles and the scissors, as well as any money props (bag of cash, coins, cucumbers, etc.), they were made extremely oversized in comparison to the rest of the hand props.

Figure 24: Oversized Beer Bottles

The result was, well, entirely underwhelming. Given the focus we put on these items, the idea of gestic objects was completely lost, and in fact, I believe that they actually detracted from the play, especially in the case of the beer bottles, as they ended up looking very confusing.

I think there are three reasons for this. Firstly, the speed with which the props were taken on and off the stage. They were hardly ever given the emphasis in the staging as I think either

Sutherland or I imagined. Secondly, the extreme stylization of pretty much every other aspect of

the production: from costumes to set to the heightened performance, our production held so many other strange and visually striking elements that our gestic attempt got lost in the noise.

And lastly, because I didn’t push them far enough. The beer bottles looked like wine bottles, so when they were referred to as beer, it was confusing given what they looked like. If I had the opportunity to do it again, I would push them to the limit; make them twice the size they were and have them glow from within. This would in turn assist the actors’ performance and allow them to give these objects the gravity they deserved, create an obvious pattern in the out-of-place items, and then actually achieve what we were looking for. But as it was, I feel that none of the props transmitted any deeper message to anyone.

My final discussion point will be regarding my very first self-proscribed challenge: the war elephant Billy Hrumph.

As mentioned in Chapter 2, my very first impulse from my very first reading of the play was: if I can solve the elephant, I can solve the play.

As it turned out, that wasn’t 100% true. I’d say closer to 60% true: while the ramshackle approach to the on-stage building of the elephant prop did indeed inspire the way in which the set would be designed, due to how the process worked, I ended up designing the elephant long after the final designs had been submitted. So in a way, while the elephant challenge inspired the design of the set, in a way, the completed set design helped dictate how the elephant would have to be built.

The final prop actually didn’t deviate all that much from my original sketch. A WWI-era gas mask would be the head, to be articulated with two sticks – one for the head and one for the trunk. It’s ears would be bayonets adorned up with a torn up Union Jack flag. The body itself would hide two actors and be made up of netting and burlap sacks, with a broom for a tail. The piece needed to be built in three pieces: the head itself, the burlap sacks that hid the actors, and the net to go over top. The intention was still that it would be built quickly and entirely on stage in as short a time as possible, and come out of existing scenery that was present.

Figure 25: Original Elephant Sketch

It worked very well, and I daresay it was one of my most proud pieces of the production.

Strangely it came together very easily. I called the two actors that would be operating the prop in for a “fitting.” In less than thirty minutes, we built the body of it, tossing the sacks on them, and cutting the net down to ensure that they wouldn’t trip while moving. The head had been built by

properties master Julia Wasilewski based on the sketch I had provided, and it was in excellent shape.

The only tweaks made once the piece went into rehearsal was the manipulation stick on the trunk – it was made from a coat-hanger and ended up being a bit flimsy so we cut it – and a simplification of the burlap sacks the actors wore, which aided in their getting dressed into the piece, but in no way retracted from the look of it. It was as successful as any piece of the design could be, both conceptually and in execution.

Figure 26: Billy Hrumph Head (L) and Full Body (R)

CHAPTER 6: REFLECTION ON THE PROCESS

At the end of the process looking back, I sincerely feel that the show we created was a success. Despite the occasional difficulties, there was a constant sense of support and creativity from all of the people involved.

I had the opportunity to see the show in performance twice, once on opening night and once late in the second week. On opening, it was immediately clear to me that many of the choices I had made where paying off. Attempting to gauge the audience through their reaction was dead easy: the set and props occasionally receiving tangible reactions from the audience.

Four specific instances come to mind here: the pagoda reveal, “Billy Hrumph” (the Elephant puppet), the mountain reveal, and the periaktoi revolutions.

