DAY 014 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

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I used to worry that I was deficient somehow because I rarely felt great on opening night. I would attend the parties and chat and shake hands, and have plenty of warm sake if it was available, but it was hard for me to be enthusiastic when I saw all of these compromises I had made, questions I hadn’t resolved, things left undone. The ground left untread stared at me, and I would witness during the course of that two hour performance that I had run out of time. As it turns out, a birth also requires an end.

I had to go outside of theatre to first find a people that spoke of perpetually being creatively unsatisfied--undersatisfied may be a better description. Ryan and Tina Essmaker’s website and now periodical The Great Discontent was a beginning for me of finding other people, models of malcontents who both loved their work and sat with their unease as their art tripped and spun its way into the world. 

Lynne Porter’s Unmasking Theatrical Design has this great section where she advises: don’t stop looking once you’ve found the solution. I think the artist’s role is to search for better. That’s not to say that I have this figured out or that I’m holding myself up as a paragon of artistry. Far from it, if I was a more clever sound designer, maybe I would be able to enjoy the fruit of my labor. This has however not been my experience, and this is the sense I’ve made of it thus far.