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PROCESS BLOG:
SPOTLIGHT: Document Design and Building Community
When appropriate for the material, I am a big fan of adding interactive elements to my paperwork to encourage community building.
One example of this can be seen in my daily calls for the Art in Motion dance concert, where I added an "Art in Motion Gallery" to the bottom of each schedule.
At the beginning of the process I asked cast members to share their favorite pieces of artwork with me, and then would share one a day along with a short excerpt about the piece with the rest of the company.
The variety of artworks submitted covered a wide spectrum of styles and their reasoning for favoring it, from the political (such as Shepard Fairey's We The People series) to just simply the aesthetically pleasing, including works from Monet, Warhol, Matisse, Hopper, Seurat, Haring, and even dance pieces such as Betroffenheit.
The Art in Motion Gallery was a perfect accompaniment to the concert's central themes: What do we consider art, how do we perceive it, and how do we interpret it through our words and our bodies?
RR 10.1.21 for Website.pdfShe Kills Monsters Rehearsal Report
DnD_5E_CharacterSheet_FormFillable.pdfDungeons and Dragons Character Sheet
Another one of my favorite examples of this was Inspired by the play's framing narrative of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I designed my She Kills Monsters paperwork after D&D character sheets, complete with accurate font choices! It was a huge hit with the D&D players in the cast, and was soon recognized by all after our "Chuck" actor led the non-D&D players in their own one-session campaign.
In addition to the design, I found other ways to engage with both the D&D and non-D&D players in the cast alike. Every day while writing the next day's call, I rolled a 20-sided die (the most common gameplay element of D&D) and listed the roll at the bottom of the page as the "Lucky Dice Roll of the Day!"
Before and after rehearsal and on breaks, cast members were invited to stop by my SM table and choose a 20-sided die to roll. If they either rolled a "critical hit" (20) or the lucky roll of the day, they were rewarded with a selection of candy.
This became a great opportunity to check in with cast members and take the temperature of the mood of the room. It was a fun game, but it also opened up great conversation opportunities: Who in the cast had their own home D&D games? What did they play in it? Did they collect dice? What kind of candy did they go for?
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