Theatre Design Research Articles

A Paradox Relating to the Costume Designer

A Paradox Relating to the Costume Designer Radoslav Lazić, Stage Director and Professor Of the many paradoxes associated with theater designers, the work of a costume designer seems to be the source of greatest admiration. The paradox of aesthetics within this complex artistic activity becomes even more pronounced due to the fact that the design of theatrical costumes manifests itself in a triple form: first as sketches, then as costumes, and lastly as stand-alone design exhibits. The costume designer must first draw the costumes for the dramatis personae, defining them by means of color according to historical accuracy and contemporary taste (figure 1).1 Amazingly, a costume designer's creative endeavor produces the greatest creative and aesthetic energy, and in theatrical practice, their artistic works are termed "costume sketches" (figure 2). This is the first aspect of the costumer's paradox. In the tailor's workshop, costume sketches are used to make the patterns that will fit the performing artists and the roles they will play on stage (figure 3). The actual costumes are made of fabrics, which take the selected models, style, historical accuracy, and characters into account (figure 4). Costume sketches give rise to the making of garments, footwear, jewelry, and other accessories to be worn by the characters on stage (figure 5). After the costumes are made, the sketches then sink into oblivion, surviving only in the theater archives or in the costume designer's collection (figure 6). On the stage, however, one encounters only the costumes, which are an integral part of the performance. Accordingly, costume sketches are forgotten, whereas actual costumes are remembered. This is another aspect of the paradox arising from the profession of costume design (figure 7). Finally, the third aspect of this paradox can be seen in the exhibition of costume designs. Appearing as an independent form of applied art and theatrical design, a sketch has now become an artifact and a work of art, which we look at in admiration [End Page 217] of its author and the aesthetics of their "palette" (figure 8). Costume sketches have become works of art, the exclusive record of the art of a costume designer and, even more so, of a theatrical performance and its ephemeral life (figure 9). While celebrating the fruitful artistic endeavors of Milanka Berberović, a costume designer and professor of costume design at the Faculty of Applied Arts and Design, I remember with nostalgia the beginning of my own career as a director. We started our career together in the (then) Contemporary Theatre in Belgrade, working on Petar Kočić's drama Jazavac pred sudom (The Badger in Court), she as a costume designer and I as a stage director. Milanka Berberović has designed the costumes for more than 100 performances, theatrical, televised, and otherwise (figure 10). Many productions have vanished according to the law of theatrical life, always ephemeral, but costume sketches survive as a valuable aesthetic record of this fine costume designer, an expert in the history and theory of costume design and an exceptional practitioner of a complex theatrical art. In addition to her skill, charm, and diligence, Milanka Berberović distinguishes herself by a highly developed style of artistic expression (figure 11). As the most outstanding representative of the contemporary Belgrade School of Costume Design, she can also take pride in her artistic creation amid "theatrical chaos," as well as morality and concern for the art of costume design. Costume sketches are the designer's authentic, lasting artistic works. Milanka Berberović's world of theater design is an exceptional creative endeavor which continues to live its own life through the surviving costume sketches. Indeed, the paradox associated with the art of a costume designer is amazing (figure 12). [End Page 218] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Miladin Ševarlić, Karadjordje, sketch for the costume of Karadjordje. [End Page 219] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, sketch for the costume of Caliban. [End Page 220] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Guiseppe Verdi, Attila, sketch for the costume of Odabella. [End Page 221] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Branislav Nuši...

How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One? How Do You See a Mermaid When You Know One?

