Good Grief, John Boy - Part Four
The Rockfish Valley Community Center is a really cool thing. Out in Nelson County, southwest of Charlottesville, it's an old elementary school that's no longer burdened with screaming kids*. I don't know who's responsible for the upkeep, whether it's the county government or the participants, but it seems like a cool enterprise. You've got all these rooms there for people to use for classes or meetings or what have you. There's a large auditorium for dances and other large gatherings. They've built their recycling center there. There are playgrounds out back. There's even a thrift store running out of one of the joined class rooms. It seems like a great place to gather disparate county residents. (Although I'm assuming that's a good thing there, and it may not be.) And in one of the joined classrooms, Peter Coy has made a little black box theater.
The two classrooms were separated by a set of wide doors. They've joined the rooms by taking the doors down and putting up black curtains, so that one classroom is now the lobby (with a concessions bar that they've built), and the other part is the theater. In the theater, they've painted the floors, ceiling, and walls black, covered up the windows on the outside wall, and built a little loft in one of the corners for the light and sound operators to sit. At the far end of the theater space is a door into another classroom. This is currently a combination Green Room/offstage/storage area. It's being shared with The Treasure Chest (the thrift store). I hope they can wrest the whole thing from the Treasure Chest clutches. As in most schools, these rooms all come off of a long hall and there are doors to them from the hallway.
So audience comes down the hall, you set up your ticket table at the door to the lobby area, and block off the rest of the hall behind you with a screen or something. You feed people into the lobby through the hall door. You feed them into the theater through the room divide. And once the show is up, there's no offstage upstage, but actors can exit and enter from either the Green Room, the hallway (through the theater's hall door), or through the lobby. That's entrances/exits on three sides. And to cross between exits they just go down the hall. Bathrooms for audience are in the lobby and their part of the hallway. Bathrooms for actors are in the Green Room and their part of the hallway. I don't know that I would have envisioned it, but it worked nicely as a little theater set up. The Homecoming was done in three quarter (almost square stage with audience on three sides), and they could seat a little more than 50 people. Though smaller, it was certainly more amenable than Live Arts's original space.
It's interesting. As much as it seems that theater, by any rational assessment is a static, fringe entertainment and artistic form at best, it never seems to fully die off. There are people who keep trying to find ways to make it exist.
(*None of my friends' kids scream or are ever annoying.)
The two classrooms were separated by a set of wide doors. They've joined the rooms by taking the doors down and putting up black curtains, so that one classroom is now the lobby (with a concessions bar that they've built), and the other part is the theater. In the theater, they've painted the floors, ceiling, and walls black, covered up the windows on the outside wall, and built a little loft in one of the corners for the light and sound operators to sit. At the far end of the theater space is a door into another classroom. This is currently a combination Green Room/offstage/storage area. It's being shared with The Treasure Chest (the thrift store). I hope they can wrest the whole thing from the Treasure Chest clutches. As in most schools, these rooms all come off of a long hall and there are doors to them from the hallway.
So audience comes down the hall, you set up your ticket table at the door to the lobby area, and block off the rest of the hall behind you with a screen or something. You feed people into the lobby through the hall door. You feed them into the theater through the room divide. And once the show is up, there's no offstage upstage, but actors can exit and enter from either the Green Room, the hallway (through the theater's hall door), or through the lobby. That's entrances/exits on three sides. And to cross between exits they just go down the hall. Bathrooms for audience are in the lobby and their part of the hallway. Bathrooms for actors are in the Green Room and their part of the hallway. I don't know that I would have envisioned it, but it worked nicely as a little theater set up. The Homecoming was done in three quarter (almost square stage with audience on three sides), and they could seat a little more than 50 people. Though smaller, it was certainly more amenable than Live Arts's original space.
It's interesting. As much as it seems that theater, by any rational assessment is a static, fringe entertainment and artistic form at best, it never seems to fully die off. There are people who keep trying to find ways to make it exist.
(*None of my friends' kids scream or are ever annoying.)
posted by - caj at 6:18 AM
1 Comments:
I just like the name "Rockfish."
And, ahem, you know there are some places where theater is not a "fringe" entertainment and art form! (Granted, some theatre is, maybe the best or most important theatre, the theatre that actually contributes to the evolution of the form, but I think there are groups in all the arts that could be described in that way.)
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