Flickr is an incredible source for scans of ephemera from all eras. There is so much to find on there. One of my dreams is to somehow organize and catalog all of this; until then, all I can give you is a somewhat ordered list of things I’ve found. Remember that this only represents a sliver of a portion of what’s available on the internet.
On the end of the first day of the 2009 SETC Theatre Symposium, I sat on my first panel, entitled “Creating Props, Creating Performances”.
The first paper, by Teemu Paavolainen, was titled “From Props to Affordances: An Ecological Approach to Theatrical Objects”. An “affordance” is the ability of an object to perform a function. For example, a chair affords sitting. A spoon affords eating soup.
The study of affordances has been around in other fields, such as music and painting, for awhile, but not so in theatre. Theatre, particularly the study of props, has long been dominated by JiÅ™i Veltruský. In 1940, he wrote the famous, “All that is on stage is a sign.” He and the rest of the Prague School believed
The very fact of their appearance on stage suppresses the practical function of phenomena in favour of a symbolic or signifying role.
(The semiotics of theatre and drama By Keir Elam, p. 6)
Andrew Sofer, one of the keynote speakers at this conference, originally took exception to this when dealing with props in his oft-mentioned book, The Stage Life of Props. Continue reading Creating Props, Creating Performances
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.
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.
If you’re interested, here is the abstract for my paper:Â Continue reading SETC Theatre Symposium
Will sent me two sites he uses for making paper props.
The first is Best Brands of the World. This has vector files of the logos for many of the most popular companies around the world. What’s a vector file? It’s a graphic you can resize without getting those jaggy edges. You usually work with them in a vector graphics program, like Adobe Illustrator, but you can still use them in a raster graphics program like Adobe Photoshop. When you open the file, it asks you what size you want to make it. I’ll probably be using this site this week, as I have to build a Starbucks sign.
The second is What the Font. Will says:
You can send a scan of any string of text (it has suggestions for size and length) and it will make a pretty good guess as to what font you’re looking for. This is really handy if you’re trying to duplicate something in a paper prop. They also have a forum that has logos and text that have already been worked out.
Maybe one day, Will can write a tutorial on the newspapers he had to make while I was working at Actors Theatre.