Costumes, wigs and sketches were among hundreds of items featured in the regional festival’s Design and Technology Exhibition on campus. Photo by Kelly Lacefield

College of the Arts Hosts Annual College Theatre Festival

Accompanying Exhibit Offers Behind-the-Scenes Look at Costume, Lighting, Scenic Design

February 10, 2009

More than 1,500 students from universities throughout the western United States will gather Feb. 10-14 at Cal State Fullerton’s Clayes Performing Arts Center for the Region VIII Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival XLI, hosted by the university’s Department of Theatre and Dance.

Open to the public Feb. 11-14 in the university’s Main Art Gallery is a theatrical design exhibition featuring scenic, costume and lighting designs from the regional festival competition.

The design exhibit is open noon-4 p.m. Wednesday-Friday and noon-2 p.m. Saturday. Debra Lockwood, festival coordinator and CSUF production manager, and Gallery Supervisor Latasha Tobias are the curators.

Scenic designs exhibited include theatrical ground plans, color sketches and theatrical models, plus preparatory research, preliminary sketches, photographic images and other sources of inspiration that demonstrate the designers’ process and design evolution.

Included in the costume design exhibit are nominated designs each featuring six-12 renderings or color sketches of play characters, plus costume fabric swatches, and graphic color scheme representing the palette for the entire production.

Lighting plots, color keys and color photographs of the production showing various plays’ scenes/locales are showcased in the lighting design exhibit.

In addition to a wide variety of workshops and presentations for participants, this year’s festival showcases performances of selected university productions from Arizona, Utah and California.

The invited productions include: Arizona State University’s “Don Coyote”; Miracosta College’s “Heartland”; Cal State Los Angeles’ “10 minutes”; Weber State University’s “Fire in the Bones”; and UC Santa Cruz’s “Poet’s Corner.”

Others are: Utah Valley University’s “Nosferatu”; Cal State East Bay’s “Tongues”; Diablo Valley College’s “Jesus Hopped the A Train”; Cal State Fullerton’s “As You Like It”; and Vanguard University’s “Life Without Parole.”

The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival represents institutions of higher education, students, professionals and the general public. KCACTF is a year-round program with eight different geographic regions across the country, including 18,000 college and university students. It has grown to become a networking system for 600 academic institutions to assess one another based on theater production quality.