Faculty Feature: Prof. Josh Thorson Breaks New Ground

Video Design for Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s Warehouse
By Josh Thorson

I just finished up a years-long project of designing video projections for a large production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, directed by Daniel Fish. We did a version of the show at Bard College for their SummerScape program in 2015, which was an immediate success and talks about a bigger production began right away, but for a variety of circumstances we had to wait. We were finally able to mount a full-on production of the show at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn this fall. This show is running through mid-November, but it is sold out.

The set at St. Ann’s is considerably larger than at Bard, and required all of the designers and the director to rethink how to configure various elements for the show. For a re-design, it’s natural to plan for variables to what you did previously, but you sort of never really know what’s going to work or not in a new space until it is built and you start working in it.

At Bard, I had four projections just above the audience’s heads. There wasn’t much of a budget, so I used what were essentially office projectors and whatever else was laying around. I think I my old analog video mixer, so the show wasn’t even in HD. The set was designed to feel intimate, so that the actors and the audience were sharing the same space, and had “fringe” hanging low over the room. Because of the low “ceiling,” my projection ratio was something like 16:3. In the new set, considerably larger, the director and set designer wanted to preserve the intimate feel, but I wanted to have improved conditions for the projections. Laura Jellinek, the set designer, and John Mosele, the technical director at St. Ann’s, began looking into ways to make the fringe raise and lower so that the room could become taller during scenes with video projection. Mosele developed a system involving a computer, a highly accurate winch automation system, and an array of pulleys to raise or lower the 23 or so lines of fringe that cross the set. I replaced the four projections above the audience’s heads with one large, 35,000 lumen projection onto a painted mural wall with no audience seating. Instead of office projectors, I had two Christie projectors that I matched to create one ultra-bright, 56-foot-wide image. The cueing system for the live HD video used a computer to communicate via network to the projectors and the video mixer.

In Oklahoma!, there is a scene in which Curly, jealous that Laurie has agreed to go to the Box Social with Jud, goes down to the Smokehouse to have a few words with him—essentially telling Jud he ought to hang himself. In this production, the first part of the scene is played in a total blackout—the lights go off completely the minute Jud tells Curly to open the door. A cameraperson walks out on stage with a wireless infrared camera rig and waits for a cue to walk to where the actors are sitting and line up the first shot. During this time in the dark, the fringe raises to its highest position to clear the video projectors. Just after the song “Poor Jud is Daid” begins, the projections fade up and reveal Jud in close-up on the mural wall. As the song progresses, the cameraperson moves around in a choreography to get different images of their faces at different moments in the song. At the end of the song, the video fades out and cameraperson leaves the stage in the dark; the rest of the scene is played out with some stage-lighting that references the color of the black-and-white infrared video.

The scene creates an immediate empathic connection Jud, the “outsider” in town, and is a major part of how the show highlights the problems inherent in negotiating who belongs to a place and who doesn’t, and for whom justice is rendered.

About the Author:

Josh Thorson’s work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Onion City Film and Video Festival, among others. His theatrical projection design work has been featured at Bard College’s Summerscape Festival, American Repertory Theater (Harvard), Signature Theater (NYC), Crossing the Line Festival (NYC) & New Settings Festival (Paris), among others. He is currently collaborating on an “internet opera” with composer Nick Hallett; this summer we premiered Act 3 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. Fall 2018, his designs will be featured in a production of Oklahoma! at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Thorson has a BFA in Film Studies and Cultural Studies from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He was awarded a fellowship from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to pursue a Ph.D. in Electronic Art, which I completed in 2013.