In the first case, I heard more than one murmur in the audience when the actor pulled up the flat. I would have taken this with a grain of salt had not more than one audience member approached me during intermission to ask about it, how it worked, and how it surprised them. In the second case, “Billy Hrumph,” the prop received quit a few laughs both nights I saw the show.

In the third case, that of the Mountain flat reveal, much like the pagoda reveal, I was able to hear audible audience reactions both times I saw the show in performance.

In the final case, that of the periaktoi revolutions, I heard no reaction from the audience, but it was the one element that was most often brought up to me by people who had seen the show (other than the Dazzle paint treatment), and always in a positive way. In one case however,

I was asked whether or not the images on the periaktos were projections. After explaining that no, in fact the images were painted, I was then asked how the images changed. To this I

answered that they rotated. The person in question then told me that they had not seen them move, many expressed disappointment at this, assuming that this was a moment that could have had immense Brechtian power insofar that it was yet another example of showing the mechanics of the theatre. This confused me, as I had made certain that the pieces where moved specifically and intentionally, despite the fact that they were never used in a way that I felt was satisfactory.

This comment reassured me that my disappointment was indeed warranted. I believe that in future productions, an element as interesting and dynamic as the periaktos could be used more effectively by not placing them upstage and out of the way. They tended to disappear, getting lost in the visual noise of the dazzle paint scheme. They could easily bear a greater scenographic weight by using them as the keystone of a design rather than as superfluous scenery.

The most valuable information I took from seeing the show in performance was at the beginning of my second viewing. The distance I had put between myself and the show was important, being able to see the show with fresher eyes, and to not obsess about the myriad details that were preventing a truly pragmatic view of the production as a whole. I must quote

(and by quote, in this instance I mean paraphrase) my teacher and friend Ian Prinsloo, with whom I took an advanced directing class in 2011. He told our class at one point that the rules of the play must be established within the first ten minutes of the show, and if we chose to then deviate from these rules, the audience would either become completely confused, unless the deviation from the rules was for a very important reason. When I think about the first ten minutes of our production of Man Equals Man, we set up the rules perfectly, and so allowed the audience to “buy” into how we were going to tell the story. We established the musicality of the show, the heightened characters, the mutability of the set, the multiple uses of the scenic elements (crates,

etc.), and the acknowledged one-foot-outside-the-fourth-wall. This was a ballet between all elements – the staging, the set design, the light design, and the costume / makeup design. One misstep, one team member who was not willing to play along, would have led to disaster. In this case, disaster was never on the horizon. It is in this spirit of collaboration that the mastery of working in theatre is: successful collaboration even over technique and skill can lay the foundation wonderful works of theatrical art.

The goals for my design were quite simple: to have a set that was grounded in simplicity in terms of its functionality, to devise a set that spoke symbolically while simultaneously not imposing itself upon the organizing principles of both playwright and director, and finally to work in harmony with the visions of my fellow collaborators. It was in the pursuit of my stated goals, and the artistry within them that I was able to find myself in the project. It is through collaborators that I judge the success of this project, as much as the quality of the work and my satisfaction with the art. This speaks so much to why I have chosen to work in the theatre, as opposed to a visual art field: it is an art of many people. The theatre I make will always be so, but in this notion is my most profound learning through this process.

As I’ve described, there were places in the design where I took risks, especially in the set and paint, and places where I was much more conservative in my choices. And while I have taken great pride in my collaborative efforts, the most important question I can take into future projects is this: how do I make space for myself within the collaborative environment? My personal aesthetic shone through in places here, but with my focus on keeping everyone happy, staying under budget, and setting up the production’s best chance of success for my collaborators, I have come away feeling slightly underwhelmed. Not disappointed exactly, but

certainly filled with a desire to take what I’ve learned and do better. The show was decent, the design certainly functional. Could I have done better? Yes, absolutely. Did I do my best given the various situations, from cost to car accidents to keeping people happy? Maybe. Maybe not.

To say that our production of Man Equals Man wasn’t a success would be an out and out lie. But to say that my designs were on their own a complete success, this would be just as false.

