KCACTF Region 3 Festival

This past week Tracey Lyons and I (with occasional appearances by Jim Butchart, since he lives in Milwaukee) spent five days at the KCACTF Region 3 Annual Festival, this time hosted by UW-Milwaukee. We took about ten Irene Ryan nominees and their partners, three stage managers, a costume design, and a sound design.

Here is most of the group, shortly after the stage management presentations:

And here are our three stage managers, Brianna, Emily, and Allison:

Here’s the unrealized costume design presented by Katie Krueger:

While none our students moved forward in the competitions, much was learned and they had the chance to present their work to complete strangers, as well as check out the work done by their peers at a number of other institutions. We’re pretty darned proud of the work our students presented and hope they take the things they learned and push on even further in their work during the coming year.

We always encourage (well, force) our students to be as active as possible at the festival. Even if they don’t move forward in their respective competitions, we expect them to attend seminars and get involved with things like Design Storm and the play readings. Our costume designer joined the critical writing program. We had four students cast in the staged readings of new plays.

Joe (in the middle) gets ready for a one-act:

Abby (second from the left) waits while the full-length is introduced. Quite frankly, I though this full length student-written play was the most satisfying piece of theatre I saw this festival.

For some reason, I can never get our students to do the Tech Olympics, even though they’ve all learned how to do it all in Intro to Tech, and most of them continue to do shop work. Sigh. Finally, here’s Tracey hiding behind her coffee as we wait to see the design presentations.

Oh, on a totally different note, I was interviewed by Gionofer Fields for Milwaukee Public Radio’s Lake Effect program on scenic design and our upcoming “Sweeney Todd.” The interview can be found here!

http://wuwm.com/post/fleet-street-comes-alive-through-thoughtful-set-direction