A "Fabularis" Leadership Experience
(Belle Frahm, pictured far right above)
It’s a Thursday night, and you and your friends meet up at the brand-new BYU West Campus. As you approach the lobby of the Studio Theatre, photos and sketches of beautiful fashion designs, bits of colorful fabric, and snippets about long-dead mythology catch your eye in the display case. Your friend grabs a program for “Fabularis: Characters of Myth and Legend.” You don’t know it, but you are immersed in Belle Frahm’s Honors Leadership Development Experience (LDE).
Belle Frahm is a senior majoring in Theatre Arts Studies with an emphasis in dramaturgy, and a History minor. You might have paused at the word “dramaturgy.” Belle is used to explaining her major: “No one really knows what that is—even some people in the theater world.” Part of the challenge is that dramaturgy “can kind of be hard to define, because it can look different for any project or production that you're working on.”
In practice, dramaturgy is a little easier to understand. If you read about the historical context of a play in a program, that was compiled by a dramaturg. You may join a post-show Q&A hosted by the production’s dramaturgs as well. Dramaturgs might help the playwright make contextual decisions, the production team decide how to represent an element onstage, or the actors understand their roles.
“We're trained to ARQ, or ‘ask the right questions,’” Belle said. The performance shifts closer to reality because of dramaturgs.
Cue Belle’s LDE. She chose a dramaturgy project, but not just any production. “I was a dramaturg—one of multiple dramaturgs—on a collaborative fashion show project,” Belle said.
The show was hosted by the Theater and Media Arts (TMA) department in November 2022. TMA had just moved to West Campus and wanted to give its design students a chance to create in a new space—many of the students had missed the chance to design in the old HFAC building. They also wanted to challenge the students, so they came up with the idea of a mythological themed fashion show.
“That's when we were brought in as dramaturgs,” Belle said—and they needed an interdisciplinary team to make the vision a reality. “It was a collaboration between design and dramaturgy as well as other areas within the theater department, like stage management… and theater, and religious and cultural history.”
Although Belle had done dramaturgy work before (on BYU’s Matilda the Musical, for example), aspects of the fashion show were brand new. “The idea of collaborating with so many students and the volume was definitely a new challenge for me.”
As a dramaturg, Belle was paired with three or four student fashion designers. She connected them with resources to accurately represent myths in their designs. She and other dramaturgs also worked with the stage manager professor to invent the flow of the fashion show: “You started at the earth level, then went down to a hell level, and then ended up in a heavenly level.”
Working with an interdisciplinary team was both a strength and a challenge of the project. At one point, Belle’s team debriefed the design team on some stage management decisions. “All the designers were like, ‘Are you joking?’” The team backtracked after they saw that “we had made a lot of decisions without even realizing what kind of strain that would put on our partners.”
“When you are collaborating with other people, especially other people who might think differently than you or have different priorities than you, communicating with them is vital,” Belle said. “That's something that the Honors Program teaches really well: being able to think from someone else's perspective and maintaining those courteous connections in order to move forward.”
Belle had her proud moments as well. Near the end of the project, Belle’s professor, Shelley Graham, was stressed about formatting the program—it was “out of our normal scope. [Usually] I would just submit it to a designer for a playbill.”
“I kind of took it upon myself [to] work on it,” Belle said. The fashion show was a collaborative effort, but it was meaningful when one person took the lead on a “nitty gritty moment right at the end” to help out the team.
“Something that is kind of interesting about… interdisciplinary connections in general, is a lot of it can be really broad and conceptual at the beginning,” Belle said. “Then when you get closer to a project due date, it’s like, ‘oh my gosh, okay, this needs to be printed.’ And ‘this needs to be hung up.’ And ‘do I have tape?’”
The lobby display was another final detail. Painstakingly created by the dramaturgs, it had 37 different fashion looks featured, with historical and regional context and a matching piece of fabric for each one. Putting it up was a challenge, though “because of complications with this space until two days before. That was another hours-long thing.”
When it came to performance day, the fashion show was a hit. “We were only doing two showings, but then on the last one, the department added a midnight or 10 pm showing—and it was sold out!”
Belle loved her LDE. “It was just such a cool product, and it was cool to see how it was only possible with everyone working together. I was able to contribute just a small thing to this really awesome creation.” After she graduates in June, Belle’s goal is to continue her dramaturgy work in the community.