John Ezell, Friday, January 27, 2006

Student Union, Room 207, University of Minnesota Moorehead

Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival

Region 5 Festival

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I thought I’d talk about some advise for young designers, as a result of my own experience. My own experience in the professional theatre and also in training programs and also say something about the interfacing the computer as the tool . I think this was Arden’s idea as a matter of fact, that this could be a topic. The computer as a tool and how is relates to the process, the artistic process of creating stage designs, creating art on stage.

Let me begin by, if you don’t mind, a personal reminiscence about my own background from earliest memory as a child. I can remember crayons more than I can remember spoons in terms of feeding myself and I was for whatever reason drawn from a very early age to art, in term of painting, finger painting, and tempera painting, and crayons, I loved the 24 colors of the crayon box as a matter of fact. Somewhat later I think I was probably 12 years old my Mother bought me a ticket to see a matinee of a National touring Company of “As You Like It” , designed by a very famous scene designer of the time

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Roger Furst, staring Katherine Hepburn in the production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”. And that Saturday afternoon, as I sat in the last row of the second balcony of the theatre in down town St. Louis I watched the winter scene, oh that stage glittering, …white and marvelous strange animals, deer and so on, I watched this winter dissolve before our eyes into the forest of Arden in spring. Flowered and green leaves dappled in behind, what I learned later, was a shark tooth scrim. As that winter scene dissolved to spring Katherine, as Roselyn, sitting on a rock, in the forest of Arden. As I said to myself at that moment, I was stunned. As I said to myself at that moment I want to do that!!!! That was my first scrim experience. Because, I really know nothing about stagecraft at that point but, for the rest of my career, and after how many years my training, 40 to 45 years, I have been, ….I’ll share with you a little private, self knowledge, I’ve been trying

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to recreate that moment on stage.

Not exactly the same way of course, because I don’t have access to Kathryn Hepburn, and the other components of that were relevant to the performance. But the kind of experience that I had, that electrified me, as a matter of fact, that inspired me is what I continued to try to do. And I didn’t realize it at the time, the experience that day was an esthetic emotion, it was like a religious experience, as a matter of fact. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. My emotions seemed so conflicted. I think this happens to young people, that they experience a moment on the stage, as they observe, and they want to feed upon. Aesthetic emotion is what inspires people. If you don’t have access to a theatre, or a first class theatre performance, you can experience this emotion in different ways. When you go to Athens, Greece, you climb up the rocks at the base of the Acropolis, and when you come up over the bridge, when you see, especially for the first time, there in front of you the Parthenon, you won’t know whether to laugh or cry. You

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will feel like your having an emotional experience. If you are in a museum in Cairo, and you approach in a dark gallery, a case with a flittering death mask of the fourteen year old King Tutankhamen, in gold with a crown, with a strange half smile on his face, you can stand nose to nose, to that piece of sculpture. And you give yourself over to that esthetic experience, esthetic emotion. There are many other examples of the museums around the country, it can happen in a concert hall, and it certainly happens in a theatre. I would say one thing we would want to do for ourselves is enrich our own experience to the point where we avail ourselves to as much as possible, for our esthetic emotion.

I think for, my advice for young designers, people who want to have careers, in stage design, as undergraduates, in the undergraduates years, and this is based on heresy, but I am going to say it anyway, don’t spend too much time in your school years because there are other things that you need to do, and you need to do those things now while you are an undergraduate, it is the best time to do it. It is never to late. So, there is

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a point at which you can have built any number of flats in our scene shop, and you can become very good at that, and that is a good thing to do but, there is a point of diminshing returns with the hands on work. There are other things you are going to have to do at the same time, that you want to do. You are going to have to give up and develop an equation of how you are using your time, your precious time, as a student, one thing I would say to do is to be sure you are getting courses in comparable literature if you are going to work in American theatre you want to be sure you actually had courses with a teacher where the teacher and other students in the class room read and discuss great works of literature that are in fact imbedded in American Theatre. In a survey course in comp literature of Homer’s “Iliad and the Shakespeare’s “King Lear” T. S.

