Alayo Oloko is a mechanical engineering and theater double major who spends his final year at the west end of MIT’s campus in building W97, where MIT’s academic theater program is located.
During her time as an actress, designer and technical crew member in MIT’s student theater, Oloko has overseen the chaos of “tech week,” when design decisions and rehearsals collide in a time-crunch. 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 says.
But just like team sports, theater is essentially a game, whether in the spotlight, backstage or in the classroom. “During rehearsals or technical meetings, we always laugh because you’re always surrounded by a lot of other creative people. And you bounce ideas off each other because you all have a common goal,” says Oloko.
Design for the theatre
In the theatre world, a team of designers, creators and actors often bring a writer’s script to the stage with the help of a director. Traditionally, design duties in theatre are handled by different people – set, sound, lighting and costume designers form the core of the design team. Just like in sport, each team member is entrusted with doing their best while collaborating with the whole team.
Whether it’s a performance of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” or a more contemporary script, every theater designer has the opportunity to contribute something unique: a design informed by their personal experience. “If you make it personal, the audience will feel it personal,” says Sara Brown, a professional set designer, theater professor at MIT, and member of the faculty advisory board of the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD).
Theatre designers can use their personal experiences to create worlds with “friction,” a metaphor for the emotional labor individuals need to do to deal with new ideas presented in an artistic work. “It’s a world of friction that then has to be dealt with by the actors, or a director, or an audience that has to deal with it,” Brown explains.
This integration of personal experiences into the design is crucial to the cultural function of theatre: to give the audience a sense of being represented or of being able to empathise with different perspectives and, moreover, to reflect the subtleties of real life.
But for young designers, engaging with their own experiences can be challenging. Like children romping about or building sandcastles, play is an opportunity to experiment in a safe environment and build social and emotional skills, but it is not effortless.
Playing in practice – exploring sound
Although a professional theater production is notoriously high-stakes and subject to constraints such as strict schedules and budgets, in the classroom, students can put aside real-world worries and become more engaged in the imaginative and expressive process of play.
“We call them plays for a reason. It’s not just a play on words,” says Christian Frederickson, a sound designer and technical lecturer in music and theater at MIT. “The learning process should be fun,” he adds.
As a sound designer, Frederickson creates audio cues and music to accompany a live performance, deciding where to place those cues in time and when to let silence do the talking.
“Sound design for theatre is not about creating or duplicating reality. It’s about finding ways to support storytelling – at least for me – in the most direct and elegant way, and in our world today there’s a lot of noise. If we try to duplicate that in theatre, it creates chaos. So it’s about finding and refining the most direct way to tell a story or give the audience an emotional experience,” he says.
The first lesson in Frederickson’s course is getting to know your personal style. In his courses 21T.223 (Sound Design) and 21T.232 (Producing Podcasts), Frederickson introduces students to the fields through a “game” he calls “Everything is an Instrument.” “I call it a ‘game’ because I think it’s fun, and I think my students find it fun too because there are no special rules,” he says.
In the game, Frederickson and his students briefly record an “everyday object” such as a metal water bottle or a sheet of paper. After he demonstrates the capabilities of Adobe Audition (a digital audio workstation), the students are free to edit the audio sample and find their own style.
“If there are 20 students in the class, we’re going to get 20 completely different results from the same sample material,” says Frederickson. “I can tell that this student is making these really sparse, interesting, structured pieces, and then that person is always trying to turn their sample into something from musical theater.”
Frederickson is a trained musician and considers his sound designs to be musical, although he may compose using helicopter and explosion sounds rather than instruments. As students play the game, they incorporate their personal interests and experiences into their sound designs, influencing the game.
React and Resonate with Design
“(Theater design) doesn’t just ask you to conform to a task. It actually asks you to face that task,” says Sara Brown. That’s what sets theater design apart from other design philosophies for Brown. To unlock a person’s personal experience, Brown urges designers to “consider, first and foremost, how you physically and personally interact with the material.”
As in Frederickson’s game “Everything is an Instrument,” Brown introduces her classes to theater design by playing with everyday materials. During one of the first exercises in class for 21T.220 (Stage Design), students work in small teams to dig through boxes of scrap paper, fabric, and mats, using a descriptive word to guide their vision and hands.
Set designers work from scripts and references to develop a plan for the entire set – everything from the type of flooring to adding walls and platforms. A traditional way to teach a set design is to create a physical model. Working with a scale model of W97’s black box theater space, students place their leftover materials into the model. As they evaluate their designs, they begin to take shape. Brown explains, “We’re starting to realize that you’re making design decisions in response to a reality.”
The unpretentious choice of materials and use of a prompt inspire set design students like rising seniors Verose Agbing and Alayo Oloko to make design decisions without hesitation, thus preventing the dreaded “blank page anxiety” caused by excessive overthinking.
For Oloko, this “quick and dirty prototyping” is essential to see if something works. “If it does, that’s great. If not, that’s OK too, it didn’t take too much time,” she says.
But Brown’s mention of “reality” is not to be confused with “real life.” In fact, Brown encourages students to abandon any notions of real-life constraints. Oloko, who is also involved in student theater outside the classroom, urges, “Imagine what you could do if you could go crazy, and then figure out what parts of it work with that… If you’re constrained by budget in your initial design, you could be overextending yourself without even realizing it.”
“My catchphrase in class was ‘this is not OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) certified’ because… I definitely held onto the idea that I could stick to real life in the beginning,” Agbing says. Inspired by modern and experimental theater sets, Agbing recounts how she gradually abandoned these preconceptions and found that software provided an even more rewarding and flexible platform for theater design projects.
Set design students learn Vectorworks, an architectural modeling program, in conjunction with Twinmotion, a 3D visualization program, in a modern approach to theater design. “The software allowed me to create this beautiful blend of … contrasting lighting, and the ability to manipulate that intensity was really important,” Agbing notes.
How the game connects us
Although MIT Theater takes this playful approach to design, that doesn’t mean it’s all fun and games. “I don’t think there’s any less at stake in theater,” says Frederickson. As an educator, he sees theater at MIT as a safe environment for students to “explore individual expression” and “develop design skills you didn’t know you needed or would use.”
Because theatre does not aim to recreate reality, it is an opportunity for designers and audiences to “pretend” to consider difficult ideas from a distance. Immersing themselves in a fictionalised world is an opportunity for audiences to feel represented, to generate new ideas and to develop empathy. For theatre designers, the process of creating a performance allows for the exploration of layered personal experiences that may be challenging or complex.
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), agrees with Frederickson, noting that his students “learn a lot about how to develop empathy, how to build connections, how to foster connections, and how to talk about difficult things in the beginning.”
By the end of the semester, theatre designers and audience members are equipped with the tools to thoughtfully express “big ideas and big emotions.” They become members of a larger community that is better able to deal with friction and bridge differences. Higgason says, “One of the many purposes (of theatre) is to tell stories of people and individuals. But it can also stand in for these larger, universal stories or these larger, universal experiences.”
