The Theatre Arts Design and Technology Concentration offers a vibrant and creative Liberal Arts educational experience for students fostering artistic expression, technical training, and conceptual growth for sustainable lives and careers in the Arts.
Costumes
The Costumes and Wearable Art emphasis within the Design-Tech concentration creates opportunities for students to explore the intersections of character design, fashion, apparel production, wardrobe, history, textiles, artistic expression, and professional exposure. Our dynamic offerings of studio and lecture courses, production assignments, and internships guide students through their unique exploration. We encourage personal growth through collaborative experiential learning and focus on integrating sustainability approaches in all we do. The Costumes and Wearable Art Faculty invite you to design your future with our creative community of curious thinkers and skilled makers.
Lighting
Lighting Design is an ephemeral discipline with a dual nature encompassing art and science. Its designers understand and interpret a dramatic work, respond to it emotionally, and collaborate with other team artists about how they collectively wish to tell that story. Their tools live in the rigid worlds of physics, geometry, computer programming, and electricity, but must be harnessed to impart that desired emotionality and achieve visibility for the audience.
In the classroom we impart professional processes and standards; in the theatre students practice this fast-paced craft. We offer hands-on experience with LED and moving light technology, incandescent gear, and industry standard consoles and software. Our students grow from electricians and operators to team leaders as production electricians and lighting designers.
Scenic
Scenic Design is an artform where we conceive of and create physical settings to contain and support a story. A scenic designer’s work on stage can be realistic or abstract, but the point of the work remains the same: to help an audience understand the time, place, and emotion of a play.
Our Scenery focus encompasses not just design and construction but also the worlds of properties and scenic painting. We work on plays, musicals, staged readings, and small student driven work while a major aspect of the Scenic focus is the department’s mainstage season productions. Student hands-on involvement begins in the first semester with crew positions in scenic construction, props, or paints, and grows shortly thereafter to running areas or creating their own realized designs.
Sound
Sound Design is a fusion of art and science, formed in equal parts of psychoacoustic exploration and audio engineering. In the Theatre, Sound Design is the means of storytelling through sound, and the deployment of that storytelling mechanism in the most elegant ways.
Students in Sound Design learn, develop, and explore their own process and craft of theater-making within the world of audio. We aim to create well rounded sound designers and engineers who can apply the fundamental mechanics of live sound reinforcement systems and general installation practices on par with leading professionals in the industry. With an accessible Sound Lab and a hands-on-gear academic style, students train to operate large format consoles and speakers by leading manufacturers, intent on creating the magic of Theatre.
Stage Management
Stage Management within the Design/Tech Concentration is centered around pragmatic experience on Theatre Arts Department productions. We consider the Stage Manager an integral part of the collaborative team who acts as a significant conduit of production information. Our goal is to provide students in Stage Management with the organizational skills to confidently take on a leadership position in the process and performance of the craft. Diligence in effective communication, empathy, time management, and paperwork is the focus. Student production stage managers are trained in the most current industry practices in order to develop and apply their tools to professional work.
For additional information on Design and Technology classes, please see our courses (scroll down to section on Design and Technology concentration).
