Theater design can make one production of a play drastically different from the next, rendering the work of a theater designer, who works with costumes, sets, props and lighting, extremely important.
In the exhibit "Empty Space 2003: Students Design for Theatre," which is running until Friday, April 27 in the CFA Art Department Gallery, students in the Department of Theatre and Dance will display the various environments they have created for productions throughout the school year.
This is the second time the department has held such an exhibit, the first of which was held three years ago. The exhibit is comprised of a hearty collection of design portfolios, set models, costumes and lighting plots.
Costume Shop Manager Donna Massimo said compiling a vast collection of work is not hard, it just takes time.
"It's not that there isn't good work, it's because it takes that long to get the work," said Massimo.
The designers, whose work is often seen just as background to performances, finally get a chance to bask in their own spotlight to theatergoers and aficionados.
"Nobody gets to see the design work process," Kate Palame, a senior theater design major, said. "There's a bigger cast backstage than onstage."
The cast Palame refers to is a tightly-knit group of artists whose passion it is to not only create art, but to use their work as a functional tool for other artists - the performers - to build on.
"It's a team sport," said Cindy Darling, assistant costume shop manager.
The team of only a handful of students, plus Darling and Massimo, works year-round to design each semester's play, musical and Zodiaque dance concert.
Of all the design projects created by students in the last three years, the work featured in "Empty Space" is not intended to be the best, but an amalgam of designs produced on stage and their runners-up. A few award-winning pieces doesn't hurt though.
Two designers from last fall's production of "The Wild Party" competed in the region-two branch of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, held in Maryland this winter.
The dichromatic makeup and hair design of Jen LaMastra, a junior theater design major, won the Mehron Makeup Design Award, while the set design of Meghan Yaham, a senior theater design major, won her the Barbizon Award. Both of these presentations are featured in the show's UB exhibit and will continue to go on to compete at the national competition next month in Washington, D.C.
In each show whose designs are represented, a great wealth of hard work and labor is evident. Oftentimes work for costumes can be excruciating and difficult.
On trying to stitch a difficult seam in a costume for the recent production of "Chamber Music," Darling said, "It's like sewing Jell-O and swiss cheese." But the hard work is just part of the process.
"No solution is a wrong solution," Palame said.
Lynn Koscielniak, assistant professor of theater design, shared her views of the work a designer goes through and their obligation to filling the empty space of a stage with something meaningful.
"Stage designers should be fearless, free-sketching any idea that comes to mind and jotting down any notion," Koscielniak said. "It is by celebrating the possibilities, which exist in an empty space, that dynamic theater is brought to the stage," she says.
A free sketch is the bridging of concept from imagination to realization. Some students find other ways to make this journey, and their creativity is on display in almost every piece.
For Raham's costume designs for "The Wild Party," she etched stencils of the characters in various poses. The near-abstract arrangements of trapezoidal boxes to accentuate shoulders, legs and heads were then used with airbrush paints to make different "sketches." Red, black and silver paints were used, showing the production's signature color scheme.
Koscielniak said the medium in which the designers express their concepts is just as pertinent as the ideas themselves.
"You can hope the style in which it's rendering can further give the feel of what the costume will be like," she said.
Hilary Walker, a sophomore theater design major, created a wardrobe for the institutionalized mental patients in "Chamber Music" out of metal wiring, packing bubbles and plastic sheeting similar to a shower curtain.
Hanging from the ceiling of the gallery is the costume worn by a character that believes she is Queen Isabella of Spain. Through the lighting and materials used in the costume, the spirit of the woman comes alive.
"It's like her ghost is here," Walker said, as the plastic-and-fishing-wire hoop dress spins freely from a wire.
The ability to evoke such personification with metal and plastic is not a fluke. A thrilling hybrid of ingenuity, education, expression and craftsmanship is apparent in each student's work, and it makes for one interesting art show.
Tickets for "Empty Space: Student Design for Theatre" cost $5 and are available at the CFA Box Office, or by calling 645-ARTS.