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Elliot’s “Wasteland” James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”. A designer needs to have read these Masterpieces of Literature because not only for the altruistic reasons but it is good for you, like a sponge maybe, like broccoli, but these works, these kind of Mythic works, forms of literature are embedded in American Theatre. You can’t fully understand the playwright, the plays of Eugene O’Neal, unless you know something about the Odyssey and some things about Sophocles. It’s really important that you have that kind of literary foundation besides we know historically in American design a relative short history of American Design that the first designers for generations in American Stage Design Robert Edmond Jones 1920’s elevated American stage design from the level of a craft to the level of an art. Because the level of the art was highly illiterate ….?.....you know so did the next several generations of designer so you want to do everything you can to reinforce your literacy and your command. You are going to have to do other things besides this. I was going to a dinner party recently sitting at a table of three with famous Broadway directors and you would know and recognize each of them. As I was listening

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to their conversations, they were talking about young designers and all of them said without any prompting from me, all of them observed the greatest impediment they experienced working with young designers, that want to work in this profession, is that they couldn’t draw. They couldn’t draw. I think the issue of drawing is potentially the most bewildering and perhaps frightening aspect of perusing a career in design because many people, because they haven’t done it, feel like perhaps they can’t. I only know one famous stage designer in history that didn’t draw very well and that is Joseph Svobada. That surprised me because he was a genius. He had other ways to evolve a set. I would say that for a young designer with the help of your faculty mentors within your theatre department to help you cross sometime, a pretty daunting disciplinary lines to get into art programs, art courses, particularly drawing and painting that would be a tremendous benefit. In my own program at the graduate level because we recognize this challenge for

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young people, because it takes a lot of time, you have to do drawings like ballet bar. For famous ballet dancers every morning they are at the bar, they are at the bar at rehearsal studios no matter what they preformed at Covent Garden, on the main stage starred in Swan Lake the night before, they are still at the bar the next morning for two to three hours. It’s analogous to a designer, drawing, drawing, drawing is the gist of design, there are some examples here for instance, some life drawing, (shown examples of life drawing). Free hand drawing becomes more and more accomplished; with practice you can do it. If you become more and more accomplished in drawing it’s going to give you a kind of freedom and flexibility of developing your design ideas and communicating those ideas. I put a big emphasis on drawing on art. Are you ok with that? How many of you had a life drawing class? Figures that take their clothes off and stand in front of you. Don’t stop…..some of you have had more and are quite good at it but keep at it because it is like your ballet bar……we have to keep at it.

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The thing about computers, I thought ten years ago that I wouldn’t have to bother about computers. I knew they were out there, I saw my nephews and grand nephews playing games. I thought, I would probably return and move to Pamlico, someplace. I always had a dream to open a repertory company in Maui, Hawaii and I was going to call it the Maui Repertory Company and I’d bring a group of very fun people together for the Maui Rep. and we would talk about plays but we would never produce one. Well I didn’t make it. I didn’t make it to Maui and also I didn’t make it to the last chapter without becoming involved with the computer. Historically the American scene design community, professional community has been notoriously slack in embracing a computer because ten years ago there was actual and still remnants of it today. There are some very articulate famous stage designers working in America and teaching in America who don’t like computers. They are bias against them. The thinking people trained in a

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more traditional art school situation dubious about the computer. Student comment, “The computer is so limiting, a pencil can communicate anything, it comes right out of your head, with the computer, your using images and programs that limit your style.”

John Ezell, “I think you’re on to something there. The fear was that the computer would indict between the designers sensibility, and the result on the stage. So the result would take on an appearance that was mechanical, mechanistic, impersonal, not nuisanced, not phrased in the same way as these free hand drawings are done. And that it would diminish the quality of work from the stage actually, rather than facilitate it. It seems to me facility is the key, because my receipt for you would be a combination, assuming you were going to get your (comp left). And some experience in the field because we can’t deprive you of that. And that’s where you want to be after all. You’re going to have to

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continue that. My idea of how to prepare, would be to do both, make sure you are getting as much as you can in both categories of freehand drawing and computer skills. Think of the computer, not as a crutch, to fall back upon but as a tool. Its senseless, its impossible, to can not ignore the computer today. No matter how classical of your training maybe, you can’t be both, one thing in this profession, in this country you have to communicate long distance, I’m never in the same place where the directors are, at the same time. I’m never there face to face, they maybe occasionally once we get in first rehearsal and later. We are communicating constantly by e-mail, we can’t operate without that! We get daily notes, rehearsal notes from another city, as a matter of fact, you read all thoughts everyday, you see what’s happening in rehearsal, so you have to have e-mail. One thing I learned to work with Spencer in our studio, and he’s very good at it, he, I can work through him, because he is so much more skilled in the application I think that, Spencer, did you have video games as a kid? Many of the students today take the computer as second nature. For me it was daunting, I probably felt about the computer the way maybe computers when they started to arrive, What I started to do was to learn what I needed to know from one day to the next. So I had no over arching concept of what computer-ism is about and learned what all the possibilities are, what all the windows of opportunity, all that you can do. over it. The way I approached the computer, was to learn, I didn’t read any books about computers, you know such books, as computers for idiots, or any of the manuals that came with the computers when they started to arrive. What I started to do was to learn what I needed to know from one day to the next. So I had no over arching concept of what computer-ism is about and learned what all the possibilities are, what all the windows of opportunity, all that you can do. Just learn first things first what you need to do. You can learn how to do that or you can connect with someone like Spencer, somebody who already knows.

