DAY 048 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

Make Certain Your Concept Is Active

Not every production is going to be a slam dunk. In fact, if you’re like me, most of them will be serviceable and appropriate and have a level of finesse, but they won’t be one of those epochal moments where you leave a production changed, either shifting your perspective or having expressed a quiet, private poetry that you thought only you knew.

A lot of the play reviews I receive in class use words like groundbreaking, fantastic, life-changing, best, and blown-away. While I hope that the reviewer has had a great time at the show, and while I am proud of the storytelling we do at BSU, I try to dissuade students from using such terms for the sake of accuracy. Nothing I have experienced yet leads me to believe that most of us will experience truly liminal, life changing art more than a handful of times in our life.

And that has only partly to do with the show. The rest of it is us as audience. What are our assumptions coming in? Have we seen the show before? What have we heard? Where are we seated? Is it a good audience? Is the guy next to you burping up dinner? Are you burping up dinner? For everything to align, for lightning to strike, we have to put ourselves in the path of the storm so to speak. We have to--if we want that sort of experience--continue showing up, paying attention, experimenting like the alchemist how to turn this base experience into gold.