Cameron Anderson

CAMERON ANDERSON SCENIC DESIGNER

Because I came to set design at the end of college, I approached every step of my journey with an open mind about what things could be, as I didn’t understand the process through its limitations. This is a mindset that many artists and innovators try to inhabit. This allows me to approach plays and operas as works of art and not as theatrical problems to be solved. I started my career working at large opera houses, and this openness enabled me to take on massive stages with my own perspective built from an artist’s mind. I was fortunate in a way to be able to approach everything with a purity and freshness and without being afraid of asking why we couldn’t do the ambitious thing. I didn’t know what had been done before, and my mind went to “why not?” I entered into these and similar moments with curiosity and without expectation for what things should or needed to be.

I remember an undergraduate theater professor at Wesleyan, the late great William Ward, encouraging me to go sit in the theater and look at the stage. I had never looked at a stage as a space I could fill. For the first show I designed, I made something abstract and sculptural. It wasn’t an intellectual choice to lean into abstraction. Instead, it was a visceral response to the ideas of the play. If I had taken many theater classes and understood how my work fit into the arc of theater tradition, I might have missed the urge to make something that was coming purely from the gut. The possibility and openness of that early experience remains a touchstone.
(Cameron Anderson)