If you look around the room, this is a rendering that was done for the New York Shakespeare Festival, in the public theatre, produced by Joseph Papp, who founded the

New York Shakespeare Festival and it was for a production of Shakespeare’s Loves Labors Lost, and it was a part of the, what Papp called, the Shakespeare Marathon, he

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produced about 33 plays in a matter of years, four or five years, I designed two of them. One of them was outdoors, which had virtually no trees for the set and the other one which was in one of the interior theatres we had to produce trees.

Loves Labor Lost, a traditional sketch use gush and watercolor. It was the kind of thing that when I was your age, that we were trained to do. Because this was the way we did the design process in those days. And now, many years later our way of working with stage directors has advanced, we are more process oriented, not product oriented as we used to be. Its kind of ironic, we now do this kind of rendering at the end of the process rather than at the beginning of it. And mainly because of public relations, to put a picture of the set in the program, into the program, a pretty rendering, in his office, or the lobby of the theatre. I think all these renderings are done in traditional ways.

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Show curtain for musical….Christmas balls as balloons

Galileo’s, a computer rendering…

These are all painters elevations, after we had conceived the set, conceived the scenery, costumes, lighting, after the drafting, had been done, then we would provide the theatre with the specifications to be painted. There detailed and accurate and some of these, half the work done up here has been done on the computer. And half has been done by hand.

What we discovered, at least I discovered, it was a revelation to me, was that the computer, the way computers work, the way they render, they paint. The computer understands exactly the same principles of art, and design that Renaissance Artists understood. And such things as tonal qualities, for instance, tonal factors in design, hue, intensity, value, what we call for years in design a wet wash. (That was always the excuse that a designer wouldn’t come to the telephone to talk to a production manager, or somebody who wanted to talk about the budget overage on a production, or even talk to a director, the excuse was always given, he [designer] can not come to the telephone because he’s in the middle of a wet wash). We can’t do that so much because we do these washes on the computer. Because the computer will just wait for you, of course.

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But what was a revelation to me; the computer knows what we know. Its like the computer has a major of art history and in all kinds of studio courses. Now, the language may differ, because we would say wash, or graded wash, and the computer would say ‘gradient.’ So we could learn that language very easily. Then of course in various programs, you have all kinds of filters. You can actually take a photograph, scan a color photo, a black and white one can be colored on the computer. Then you could apply a filter. One that I love is called daub. I love to daub anyway as a painter, but you can make a photograph of the street out here look like it was painted by Monet, by putting it through a screen or a filter. There are many more, I wouldn’t know what to call them. I still haven’t had the opportunity to use them all.

To give you some practical advice about painter’s elevations as you see here, make your painters elevations in one-inch scale. You may work in 1/8 inch scale and then move up to ¼ inch scale. When you do drafting you do them in ½ inch scale and then

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Details in one-inch scale. So any advice would be always do painters elevations in one-inch scale. That is the best scale for scenic artists to interpret the kind of detail in the style. So I often see painter’s elevations from young people that are too small, just too small to transpose. So keep it in one-inch scale. The other word of advice I’d have, don’t give too much information on a single sheet of drafting. Because in a big scene shop, once you reach that level, other people really skillful scenic artists and painters, painting your scenery, more than one person doing it. If you get too much info on one plate, then everyone has to look at the same plate, rather than passing them around, who’s going to paint which? The thing about backdrops, because they are very large, because you don’t want to give your elevations to large, because they are difficult to deal with. Backdrops we do in half-inch scale.

A footnote: we saw some brown painted furniture and brown rendered trees in the exhibited designs. I would avoid brown, in your thinking, because if you look out there, you say trees are brown, barns are brown, wooden floors are brown, timber is brown, but

brown isn’t really anything, brown doesn’t actually exist. In an artist pallet brown is always something else, sometimes we call them earth colors, but brown is red, brown is sometimes blue, sometimes violet.

