Performance Conventions

The Unconscious

Professional Flair

Professional Flair

Professional flair has to do with how the engineering product is handled during performance. Professional flair involves three different approaches to how the product is handled. Usually, sound board operators, light board operators, and rigging operators would be concerned with professional flair as well as the other personnel involved when using a computer to set up the product's handling during performance. While the designers usually make the decision concerning which approach to use, the operator's artistic sense and ability actually makes it happen. Most of the time, the goal is to smoothly bring in or out the product. The key to choosing a professional flair approach is to know how the engineering product manipulates audience focus.

The audience does not notice when it begins or ends. With this approach, the engineering product's entrance and exit is completely non-distracting. The patron does not refocus out of the story onto the product until it becomes a natural part of the story, if then. For instance, during performance lighting needs to change from night to dawn. A lighting designer would set up the dawn but allow fifteen minutes for the lights to slowly change from night to dawn. The audience would not notice when the change begins or ends. By the time the dawn change is complete, the story requires the dawn.

The audience notices when it begins or ends, but it is so in tune with the rest of the performance, it seems to be seamless to the audience. The engineering product does not make the audience break from the story to refocus onto the product. Periodic special effects, sound specials, and lighting specials for theatre productions often require this approach. This approach is probably the most difficult and seems to take up the majority of the time during technical rehearsals. A key factor in doing this well is to match the product's handling with the pace and location of other theatrical elements. For instance, a performance of Metamorphosis required the sound of a tree being torn down. The actual engineering product was right: the quality of the sound, its direction and intensity. The sound entrance matched the movement of the actor beginning to tear down the tree. But the pace was off. The sound was too long, so long that the audience would have refocused onto the sound itself. The sound designer, representing the audience at that moment, knew that the sound length needed to be cut in order to achieve this approach to professional flair. He did that. To achieve professional flair, it is imperative for the theatrical artist/engineer to attend as many rehearsals as necessary before technical rehearsals. And, as in the case of Metamorphosis, the theatrical artist/engineer tried the sound during rehearsal runs before technical rehearsals without interrupting rehearsals. Lighting is more difficult to try out before technical rehearsals, so close attention by the lighting designer to pace and actor location is essential during the rehearsal process.

The product makes the audience focus onto itself, that is, onto the product. When the audience focuses onto the product, it becomes either a character or represents an existing character. Stella's trunk in A Streetcar Named Desire closely represents the character, Stella. When Stanley opens the trunk and strews Stella's clothes around the stage, that action represents a violation of Stella. During that point in time as well as other moments to clarify the trunk's equation to Stella, the trunk needs to be handled in such a way that the audience focuses on it. Other times the product may be its own character. A production of a different play required a huge skeleton head engineering product to move. Its intent was to reflect attitudes of the world of the drama from time to time. In this case, the engineering product was meant to be its own character. But its handling did not make the audience focus onto itself, so many audience members did not notice its change. It did not work.