Description

Many theaters with reasonable budgets and skilled workers make beautiful scenery, creating the illusion of a complete world on stage for a performance. Only a small fraction of this can be kept and reused due to lack of storage, very specific design choices that don’t work for other shows, construction and installation techniques, the difficulty and expense of transporting items, and the addition of paying people to handle the pieces. The result is a cycle of raw materials coming in, applying beautifully skilled work and transforming it into scenery, and tossing it into a dumpster several weeks later after its one time use. There is another way, I think a better way; it involves developing a network of “producing” theaters and smaller theaters that may not have as many skilled people, as much money, or time, and sharing resources when they are finished in a show. This can benefit all parties, help large theaters with their environmental impact, and smaller theaters produce better shows. This project will show potential ways of finding and creating a network, practical considerations and steps to take in using and supporting a network, and hazard and benefit analysis for participating. This stems from years of personal experience developing personal local networks with school drama programs, borrowed concepts researched from groups who successfully collaborate in this way, and additional research found specifically to help this be more possible, less open to litigation. If these concepts were to reach a larger audience in the general theater and theater education world, possibly more theater companies would find they could participate in sharing resources.