UW Whitewater Theatre/Dance Department

Working up a rendering of “On the Verge” today:

Today, working on the portable pieces of “On the Verge.” The director, Angela Iannone, would like the pieces to be made of cardboard — heightened artificiality, the sense of it as a prop — and they need to come on and off easily, through the portals on either side of the stage, and carried by, at most, a single actor.

Here are sketches for the palanquin and the Esso pump:

Another day working on ‘On the Verge” drawings. Finished drafting the header and spent some time working up a contour mapped model of the sandpile feature:

I believe all the plates of drafting are now done. Have to double check things, do some prop drawings, and then next week, scan it all.

The Fall semester is fast approaching. I discovered as I was working up the Sketchup model of “On the Verge” that I had failed to take into account the 9″ clearance required for the wall mirror covers along one wall of the theatre, and am now in the process of redrafting the show. Here’s the elevation on the drafting table:

Steve Chene, our department’s technical director for many, many years, retired this year, so this Fall we will be welcoming Ruth Conrad-Proulx as our new TD! I told her I would turn over a complete set of drawings for Verge next week, so I must draft, draft, draft away. . .

Last night was final dress of “Yankee Tavern.” Here are a few photos:

We’re heading into tech for Yankee Tavern later this week, and things are moving along. Our TD Steve and the students got the bar in place yesterday, so I spent this morning working on dressing it:

One of my activities yesterday was creating floral arrangements for the wake:

I never did get a picture of the finished “The Tangled Skirt” up last week, and now it’s closed and we’re in the middle of getting “Yankee Tavern” built. So here are two photos from “The Tangled Skirt’s” final dress rehearsal. First, the set in preset:

And then with actors Morgan Gorman and Ben Treinen on stage:

It’s a smaller shop crew during the summer, but even so, things are going swiftly, and today I painted a lot of walls and made a dent on the floor. The floor, with it’s base linear scumble:

And then with the first graining:

In the shop, TD Steve Chene and Mason work on the bar and the door:

And Emily reestablishes the mortar lines on our brick walls:

The Summeround shows are in full swing, and “The Tangled Skirt” will be heading into tech sooner rather than later. Steve and the summer shop crew have been working hard, and when I finished up my paint work on Monday, the wall were pretty much ready to go up after the floor dried.

Here’s Emily sealing the floor:

I went away for two days, and when I came in the morning, here’s what it looked like:

Summeround is in full gear now, and the shop is working on the set for the first offering, “The Tangled Skirt.”

I spent some time this morning working on the bus station floor:

While students worked on flats in the shop:

Allison traced, cut, and primed our greyhounds:

And I finished the morning by finishing paint work on a few walls:

At our “On the Verge” production meeting today I presented the virtual model at its current state. I’m finding that with the irregular shapes and slightly off angles, as well as needing to leave 9″ of clearance along the wall for the mirror covers, a lot of odd shifting happened to the measurements. Now that I’m this far along on the modelling, I find I have to go back and pretty much re-draft most of what I thought I was done with.