ChurchProduction.com: Versatile stage design is more important to churches than ever before. Contemporary churches change set designs every few weeks. Portable churches require simple, lightweight designs. Many churches offer two different style worship services with a small window of time in between to transition all elements, including the look and feel of the stage. Depending on your situation, the versatility of the stage design may be just as important as the look and feel of it.
2 comments:
There are a couple of things I find interesting about this article. 1. I would not think that designing Church stages would be quite this complex given that most of the time when you see a service, it is stationary/appears to be a unit set. 2. This is incredibly applicable for summer stock and smaller theatre companies as a way to look toward decreasing the mount of time it takes to turn over sets. Instead of having a different set for every show or a single unit set that each show has to conform to, can you make the set more versatile? Can platforms be put into place by simply rolling them there and locking them down? Can the scenic and lighting designer work together to make the whole process more ‘volunteer-friendly’ as true of the in many small theatres or community theatres? 3. This is an interesting way to set up theatres in unconventional spaces. For instance, could an unconventional stage be built in a warehouse to allow for what seems like an unlimited number of configurations while still decreasing the amount of load-in and strike time required to install a show?
Personally, when I think of "versatile stage design", I don't think of churches. However, this article presents a lot of interesting ideas that definitely require versatile and unique design. One aspect of church stages that I never considered is the fact that the "run crew" is completely made up of volunteers! I'm sure that many churches have volunteers who have some technical theatre background, but they aren't technicians. It's interesting that churches and theatre have an intersection point at all, but it's even more interesting to consider the techniques that churches use to put on services in unconventional spaces. I wonder how the lighting/scenic/costume(?) designers play a role in these sorts of theatrical churches, and how they change their designs to fit the needs of a church service. All in all, after reading this article I feel like I have more of a grasp on how unconventional spaces are designed and also the extent of theatrics used in modern church services.
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