Faculty Profile

A day at the circus (with a remote-controlled glove)

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 21:31:32 +0000

A day at the circus (with a remote-controlled glove) Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/31/2023 - 15:31

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder theater instructor Jordan Feeler learned how to troubleshoot sparkly homages to Michael Jackson and illuminated magician props while working with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas

A memorable day in Jordan Feeler’s career as a props technician and props maintenance lead for Cirque Du Soleil: Michael Jackson ONE was when he approached the staff at a machine shop in Las Vegas.

The bulk of the shop’s business was producing parts for the aerospace industry, but Feeler figured it couldn’t hurt to ask: “Hey, I designed this thing to make a remote-controlled, sparkly, sequined Michael Jackson glove drive around a stage. Can you machine parts for it?”

Fortunately, they said yes and were excited about the challenge, and Feeler got a much-improved mobile glove. It was a memorable but by no means extraordinary day in props for one of the most well-known shows in not only Las Vegas, but worldwide thanks to touring productions.

At the top of the page: Cirque du Soleil: Kooza, which is in Denver until Aug. 13, includes a wide variety of props and performances. Above: Jordan Feeler, an instructor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, gained broad experience in props while working with Cirque du Soleil: Michael Jackson ONE in Las Vegas.

Feeler, an instructor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance, teaches courses in props, hand drafting, advanced woodworking, stage machinery and others—skills that he honed over six years with Cirque du Soleil and more than 15 years in theatrical production.

The touring Cirque du Soleil: Kooza is at Denver’s Ball Arena through Aug. 13, and while certain props needs vary between touring and residency shows, like Michael Jackson ONE in Las Vegas, there are many fundamental similarities: The props must be sturdy and safe, they must meet performers’ needs, they must hew to the show’s initial designs, and they must be eye-catching but not distracting from the performance as a whole.

We recently spoke with Feeler about the world of props for a show as well-known and spectacular as Cirque du Soleil.

How did you get into props?

Feeler: I was never really interested in being onstage as a performer, but I always loved the technical aspects of theater—how it involves creativity and design and engineering skills, and then really practical things like sewing and carpentry.

So, I studied technical direction at Webster University Conservatory of Theatre Arts and kind of hopped around doing different jobs after I graduated. I was working as a scenic painter in St. Louis and then in Sacramento, and I figured I was already out that way, I might as well pop down to Las Vegas. I’d tried applying online, but I heard it was a lot easier to get your foot in the door if you’re actually there, so I just moved to Las Vegas and applied everywhere.

At one point, there were something like seven Cirque du Soleil shows in Vegas, so I applied to pretty much all of them and got hired on to Michael Jackson ONE in February 2013 before it opened in June that year.

Props is one of many teams in Cirque du Soleil; what was your team’s role as the show prepared to open?

Feeler: To start with, the director and directing team basically envisions the entire show—what they want it to look like, and they started at least a year in advance of when I came on. They went through and storyboarded the show, then different design teams, which were all based out of Montreal, started designing everything from props to costumes to rigging and lighting.

There was a props design team of three or four specialists who were heading that design work up and prototyping all the props, and then our Las Vegas props crew of about 10. The props design team were prototyping by October 2012, working with artists there in Montreal to figure out the needs of the performers, and then things began coming our way, a lot that weren’t finished.

For Michael Jackson ONE, there were a ton of props to build. There was a bench that had to light up and have a performer inside of it for some magic acts, there was a little remote-control car, there was a Michael Jackson sparkly glove that had to drive around stage and have its wrist lift and fingers actuate. It was so creative, things I’d never worked on before.

How are performers’ needs incorporated into prop design and construction?

Feeler: When you’re working with performers of that caliber—artists from all over the world who are so amazing at what they do—it’s so important to always be communicating with them to make sure that everything is just right for them. There was a magician in the show, and just the slightest thing would throw their performance off, so we were always checking in and making sure the props were doing exactly what they needed, making sure things were safe.

We were constantly getting input from not only performers, but other departments—rigging and lighting, carpentry, costumes. It’s all completely intertwined because you also have to be thinking that it needs to look seamless to the audience.

How did working in props with Cirque du Soleil differ from your previous theater work?