Whether as tailed chimeras or human-shaped naiads, merfolk have preoccupied the European imagination since the Greeks. Inspired by Fouquet's 1811 novella, opera and ballet adaptations of the Undine myth proliferated on the nineteenth-century Germanic stage. Recognizing this tradition has implications for the locus of "blue humanities" and situates the crux of the nonhuman embodiment problem in theatre practice, which epitomizes three-dimensional kinetic problems. Two solutions to the challenge of depicting mermaids' physical form were derived: Undine (1845) locomoted like human women, but the Rheinmaidens (1869) were draped in long trains and flown aloft. Theatre design drew upon literature and fine art, but in turn profoundly affected the scenography of aquariums and the standardization of bodies' decorative motifs in other media. These motifs, differentiated from nonchimeric sea life in revues, remain recognizable in productions across a succession modernist artistic styles during the twentieth century. The indelibility and internationalization of these conventions holds into the twenty-first century, as the Disney stage adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid for Broadway and a host of other venues in Europe and Asia demonstrates how specific conventions are retained for merfolk and other sea creatures. As this diachronic study shows, the remediation of circulating repertoires survives changes in predominant style, whether pictorialism, modernism, or postmodernism.

Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above by Caren Kaplan

Reviewed by: Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above by Caren Kaplan Blair Stein (bio) Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. By Caren Kaplan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 312. Paperback $27.95. In her sweeping, richly illustrated work on the uses of aerial views in wartime aftermaths, Caren Kaplan is interested in inhabiting the spaces-between. Creating and viewing aerial observations—by balloon, drone, or even optical-illusion painting—is a messy, uneven process that obfuscates the separations between science and art even as it creates them. Neither entirely instrumental "objective realism" nor aesthetic sensibility, views from the air reveal how the overlapping aftermaths of war infiltrate everyday life until "it becomes difficult to discover a place or time or way of life in which war is not palpable or present" (p. 132). Kaplan argues that the construction of aerial imagery as a singular, modern, "God's-eye-view" was achieved in fits and starts, and that the "God's-eye-view" itself is not a monolith. It obscures as much as it reveals, especially as aftermaths—a [End Page 915] term she uses to describe the non-linear flow of time, place, and space that pushes wartime's "when" and "where" boundaries—continue to scar both the landscapes viewed and the people viewing. The longue-durée view of modern aerial views, Kaplan argues, reveals that all views from above are situated in a wartime aftermath. Aerial Aftermaths is split into five body chapters, an introduction analyzing aerial photographs of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 terror attacks, and an afterword exploring aerial imagery in the drone age. The first chapter traces the eighteenth-century First Military Survey of Scotland as a hybrid between early modern bird's-eye-view imaginaries and "modern" scientific practices of mapmaking. "Unabashedly political in provenance," the Survey portrayed the Highlands, a territory newly folded into British state infrastructure, from above, but used an amalgam of ground-based tools, techniques, and media to "empty" the territory of history and meaning (p. 35). The second and third case studies examine two other types of Enlightenment-era aerial views: aerostation and in-the-round panorama paintings. Early balloonists recorded their feelings alongside their scientific data, disturbing the "desire for a totalized overview" that military aerial observation was imagined to provide (p. 95). Entrepreneurial panorama artists used theatrical design techniques as pedagogy, normalizing curated aerial views as a way of "seeing all" at once; wartime landscapes, which brought distant battlefields into immediate sensation, were especially popular. For her final two chapters, Kaplan shifts her geographic focus to the area currently referred to as the "Middle East," and her technological focus to powered flight and mechanical reproduction. Interwar British aerial photography of Iraq, she argues, disrupts dominant historical narratives of World War I and aerial surveillance by showing how "political violence extends and expands" beyond the temporal and geographic boundaries of "war," even up to the "colonial present" (p. 139). She is especially interested in how observers were trained to read desert landscapes using manuals that "perform[ed] modernism" by attempting to codify messy, chaotic affective experience through abstraction (p. 172). The final chapter engages with three late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art installations that use aerial images of the "Middle East." Kaplan argues that in the First Persian Gulf War media landscape, aerial views of arid places flouted traditional photojournalistic tropes, erasing some wartime aftermaths and revealing others. The greatest strength of Aerial Aftermaths is also its greatest weakness. Kaplan's spectacular interdisciplinarity—photography, art history, Middle East studies, war and terrorism studies, history of technology, modernity and modernism—means that she engages more with the literatures than she does with historical voices. This is not to say that she avoids detailed historical studies. Her earlier chapters on mapmaking, surveying, and panoramas [End Page 916] feature close readings of historical images and texts, and her analysis of the manuals provided to World War I pilots flying over Iraq is masterful, but her explicit goal is to complicate how we talk about war, peace, and geopolitics from above. Because of this, historians of technology looking for archivally-sourced histories of pre-twentieth-century views...

