We spoke with current first year Stage Management and Technical Theatre, BA student Kiara-Ann Atkinson, on behalf of the first year BA (Hons) Theatre Practice students involved in creating this year’s Tableau.
What’s Tableau all about, and who is involved?
Tableau is back! First year Stage Management and Technical Theatre, BA students and Crafts students from Costume Construction, BA, Set Construction for Stage and Screen, BA, Scenic Painting for Stage and Screen, BA, and Prop Making, BA have been working together tirelessly to bring you this year’s Tableau.
A well-established and well-known project amongst Central staff, students, and alumni, Tableau is a project worked on solely by BA (Hons) Theatre Practice and highlights these disciplines and their skills.
We are given an image from a film or television programme set in a certain time period – for example, this year is 1800s Regency – and the costume, set construction, scenic painting, and prop making students work to create replicas of everything within the image as closely as possible. Stage Management and Technical Theatre facilitate the management of the exhibition, and will create and run lighting and sound for the piece.
What is the purpose of Tableau?
Crafts and Stage Management and Technical Theatre students create Tableau as an in-house Central project within their curriculum, giving them a chance to focus on their discipline before moving towards shows and other projects. It builds on communication skills too, and introduces production meetings, budgets, and separate departments in a more realized way.
It is an exciting project that everyone at Central looks forward to year in, year out, and it’s great to see how the incredible backstage teams come together to focus on a specialized project.
How is this project related to the coursework?
It feeds directly into the term’s unit of ‘Text Analysis’ where we have been focusing on texts and other stimuli to ensure we are fulfilling what is required from them, in this case from the still image. It plays a huge part in the term’s assessment work, but equally everyone’s personal development within their discipline.
What have you been getting up to?
All the courses have been experimenting and preparing over the past few weeks and are now in the making-process and beyond. We start getting into the space on Monday 6 March so it is all moving very fast!
What has surprised you most about your experience working on Tableau?
Everyone on Tableau is getting a good chance to work in a professional way with a production manager, designer, and across departments to bring a project together, which perhaps we were not expecting to do before moving into shows, for example.
Tableau is an internal project at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and will take place on campus on Thursday 16 March 2023.
While it is not open to the public, you can get an insight into behind-the-scenes by following @tableau_25 on Instagram.
