Diary of an ICT Intern: Theatre is a Versatile Medium

July 24th, 2015

ICT’s Production of Loving Repeating in 2011

International City Theatre is excited to introduce Amy Patton, our Summer Administrative and Production Intern. She will be working with us this summer thru the Los Angeles County Arts Commission Internship program, and will be producing a Blog series entitled “Diary of an ICT Summer Intern.”

When people think or talk about art, it is often in reference to a focused singular medium. A Van Gogh painting, visual arts. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata: a classic piece of music. Quite often theatre goes without the acknowledgement of being a mosaic of all art forms, weaving together different artistic mediums. Below is a breakdown of the art of theatre:

1. Acting – At the forefront, theatre is largely a performing art. The semiotics of acting, the ability to believably transform into a character, is arguably, one of the most challenging mediums to work in. Actors use their bodies to create live art. As they perform, they are simultaneously creating and being the art right in front of the audience. It is intimate and temporary in nature.
2. Music/Singing – Artists can utilize the theatre to write and produce music. Existing in the earliest forms of theatre, the Greek use to incorporate choric odes into performances. Music can create a cohesiveness from scene to scene, create a mood, or even be spliced into the script to advance the plot, such as in International City Theatre’s 2015 season closer, autobiographical musical Sondheim on Sondheim, by Stephen Sondheim himself.
3. Writing – Playwriting, a difficult craft to master, allows writers’ thoughts and ideas to transcend the pages to the physical world. ICT’s next play Fences, written by one of the best American playwrights, August Wilson, transports the audience back to the 1950s to follow an African-American man’s struggles of living and raising his son under the stress of racism in the United States.
4. Set design/lighting – Those who create the sets for plays are visual artists who bring to life the script with the director’s vision on a tight budget. To master the art of stage lighting, the perfect balance of artist and engineer must be created. Stage lighting, along with set design, sets the mood, tone and very essence of world in which the characters reside.
5. Fashion/Make-up – Creating costumes for characters in a play again makes the human body the piece of art. Costume designers and makeup artists are the key to bringing characters to life. Look what an emerald green face and tattered black shroud did for Wicked’s Elphaba.

An ancient art form, theatre has been bringing stories to life on stage for centuries. It is the only art form that incorporates all other art mediums within it. According to New York’s Theatre Communications Group, theatre attendance in the U.S. has been increasing over the past five years. With more patrons attending the theatre, perhaps it will be better appreciated as one of the most diverse and most human art forms.