The Effect of 3DS Max in Developing the Skill of Designing Theatrical Decoration among the Students of the Department of Art Education

The research aims at benefiting from the technological development and the technical progress. This development necessitated that the educational process take advantage of this progress, and the development of special computer software, especially the design programs, made the two researchers think about how to benefit from these design programs in teaching students the skills of theatrical design. The current search aims at: Identifying the effect of 3Ds Max in developing the skill of theatrical decoration design among the students of the Department of Art Education Third stage / Department of Art Education / Faculty of Fine Arts / University of Diyala for the academic year 2014-2015. The researchers used the experimental method of the two groups (controlling and experimental) and pretest and posttest method to achieve the objective of the research. The sample was selected from the students of the third stage / Department of Art Education for the academic year 2014/2015. The sample was randomized into two groups: the experimental group consisted of (15) students who studied through the use of 3Ds Max and the controlling group consisted of (15) students who studied in the traditional way. The researchers prepared a form for evaluating the skill performance of the theatrical decoration design. This form consisted of (10) paragraphs with a five-point scale and a percentage weight of five degrees. After preparing the research tool and achieving its validity and stability, the research was applied for eight weeks. The data attained were statistically processed and the results were reached at and the most notably effective of which was the 3Ds Max program in the development of the skill of the theatrical decoration design among students of the Department of Art Education.

Locating and Mapping the Traces of the Covered Ancient Theater of Amphipolis (Eastern Macedonia, Greece)

Ancient Amphipolis (Eastern Macedonia, Greece) is one of the most important archaeological sites of Greece. Despite the restricted excavation studies, important monuments have been discovered, such as the city walls and the Macedonian burial site at the Kasta hill, etc. Currently, the location of the ancient theater is unknown and only assumptions can be made regarding its location. In the current study, we aim to detect the accurate location of the ancient theater using archaeological prospection tools, data collected from the excavated sites, and testimonies of people of the modern city. For the first step of the approach, the approximate location of the ancient theater was determined using information derived by archived geospatial data (multi-temporal aerial photographs, satellite image, and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) of the area) as well as information regarding the neighboring excavated sites. For the in-depth study of the area of interest, a drone was used for the acquisition of high-resolution geospatial data. The generated orthorectified image (3 cm spatial resolution), DTM, and Digital Surface Model (DSM) allowed the determination of the potential location of the buried orchestra’s center using geometric rules for the design of ancient theaters. Furthermore, using the produced DSM and DTM, terrain cross-sections were generated.

Garish Luxury and the “Constructed Landscape”: Transcending the Colour of Opals in the Griffins’ Capitol Theatre

Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin synthesized a modern crystallized interior within their Capitol Theatre design (1920–24) in Melbourne. The Capitol’s auditorium, a mine-like cavity, houses a constructed landscape, elucidating the link between architecture and geological references. Ornamented with prefabricated stepped plasterwork, the auditorium is inserted with opal-coloured light technologies. Through the concept of the “constructed landscape”, this article traces the garish luxury elements found within the Griffins’ Capitol auditorium to understand the design associations between Paul Scheerbart’s Expressionist writings on crystal-glass iconography and William Le Baron Jenney’s symbolic crystal cave. The Griffins’ architectural contribution to the Australian entertainment industry conveys both Jugendstil garden effects and Mesoamerican echoes through its elaborative prismatic ridges. Owing to its transcendental opal allusions, the Capitol’s auditorium shows a constructed landscape model and constitutes a form of garish luxury, exemplifying early Australian glamour.

