Michelle Riel brings to the Monterey Peninsula’s newest university theatre department at Cal State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) a resume built on stage and media design work with a list of major U.S. regional theatres. "Stage design inevitably involved me in more and more use of the computer," she explained in her campus office last week. Next door the university’s spacious new World Theatre was being prepared, with help from some of Michelle’s students, for a prestigious multimedia visual music performance by the Kronos Quartet.

"Designing for companies like the Milwaukee Repertory, San Diego Repertory, and the La Jolla Playhouse meant more and more work with the computer - at first as just a handy and flexible communication tool. But I began to branch out into multi-media design, some of it for live theatre performances, some of it in developing media-movement work by various dance companies. When I saw that CSUMB wanted its new theatre department to reflect a fusion of different visual and technical elements within any individual performance, I said, ‘That’s the place for me.’"

Now in her second year on campus, the youthful-looking Michelle carries the impressive titles of Assistant Professor of New Media and the Director of the Institute for Teledramatic Arts & Technology (TAT). Her new job has meant helping to launch a program that unites five performing arts disciplines - live theatre, radio, film, broadcast video and new media. "Every student starts by exploring all five through required ‘core’ courses - and from that broad-based exposure, each goes on to choose an elective. This becomes the basis for what we call a 'capstone project,' representing the culmination of what they’ve achieved - in directing, screen writing, video production, film writing or whatever choice they’ve made. Every semester, we hold a festival for presentation of the capstones along with other performance pieces based on work in progress."

A major challenge of being on a young campus like CSUMB is that you can’t count on gathering, say, a dozen students to form a traditional lecture/ discussion class in a particular theatre specialty. But one advantage of being new and small, Michelle believes, is that students have the valuable experience of interacting very directly with faculty and with one another. "When someone has come up with a capstone, that excites them," she says, "my challenge is to seek out a faculty member who can guide the independent study and practice that will be needed for that particular project. Or I may try to departmentalize the project. Tell them, ‘You want to do script and directing; you’ve got a classmate here wanting to do design or sound or what have you. Collaborate.’" Capstones can also mean linking students with full-fledged courses at older institutions like Monterey Peninsula College or Hartnell. Or a student’s project may require signing on as an intern with a local arts, media or technology organization.

The World Theatre at CSUMB

The multi-media and experimental nature of CSUMB theatre produced last year’s stage-media play FLATFISH BLUES by Michelle’s colleague, Will Shepherd. She also describes how a student writer/director staged a "site specific" performance of a script he’d written about a mad scientist in a haunted house. To be "site specific" harks back to the work of Polish theatre giant Jerzy Grotowski, who believed that instead of forcing a play into an existing theatre building, the work could be better served by performing it in a space dictated by the script itself. If your story is set in a restaurant - find a real restaurant and do it there, etc.. "Being in a place like Fort Ord you can still find plenty of abandoned buildings. Ian and his cast did the mad scientist play in the old Fort Ord Army jail. . . It was memorable and very scary!"

The capstone process also enables TAT to realize another key goal - the integration of life on campus with life out in the local community. This effort to link "town and gown" is reflected in the choice of works for the 2003 Season of the World Theatre, which will house "Global Wake-Up Call" - a live studio television broadcast spotlighting current world issues and reflecting CSUMB’s multicultural ethos.

Michelle and her department colleagues are also aware that "we live in a video society - where the lift of an eyebrow or a whispered word are all that are needed to make your point on screen." Live theatre, on the other hand, often reveals the fact that American actors may develop the "method mumble," lacking the voice, articulation and projection needed to carry words into far reaches of a big theatre. TAT is trying to meet that challenge with a production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. Focusing on voice projection, the show will also forge an important new link with Pacific Repertory Theatre, whose Founder/Director, Stephen Moorer, will direct a cast that includes not just CSUMB students and faculty, but actors from the local community. "When you’re at this stage," Michelle Riel insists, "you look around and pull wherever there are assets available."