To reduce the disciplinary siloing in our program and provide opportunities for all our graduate design students to collaborate, my colleagues and I created this new course that we now offer each fall. The course addresses five scripts, different each year, and asks students to create designs together, sometimes in their discipline, sometimes outside of it, and sometimes outside the bounds of theatre entirely.
One early project asks students to work in small groups, not to design a theatrical production, but to create an installation piece in response to a script. These are realized works that the class, and often friends and colleagues outside of the class, can experience.
Another example of this transdisciplinary work is the project I created for the most recent offering of this course in the fall of 2022. I reached out to a professional contact in the themed entertainment industry, Scott Swenson, who writes and creates haunted attractions for parks around the country. Scott agreed to provide the students with a script treatment for a haunted attraction that he had written but not produced.
For the project, students took an available building in Columbus, Ohio and designed the entire attraction including the overall layout of the building, the scenery for each of the ten rooms, and costumes for the twenty-three cast members.
click to view syllabus as PDF
Scott Swenson, Creative Director
