Stagecraft
The art of stagecraft constituted our largest collection of tools and were foundational in understanding how dance creators could best leverage video and photo capture as well as augmented reality and virtual reality. The toolkit emerged from initial brainstorming and our discovery that many of the dance creators did not have confidence in their skills of stagecraft. Regardless, of the reasons why, we recognized a need to first workshop essential skills and awareness of the art of stage crafting.
These included:
staging itself;
lighting;
set;
sound;
projection;
safety;
integration of all elements through tech;
performance playback software;
rehearsals reinvented.
The lack of knowledge around staging revealed to us a lack of general technical skills that dance creators would need to have, in order to collaborate with other disciplines such as with a lighting or sound designer. Giving them experiential knowledge we felt was essential for them to, for example, understand how to properly light a dance. This was seen as the first step as dance creators were not really able to understand what they could do, nor what they had to know in order to guide someone else to support them with the integration of digital tools such as performance software, projection, augmented or virtual reality.
Location: All tools for the stage crafting teaching and learning that occurred were taught in a 5000 square space called the Hangar located at the Centre for digital Media. This occurred over a period of 4 weeks.