On models: the ambiguity of a future manifestation

ABSTRACTPhysical models are a natural way to plan, research, express, communicate and manipulate. Even as we relate to models as representations of things to come, we invoke a complex web of social, political and ethical paradigms. One is the model’s innocence, evoked in us by the idea of the miniature, of childhood toys stretching across cultures and centuries. Another is the model as a design tool, an instrument of accurate geometrical information, in a consistent reduction of scale. A third is the model’s centrality to urban planning, architecture and theatre design, as a means of development and communication. The combination of the three renders the model a multifaceted, powerful instrument which at the same time is vulnerable to exploitative, propagandist abuse.

Linguistic Aspects of Sound Design for Theatre: A View from the Fringe

Although sound design is a well-established part of the toolkit for creating theatre, its function in creating meaning for performance texts is often overlooked in discussions of the relative semiotic importance of various scenic arts. Many of the most cogent observations and theories concerning the use of sound as a parallel to spoken language in performed narrative come from scholars and practitioners whose specialty is not theatre, but radio drama. Using these theories, and the deeper analyses of linguistic structure proposed by Roman Jakobson as benchmarks, this is a preliminary survey of the resemblances between sound design and conventional forms of linguistic communication. The territory mapped is the world of small-venue touring fringe theatre, with a special focus on the roles that time and timing play in determining the semiotic content of designed sound in a performative setting.

Old wine, new bottle: Theatre design and transnational hybridity in Ọlóbà dance of Adó–Èkìtì, Nigeria

Using the Ọlóbà ritual dance of Adó–Èkìtì, in the Èkìtì–Yorùbá region of Nigeria as an example, this study examines the contextual shift in the visual realization of the African dance as evidence of transnationalism. The Ọlóbà tradition, as old as the Adó–Èkìtì town, is intended for cleansing the community to ward off evil. However, the visible matters that constitute the visual designs in the ritual process are gradually losing touch with the African tradition. Traditional props in the Ọlóbà performance are now being replaced by factory–made accessories, making it a hybrid of transnational cultures. Recent studies have focused on the aesthetics of the Ọlóbà dance, without paying adequate attention to the influence of transnationalism in the design elements. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the traditional African dance, today, is faced with complex contemporary realities that tend to redefine it. Based on Roland Barthes’s intertextuality and a combination of case study and survey research designs, data was collected through in–depth and key informant interviews. Using content analysis, the study concludes that the survival of traditional African dance compels it to use material constituents that characterize it as a hybrid of multiple transnational cultures.

Review: Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi, by Ann C. Huppert

Ann C. Huppert Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 224 pp., 35 color and 140 b/w illus. $70 (cloth), ISBN 9780300203950 Elusive, enigmatic, and engaging, Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481–1536) was among the most compelling artists of the Italian Renaissance. He was responsible for some of the greatest architectural achievements of the sixteenth century and was a pioneering antiquarian and draftsman. In Rome, he was a close collaborator with Raphael, Donato Bramante, and the Sangallo family architects, and in his native Siena, a skilled fortification architect and a knowledgeable designer of hydraulic works. In recent decades, his prolific graphic output and masterful constructions have rightfully been the subjects of a significant body of scholarship. Yet where much has been written in Italian and German, comparatively little has been published in English. Ann Huppert's Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi addresses this lacuna, providing the first English-language monograph on this exceptional artist in nearly a century. Richly illustrated and beautifully produced, Huppert's volume engages Peruzzi's entire career, bridging the two halves of his life—characteristically marked by the Villa Farnesina (1506–10) and the Palazzo Massimo (1532–36)—and examining the practices that grounded these achievements. Above all, this is a book about Peruzzi as a draftsman. As argued by Huppert, it was Peruzzi's adroitness with the pen (stylus and chalk) that allowed him to excel in diverse artistic fields, from facade painting to book illustration, theatrical design, fortifications, and surveying. Further, as documentary evidence, the drawings offer insight into those periods of Peruzzi's life not directly associated with his authorial achievements. They reveal aspects of his early training in Siena, his methodical study of antiquity, and his approach to building design. The image of Peruzzi formed by the reader is that of a pragmatist, an artist whose creativity was tempered and refined by his distinctly rational …

