Arayo Oloko, a fourth-year mechanical engineering and theater double major, can often be found in Building W97 on the west end of MIT's campus, where MIT's theater academic program is based.
During her time working as an actor, designer, and technical staff member on student-led theater at MIT, Oroko oversaw the chaos of “tech weeks,” where design decisions and rehearsals occur amid a pressured schedule. She calls theater a team sport. “If you screw something up or drop the ball, it doesn't just affect you. It affects the entire production and the entire final product,” she reflects.
But like any team sport, theater is essentially a form of play, whether it's under the spotlight, behind the scenes, or in the classroom. “We're always laughing during rehearsals and tech meetings because we're always surrounded by other creative people, and we're all united by a common goal, so we bounce ideas off each other,” Orocco says.
Theatre Design
In the world of theatre, a team of designers, producers and actors often work with a director to bring a writer's script to the stage. Traditionally, design responsibilities in theatre are shared by a variety of people, with set, sound, lighting and costume designers forming the core of the design team. Just like in sports, each team member is expected to bring out the best in themselves while working with the whole team.
Whether they're staging Shakespeare's Macbeth or a more contemporary script, each stage designer has the opportunity to offer something unique: a design based on their own experience. “If it feels personal to you, the audience is going to feel the same way,” says Sarah Brown, a professional stage designer, professor of theater at MIT, and member of the Faculty Advisory Board for Morningside Academy of Design (MAD).
Theatre designers can draw on personal experience to create a world with “friction,” a metaphor for the emotional work individuals do to grapple with new ideas presented in a work of art. “It's a world with friction that an actor has to deal with, or a director has to manage, or an audience has to manage,” Brown explains.
Integrating personal experience into design has proven crucial to theatre’s cultural function: to make audiences feel represented, to empathize with different perspectives, and even to reflect the complexities of real life.
But for young designers, digging into their own personal experiences can be tricky: Like a child playing roughly or building sandcastles, play is an opportunity to experiment in a safe environment and develop social and emotional skills, but it's not easy.
Explore the sounds by playing the instruments
Professional theatre productions are notoriously risky, with tight schedules, budgets and other constraints. In contrast, the classroom environment allows students to set aside real-world concerns and better embrace the imaginative and expressive process of theatre.
“We call it theatre for a reason; it's not just a play on words,” says Christian Frederiksson, a sound designer and lecturer in music and theatre technology at MIT. “The process of learning theatre should be fun,” he adds.
As a sound designer, Frederickson creates the audio cues and music that accompany live performances, deciding where these cues are placed in time and when it is appropriate to fall silent.
“Sound design in theatre is not about replicating or creating reality. For me at least, it's about finding a way to aid in the storytelling in as direct and elegant a way as possible. There's a lot of noise in modern society; if you try to replicate that in theatre, it creates chaos. It's about refining and finding the most direct way to tell a story and give the audience an emotional experience,” he says.
The first lesson in Frederickson's classes is to know your style. In his courses 21T.223 (Sound Design) and 21T.232 (Podcast Production), Frederickson introduces students to the field through a “game” he calls Everything is an Instrument. “I call it a 'game' because I think it's fun, and I think students will find it fun because there are no rules,” he says.
In this game, Frederickson and his students make short recordings of “ordinary, everyday objects,” like a metal water bottle or a piece of paper. After introducing them to the capabilities of Adobe Audition (a digital audio workstation), he lets the students freely manipulate the audio samples to find their own style.
“If you have 20 students in a class, you're going to get 20 completely different results from the same sample material,” Frederickson says. “You're going to see this student creating a really sparse, interesting, textured piece, whereas this student is constantly trying to turn their sample into something like musical theater.”
Trained as a musician, Frederickson believes his sound designs have a musical quality, even though he composes them using helicopter and explosion sounds rather than instruments. By playing the game, students are able to draw on their own personal interests and experiences to inform the sound design and influence the game.
Responding and resonating through design
“[Theater design] “Theatre design doesn't just ask you to adapt yourself to a task; it asks you to actually throw yourself into the task,” says Sarah Brown. For Brown, theatre design stands apart from other design philosophies. To unlock the individual's experience, Brown asks designers to consider “how you physically, personally interact with materials, first and foremost.”
Like Frederickson's game “Everything is an Instrument,” Brown introduces his class to theater design by playing with mundane materials: In one of the first in-class exercises for class 21T.220 (Set Design), students in small teams rummage through boxes filled with scrap paper, fabric, and matboard, prompted by evocative words that guide their sight and their hands.
Working from a script and reference materials, set designers plan the entire set, from the type of flooring to adding walls and stages. One traditional way to communicate set design is to create a physical mock-up. Using a scale model of W97's black box theater space, students place scrap materials on the mock-up. As they evaluate their designs, they begin to see a shape. “You start to understand that when you're making design decisions, you're making design decisions in response to reality,” Brown explains.
The unpretentious material choices and use of prompts encourage set design students like seniors Bellows Agbing and Arayo Oloko to make design choices without hesitation, thwarting the dreaded “blank slate anxiety” caused by overthinking.
For Orocco, this “rapid prototyping” is essential to see if something works: “If it works, great. If it doesn't, that's OK because it didn't take that long,” she says.
But Brown's “reality” shouldn't be confused with “real life.” In fact, Brown encourages students to let go of any notion of real-life constraints. “Imagine what you could do if you were passionate about it, and think about what parts of that could work within that,” urges Oroko, who is involved in student theater outside of the classroom. “If you limit your budget in your initial design, you can unintentionally over-limit yourself.”
“My catchphrase in class was, 'This is not OSHA.' [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] “At first, I was adamant about staying true to real life, so I got ‘certified,’” Agbing says. Drawing inspiration from contemporary and experimental theater sets, he says he gradually let go of those preconceptions and found software to be a more challenging and flexible platform for his theater-design projects.
Set design students will learn a combination of architectural modeling program Vectorworks and 3D visualization program Twinmotion for a modern approach to theater design. “The software allowed us to create beautiful combinations of contrasting lighting, and being able to manipulate the intensity was really important,” says Agbing.
Play connects us
MIT Theatre takes a playful approach to design, but its purpose isn't just play. “I don't think theater is less risky,” Frederickson says. As an educator, he sees MIT theater as a safe environment for students to “explore personal expression” and “develop design skills they didn't know they needed or would use.”
Because theatre does not aim to recreate reality, it offers both designers and audiences an opportunity to “make-believe,” to consider difficult ideas at a distance. Immersion in an imaginary world gives audiences an opportunity to feel represented, to entertain new ideas, and to develop empathy. For theatre designers, the process of designing a performance allows for the exploration of multifaceted personal experiences that may be difficult or complex.
Echoing Frederickson, technical instructor and video designer Josh Higgason, who teaches courses in Lighting Design (21T.221) and Interactive Design and Projection for Live Performance (21T.320), said that together with his students, “we learn so much about how to have empathy, how to connect, how to foster connection, and how to talk about things that are difficult at first.”
By the end of the semester, theater designers and audience members are equipped with the tools to thoughtfully express “big ideas and big feelings,” and become members of a larger community that can handle friction and work through differences. [theater’s] A lot of the purpose is to try to tell the stories of people, of individuals, but it's also a proxy for a larger, universal story or a larger, universal experience.”