Theatre Arts; Scenic Design

Theatre has always been a passion of mine. I began acting in school and community theater when I was ten years old. In high school, at the insistence of my drama teacher, Mrs. Julie Andrews, I began to branch out from simply acting. She suggested I take a Stagecraft class our school district offered to broaden my horizons and expand my knowledge of theatre. One of my first tasks was to design and paint a twelve foot high by thirty-two foot wide, reversible flat for a dance concert. I fell in love with the process, and I have been doing technical theatre ever since. At the end of my senior year, I was offered the opportunity to stay on at the theatre I had been schooled in as an employee. I have worked in a technical theatre setting for three years at the Mercedes Edwards Theatre in Clovis, CA and for various other companies throughout the Central Valley. I moved to Sacramento to finish by BA and learn form a different group of people how to design and bring a show to life. I am currently a Theatre Major, with a Technical emphasis, at CSU Sacramento where I am enrolled in my first college-level stagecraft class. I hope to graduate, get an MFA at CSU Long Beach, and peruse an active career in Scenic Design and possibly Technical Direction for a small, local theatre company. I would like to eventually wind up in an educational setting- either as a professor or an instructor at my home theatre, Mercedes Edwards, when one of the people current employees retires.

I hope that this project will allow me the opportunity to get a more clear idea of the responsibilities and process that are involved with my chosen profession. As a young artist, who has too often been given way too much free license, sometimes I neglect the necessary, proper procedure for producing a project. I would like to have a better knowledge of how to effectively convey my ideas to those I am working with, who can’t see the pretty picture inside of my head. I would also like to know how people in my field study: what books do they read? what are the most reliable sources of information? I expect that people in my field, beyond the obvious text of a play itself, probably study books with pictures of previous productions of a specific work or an era to be replicated, magazines such as “Live Design” to keep updated on what is going on in the industry, etc. in this field, we discuss everything from lighting to paint samples, 1x3 pine or 2x4 dogwood, historical eras, physical representations of metaphorical ideas within the text of the play, etc.