You’ll notice I didn’t have a post yesterday. I flew down to Winston-Salem to attend the 2009 SETC Theatre Symposium. This year, the topic is props, which is very apropos for this blog.
It was a long but fruitful day. I presented my paper. Bland Wade, the props director at North Carolina School of the Arts (NCSA) gave a tour of their props shop and a speech on what a properties director does.
I forgot my USB cable, so I cannot get the pictures off my camera at the moment. I’ll have a more in-depth summary of this weekend when I get back to New York. Today, in addition to more papers, we have a speech by Andrew Sofer, author of The Stage Life of Props.
It’s all very fascinating stuff, and I can’t wait to write it all up for this blog.
TheatreFace is a new social networking site for theatre people. It was set up by the publishers of Stage Directions Magazine, so it’s got some oomph behind it. I joined a few months ago and it’s been growing at a phenomenal rate.
Like Facebook, you can add photos and share links and blogs. You can also talk in forums and join groups based on your interests. It has some more theatre-specific features too, such as tracking conversations on Twitter dealing with theatre. Recently, they announced that they will be producing some exclusive content for members, starting with a backstage look at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
I’ve been lurking around ControlBooth for awhile now. Though it’s mostly geared toward the lighting and sound kind of theatre technician, you can find some useful information for scenery or even props.
I just discovered the site has a whole section called “Collaborative Articles“. This is a collection of articles written, surprise, collaboratively. It’s organized alphabetically, and there is some useful information there.
Jean Burch pointed out various USITT resources on her blog. One site she mentioned was their Tech Source Guide. It has a whole number of recipes and tutorials for a range of theatrical problems, including some that will be of interest to the props person.
Next Friday, I’m flying to North Carolina to take place in the SETC Theatre Symposium. This year’s theme is “The Prop’s the Thing: Stage Properties Reconsidered”; how can I not participate? I’m hoping to bring back all sorts of interesting and useful information for this blog. Also, since I’ll be busy getting ready for this, my postings for next week will probably be shorter than usual.
My paper is called, “Devising a Mental Process for Approaching a Prop.” It’s part of a larger goal of writing a book about props dealing with the choices we need to make before building a prop. Essentially, rather than dealing with specific techniques like carpentry or upholstery, my book will be about how you decide whether you will use carpentry or not on a specific prop.
