David's Crit

So we did classes and summer.  Students doing their reviews would talk about production.  In a faculty setting it would seem appropriate to talk about production, service, and professional development.

My production involvement remained pretty much the same as in prior semesters.  I continue to prescreen all the scene designs to get the reasonably close to budget before we put them into our process.  The more we do this the less well I feel like it is working.  We made an effort at the top of the fall to try to build some good will with the scene design cohort as a group.  We had for some reason slipped into an adversarial posture and there was some question as to whether our motives were pure.  I tired to get in front of it, but honestly it hasn't been long enough to know if it had any effect.  We also did a little bit of a Crazy Scheme reboot with our own population to try to shake out some of the requirements and procedures that had spontaneously generated over the last few Project Managers.  We didn't do our best work on the first show.  I probably own some of that as I tried to convince them that we could do something to preserve the scale they were looking for that I probably shouldn't have.  I just hate being the bottle neck everything has to pass through.  Sometimes I may turn out to be unjustifiably optimistic.

Something nearly nobody would ever say about me.

The largest service contributions I made this fall were both about campus visits.  In both cases the work turned out to mostly be a thousand emails rather than something more substantive.  I guess I am good at legwork though, and neither event would have happened without it.  The first was a direct outgrowth of the summer trip to TAIT.  We arranged for a delegation to come to campus from Lititz to do some recruiting.  We wound up with two class appearances a dinner and an open info session in Drama.  They also did a few appearances in some engineering classes.  It feels like there's a possibility that we'll make it a regular thing for the fall.  The other event was that we hosted the USITT Glerum Rigging Master class.  They were here for two days just after classes ended.  It was well attended and everyone seemed to suggest that the event went well.

I also reprised my coordination of semester reviews - another task that centers on a thousand emails, but also has the added dimension of being something that nobody is ultimately happy with.  We wound up doing 10 sessions over 4 days this round.  I believe that if we make it into a world where we need 11 sessions something might break.  If all the grad programs hit their recruiting goals we could definitely get into that world.  Not sure what that would mean.

On the professional development end I continued - and reupped - as a Subject Matter Expert for the ETCP Theatre Rigging Certification.  I attended the Glerum Class as an attendee to fill out renewal points for my certification.  After taking the class I am seriously considering taking the Arena test; maybe next fall at LDI (or maybe by then the thought will have passed).  For a minute I thought I might be getting a chance at something I had been lining up for... forever, but it didn't happen.  Just didn't talk to the right people in the right moment.  I continue to kick around ideas for books.  I came up with one recently that would be really fun to do and would probably sell, but holds little value career-wise.  Probably not the best idea.

All in all things went reasonable well for the fall and I am looking forward to a successful spring.