Building sets and moving props aren’t the only things theater tech students do. Theater’s tech 1 students are exploring the more creative sides of technical theater, learning key concepts like character design, marketing design, and eventually, prop creation. 

“We’re really good at building sets and painting sets and finding props, but we have not spent a lot of time, in my two years here, creating props from scratch,” technical theater director Aaron Yowell said. 

Creativity is nothing new to the fine arts, but few classes are able to embrace it in the way this class can.

“My favorite aspect of tech theater is how much of an outlet for creativity it is,” senior Catalina Landauro said. “It’s not like a normal art class or something like that, you’re able to hone your skills in a lot of different ways like drawing, crafting, and building.”

After creating characters to represent themselves, students were put into guilds, or groups, with each group needing to create an elaborate slideshow to show off their brand for their guild.

“So for this project, we had to find a mythical creature to incorporate in this, so we chose the feng-huang, which is the phoenix of Chinese culture,” freshman Harini Ramesh said. “It is very colorful, and we wanted to bring that colorfulness and life into our project.”

Eventually, the guild group members will be working together to construct a prop book in order to learn the ins and outs of prop creation.

“I hope that the students see how something as simple as taking vocabulary words or simple math problems can be turned into something fun and unique, and it’s also just a skill nobody teaches anymore… and I want them to just have fun”