Theatre set rooves
Class: Year 9
School: Takapuna Grammar School
Teacher: Demelza Cusens
Category: Teaching strategy
Faced with teaching Soft Materials in a Hard Materials workroom, Technology teacher Demelza Cusens chose to see it as a challenge rather than problem. "I thought it was a perfect opportunity to change people's perceptions about Soft Materials and so I took it from the textiles manipulation standpoint."
Timetable changes meant Demelza would only see her Year 9 classes for five one-hour periods over ten days, so she also needed a context that would allow her students to complete their work within this time frame. She decided each class would work on a different project based on experimentation with natural dyes: developing house rooves for a stage set and creating a booklet resource.
Demelza was keen to introduce her students to natural dyeing techniques, having attended a week-long course run by India Flint; see the Techlink Resource Review on India Flint's book Eco Colour: Botanical dyes for beautiful textiles. Head of Drama Bruce de Grut's request that she help as set designer for the school production Fiddler on the Roof provided an opportunity to incorporate this into her teaching. Bruce wanted a minimal set design, something that was largely conceptual, says Demelza, to challenge people's views about a well-known and very traditional show.
They discussed various concepts and decided to construct house rooves, made of fabric, to represent the village. These "floating rooves" would be lowered and raised depending on whether the characters were in or out of town. Inspired by the figurative style of artist Amy Cutler, Demelza showed examples of Cutler's work to the students and based the rooves on her illustrations of old-style roofing shingles.
The same brief (PDF, 15kb) was given to both classes, with one class developing an outcome for Fiddler on the Roof while the other provided research to assist future technologists with botanical dyeing. "I thought, we'll experiment and surprise ourselves as we go. I like to push the idea that the teacher doesn't know everything and shouldn't have to know everything; that we can learn together."
The production class researched images of shingles and drew some "really rough and quick" ones as they considered the 'look' they wanted to achieve. Students were given small pieces of calico for a practice session in hand-sewing and told to sew whatever they liked (but not shingles) as a response to their shingle drawings, "and I got some weird, interesting stuff!" They also trialled hand-sewing three different types of silk – this allowed Demelza to discuss how some fabrics might be harder to sew if they're slippery or stretchy, and to talk about the importance of material selection in ensuring an object is fit for purpose. After discussing the properties of silk, Demelza talked to the class about which sorts of fabric can be coloured with natural dyes and why, explaining about acids, bases, and proteins.
The students gathered plant materials but were limited to the garden outside the classroom. Demelza explains she provided much of the material, to set the students up, and due to lack of time and proper facilities the unit had to be quite structured. However, while she knew some plants, such as the eucalyptus, would give a good colour, Demelza didn't know the properties of all of them. She points out there are many variables when using natural dyes, but the students were very supportive in trying things out and appreciating the results of their experiments. Some plants produced immediate, striking colours while others were so subtle that students would say "there's nothing there". Subsequent discussions, when Demelza pointed out where the colours had taken, helped them understand that just because a result wasn't striking didn't mean it wasn't valid. She pushed them to go beyond "I don't like that " to explain why they didn't like an effect. "I'd tell them if you know why you don't like something, especially if you're a designer, then you can deliberately use or avoid a technique. "
As most of their lesson time was spent on practical work, students were expected to do their research, planning, reflection and evaluation at home.
The students trialled dyeing different fabrics, to observe how the same dye produced different results, but mostly used silk because protein-based fabric takes dye much better. "We talked about the properties: 'What does it feel like?', 'What does it smell like?', and 'What's the difference between these silks?' Some said 'Oh, it's just fabric' but by getting an understanding that there are many different types of silk and they all look different, it starts them thinking about how all fabrics have different properties and attributes".
The students also experimented with different pre- and post-mordants and cooked some dyes. "Half of it I didn't know, and that was the point of it. I told them 'We don't know what's going to happen, but when it does happen we need to be confident that we can make good decisions as a result of what we've got'".
Demelza also prepared some samples at home, using mordants such as persimmon and soy milk, to share with her students. She ruefully notes that the students didn't even want to enter the classroom after she forgot to remove an egg mixture one weekend! "I asked them how we'd rescue the fabric and they thought I was crazy, but this was an issue and we talked about how we had to deal with it. "
"We discussed how you won't always get a perfect colour with synthetic dyes – noting the outcomes from trialling natural substances helps others who want to know what could happen."
The students also tried a variety of dyeing techniques, from traditional methods, such as shibori, to trialling other ideas such as chopping up pieces of wood (left over from Hard Materials projects), rolling them up tightly in fabric and tying the bundle. Sometimes the colours were muted because there wasn't time to immerse the fabric in the dye bath for very long, and the students sometimes found mould growing when they came back to the classroom, so more drying lines had to be rigged up.
The students had conducted their first trials individually, then a system was set up so that some did harvesting, rolling, wrapping, cleaning, etc. "It really linked to the Key Competencies – managing self, aiding and contributing – and they got really good at it".
Synthetic dyes were also used, to obtain a bright blue for some of the rooves which would represent the rooves of the Russian Orthodox Church. Each student dyed their own 'shingle' strips and, as some were very different to others, they laid them all out to decide which would look better on which roof. The students sewed their shingles together and they were put into wooden frames which, given the time constraint, Demelza had constructed. The only panic was when the students realised that there weren't enough brown shingles, but this was quickly resolved by dyeing extra strips using tea bags.
Dyeing 30m pieces of calico was more difficult and, Demelza says, wasn't as effective as it could have been because they really needed industrial equipment. These pieces were draped over the balcony to dry and plaited together for a dance sequence, in which the actors bound up the plaits, only to unbind them in the final scene. "Fiddler on the Roof is very much about the binding of families and the community, and the unwinding of a community as well."
The set was well received by the audience and the client was pleased with how it looked. The rooves weren't just put away afterwards but were displayed later that year, along with other work from Demelza's classes, at the Devonport art gallery The Depot, and then put on display in the school's Technology centre.
The second class experimented with different dyes and techniques and used their research notes (PDF, 7kb) to compile a book so that anyone else wanting to use those processes would know the results. Demelza notes that she would have liked to build more into the unit, such as ecological information, Māori pronunciation and sustainable harvesting, and if there had been more time might have done some bookbinding focussed on paper engineering.
When asked if those students were disappointed that they weren't involved in the production, Demelza says they were and notes it's a valuable lesson that Soft Materials Technology isn't about "everyone making a hat". She adds the success of a unit often depends on how the teacher sells it to the students, "You can dress almost anything up and get excited, and the kids will get excited too. " The students particularly enjoyed the variability in the unit – there was a lot of experimentation and nobody (including their teacher) knew exactly what the results would be.
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