Name and Year: Sara Outing, C’13
Hometown: Chapel Hill, NC
Major: Theatre Arts
Website: http://saraouting.carbonmade.com, http://cardboardcollector.tumblr.com
STREET: You have such a wide range of talents and interests. Tell us about them.
Sara Outing: My plans are hopelessly scattered, but I’m always working towards becoming a scenic designer for the theatre. I work on play sets at Penn from time to time, with a couple off–campus gigs here and there. I do a lot of play reading, drawing, designing, meeting with directors, building and installing scenery—all steps to help imagine and realize the physical setting for a play. My next biggest obsession is puppetry. It’s just for fun, but my end goal is to take some puppets out busking on 2nd Street and earn a bit of pocket change. I also dabble aimlessly in social dance, graphic design, digital illustration and music, and I make frequent attempts at things like woodworking and sewing. It is a lot to juggle, and each interest tends to be a distraction from the all others.
STREET: How did you first get involved in all of this?
SO: I grew up in the arts: shuttling back and forth between dance classes and music lessons, drawing chapter-book characters in my sketchbook, littering my room with cut–up paper and constantly peeling Elmers glue off my arms. Theatre didn’t come into the picture until high school, when I decided that acting classes would cure my social anxieties and ended up playing ‘Secretary #3’ type parts in a lot of plays and musicals. I was reading a lot of plays, seeing a lot of shows, and slowly becoming fascinated with some of the famous scripts and characters of American drama. Moving into college, I found myself trying to choose between the Fine Arts and Theatre Arts degrees, and realized that pursuing theatre technology would land me right in the middle of the things I love: craft, which was part of my life since childhood, and theory, which felt meaningful, important and smart.
STREET: So how did you get into puppetry?
SO: The puppetry thing kind of popped up out of the blue. Sophomore year I needed a work–study job and came across Spiral Q Puppet Theatre, which has got to be one of the greatest things in Philly. Ever. Period. The next summer I worked at Paperhand Puppet Intervention back home—and again last summer, and I’ll be there again after graduation. I fell in love with the community as much as with the craft; it’s full of down–to–earth people who truly believe in art as a mechanism of social change. Also, puppeteers across the board have GREAT taste in music, and usually have a kind of wacky sense of humor.
STREET: How do you conceptualize a theater set? Walk us through your process.
SO: Most realistic scripts are full of clues about what should be in the set. The very best production designs, though, are really picky about what the audience and actors need on the stage to turn words on a page into a breathing, believable story. Sometimes the director will come in knowing exactly what the ground plan should look like, because sometimes the action of the play depends on how the space is laid out; whereas, in other scripts, there might not be much stuff on the stage at all. That can be a chance to do detective work (we’re in ‘a living room,’ but whose, and when?) or a chance to depart from realism and worry more about color, form, and symbolism.
STREET: So does planning and drafting play a crucial role in your creations?
SO: Yes! That’s the most important part of the job. And the hardest, and the most time–consuming, and the most fun. A set of rough sketches might be enough to go off of for some shows, but sometimes they aren’t, and then there are five million ways of visualization to choose from. I’ve been trying to get myself working more from abstract painting, because otherwise, I tend to get bogged down in detail. Miniature scale models are wonderfully self–indulgent, for the same reason.
STREET: What different types of materials do you use in stage constructions?
SO: All–wooden–everything—with some fabric thrown in to make things lighter. In the real–life industry, there’s apparently a good deal of metal, but college theatre isn’t so big on welding.
STREET: How about in your puppets?
SO: The rule is to be as un–fancy as possible. I’ve found that cardboard, papier-mâché and hot glue will come through no matter what, but found–objects and dumpster scraps can sometimes be the icing on the cake. For example, I’ve heard that the swivel part in a Swiffer mop makes an amazing neck joint (this is what puppeteers chat about over coffee!). There’s also a high-art, European version of puppetry that I admire, but I mostly enjoy seeing cheap, useless, everyday objects take on a new life as recycled elements in a design.
STREET: If you were to design a set for your life, what would it look like?
SO: Actually, my bedroom would make a pretty spot–on representation of me. It’s a clutter of found objects with layers of colorful flyers acting as wallpaper, and there’s a lot of paint-splattered worktable nonsense lying around.
STREET: So does theater serve as the perfect outlet to combine all your interests?
SO: It’s an ideal mash–up of my interests and it makes a perfect challenge for my growth as a craftsperson. Scenic design work keeps me drawing, planning, painting, building, and constantly seeing amazing theatre in Philly.
STREET: Where do you see your talents taking you in the future?
SO: There’s a lot left for me to learn in set design, and many more other crafts I want to try in the meantime. I’d like to keep growing and improving as a craftsperson for as long as I can. That means keeping up my hobbies—all of them—by freelancing whenever I can, and following the theatre job market wherever it wants me to go. There are some short–term plans for work after graduation, but as long as I can find a woodshop and an audience somewhere nearby, I don’t much mind where the next few years go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LTD4W5PbHI
