Designing a show; preamble.

Okay. I’ve decided to blog about piecing together a live performance. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons.

The first being that I am really quite interested in development  diaries. I enjoy both reading them and writing them. When I was doing undergraduate theatre at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW for short,) we were required to keep a workbook which we would hand in every so often for evaluative measures. The students who didn’t hate writing it often had really interesting stuff in their books. Often, technical development journals , while often incomprehensible (to me at least, especially when they start posting foreign code), are also, if not fun, then at the very least interesting reading; who doesn’t get a little thrill each time a project forks? This blog is written for people like me, who took that as a rhetorical question.

The second reason is that I hope this could be of some use to other theatre, comedy or improv people who are trying to build themselves a show. All too often theatrical people are terrified of sharing technologically, or try to hide behind a veneer of mysticism. It’s as they are losing value or status by sharing with other performers. Anyone who has tried to research the lighting designs of a “certain well known American lighting designer,” can see how persnkitty theatrical people are about protecting their processes and about their intellectual property. This has an end result of keeping Theatre skills and facts inaccessible to all but the few who aren’t hampered by the tyranny of distance. I don’t see how it could hurt me to show people what I’ve done and letting them examine my successes and failures for their own benefit.  So, considering this, I’ve decided to release this entire site on some sort of Creative Commons license. I must admit that I’m still not sure if I will give the final work to the commons or not, but there is a good chance that at least a chunk of it will be.

The third reason is totally selfish. I hope that by making an effort to blog about what I am achieving and how I am doing it, I am giving myself another excuse to keep on slogging through these hard yards. I, of course, hope that I am  able to succeed and succeed well, so good luck to me.

I guess I should really get to work on it then.