USITT Sightlines: In 2008, I was the set designer for a production of Into the Woods. It was produced on our main stage, a 51-foot proscenium. It was a big set, done in a fairly traditional way for that show. A local high school was producing the same play a few months after us. We were able to give them a lot of scenery that we would otherwise have thrown away. It was nice to see so much scenery get used a second time.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
A New Way to Go Green
USITT Sightlines: In 2008, I was the set designer for a production of Into the Woods. It was produced on our main stage, a 51-foot proscenium. It was a big set, done in a fairly traditional way for that show. A local high school was producing the same play a few months after us. We were able to give them a lot of scenery that we would otherwise have thrown away. It was nice to see so much scenery get used a second time.
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I like this idea but the website in its current state is kind of unnerving. There's only 11 posts for scenery in the whole country. (most of them are props/furniture) The discussion forum that is set up has organized threads for various topics but there has only been a handful of threads started. It's very clear that the creator of this site expects it to be big and has designed the site to accomadate it. His optimism is very inspiring yet my pessimism says it's hopeless and I'm looking at something that will never take off.
But I'm excited it's happening and I really want it to take off. Some of my earliest jobs in the theater were working on crews striking sets at regional theaters. It broke my heart to see it all go in the garbage. I like this idea but I'm wondering if there's a way to solve the problem before it gets there.
If the problem he is trying to solve is that Scenery isn't green, I wonder if he's looking at it at the right point along the calendar. For example, saving the scenery or giving it away doesn't make the scenery more sustainable, it just hands off that piece of scenery to another theater. It's may be "more green" when that high school gets a hold of it (they've saved energy, time, money and raw materials by accepting the used scenery) but the scenery itself still exists. A cynical aside for a moment: the most sustainable scenery is scenery that doesn't exist. You've exhausted zero resources in your creation of nothing. Are there material choices? Design choices? that affect the greening of the scenery? His hope for the website touches on that, perhaps designers will design will free scenery in mind. But that's not a sustainability issue, it's a design issue. So the design process needs to be greener, that may contribute to more sustainable sets.
I like his thinking, I think it's a good idea but people have to be ready for the change. That means the demand for recycled scenery has to increase. If that doesn't happen the supply will continue to increase perhaps detrimentally to participating theater companies. It's great to mark a whole bunch of flats and platforms at strike with a GreenList tag hoping someone takes it. But if no one does then you have to address your storage problems. Sure you could post things in advance but you're still posting to the GreenList with the assumption that the demand is there. This website is a good way to address the demand for greener scenery but I think first that demand needs to be created. I don't think this website will do it, but it helps that there's a platform for it manifest itself, hopefully, when it does.
Matt makes a lot of really good points, and I know it is something he is particularly interested in. My initial thoughts on this article is that it is something that we should try to do. I don't think we have someone in a position to take over the job of putting our scenery up and trying to get it to another theatre, but I feel like the PM or their assistant should do it. The other issue with instituting the process of using the site and giving away our scenery is that our scenery is not really designed to be multi-functional. Which isn't really a problem for our institution, its just the way we do things. We usually design sets that are very original and specific to our production here, which other production companies may not be keen on. This kind of site is probably strongest for stock sets that do shows in a conventional way, which isn't something we do here really at all.
This is great to hear that someone is looking at how scenery is used and make it easy. I always felt bad when a set was trashed and are not even recalled in any way rotting away. And the life span of a set is usually less than a few months and then it goes in the trash. I think that there needs to be a better way of communicating what you have and I feel that they have their hand on this. But I feel that this should not just be sets, they should have technology that people are going to get rid of and someone could use even though they have no use for it now since they got the new thing that does all of that plus a ton of other things. I am anxious to hear where this is going.
I love this concept of making a set 'repurposed' if you will. I agree with Robert about how I always get upset when having to tear down a set that has been used for three performances and up for maybe a month. You put so much work into this beautiful work of art and then have to tear it down. This idea of sharing and re-using set pieces from other shows makes me so happy to think that maybe not everything has to be thrown away after barely being handled. I hope that more people hear about this and want to get involved as it continually grows.
This is great news. I love the fact that someone finally created a network to share these resources. Time and time again, theaters have to make tough decisions purely because there just isn't enough room to store all the things made, bought, or adapted. There is a tendency, design-wise, to take materials and processes from other industries and warp them into things we can use to "build theater" more efficiently. I'm a little skeptical of how much CAN be shared, especially when it come to scenery and set. Those elements were made though a creative process specific to that particular production- perhaps another school is doing the same play two weeks after our run, but would they still want elements so unique to our production? Wouldn't there be a lost opportunity for the other school to create and be innovative, if they are using hand-me-down pieces? Though I like the idea of this network, I think it will be limited to the most generic of materials.
Uh, I agree with everything Matt said.
My first instincts are very on par with his: Yeah, Hippie Theatre!!!
But the Devil is Always in the Details and there-in lies what sets off Rohner's pessimism and my own. When I was a TD in Philly, I was amazed at how insular a lot of regional theatre companies were. There was a large, unspoken sense of Us vs Them between companies, which prevented a lot of sharing and co-support, which I never understood. Some of that, I believe, stemmed from a sense of "They're taking patrons away from us," which is a very closed-minded and xenophobic attitude. Even to the point where two companies producing the SAME SHOW had a chance to share resources, there was a jerk-reaction that meant one company couldn't 'make it' on their own.
For even the surface of what Kizer is proposing and hoping to achieve to work, that outlook has to change for the better. IF theatre is aimed at a sense of community, then it's logical for us to WORK as a community. But without a demand for that, it won't happen.
And, like Matt said, if there isn't a demand for "greener" design in scenery [which, I suspect, the concept of which tends to cause the same knee-jerk reaction of "That means we can't do it bigger/better than someone else."] then the ideas presented by Kizer will never take off.
It seems that the general idea here is that, while this is a great plan in making the process of creating theater scenery a greener one, that may in fact prevent us from the creative process that theater is meant to inspire. I would have to agree with this, and feel that while the idea is nice, it will do very little to actually make this a greener process. I feel that the issue of designer's rights will come into play, and perhaps that "recycling" sets to high schools will be the only hassle-free way of accomplishing this goal. That said, I do think this is a noble cause, and hope that it inspires other theaters to do as much as they feasibly can for the environment.
The concept here is really great (and one we read about every six months.) I certainly wish them luck in improving reuse in theatre, but I still don't see the execution as clear. I don't see a way that the custom-build-for-one-use paradigm is ever going to lead to a substantial amount of recycling. If folks start building things for reuse, there might be a lot more interchangeability, but that drives up the original cost which I think might be prohibitive to most folks. Transport and storage are also substantial costs here. I think a better solution might be fore theaters in a locality to agree to join together on a shared stock of at least elemental pieces. Even if they shared platforms and flats, that could be a help, but really there are many more things which might be good to share.
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