Stephen Mohring Since I started designing in 1998, I have built 21 sets for Ten Thousand Things. I have held many other jobs during that past near-decade (from housepainter to furniture-builder), and I currently support myself by teaching sculpture and woodworking at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. Some of my work is online at www.mohring.us. There you can find this statement: As a sculptor and designer I build site-specific installations for exhibition and dramatic sets for a critically acclaimed theater company that stages classic and contemporary plays for non-traditional audiences. In the studio and in performance, I am exploring new ways in which the two genres might complement, argue with, and enliven each other; how sculpture and sets, in their provocation of space, perspective, and narration, are capable of creating novel conditions for cultural transformation; and how the elements of materials, dimension, lighting, and various technologies might find unorthodox applications in altered sculptural and theatrical contexts. All of which is true, except for the 'sculptor and designer' part. This has over the years become Designer (and sculptor) both in terms of my output, and development. It is an interesting and ongoing transformation - in truth I don't see it as a bipolar switch, but rather a reassessment of what medium is the most exciting, and how I can most actively participate in it. For some time now my sets have become sculptural and my sculptures theatrical - the two creative processes feeding each other in ways I am only beginning to understand. Ten Thousand Things has given me the gifts of an open and receptive audience, and tremendous physical limitations on what I can build due to the parameters of our staging. While initially daunting, this has been a wondrously liberating experience. Here I can focus on the true nature of theater, not verisimilitude, but the calling out of the imagination, of make believe. Together with the audience, the actors get to pretend for a short while, and my sets hopefully focus that energy, and help it along. My sets aren't miraculous worlds or overwhelming feats of material manipulation - they can't be - I don't think that would work. The actors are the stage hands. We have no lights, no traps, no wings. I can't fool the audience, I have to beg them - well not beg exactly - ask, entreat...'Wouldn't it be great if this were the moon, this a door, this a boat? What then?' The simplicity, perhaps even audacity, of the request strengthens the audience's commitment to the world the actors create - and we all become part of that world, that experience, the play, together.