Clock-Watching: Melodrama, Realism, and the Dialectics of Time

As the conventions of theatre design would have it, a clock onstage is a distraction for the audience. This has not always been true. Late nineteenth-century popular plays were alive with the sights and sounds of working clocks, their pointing hands, swinging pendulums, and striking bells announcing the time of significant events and actions in the fictional stage world. Visible on the mantelpiece, or audible in the town square, stage clocks in this era lent verisimilitude while heightening suspense, mirroring the broader aesthetic conventions of popular fin-de-siècle productions, in which highly realistic and detailed settings coexisted with the suspenseful plots and broad character types familiar from older melodramas.

Exploring theatrical costume design as a pedagogical tool for empathic design

ABSTRACTEmpathic design, a relatively new user-centered design approach, has been utilised in the industrial design field to understand potential users’ feelings, experiences, and needs in their circumstances. To help fashion design students practise empathic design, the researcher developed a special topics course focusing on theatrical costume design. In the course, students worked on a semester-long project to provide costumes for a collaborative theatrical production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. For design development, students analysed play structure and characters, interviewed actors as the clients, and conducted group discussions. In the assessment conducted 1 year after the class concluded, students recognised that conducting a character analysis using a description table was an effective tool to empathise with characters and to convert design ideas into a physical form of design. The results of this study suggest theatrical costume design is an effective pedagogical method to practise empathic design approaches in the fashion design curriculum.

Haptic insights: model making as historical methodology

ABSTRACTThis article explores the value of digital reconstruction practice to the theatre historian in general, but in particular to the historian concerned with exploring visual histories offered by the areas of theatre design and architecture. It will articulate differences between the expectations and reality of digital reconstruction as illustration (both fixed and interactive) and suggest caveats and opportunities offered by digital (and virtual) outputs as a mode of communication. While the article will explore practice and critical commentary related to reconstruction as illustration, it will focus in more detail on the model as practice as research. The intention is to explore the methodological value of reconstructive practice in the process of the historian and identify possibilities for communicating the tacit knowledge generated by these approaches in ways that move beyond the simple presentation of visualised outputs as illustration.

