Wheaton Wire

Issue date: 10/29/08 Section: Arts & Culture

Media Credit: Margaret Wheeler ’08 O'Dell served as design advisor and costume designer for last fall's musical "A Chorus Line," creating the environment (as he teaches in his course) of a high-stakes, old-school theatre/dance audition.

Theatre and design offer people a way of thinking. In theatre, you have to think beyond yourself," says Clinton O'Dell, the professor of Theatre 203: Scene Design.

The course shows the general process that a scene designer goes through to create the environment on a play's stage. "Scene design is the process by which you create the set," says O'Dell, and so the class deals with the entire artistic process that happens when directing a play.

"It's more than just the room, the platforms or the staircases or the furniture," he explains. "It's about creating the entire environment."

O'Dell has students begin their research with a theme or idea that evokes the tone of the play in order to immerse themselves within the world of the play. And so he begins his class with an exercise to just make art, before they make scenery.

"It results in a much livelier design that has vitality and a more dynamic look about it," he explains, "there is just a breath and a life in it that you might lose if you just go straight to period furniture or wallpaper. The play is never about wallpaper. The play is about an idea."

Before jumping straight to plays, however, O'Dell has his students begin with poems, and then songs to practice the artistic research that goes into design. Eventually, the whole class works on one play.

Students work in teams on this project because, as O'Dell states, "theatre is a collaborative effort and it's important to find out, even outside theatre, how you can work to compromise with another person. It's also always good as an artist to have another brain and another set of eyes looking at the work so that you can be really ruthless in how you judge that work."

O'Dell tries to incorporate different perspectives in his class, inviting students from all majors, ranging from psychology to music to Hispanic studies to take the class and challenge themselves as artists.

He waits until he knows the class and how they work together before choosing the pieces on which they will work for the semester. O'Dell loves this interesting dynamic of an eclectic group of students, some who have never thought of themselves as artists.

"Some students are shy to think of themselves [this way] and are never given an opportunity to and so, as a teacher, it's exciting when somebody finally breaks out of that," he says.

"But the most I can hope for is to give them a way to appreciate what happens in the theatre. And maybe they'll go to the theatre and question what actually went on to create what they are seeing."

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