When approaching the theatre I make, I have often kept the phrase “a no is as good as a yes” close to my heart. I didn’t read this anywhere, but I heard it first when devising new plays with Ghost River Theatre and Downstage, two companies I’ve worked with extensively. What this phrase means to me is this: given a question or experiment or theatrical attempt, a “no” – or a failed result – provides us with the same information as a “yes” result: a path forward.

Man Equals Man had a lot of “yes” results. But it yielded many “no” results as well. The greatest “yes” was in the collaboration with my co-creators: with the technical staff, with

Sutherland as director, with the designers on the show, and with the students and University itself. I have the language to communicate my ideas clearly, to listen to ideas, and to process and respond to nearly any situation. The greatest “no” was in the art itself. I could have pushed further, especially in the storytelling of the scenography, the seeds of the design concept, and entirely throughout the lighting design. I could have asserted myself more, made space for my own artistic vision within the process.

A true collaborator doesn’t stay idle when it comes to their vision, to their art. With the mastery of theatre comes the responsibility to use one’s artistic vision and skills, and to never hold back. This is the greatest learning I have taken from my time at the University of Calgary,

and through working on Man Equals Man. I have the skill. I possess vision. Now it’s time to say yes.

ADDENDUM

In the wake of my oral defense, a few notes have come to light that I would like to shed some light on. The first if of critical importance.

I wrote early on in this document of my decision to stay in the moment, as it were. To draw inspiration from the collaboration between Sutherland and I rather than focus on the ideas that arose from our discussions and our circumstances. This was in spite, and in part a pushback, to Sutherand’s desire to – as I put it so often in this discussion – “Do Brecht.” On this point, I need to explain myself. To what I am referring is better described as Sutherland’s directorial vision, and my understanding of Brecht’s techniques as described by Sutherland in our conversations and his work with the actors. As he described them to me, here are some key points:

1. That the audience be always aware of the fact that they are watching a play. This was

achieved in various ways, including the actors breaking character from time to time

and referring to each other by their actual name, as well as breaking character to

argue over the pronunciation of certain words. For the scenography, this was achieved

in part with the transformability of objects, and the ever present proscenium arch with

the title of the play lit up brightly hanging over the entire stage.

2. The gestic props: the oversized beer bottles, scissors and cucumbers. Each of these, as

well as others, that point to the satire and the images of currency. This, as mentioned,

was somewhat lost in the noise of the production.

3. Sutherland’s desire that the audience be completely divorced from an emotional

reception of the play by way of the above two points. This was, as he described, the

purest “Brechtian” methodology he was striving for. He felt that through this, the

audience would be much more receptive to the messaging and satire within the play

as they would not be preoccupied with an emotional journey that comes with

watching a play.

It was on this third point that Sutherland and I completely disagreed. I feel that an

audience is much more liable to receive a message when that message is tied up within the

story and an emotional journey. It was also on this third point that Sutherland and I began our

discussions very early on, and which I know most certainly discouraged me from a deeper

investigation of the true theatre of Bertolt Brecht, and the decision to try and base the entire

design upon the impulses and discussions between Sutherland and I.

I describe this decision as perplexing in Chapter 1, but the fact of the matter is that this was completely irresponsible. Collaboration does not preclude in any way doing my own research and planning, and furthermore, willful ignorance – under no circumstances – is able to contribute to an artistic process.

I conclude this portion by saying that while my methods here were dubious, I do stand by the intention. Choosing to ignore the body of the research was a worthy experiment that led to a good design, but ultimately, I would never attempt this again.

My second addendum here is to address a misunderstanding. I describe in Chapter 3 my decision to use “saturated” colours for the lighting gels. I make the claim that saturated colours can affect a viewer on an emotional level, and so it follows then that I have asserted that muted colours then do not. This was not my intention. Colour of any kind is a means to communicate

emotion, be they saturated, muted, and everything in between. The spectrum I was thinking of in this discussion was rather between a saturated colour, and white. White being to our eye an absence of colour (although technically it is in fact the entire colour spectrum, so in essence, all the colours rather than none). The misunderstanding here negates the power of subtle colouring on stage, something for which I believe can be very effective.