Introduction

Introduction Sarah McCarroll (bio) In the final moments of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the Count Orsino says to Viola, newly revealed as a woman, … Cesario, come—For so you shall be while you are a man,But when in other habits you are seen,Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen. (5.1.387–90) The word "habit" here obviously and explicitly refers to garments. Cesario remains Cesario, and a man, while dressed in male garments, but upon assumption of Viola's female clothing, will become a woman who is a suitable love match for the noble Orsino. There is a double meaning in Orsino's turn of phrase, however; habit, of course, also means a pattern of behavior, an ingrained practice, which is repeated to the extent that it becomes routine. What Shakespeare's wordplay calls attention to is the way in which our habits (clothing) influence or even dictate the way we and others understand our habits (tendencies) of behavior. When we dress in a certain manner, we are expected and perhaps expect ourselves to behave in a way that matches our clothing. When we examine this dynamic of dress from a theatrical perspective, we immediately encounter something that seems almost self-evident, and which costume designers know instinctively and are trained to exploit: the manner in which we costume a character creates audience expectations for that character. The costume provides information to the audience about who the characters are, how they function within the world of the play, and how they might be expected to behave. Costumes also [End Page 5] work to provide information to the actor who assumes a character; I've had more than one actor say to me, "I don't know my character until I have my shoes," or some other costume piece deemed essential to getting into the character's skin. There it is: the costume can work as the character's skin—something to be stepped inside, assumed—and putting it on means putting on not just the garments, but the habits of the character. Perhaps because of their inescapably intimate relationship to the actor's body, perhaps because fragile materials mean that costumes do not necessarily survive from historical productions, perhaps also because the creation processes of costumes are connected to skills traditionally understood as "women's work," like weaving and sewing, theatrical costume has been under-theorized and under-examined historically. Theatrical design fields and production elements in general tend to be dealt with as craft, so that meaning-making is understood as a process whereby designers manipulate elements and principles of design: line, shape and silhouette, color, symmetry and balance; craftspeople then construct pieces for use onstage based on those designs. Important historical productions receive analysis, but it is of ten focused on just these dynamics of manipulation. Analysis of the ways in which meaning is made via these visual elements often stops at the ways in which designs support and communicate the given circumstances of text or the production's conceptual approach. This is true across the theatrical design fields, but I often have the sense that it is more true of costume than of other design areas. While there are certainly exceptions (Shakespeare and Costume, edited by Patricia Lennox and Bella Mirabella, for example), theatrical costume is most usually written about in a variety of "how-to" texts, which are focused on practice: how to design for the stage, how to construct costumes. To my mind, some of this has to do with the way the word "costume" is used. A quick Google Books search of the term "historic costume" reveals that most books on the subject are actually focused on historic clothing, not costume, in the way theatre practitioners understand the term. Even in theatre, we often think of costumes as "the clothes the character wears." This is true, of course, but it serves to deemphasize the larger ways in which theatrical costume is a part of the deeply systemic creation of meaning onstage, a process that would benefit from rigorous analysis at every stage. At work, too, are the divides in theatrical training, which see designers and technicians routed through one...

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film

Nostalgia pervades William Paul's discussion of the way Hollywood's film productions were intricately tied to the theatrical spaces where they were exhibited, given that today the theater has ceased to be the primary venue for watching movies. The book's photographs of store theaters and movie palaces evoke a lost world, and its discussion traces the changes in movie theater design, asking us to rethink the effect of these architectural spaces during their heyday. By manifestly defining the relation of the spectators to the film screen, theaters shaped the way the audience came to define a moving image. As such, this book fills a lacuna in film studies. While much attention has been paid to the economic, cultural, and political conditions of Hollywood, the movie theater has been of less interest. By shifting the focus to the reciprocal relationship between filmgoing and movie theaters, Paul offers many insights into how questions of illumination, seating, and curtain arrangements helped contain uncanny aspects of cinema's magic effect even while producing a more democratic theatrical experience than live theater.

The interactive multipurpose performing arts hall

Each multipurpose performing arts hall has a unique acoustic signature. The success of a modern multipurpose hall relies on how the disciplines of architecture, interior design, stage lighting and rigging systems, and acoustical design are coordinated to very small tolerances. The shaping and finish materials are integrated both visually and with precision to create the sound field of the room to accommodate a variety of venues. Two case studies are presented. The first is a 1000 seat multipurpose performance hall in central Florida which accommodates the use of variable acoustics, a specially designed orchestral shell, stage lift, and all visible interior spaces sculpted to provide richness of both amplified and natural acoustics. The second is a performance hall for a magnet high school for the performing arts in western Georgia that has undulating waves of aesthetically integrated panels on the walls that provides a stunning multipurpose space even with economic constraints. The case studies present different approaches to acoustical design of multipurpose theaters. The first multipurpose theater accommodates the needs of varying visiting performers while the second case study focuses on the presentation of students of performing arts that needed an economical but aesthetic center piece of a magnet school. This interactive process between the design team ultimately results in the beauty of the interactive participation of the audience and the performers also.

