“It was a chance to do something other than theatre,” said Tom Bergeron ’08, a lighting designer and alumnus of the Technical Production Track Studio in the Drama Department at the Tisch School of the Arts (TSOA.). He and his three design collaboratorsalums Travis Sawyer ’08 (lighting), Joshua Schwartz ’08 (costumes), and senior Gary Solomon (producer)were standing around earlier this month in TSOA’s Abe Burroughs Theatre amidst a clutter of paint buckets, brushes, and lumber showing off the dining environment still under construction.
The focal point of the environment is an 8 ft. long table that is placed in the center of three 11ft. square walls adorned with blue plexi-glass mirrors and a ceiling 10 ft. high that holds a chandelier made of metal paint bucket handles. It was the School’s entry in the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA) 2008 Dining by Design event that was held March 30-April1.
This year, DIFFA introduced a new Student Design Initiative and TSOA was one of five schools asked to present a dinning environment. The only design requirements were it had to be an 11’ x 11’ space, and it must accommodate 10 dinner guests. The Technical Production Track studio is for students pursuing a career in the design and production areas of the performing arts. To be sure, this project was unlike any theatre project the students had ever been asked to do. “We learned that designing with just a few restrictions placed on us is more difficult than designing for the theatre,” remarked Schwartz.
