Rachel 5/4/10

Thus ends the saga of Hair, with a doubled-up rendering of the characters of Claude and Berger.

As with the Dionne rendering, i approached this one as sketching practice rather than design--it's been a long time (like, 15 years) since i drew two characters in this kind of OTT musical-theatre ack-shone pose. Literally every rendering i have done in the intervening years has been single-character in a fairly sedate "drama" pose. So, these are essentially Michael McDonald's costume designs for these characters in the current Broadway production (link goes to the reference pic i used to create the sketch).

Again, my thinking is that, because Hair is a show that I can really only envision in terms of being serendipitously designed/coordinated--largely shopped/altered, found/thrifted--just by its very nature, I've been approaching the renderings as characterization guidelines rather than as something i'd hand to a shop foreman and expect people to drape right off them. (Though, arguably, someone could sit down and pattern these two men's jeans from this sketch.) In fact, i could probably spool out some elaborate art-language justification for why, in homage to the values of the script and characters and historical subculture it dramatizes, that production method is imperative. But, that's wankier than i intend to get at 8am. Imagine it in your minds, that i have done that.

These boys are green, partly because that was the color i didn't use for Jeanie and Dionne's renderings, but also because they are so full of life. I'm happy with almost everything about this sketch--the figures, the composition, the cartoonish style, the way the background works with the layout. If this were a real show (and i had infinite supplies of these boxes for renderings), i'd redraw it so i could rework Claude's facial hair to be a bit less D'Artagnan-y, but when you work solely with marker, there's no going back.

The show as i read it is really about Claude's tragic arc--he's this totally confused suburban kid that i read as being on the gayer side of bisexual, crazy in love with Berger and also crushy on Berger's sort-of-girlfriend Sheila, both of whom are willing to indulge in free-hippie-love encounters with him on occasion, but see him only as what kids these days call a FWB. The way i interpret the script, he then essentially gets drafted and sent off to Viet Nam to take part in the horrific war and ultimately die (though i think you can argue that is "just a bad trip" and doesn't really happen to him, too).

Berger is this grunty sex-driven hedonist, whom everyone in the entire cast has probably hooked up with at one point at least. He's massively charismatic, good-looking, loud, confrontational, but not cerebral; he's part of this movement because he can drop out of school, be an asshole, do a bunch of drugs, live in the park and get laid all the time, not because he actually cares about peace, love, and understanding. Claude is his best friend, inasmuch that he has one, and he'll "do it if it feels good" with Claude, but doesn't have the significant depth of romantic love that Claude (as i see it) feels for him. Berger cares about Berger.

I chose this pose because i feel like it illustrates that dynamic between them really well, yet also conveys the whole exuberant-hippie-vibe of the show, in that "We just got finished singing 'I Got Life!' OMG Yay!" sense.

It's funny, but i really feel like this whole exercise of doing a set of renderings entirely inspired by a trash-picked cardboard box has been one of the most creatively freeing experiences of the past couple years.

Because what i do in 90% of my career is production, the creativity i exercise in that realm is within a set of guidelines--silhouette, color palette, fabric choice are all handed down from the designer, and my creativity is exercised in translation of the rendering to reality. In La Bricoleuse recently, i said "i'd liken production artistry to writing a sonnet--you have a set form and a rhyme structure in which you exercise your creativity. Design is free-form verse. Both are interesting exercises in the production of art, and stretch the mind in different ways." Whenever i switch back to design work after a long stretch of production, i'm initially panicky, like, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN, I DON'T HAVE TO USE IAMBIC PENTAMETER AND AN A-B RHYME SCHEME?!" And then, in short order, i remember how to swim and i'm good. (Hi, mixed metaphor to the max.)

I will say, one weird thing about participating in this blog is, this is where these things stop. I've done all the renderings for Hair that i intend to do...and now i'm on to something else. There's no cast to meet or design meetings to attend or color palettes to settle on or shopping to be done or shop to work with. I don't get to work with a whole creative community of people to pull these characters off the page and give them life. And, that makes me sad, in a sense. I want to see these scenes happen, laugh and cry and marvel at how it's exactly what i envisioned but so different as well, suck up the free wine at the opening gala and congratulate the guy playing Claude who of course looks absolutely nothing like the rendering when he's out of costume, all that comes AFTER the sketching.

I've talked with some designers who think that's paradise--"If only i could just sketch all day, create the designs *I* want and not have to deal with actors and directors and their messy opinions, and drapers and tailors who care about what fabric can actually do in the real world," that kind of thing. And i just think, really? Why aren't you an illustrator then? Because all of that, which you find so frustrating, is the very life's blood of theatre, and exactly why it holds a mirror up to life itself. It's not about a perfect hermetically-sealed easy isolated antiseptic creative bubble--it's messy frustrating beautiful angry gorgeous life.

Which is not to say that you don't on occasion want to give every other person on the creative team, in the shop, or part of the cast the vigorous angry double-middle-finger. And maybe that's the place they're coming from when people say that about the ideal design bubble. But i digress.

I'm done with Hair, but i do have another found background for a sketch that i'm excited about, so i'll do that one for tomorrow. It is drastically different from this series, so it'll be fun to change gears in a huge way for it. Then maybe i'll pick that tablet computer back up...

Let the Sun Shine In!