By BRIGID PARKER
Can you say that you’ve built a new world on a sheet of white printer paper? No? Sucks to be you! After attending this weekend’s Visual Worldbuilding Workshop with Tamara Ketabgian’s community connections class, Science Fiction and Speculative Writing: Worldbuilding and Ursula LeGuin, I can proudly say that I have.
On Saturday, November 9, members of campus and the Beloit community were invited to join Tamara’s class at the Beloit Public Library in a hands-on workshop, exploring how other worlds can be imagined and even brought to life on stage.
This course on LeGuin is new this semester, and celebrates not only LeGuin’s award winning utopian novel, The Dispossessed, but also her time spent in Beloit as the college’s Mackey Chair in 1992. The course is unique in that it is not only class, but also an initiative to bring our college community closer and the greater Beloit community together. To drive this goal forward, members of the course have hosted numerous events open to the public, such as roundtable discussions and other workshops involving worldbuilding and creative writing. At the heart of this course lies the belief that reading, writing and imagining new worlds can bring our communities closer together, and this proved true this past Saturday; members of Tamara’s class were joined by members of the college and community of all ages, creating a space for connection amongst individuals who may not otherwise interact.
The first part of the workshop took place in the form of a lecture and visual presentation from Shelbi Wilkin, professor of costume design and manager of Beloit college’s costume shop. Shelbi detailed her experience working as the costume designer for the premier stage production of The Left Hand of Darkness, another LeGuin novel taking place in the same universe as The Dispossessed. She discussed the difficulty of creating costumes for a world that had not yet been visualized on stage, saying she basically had to create things that did not yet exist on earth. Additionally, the story takes place in a genderless world, leaving Shelbi to figure out how an androgynous society might look.
Using photo examples from the production of The Left Hand of Darkness that she worked on, Shelbi illustrated how she used different factors of costume design to bring LeGuin’s ideas and characters to life, such as using flowing, wide-legged pants that could look like skirt or pants depending on an actors stance, using layering to change the silhouette of an actor, and taking inspiration from fashion within our own world, researching communities that live in acclimate similar to what LeGuin describes for her settings.
In the second part of the workshop, participants were left to try their hand at worldbuilding. We first completed a brainstorming worksheet, focusing on either The Dispossessed or another world of our choosing, weighing the different factors that might change how people in our world dress, such as climate conditions, resources and social attitudes. Using fabric scraps and magazine clippings, we visualized our worlds through different textures, color schemes, layering techniques, and more.
At the end of the event, everyone who attended was able to leave with a lovely, multimedia collage showing different parts of their world, from climate to fashion to infrastructure. This workshop proves that imagination and creativity really can bring people together, even if they are worlds apart (tee hee). If you missed this workshop, don’t fret! On November 19th from 7-8:30pm, Tamara’s class will be unveiling their exhibit “Ursula LeGuin at Beloit” in the Morse Library. The exhibition is a collaborative effort between Beloit College and high school students and will feature archival oral history regarding LeGuin’s writing and her connection to the Beloit community.
Featured Image: LeGuin at Beloit College
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