I am transferring to Columbia College Chicago. (provided they let me in)

This shouldn't be a surprise to any of you, now, and I don't feel like going into much detail regarding my decision suffice to say I am miserable in Urbana and hope to change that.

I had to write an entrance essay based on a provided prompt, and though I'd share it here, with you, my dear reader(s?).

The prompt:

"Improvements in consumer-grade technology and its relative affordability have provided opportunities for students to create and distribute their art, their films, their writing, and their music in a way previously unavailable. Though it was once far too expensive for an individual outside of the professional world to make a "film", for example, many young people now engage in scripting, shooting, and editing their own works. Aspiring journalists write and publish their own e-zines, blogs, and on-line journals. Self-managed musicians create and distribute their own CD’s and promote themselves.

With so much ready access to the technology tools that help produce and distribute these creative works, and with so much work being produced and distributed "out there" (some of it not very good, by the way), how will you make your work stand out? For the moment, forget the technology and what it has done for you and your art form. Tell us, instead, about your ideas. What themes or concepts do you want to explore through your work? What do you want to make your ‘audience’ think or feel? What do you want to make them aware of? Why are you interested in your ideas? Why should anyone else be interested in them? Have you already begun to explore your concepts through your work? What do you hope or expect Columbia College Chicago to contribute to the development of your ideas? What is the first thing you want to do at Columbia to explore your ideas?"

My response:

For now, the themes and concepts that I want to support are those of whatever director I happen to be working with, which, as a scenic designer, is the textbook definition of what my duty is. Through generous collaboration with the design teams for the myriad shows I'll work on, I hope to discover not only what concepts I feel need reinforcing in society, but how to convey that to an audience. In essence, I've got no particular ideology that I've started to cling to yet, which, considering that my artistic career is in it's infancy, I consider a positive characteristic. Only by working with as many different individuals on as many different shows as I can will I ever develop a sense of what I want to say about, well, anything.

What I have discovered in my relatively short time working in theatre is how far it has fallen. No longer a prime method of entertainment, it has been relegated to being a window into antiquity. Novel, to be sure, but to the casual audience member nothing more than that. I want to do my part in pulling our art up from the inaccessible station that it now occupies. As individuals are often so eager to point out, theatre in the Elizabethan age was loud, cramped, and well-attended. But even before that, in the Spanish Golden Age of theatre, raucous and drunk young men would congregate in small courtyard theatres to yell at the actors and be chided in return. Theatre was, for lack of a better term, fun. One question I frequently ask myself is "Where did we go wrong?" One question that I desperately want to answer, though, is "How can we make this right?"

As a designer, then, in both properties and set, I want to work towards making theatre more accessible to the audience through careful attention to detail. The more accurate one portrays a setting, the more an audience that is familiar with that setting will suspend their disbelief for you. If a designer has not done their homework, and an actor is fumbling with a prop, then every audience member familiar with the proper function of that prop will have their disbelief shattered.

Columbia offers me something that my experience at the University of Illinois has been sorely lacking: An urban environment. I feel the most at home in Chicago, and the opportunity to work on shows in the city while going to school has finally become too much to bear. I'd like to hit the ground running, attending as much theatre as possible in order to gain a lay of the theatrical land, so to speak. I'd like to meet the actors, directors and designers that compose the current theatrical atmosphere in Chicago. An atmosphere that I have, sadly, been deprived of down in Urbana.

More than that, I'd like to act, direct, as well as design lights, costumes and props either at Columbia or beyond. Our discipline is so remarkably small. To be a professional working in theatre who has not at least familiarized themselves with every aspect of the art is, I think, to be selling oneself short. There is no reason to not be speaking the same language at production meetings, or to be able to help out when one aspect of the production needs it. I've chosen scenic design as my major because of it's ability to afford me the ability to be creative as well as interact with every member of the team. It is my hope that in doing so, I'll gain the confidence and technical skill to one day be an individual capable of working on any facet of a production.

One day, I hope to start a theatre company in Chicago based upon the principles of affordable and fun theatre that anyone may come and enjoy, just as it once was. By being at Columbia I hope to make the necessary connections as well as develop the vital skills to make this possible. The development of such multi-talented individuals is the first step to re-establishing the raucous, fun, and, most importantly of all, well-attended theatre of old.