September 16, 2024

Sitzprobe and wandelprobe

Words from the theatre that align to product, design, and tech

I learned new words this weekend!

I was watching Only Murders in the Building, a multi-season murder mystery television show where Selena Gomez, Martin Short, and Steve Martin host a podcast about…murders in their building.

The third season centers around the murder of Paul Rudd, with Meryl Streep joining the cast as an undiscovered talent.

It’s wonderful.

Also—extremely self-referential.

It reminds me of Community, featuring another of the Three Amigos, in how often it refers to itself throughout the storyline, plot, and characters. Throw in some Deadpool callbacks to previous projects, and you have a feeling of the vibe.

…spans around five decades of television shows, films, and actors of specific genres. 😅

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Sitzprobe

During the third season, there’s a moment where the cast of a Broadway musical get together, at the theater, for their first run-through of the play with the orchestra.

Theatre Geek defines sitzprobe as “a music rehearsal where only music is rehearsed and the cast sits and does not work with any blocking.”1

That moment where things start getting real.

I had never heard of this word before, but it’s going into my collection.

Wandelprobe

If you saw these words and thought, “that ain’t English” you’d be correct.

Both are likely German so have Deutsch-ish pronunciations:

• sits-pro-buh, and

• von-dell-pro-buh,2 respectively.

The wandelprobe is when the actors have to do multiple things at the same time. During the sitzprobe you sit. During the wandelprobe, you wandel (walk). It’s the moment of practicing:

• how to move on stage;

• where to be for different lighting cues; and

• singing while walking while remembering places.

They’re not rehearsals

They’re quality control.

They’re done early enough in the production process to figure things out—is something sounding off, what do we need to work on more.

The part of the project where “we still have time to change things.”

The Metaphoric Method

If we use my metaphoric method, it’s exciting how easily this way of working translates into the Tech and Design industries.

We do wireframes, mock-ups, prototypes, testing, staging and testing, then role it out for it’s final production…but then we’re editing on the fly as the orchestra plays on. As people participate.

The wandelprobe best maps to wireframing.

It’s after the information and content architectures are figured out-ish. It’s where you start making the boxes to figure out what goes where, why that makes sense there. Afterwards you start to move with other aspects of the project.

The sitzprobe best maps to prototyping or collaborating with developers

Prototyping is when design meets interaction—whether through real code or animative interactions. It’s where, hopefully, the rhythm of the violin matches the cadence of speech. It’s not just the “is this thing possible” but “how does it feel when it’s in a closer to real environment?”

We’re not so different

I’m sure I’d find more and more shared moments between theatre and product, design, and tech. But: that’s the thing.

From the story of one of my new favorite websites—aligning language from news publications and productions like hed, dek, lede, nutgraf, and prose for development, in the same way of naming font sizes—diamond, pearl, ruby, brevier, bourgeois, pica, paragon, meridian.

When we look into other disciplines and crafts, we can learn and apply those learnings to our own ways of talking about our work.

The cross-pollination of these industries brings about more exciting possibilities and creativity as people come together.

The language we use actively shapes the world we experience.

Words have power—let’s play with them.

I bet we can come up with more accurate, interesting, and diverse ways of talking about things.