Feeler: I think probably the biggest difference was the depth we could get into and the time we had. For what we would call “normal” theater, the tech process can be as short as two days—you do a few rehearsals and within a week the show is up. In that situation, in props, you have to be so fast—you’re constantly thinking on the fly, just immediately problem-solving and sometimes with Band-Aid fixes. With Cirque du Soleil, that process happened over months, and then there was a month-long preview period before the show officially opened.

But there are certain similarities in props that you see across all theater. Where something like rigging is really specialized and more aligns with engineering and certain, specific skills, props is so broad. There’s sewing, painting, molding and casting, metalwork, electronics, there are all these different things, and you acquire skills in all of them as you go along.

Feeler worked with Cirque du Soleil: Michael Jackson ONE from the time before it opened in 2013 until 2019.

The nice thing about Cirque du Soleil was there were specialists in pretty much everything, so I could go to a lighting specialist and say, “I want to do this,” rather than having to figure it out myself. It’s pretty common in the industry to have that interdepartmental collaboration, but in Cirque it’s magnified by 10.

Another thing that was nice about Cirque du Soleil was time was certainly on our side. We had months to develop and test things, we had a lot of time to think things through. We were able to create a binder full of contingency plans where we asked, “If this happens, how do we respond?” We had time to sit down and play out every little distinct scenario that could go wrong.

When I made the shift to props maintenance, there was even more opportunity to go through and play with things and experiment and replicate what was going wrong when something happened. The crew would give us notes from the previous night’s show, and then we could make the adjustments and changes, or in some cases redesign a prop entirely and make it more functional. With a show like Michael Jackson ONE, which just hit its 10-year anniversary in Las Vegas, we were thinking about what would make the props more durable and consistent with the original designs.

Once the show opened, then we focused on maintaining functionality and appearance while incorporating notes from performers and stage managers. That became the fun part. For example, there was this mechanical hand, this Michael Jackson glove, that was designed and built by a brilliant engineer. It has so much going on in such a small package, but it kept malfunctioning where it would be driving down and then spinning out, which wasn’t supposed to happen. We weren’t sure what was going on, but I was able to figure out that the frame was sort of tweaked and if we could go through and reinforce frame, that would fix it.

So, during what we call darks, which is a week out of year when they shut the show down and everyone does maintenance, my boss was like, “Hey, you’re going to redesign this.” So, I did, and then found a machine shop that mostly made aerospace parts, but they were excited to do it. Who doesn’t want to make weird stuff for the circus?

What advice do you give students interested in pursuing a theater career in props?

Feeler: One of the most important things I can tell students is to approach people, ask questions and then listen. If you’re a decent person and you’re a hard worker, if you have some skills, you’ll find work and you can make a good living.

With my students, it seems that everybody wants to learn how to weld, there are a lot who enjoy carpentry and painting, and the more tools you have in your tool bag, the more marketable you are in this industry. I tell them to always be learning new skills.

I mean, I’m horrible at sewing but I can do it if I have to. I spend way too much time on YouTube just learning about how things are made, which is a really fun aspect of this field—it’s challenging, but it’s something new every day. There’s not really a book that can tell me how to make an 8-foot-tall Poseidon head that moves and its eyes blink. That’s something I just had to figure out.

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CU Boulder theater instructor Jordan Feeler learned how to troubleshoot sparkly homages to Michael Jackson and illuminated magician props while working with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.

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Meet CU Boulder’s Viking-cowboy-scholar

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 16:15:40 +0000

Meet CU Boulder’s Viking-cowboy-scholar Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/14/2018 - 09:15

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Jackson Crawford’s unique academic, YouTube worlds collide, with felicitous results

When Jackson Crawford came to the University of Colorado Boulder in 2017 to take up the reins as coordinator of the Nordic Program in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, it felt like a homecoming in many ways.

First, having spent much of his childhood living in the mountains at the upper end of nearby Clear Creek Canyon, teaching at CU Boulder was “the closest I could ever get to home,” says Crawford, 33.

Jackson Crawford, above with pickaxe and pickup, and at the top of the page on his YouTube channel.

On top of that, Boulder quickly proved more welcoming of Crawford’s unique personal style, academic approach and external activities than the communities at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA, his two previous postings. Boulder isn’t exactly the Wild West, but it’s not hard to see why it suits Crawford.

