Change

Working at a college there is always change.

Each year the student body changes as some students will graduate or drop out and new ones come in.

Students stay as little as one semester and stay as long as five years or more.

As I noted in another post I think an average stay for students is about three years.

There are changes in the staff over time as well but not usually as dramatic as when we graduate a large number of students in one year. 

The fall of 1988 was the beginning of many staff changes in just a short time that really re-shaped the department.

At the end of my first year one on the faculty left to become a dean at another college and after my third year the lighting designer left after not getting tenure.

There had been little change until the fall of 1988 when we got a new costume designer.

Don was a very good designer but would only stay for two years and then we got a temporary new designer in the fall of 1990 and she would stay just one year.

The fall of 1991 brought our fourth costume designer in just over three years and luckily she would stay for about six years before leaving and we would get the fifth and current costume designer during my time at Brockport.

In the fall of 1989 we would also get a new scene designer who became very popular with the students but would only stay six years before leaving.
 

We would also get a new acting teacher in the fall of 1990 when long time popular teacher Gisela Fritzsching was forced to retire by state law at 70, a law that was changed the very next year.

As I write this she is still going at about 93.

Over the years there would be several more changes with our music staff and other academic faculty, but that period from 1988 through 1991 with so many design faculty changing was challenging for me.

It always seems to take a few shows working together to get use to how other designers work and get to the point where everyone works as a team.

This does not mean that we did bad productions; it just means that we had to work just a bit harder to get it right.

As I get ready to write about the plays I worked on during this period I thought I would take a minute to figure out just who I was working with.

I think maybe I need to go through all my programs and make a chart of who was here when, but that sounds too much like work and not lots of fun.

As I write this we are two weeks away from the start of another school year; it will be my 32^nd year at Brockport.

We have already had a design meeting for the first fall production.

The 2013-14 season for those who care:

Almost, Maine

by John Cariani

October 4-6 and 17-19  

 

Avenue Q

by Lopez, Marx and Whitty

November 22-24 and December 5-7  

 

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

by Sarah Ruhl

February 28-March 2 and March 6-8   

 

bobrauchenbergamerica

by Charles Mee

April 25-27 and May 1-3

So up next the 1988-89 season and stories from those plays.

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