So I thought if you were polishing up some things, I’d take this opportunity to urge you to avoid the brown and just think of your doing a wood grain and if it’s the right tonality, the right emotion, effect for a production, then you can give it some color, it can still be very subdued and stale. This is an example for a painter’s elevation that has been done both by hand and, a kind of spatter technique in this part of the stone and by the computer in the wallpaper. You can also work back and forth on these things. Here’s a backdrop for the Mystery of Edwin Drood, the musical, this is the young ladies finishing school what this scene is supposed to be. This is silk that was scanned in the computer.

If your doing elements in a set that are particularly graphic, the computer is a God send! This is just a section of a back wall for a set, a play by Edward Albee, The Goat. It’s a home of a famous architect and this was the back wall, just the back wall section of shelving units. All these images are the awards he has won, all the prints; computer does all of these images. The gradient background was also done by computer, you can do wall paper. The computer is also a very useful tool in research. The best-case scenario is to do your research on location as we did for a production of Blood Wedding. We traveled to Spain for two weeks. Best research strategy as possible, went to Spain for two weeks. We went to the actual location. One isn’t always able to do that so the next best thing is to go to a library and find out everything you need to know about Spain. Now you can go onto the computer to the web sites and get a lot of that. Google, I’m a big fan of Google.

I still think drawing is important. I don’t want you to just go out of this room today thinking about computers. Because drawing is the gist of design and it still is!

If you sit face to face with a stage director, a phenomenon that happens a stage director, if you set face to face with a stage director, the designer in a SITUATION LIKE THAT SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE A PENCIL IN THEIR HAND.

Whether your in a restaurant, writing on a table cloth, sitting next to each other on an airplane with a napkin or with a note pad with your first several discussions with a stage director, if you as the designer, a pencil in your hand, take note, you actually loosen the directors tongue. The pencil that you’re holding actually loosens the director’s ability to think and verbalize about ideas for the production. I worked with a stage director Gerald Freeman, who’s at the New York Shakespeare Festival, who talks a lot with his hands. I found that he actually, what he’s doing, when he talks a set or a moment in the play, he’s actually drawing, give him a flash light in a time laps and tape this, you’ll find he’s actually drawing.

The subject of directors, which I was talking to Matt Rinert this morning. Just be aware that stage directors are the only people in the theatre that make a difference in the

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designers careers. For the designers its all about the directors and there’s several reasons for this. Directors are invariably asked who they want to work with. They really don’t want people they don’t know. Everybody in the theatre makes lip service to youth as a commodity. Youth and new ideas, fresh blood. But no LORT theatre wants to trust a young person. That’s the threshold you have to find yourself over. But once you have worked successfully with a director, the director has come to think of you as a golden retriever. As a person guarding their flank, who enhances their work on the stage, then you’re in.

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[http://cas.umkc.edu/theatre/Inchead.htm]

UMKC’s program in scene design – "the art school of the theatre" – treats dramatic ideas and techniques of drawing and painting with equal emphasis. The aim is to enable each student to increase their capabilities and resources for design and to develop responsibility for the images produced. The program shows cognizance of the high level of skill and individual virtuosity demanded for employment and survival in major theatre centers. The supposition is that students who pass through the program are able to function competitively in the professional theatre.

The design program is focused on individualized instruction. Unlike other programs, this one emphasizes the interaction between individual students and professional stage directors. The young designer is offered the opportunity to work in a wide range of styles and approaches under the guidance of practicing, professional artists. Housed in the Missouri Repertory Theatre’s shops and studios, the learning environment strives to be adequate to the experiences a student will have as they grow to maturity as artists and designers.

The program has these major components:

Scenography – organized around a substantial body of theory relating to American theatrical forms and directed to the development of expressive rendering techniques through systematic practice of drawing and painting;

History, Dramatic Literature, and Text Analysis – specifically directed toward research into the distinctive character of American playwriting and design, their European and Asian antecedents, and professional ethics;

Professional practice – students design productions under the supervision of an impressive roster of professional stage directors and artists. The Missouri Repertory Theatre and the University theatre provide well-equipped laboratories and stage spaces in which students test, practice, and perfect processes learned in the classroom. Design assignments are systematically graduated in scale and complexity, consistent with the student’s increased command of the theatrical medium.

Charrettes – periodically conducted over a concentrated period bringing renowned masters of unique vision such as Fiona Shaw, Santo Loquasto, Barry Kyle, and Ralph Koltai into the classroom. Charrettes enhance the aura of the program with infusions of glamour, excitement, and creative challenge.

