Beyond the Classroom
At Cornish, students learn by doing and working side by side with creative professional designers. Our students are involved in exciting, hands-on work for actual productions, not just theoretical projects. The Performance Production Department prepares students to work not just for theater productions, but for music and dance performances and concerts as well. During recent years, Performance Production Department students were involved in a production of new works written by Theater Department Original Works students, a Moliere carnival marathon of plays, Jose Rivera’s Marisol and an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Other performances included Macbeth, Caryl Churchill's Mouthful of Birds, Studs Terkel's Working, Naomi Iizuka’s Aloha Say The Pretty Girls, Red, Hot, & Cole a review of Cole Porter’s music, a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure with original music composed for piano and accordion, and dance performances of original student choreographed modern and ballet works. Over the course of study, students take increasing responsibility for productions so that by their senior year they are working primarily as designers, technical directors and stage managers. This wide experience base also leads to opportunities to work with faculty and alumni on outside productions in the Seattle production community.
Facilities:
Facilities and resources: Productions are staged in two on-campus locations: PONCHO Concert Hall in Kerry Hall and the Ned and Kayla Skinner Theater in the Raisbeck Performance Hall adjacent to the Main Campus Center. The Skinner Theater is a flexible performance space with state of the art distributed dimmers (186 channels), Obsession 600 lighting console, and computer based sound playback using a digital mixer and high end Meyer powered speakers. Dance department main stage productions and some Theater productions are presented at the Broadway Performance Hall, a nearby professional theater.
Adjacent to the performance hall is our 6,000 sq. ft. scene shop equipped for metal, woodworking and painting in scenery and property construction. Our spacious Costume Shop (over 2000 sq. ft.) features open design with many windows letting in natural light, an industrial dye vat and multiple washers and dryers in our wet-room, and highly organized and easily accessible storage of our costume stock. Student Stage Managers have a dedicated office on the 4th floor of the MCC. Also in MCC, a small computer lab dedicated to Performance Production students includes a 36” plotter and a photo-quality color printer, CAD and digital audio editing software, and internet access. In the Raisbeck Performance Hall, Performance Production maintains an open studio working area for juniors and seniors with drafting equipment, and a computer connected to the internet. Also in Raisbeck Hall, in the Skinner Theater booth, two sound design stations are available, including a 40 input 16 output digital mixer, a 24 input analog mixer, two computer based digital audio workstations (also with removable drives), and quality playback speakers (this equipment is also used for playback during productions in the space). In the MCC, the department maintains limited digital video editing equipment, and access to the larger video studios of the Art Department can be arranged. Also in MCC, students enjoy working with our LIGHTBOX, a unique fiber-optic scale model lighting lab, allowing scenic and lighting design students to easily visualize realistic lighting on scenic models in a classroom situation (without needing a ladder!)