I wanted to mention here as well the machine gun that was built for the four soldiers.

Unlike many of the other bits of scenery throughout, this piece was grounded in realism. When assembled, this machine gun was a fierce sight to behold. I chose this route rather than to have it built similar to “Billy Hrumph” the war elephant, that is a bit theatrical and with a ramshackle appearance. The reason was this: this gun was seen twice in the play: once at the beginning when the four soldiers vandalize the Pagoda of the Yellow God, and once at the very end when Galy

Gay singlehandedly destroys an entire mountain fortress with only a few shots. I felt that these two moments were critical to our connection with the play: we needed a sense of danger here.

Especially how the final moment was played, with all its weight and tragedy. If the gun itself had been as much a part of everything else, I feel that these moments wouldn’t have held the weight they deserved. In retrospect, I was connecting with Sutherand’s desire for “gestic” imagery here, but instead of exaggerating it to make a statement, it stood apart due to its realistic nature, and so made one of the most poignant statements of all.

Finally, I would like to address here is the notion of satire. I mention early on that satire was to be a critical organizing principle for the entire production, at which point, this notion appears to fall away from the discussion. I wanted to touch briefly again on the great success I felt this satire to have been achieved within the scenography. Firstly, the proscenium arch and

lighted play title hanging above. This was satirical of theatre in a way; by having these so present and dominating the image, they poked a bit of fun at the form in which we were working.

Secondly, the success of “Billy Hrumph” was entirely satirical. By drawing on materials that should have been well respected by an honourable military person (a gas mask, camouflage netting, and their country’s flag), and seeing how these items were used so foolishly in order to dodge a well-deserved punishment, this attempted to skewer the military institution itself. While an institution may take itself so seriously and call itself honourable, at the end of the day it is simply the sum of its parts, and and in this play those parts are the least honourable individuals that ever lived. This was all in addition to the oil derrick representing the architecture of the

Pagoda of the Yellow God, a temple we discover in the play is dedicated to making money at any cost.

I am grateful for the opportunity to add a few words that further flush out my work, and feel that the points in this addendum provide further context into the final design that was our

Man Equals Man.

Bibliography

Brecht, Bertolt. Man Equals Man and the Elephant Calf. New York: Arcade Pub., 2000. Print. Roman Mars. Razzle Dazzle. Radiotopia, 2012. Podcast. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Middlesex, EN: Penguin Books, 1972. Print. "Design Envy · 99% Invisible: Roman Mars." Design Envy · 99% Invisible: Roman Mars. Web. 20 May 2015. Dix, Otto. Skat Players (Die Skatspieler). Digital image. Utopia/Dystopia. N.p., 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 15 Sept. 2014. . HMS Kildangan (1918). Digital image. Dazzle Ships. The Public Domain Review, n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2014. . Forbes, Peter. Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2009. Print. Hruska, Libby, ed. German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Print. Mars, Roman. "About 99% Invisible. “Web. . "Theater of War." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2016. Newark, Tim. Camouflage. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print. Peters, Olaf, ed. Otto Dix. Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2010. Print. Scott-Samuel, N. E., et al. "Dazzle Camouflage Affects Speed Perception." PLoS ONE 6.6 (2011) Print. "That old razzle dazzle; Military camouflage." The Economist 11 June 2011: 83(US). Academic OneFile. Web. 15 Sep. 2014. Willett, John. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London: University Paperbacks, 1959. Print. "Theater of War." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 9 Mar. 2016. Shakespeare, William. Henry V. Histories Volume 2. Ed. Sylvan Barnet Smith. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Everyman’s Library, 1994. 365-366. Print.

Appendix 1: Final Properties List

Appendix 2: Final Lighting Plot