After all, he’s a competitive pistol shooter who spends much of his free time roaming the wilds of Wyoming. And he has thousands of followers on YouTube, where he regales followers with tales of Nordic heroes in a dulcet baritone (and sometimes, grave Old Norse that sounds like the language of the gods) while wearing a cowboy hat and boots against stunning Western backdrops. Of late, he’s expanded his repertoire to include other topics that interest him, whether it’s ravens, his favorite poet, Robinson Jeffers, or advice on publishing a book.

Though he claims no significant Scandinavian ancestry himself, Jackson Crawford is surely the world’s top cowboy-Viking-academic.

As a teenager, Crawford lived on his grandparents’ land near Blackhawk, where his grandfather “nurtured in me this deep love of the West, as a geography and a way of life.”

His fascination with Old Norse sagas began in eighth grade, when he read the Hávamál—which translates roughly to “Words of the High One” or “Words of the One-Eyed,” referring to the Norse god Odin—which Crawford describes a “Norse equivalent of the Book of Proverbs.”

Not exactly common fare for the average American middle schooler.

“I guess I was a pretty weird kid,” Crawford says. “We moved around a lot. I wasn’t too popular, a little socially awkward. I was a big reader. I played Dungeons & Dragons.”

He earned a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Georgia and a PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing on Scandinavian languages, especially Old Norse.

His first two books, The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (Hackett, 2015) and The Saga of the Volsungs with the Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok (Hackett, 2017) are translations of 800-year-old Icelandic sagas from Old Norse.

“I was interested in them as the forgotten sisters of English. They were very close, then developed differently for about a thousand years,” he says. “And Old Norse certainly provides the most interesting stuff to read.”

Viking cultures and stories of the wild west both portray self-reliance, a certain grit and a fatalistic sense of humor."

There may be considerable distance—in time, geography and style—between ancient Iceland and the American West, but Crawford detects many cultural parallels.

“Viking cultures and stories of the wild west both portray self-reliance, a certain grit and a fatalistic sense of humor,” he says.

Crawford has even written and created videos about what he calls, “The Cowboy Hávamál,” a condensation of the first part of the Old Norse text rendered in a Western American dialect.

“The voice is that of my grandfather,” he writes, “sad with wisdom and cynical with experience, which I have always heard when reading this poem in the original.”

Crawford decided to start the YouTube channel two years ago as a way to supplement his adjunct academic’s income while using his skills to educate the public. Despite the popularity of Viking and Norse culture, much of the information he found online was poorly sourced or simply wrong. His shot his first videos in Berkeley in front of a whiteboard, but soon discovered that his occasional ventures outside drew a larger audience.

“When I moved back to the Rockies, I moved them all outside. That’s been a big plus. My social media life gives me a good excuse to go out to all my favorite places in the mountains,” he says, especially the Wind River and Bighorn ranges of Wyoming and the central Colorado Rockies, which swallow the sun each evening.

Such an esoteric mashup of Nordic nerd-ism and rugged Western ideals doesn’t exactly scream “mass audience.” Yet the YouTube channel Crawford created two years ago now boasts 67,000 subscribers and he has cultivated more than 900 Patreon supporters.

His videos have become a major channel for public service and outreach, but many of his California colleagues seemed to disdain his online avocation.

“Some of my peers looked down on (the YouTube work) because it wasn’t in the ivory tower,” Crawford says. “The department here (at CU Boulder) is much more interested. Both department chairs have actively promoted it and speak of it highly.”

Of course, he doesn’t get to spend all his time making videos. Crawford teaches a full load and continues to work on his research. He recently recorded an audio edition of his first book and his next two books, translations of The Saga of Hrolf Kraki with the Saga of Hervor and Heidrek and The Prose Edda, are slated for publication.

And despite the naysayers, it turns out his seemingly disparate worlds—academic and YouTube—have begun to cross-pollinate. YouTube is largely responsible for the fact that his second book has already gone through six printings and put his translation of the Poetic Edda atop Amazon’s European history bestseller list.

“I’m reaching a lot more people through YouTube than I would otherwise,” he says. “Any given video I make is probably seen by more people than anything I’ve ever published, and some of them are buying the books.”

[video:https://youtu.be/-g7MWQRuNjk]

He’s a competitive pistol shooter who spends much of his free time roaming the wilds of Wyoming. And he has thousands of followers on YouTube, where he regales followers with tales of Nordic heroes in a dulcet baritone.

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