Black Box Theatre Comes to SIGCSE

A blog posting contributed by Steve Wolfman, Program Co-Chair:


My college roommate lured me into the theatre back in freshman year at Duke to lay bricks for a production of Studs Terkel's "Working".

Wob — that's the roommate — was the show's technical director. "Working" was playing in a small "black box" theatre. The term may not be familiar, but it's largely self-explanatory. The theatre is a big black box, and amazingly flexible. Minimal catwalks above allow for lighting, and the seats are lightweight and movable. For this presentation, the audience sat on risers along two sides of the box facing a stepped "pyramid" stage rising to a peak in the corner.

For a blue-collar city feel, every vertical face on the set was rendered as brick: first grey paint, then thousands of pieces of tape in a brickly pattern, then red paint, and finally strip the tape. Wob was going crazy laying tape, and I was drafted to help.

It was fabulous. When the play's brick mason proudly displays his work with the line Those bricks are mine, I leaned over to my girlfriend (now wife) and whispered that they were mine.

In the subsequent years, I watched Wob and others transform that theatre into dozens of different stages, even one that welded iron steps to the catwalks and sent the show up into three dimensions.

Like traditional theatres, conferences can be brilliant and inspiring, but they can also be staid in their format. Papers, panels, posters, workshops, and BoFs are an impressive array of choices, but they can only take us so far. This year's introduction of a video exhibition just emphasizes how much more there might be out there, if only we had the conference equivalent of a black box theatre.

And, that's just what special sessions are meant to be. A special session is a 75 minute hole in the conference: four walls, some chairs, a bit of A/V, and your vision for how to engage in CS education with your colleagues: borrow from other conferences ("CHI fringe", anyone?), follow pop culture ("SIGCSE Idol"?), or maybe invent something brand new.

However you do it, propose something great for a SIGCSE special session this year.