ACT III is a proposal for a competition put on by the Ragdale Foundation to design a temporary outdoor theatre to be used for their summer programming (think concerts, plays, ballet recitals, etc). The Ragdale Foundation is an artist residency program/site a short drive outside of chicago. In the 1930s Mr. Ragdale built a small amphitheater for his wife, a playwrite and performer, there and years later his daughter turned the property and house into an artist residency program. The competition calls for submissions that pay homage to that history and that create a fun, unique, innovative, creative place for performances and visitors.
You can read more in the proposal below but for our design we wanted to create something that the actual building of it, the designing of it, and the presentation of it would be a performance in itself, and would facilitate a unique relationship between audience, performer, and artist. So, “Act III” was born; a title that nods to the proposal’s nature as a design performance, the third act of which is the actual use of the theatre. Also, the Roman numeral “III” is a graphic representation of the architectural elements that our proposal is composed of.
In a nutshell, the theatre we have designed is a machine - a weaving machine, or loom - that is used to create woven seating for the audience that we call “nests”. In this way, the audience has a very physical and visible connection to the performers - to the stage that created their seats. These looms are then left with the “warp” (the vertical strings) still on them to create interesting shadows, to play/reflect in the sunlight and moonlight, create visual interest amongst audience members, and form wings of the stage that can be used as scrims during performances.
I had a lot of fun working on this. Our interest in bringing together different ‘characters’ in the design/performance world and characters in and around the Ragdale foundation brought to the surface the name we used to submit our proposal - ‘Character Studio’.