Charrettes

Recent artists who have come to campus for intensive workshops we call "Charrettes," include: Ralph Koltai ("dean" of European scene designers); Mary Zimmerman (Tony Award-winning director); Santo Loquasto (Academy Award nominee in costume and art direction); Fiona Shaw (internationally acclaimed film and stage star); Ian McNeil (Tony-nominated and Olivier Award-winning designer); Eldon Elder (Broadway designer); and Barry Kyle (Award-winning Associate Director of The Royal Shakespeare Company).

The Charrette program brings distinguished artists to campus for intense, concentrated periods of time. The program’s goal is to introduce students to acknowledged masters of unique vision, enabling students to learn from and network with representatives of the national and international theatre community.

John Ezell, Hall Family Foundation Professor of Design, has designed for Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Tony Award winning Crossroads Theatre, Roundabout, Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, Swedish Riksteatern, and the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm, Sweden. He has designed for dozens of regional theatres including the Great Lakes Theatre Festival, Repertory Theatre of St Louis, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Indiana Rep, Olde Globe,San Diego, Williamstown and Bershire Theatre Festivals, Asolo Theatre, and Chicago’s Second City. He is a consultant to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and a participant in the exchange of theatre artists with the Peoples’ Republic of China. His drawings have been exhibited in New York, San Diego, Prague, Brussels, and Beijing. His work received the Award for Experimental Television Art in Milan, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award for Excellence, and nine Critics’ Circle Awards. Gene Emerson Friedman, an award - winning scenic designer, is known especially for his work on Shakespeare and the American musical. Professor Friedman has been awarded the prestigious Peggy Ezekiel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre Arts by the United States Institute for theatre Technology for his design drafting, the only time this award has ever been granted in this field. He was recently cited as "a significant artistic contributor" in the American theatre community.

He teaches the history of design and technology of world theatre, drafting for the theatre and rendering techniques for the designer, as well as contributing his insights in the scenic design master classes.

Professor Friedman has worked with George Abbott, Gerald Freedman, Adrienne Kennedy and Vincent Dowling among other theatrical luminaries. His work has been seen at the Lincoln Center Institute, the Kennedy Center, Historic Ford's theatre, the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland, the Repertory theatre of St. Louis, Stages Saint Louis and of course, the Missouri Repertory theatre. He is the Resident Scenic Designer at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival.John Ezell, Hall Family Foundation Professor of Design, has designed for Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Tony Award winning Crossroads Theatre, Roundabout, Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, Swedish Riksteatern, and the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm, Sweden. He has designed for dozens of regional theatres including the Great Lakes Theatre Festival, Repertory Theatre of St Louis, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Indiana Rep, Olde Globe,San Diego, Williamstown and Bershire Theatre Festivals, Asolo Theatre, and Chicago’s Second City. He is a consultant to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and a participant in the exchange of theatre artists with the Peoples’ Republic of China. His drawings have been exhibited in New York, San Diego, Prague, Brussels, and Beijing. His work received the Award for Experimental Television Art in Milan, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award for Excellence, and nine Critics’ Circle Awards.

Last Updated on: 12/06/04

[http://cas.umkc.edu/theatre/Incbtm.htm]

John Ezell (Hall Family Foundation Professor of Design) has designed for Broadway, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Tony Award winning Crossroads Theatre and Cincinnati Playhouse, Roundabout, Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, Swedish Riksteatern, and the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm, Sweden. He has designed for dozens of regional theatres including the Great Lakes Theatre Festival, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Indiana Rep, San Diego Old Globe, Williamstown and Berkshire Theatre Festivals, Asolo Theatre, Clarence Brown Theatre-Knoxville, Chicago's Second City, PBS, and CBS Television. He is a consultant to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and a participant in the exchange of theatre artists with the Peoples' Republic of China. His drawings have been exhibited in New York, San Diego, Prague, Brussels, and Beijing. His work received the Award for Experimental Television Art in Milan, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award for Excellence, and nine Critics' Circle Awards. He received Washington University's 2001 Distinguished Alumni Award and he was recently inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

http://cas.umkc.edu/theatre/Scenic/instructorbios.html

Department of Theatre

5319 Holmes Street

(816) 235-2702

Fax: (816) 235-6552

theatre@umkc.edu

http://cas.umkc.edu/theatre

Mailing Address

University of Missouri - Kansas City

Department of Theatre

Performing Arts Center 404

Honorary Patricia McIlrath Street

4949 Cherry Street

Kansas City, MO 64110-2229

Name Ezell, John D 

Department Theatre

Phone 816/235-2773

Email EzellJD@umkc.edu

Title PROFESSOR

Office Address 00221 PAC 404

Website No web site found

*John Ezell ; Hall Family Foundation Professor of Design; B.F.A. (Washington University); M.F.A. (Yale University).

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