Silk Road Theatre Project

It’s Sunday of tech here in Pierce Main (aka the Silk Road performance space). Jason came in this morning and told us that Chicago got 6.5 inches of rain yesterday and broke a record for the most rain recorded in the city in all of record-keeping. This was about half an hour after Sara and I finished taping garbage bags up over the set to catch the drips coming from the ceiling. There has been a lot of wet socks draped over railings, pants being thrown in the dryer, shoes propped up with the air mover blowing on them during this long weekend. At least it seems that the rain is due to taper off tonight. And then I try to remember how we ever manage to put a show up in February with the snow and ice!

Excepting the rain occuring outside and in, things are going well. Got the carpet finished yesterday and now we’re starting to run with costumes and get the quick changes down. More and more set details appear every time I look up and I’m sure they’ll continue to pop up right on through next week. Lee and I have been chatting on Google Docs from across the house. He’s put up several pages of “to do list” that we can all view and use to figure out what needs to get done, and as we sit here watching he can tell me to watch for something or I can ask him to listen for something. Then at night we use the Doc to discuss the schedule and figure out who’s coming in when and what they’re finishing. As I’ve said before, technology is a wonderful thing.

Speaking of technology, we’re having an interesting time with the modern technology vs. the technology of 1986, when the play is set. Off stage Lee is downloading and editing images of pottery on the Mac Pro. He’s making them into crisp, classy projections that we use during scene changes. Meanwhile, on stage we’re rigging up a slide projector - an actual, complete with slide carousel and remote control slide projector - which Sumi, an art student, would use to research the Japanese pots she studies. Yesterday we had to make the choice of when to use the projections and when to use the slides. We liked the grainy look of the natural slides for some moments, and clearly the projections are better for others. It seems to say, “yes, we could do this high tech, but sometimes low tech is actually just as beautiful.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Yohen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.