توظيف برامج الجرافيک في الديکورالمسرحى وأثره على تحصيل طلاب المسرح بکليات التربية النوعية

استهدف هذا البحث التعرف على فاعلية توظيف برامج الجرافيک في الديکور المسرحي وأثره على تحصيل طلاب المسرح بکليات التربية النوعية، ويعد هذا البحث من البحوث التجريبية، حيث قامت الدراسة على التصميم التجريبي للمجموعتين، إحداهما ضابطة والأخرى تجريبية، وتم تحصيل أفراد المجموعة الضابطة وعددهم (23) بطريقة التدريس التقليدية، أما المجموعة التجريبية وعددهم (47) تم من خلال توظيف برامج الجرافيک باستخدام Studio ويتمثل المجتمع البشري للدراسة في مجموعة من طلاب الفرقة الثالثة کلية التربية النوعية قسم الإعلام التربوي شعبة المسرح المدرسي، وتمثلت أدوات البحث في بطاقة معايير خاصة بتصميم المسارح، اختبار تحصيلي للجوانب المعرفية لمعرفة أثر توظيف برامج الجرافيک في بعض الموضوعات المقررة في الديکور المسرحي، استمارة تقييم منتج لمشهد مسرحي يقوم طلاب المجموعة التجريبية بتصميمه من خلال برنامج 3DS Max، وبرمجية تعليمية خاصة بتعليم بعض الأوامر والارشادات ببرنامج 3DS max، وذلک لتوجيه الطلاب لتنفيذ الديکور بأي مشهد مسرحي، وتوصلت نتائج البحث إلى زيادة الجانب التحصيلي لطلاب المسرح بکليات التربية النوعية نتيجة توظيف برامج الجرافيک في بعض الموضوعات المقررة في الديکور المسرحي، مما يؤکد فاعلية توظيف هذه البرامج في العملية التعليمية. Abstract: This research aimed to identify the effectiveness of employing graphics` programs in theatrical decoration and its effect on the achievement of students of theatre in the faculties of specific education. This research is based on empirical research and experimental design of the two groups, one of them experimental and the other experimental. The traditional group (23) learned with traditional teaching method, and the experimental group (47) learned with the use of graphics` programs using the 3D Studio Max, the human community of research is a group of students of the third division at Faculty of Specific Education Department of Educational Media, Division of the school theater. The tools of Research are the card of standards for the design of theaters, test for the cognitive aspects to see the impact of the use of graphics` programs in some subjects in the theatrical decoration, card of product`s evaluation which designed by the students of the experimental group through 3DS Max program and a tutorial program to teach some of the instructions and instructions in 3DS max program to guide the students to perform the decoration in any theater scene. As a result of the employment of graphics programs in some subjects that are planned in theatrical decoration, which confirms the effectiveness of employing these programs in the educational process.

Loudspeaker Requirements in Object-Based Cinema

Object-based cinema formats present acoustical design challenges in the loudspeakers used in theaters, which require analytical study. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the acoustic delivery requirements in a typical theater utilizing these formats. Further, the paper proposes a metric for loudspeaker placement and selection to be used in theater design. This becomes particularly useful for surround loudspeaker specifications knowing that object-based theaters utilize venue-specific rendering engines. The metric provides a means to both improve performance and reduce system cost compared to current methods.

Toward opera houses: Acoustic analysis of the ancient literature

From XVI Century to the present, the demand for buildings where the opera took place followed the development of the melodrama. Several authors wrote about the optimal design of an opera house. While some of them did not cross the boundaries of the theoretical research, as Milizia, others went on building theaters following their particular theories, such as Nicolini with the San Carlo theater in Naples. Early authors researched on a merely architectural systems and principles, following the classical approach—as Carini-Motta in relationship with Vitruvius. Late authors, from the XIX Century, widened the scope including social reason in the theather design. The aim of this article is to focus on the publications, regarding theatre design, of the early authors, analyzing them by highlighting the consistencies and discrepancies in respect to contemporary literature findings.

Yolanda Sonnabend (1935–2015)

Peter Farley looks back at the drawings of fine artist, theatre and film designer, Yolanda Sonnabend. Farley is able to recall her approach to drawing from first-hand observation. Many of her drawings are considered 'artworks' in their own right and hang in galleries throughout the world.