“...we’re asking the audience to participate in playmaking with us by having it very visible to everyone.”
One of our production dramaturges, Lebo Disele (she/her), caught up with T. Erin Gruber (she/her) to talk about her design for She Kills Monsters. Erin is an MFA Theatre Design student at the University of Alberta. She did the set and lighting design for the show. Although Erin’s professional work tends to centre projected media and video design, she says her and Mieko Ouchi, the director, have resisted the urge to use video projection. Instead they have chosen to go “analogue” as it were to focus on the immediacy of the game and the relationships between the characters:
“...in an era where so much of the theatre we’re engaging with is digital and there are so many wonderful and exciting ways to engage audiences in that digital realm, this has been a fun opportunity to set some of those burgeoning skill sets aside and kind of dig back in to some old-school theatre magic.”
Bonus: hear Erin’s story about how she ended up enrolling for the BFA Design program at the UofA.