Saturday, March 7, 2015

Mort...Mork...Morgue (Really? Yes, Really!)

In our directing class meeting last week we talked about more things to be adding to our journals (gotta show the administration that yes indeed we are working, never mind the fact that we're producing shows here but whatever) and the instructor mentioned a sort of idea scrapbook where we could put a bunch of images and sketches and things and my little heart became oh-so-happy because I just love things like that. So I asked him again what it was that he was calling this wonder of wonders and I was pretty sure he said morgue, but that doesn't make a lot of sense (I mean it didn't until I analyzed it deeper but that comes later) so I asked Em (who is also in the directing class with me and she thought he said mork...maybe mort. So, I though we would ask the modern day oracle Google and see oodles of examples of these wonderful books but no. In fact, I couldn't even figure out exactly what this was called. Since I had already asked the instructor to repeat the word a few times in class I didn't want to go back to him and say I couldn't understand his diction so I went and talked with our musical director who told me it was in fact a morgue. At that point the English major in me came out and I began to analyze the meaning of the word as a file or catalog of images for t inspiration and what is a traditional morgue other than a file or catalog of bodies. After some digging (and asking Google the right questions) I discovered that a morgue is common in the newspaper world as a collection of old cuttings and photos. I imagine with our digital age this has become a more antiquated practice simply for the fact that it's easier to store things like this in a file on your laptop rather than in a notebook. However, having a bit of a fetish for notebooks and the like, I will be creating a scrapbook of sorts for my one act. Now, it should be mentioned that these are usually kept for a single aspect of the play, for example the costumier would have her own morgue and the set designer her own as well. However, that seems more logical for larger productions, so instead I'm creating a single morgue for the entirety of my show and dividing it up into sections for the main components (which I will be color coding just like the markings in my script because I am truly a stage manager at heart).

No comments:

Post a Comment