Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

142 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
falls—either with the grain or on the bias—to create
the desired look of the eventual garment both at rest
and on a moving (and possibly dancing, tumbling, or
fencing) actor.
• Cutters, who cut the fabric according to the selected
grain direction, either from a flat paper pattern or
with no pattern at all, often first creating a cheap
muslin prototype. (Most often today, draping and
cutting are performed by the same person, a draper/
cutter.)
• First hands, who, working directly for the cutter,
correct the pattern after the muslin prototype has
been fitted to the actor and then “hand off” the work
to stitchers.
• Stitchers, who sew the garment.
• Craft specialists, who make costumes or costume
elements involving more than fabric—armor,
belts, masks, and so forth. Some plays use specific
specialists, such as milliners to make hats and
cobblers to make shoes. Other specialists may
be involved in distressing costume elements
(making them look older and well used) or adding
decorations, such as badges, military ribbons, and
gold braid.
• Hairstylists and wig-makers, who coif the actors as
the designers specify.
• Wardrobe supervisors, who ensure that costumes are
cleaned and maintained during the run of a show and
delivered to the appropriate backstage areas during
dress rehearsals and performances. Wardrobe (or
storage) supervisors and technicians also oversee
the costume storage area and help determine which
existing costumes can be taken from storage and
rebuilt to serve a new design.
• Dressers, who work backstage during dress
rehearsals and performances, helping the actors when
necessary with quick changes between scenes.
In the area of lighting, electricians and master electricians
hang, focus, and “gel” (put color media in) lighting
instruments prior to and during technical rehearsals
and maintain the lighting technology during the run of a
show. Lighting-board and follow-spot operators execute
the lighting cues called by the PSM. For the sound department,
one or more sound engineers work with the sound
designer in recording the sound cues and placing the
speakers, and a soundboard operator executes the cues
during technical and dress rehearsals and performances.
And in the makeup room, makeup artists may provide
assistance to actors requiring it, or they may apply full
makeup to the actors as specified by the designers.
Each of these backstage technicians plays an absolutely
crucial role in theatrical presentation. The stage
fright of the actor playing Hamlet is not necessarily
greater than the nervousness of the stagehand who pulls
the curtain: backstage work, though technical, is never
merely mechanical. Every stage production poses a host
of problems and situations that are new to the people
who deal with them and, sometimes, new to the theatre
itself. Technological innovation takes place when sound
knowledge of craft combines with creative imagination
in the face of unanticipated problems. The technical artists
of the theatre have always manifested impressive
ingenuity at meeting unprecedented challenges in creative
ways. Each of the theatre’s shops—scene, costume,
prop, and makeup—is both a creative artistic studio and
a teaching laboratory for all its members.
When follow-spot operators and stage managers are
placed in direct public view, sound operators and their
consoles are plopped in the midst of the audience, and
puppeteers are seen visibly manipulating their animals
on the stage, the theatre’s technicians themselves are
increasingly drawn into direct public awareness—and in
some cases are invited to take onstage curtain calls with
the rest of the cast. Popular fascination with technology,
combined with diminishing interest in realism, has led
to a scenography that deliberately incorporates technology
as a visible aesthetic component of the theatre itself.
Given this trend and the theatre’s increasing use of the
most recent technical innovations—superhydraulics,
lasers and holograms, air casters, wall-size video, moving
lights, and projections, to name but a few—theatre
technologists are becoming widely recognized as not
merely implementers but full-fledged stage artists and
creators.