Last week I had the privilege to sit down and interview Matthew Kizer. Kizer is the chair of the Music, Theatre, and Dance department at Plymouth State University.
My first questions asked Kizer how he got to where he is now. How he got into theatre, why he decided to pursue it as a career. Or, as he simply put it “his life story.” His interest in theatre started in high school. Kizer was apart of many extracurriculars during that time including ROTC, writing for the school paper, and eventually (sophomore year) started doing theatre with his friend. He said he was in a production of South Pacific and helped out backstage a bit. Then he really enjoyed it and started helping with the sets and acting and it became “something I did” In his senior year he went to see a production of Cats in Chicago (At which point in the interview I got very excited as that’s one of the shows I have recently done and very thoroughly enjoyed performing) and on his ride back he was reflecting on “the scale of that set and the complexity of the lighting” and he said he had this “sort of epiphany” that people were paid to build that set and to put that together and that they do that for a living. However, as he was a senior in high school at this point he had already been accepted to Purdue as a physics major. So, when he went to register he changed to a theatre major with a focus in set design and lighting design. Hooray for theatre!
As we all know and feel the pain from, college is expensive. Sometimes that means you take semesters off to make more money to pay tuition. It ended up taking Kizer 6 years to finish his bachelor's degree, but it paid off. He ended up working part time and doing freelance work/ early designing that most students don't get to do until they’ve completed their undergrad while he was still in his undergrad. At the end of senior year he went to the University Resident Theatre Association and set up a display to just put himself out there to grad schools. He had 11 interviews and got many offers. He then told me during this week this was when he realized that “Oh, maybe I know what I’m doing” He then graduated in 1992 and went to Ohio State University where he got his masters in fine arts degree in 1995.
Now his adventures lead up and down the east coast freelancing wherever he was needed. This landed him a job at one point up here in White River Junction where he was the Technical Director. While he was doing that he met a women named Allison Ford, a set designer who worked out of Concord, NH and her husband John McQue who was a movie carp. Now, she was overbooked with shows so she asked Kizer to be her assistant for a few months. He had previously had a few other job offers but they ended up falling through so he decided to go work for her. Now she was the resident designer at Plymouth State College (not a university yet!) One of the shows he worked on was a large production called The Welfont written by a playwright named Paul Mroczka. This was a large production to be put up in Exeter, NH and he designed the projections for that show. This is a big deal. Projections at this time are still 35mm slide film and not anything close to what we have today. This is the start of his major projections work, more on that later.
After a while he ended up jumping around the country again for work until he ended up at Kearsarge Arts Theatre with Trish Lindberg. Then he got a call from Allison informing him that she was leaving PSC to work in Iowa so he should maybe come apply. “So I did!” So they brought in three people, none of which were Kizer, and did not like any of them. And he happened to be in the area, and Paul, Bob, Joan, and Trish all knew him and said hey, let’s bring him in! And they did. They all liked him but unfortunately he did not meet all of their criteria for the position, so they decided to rewrite the position as an interim faculty member and hired him on for one year. Fun fact of Plymouth’s history, at the time there were only two theatre positions, Paul’s and this one that they created. Then he designed the shows that year and designed the Educational Theatre Collaborative (ETC) show that year as well. Then they brought him in again for a new interview to have him become a tenure track and be assistant faculty. Since then this has become his base of operations and he had continued to freelance while working here at PSU.
Now I was curious about the projections because Kizer is very well known for his skill with projections, “the man of projections!” as I referred to him, to which he rolled his eyes but then ended up agreeing with me because Kizer has been doing projections for shows for longer than anyone else. So, his modesty aside, “I dug it” He started working on them in grad school, but at this time 35mm slide projectors were the norm. But even then there were some high end moving light fixtures, which in 1994 his graduate school had installed into one of their spaces and they learned how to program them. And he thought these were really cool however, he told me that same year he did a presentation in one of his classes on how a video projector could be made to do the exact same thing, it just wasn't as bright at the time. Kizer even put together a mini demonstration to show this, and the projector was silent compared to the tele beams (the moving light fixtures) that were very loud and made a lot of mechanical noises. After this he continued to research projectors and how we could use them to light theatrical performances. But at the time the technology wasn't here yet. The lights just weren't quite bright enough. A few years later (1997), after tracking the technology and it's improvement, Kizer was able to create a whole video wall onstage using a combination of slide projectors and video projectors. Then two years later he something he hadn't seen be done in theatre yet, and that was to use just data projectors for theatre. "I installed two video projectors there and had to bring desktop computers (we didn't have laptops) one for each projector, in the wings sitting side by side and did projections there." It turns out they took this show down to Washington D.C. and he had to explain everything to the Technical Directors down there because they did not understand what they were seeing and didn't think it was possible because they wouldn't be able to accommodate those projections. The projectors were placed behind the first boarder, not being projected from the back of the house- this concept was entirely new and they didn't understand until Kizer fully explained and they ended up bringing the whole system down and ran the show successfully. He explained everything of how he adjusted everything and did the computer mapping which was very complicated at the time, and if I was able to explain it all to you here I would but this was amazing for its time and Kizer is a genius, despite his modesty about his work on this subject.
During my interview I also questioned Kizer a bit on work he does with other disciplines *cough cough interdisciplinary studies* however I knew going into this that part of why he fit so well for department chair at this time was because he is very involved with the new clusters system that the school is working on implementing from our department’s point of view. So I asked him has he worked on any projects between disciplines, and Kizer’s response was “Well everything I do is between disciplines.” Then we went on to say this, “I am the sole visual artist in the performing arts here...I’m the person that does autocad and photoshop, camtasia studios, and does video and projections and lighting and I paint things. I’ve always had more in common with the people over in D&M and art than I do in this department” But he went on to add that everything we do is collaborative, which is entirely true. Music, theatre, and dance are three separate curriculums. We are already a mini cluster and as students we rarely share professors, we just are all under one roof. “Most people will get a music degree and never take a theatre course."After this I tried to find out any more cluster information and interdisciplinary work Kizer has worked on but as he put it, "Its hard for me because when we talk about cluster projects and interdisciplinary as something innovative and new I get stuck because its old stuff."
“Everything we do here is interdisciplinary”
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