Sound designer G Clausen shares how he is coping with COVID-19 closings in this series, "When the Lights Went Out," where theatrical designers discuss what they are doing these days.
Before G Clausen started designing sound for the theater, he was, and still is, a studio sound engineer and music producer. He also teaches at the University of North Carolina School for the Arts. He’s continued to do both—with adjustments. These days, he teaches artists to record themselves and share files on Dropbox, and he mixes the files created by different musicians on different instruments.
“The show I was working on at Gilford College got canceled, but they still paid everyone, so that was good,” he says. There were other cancellations: a show in Durham and two upcoming shows at the Pyramid Theatre Company. The Pyramid, though, is producing a short film instead, and Clausen is designing sound for it.
Last summer, he developed a business plan and a curriculum for a nonprofit sound school, an after-school school in Charlotte, NC, where he hopes to get students of color interested in sound. He’s using this time to get the word out and start to raise funds. He dreams of a full campus with two classrooms, two studios, and a black box theater, where students can spend a month on each basic sound skill—mixing one month, reinforcement another. “It’s a big dream, but if I speak it, I have a better chance of making it happen,” he says.
Thursday evenings, he enjoys a happy hour with friends, virtually. He had never used Zoom or Facetime—now he depends on these for his work and social life.
Clausen loves to cook and has always avoided eating out, except when he’s pressed for time during techs. Now he’s spending more time in the kitchen, preparing more complex dishes. He bakes bread and tried his hand at escovitch fish, his favorite Jamaican dish.
He misses being able to record artists in person and has concerns about the future of theater. With fewer seats and ticket sales, how do you grow a theater? Still, he sees this period “as a huge opportunity more than a hinderance. There are a lot of things that need to be examined. We need to find out if some of the theatrical culture is necessary,” Clausen says, noting there are positive attitude changes toward race and gender today. “We have an opportunity to see into the future and think about what we want that to be, and we have the time to think about it.”