The Dragon Singer

The playbill opens on a dragon. In the surviving record of Stages of Imagination, the dragon pages are the most dressed sheets in the volume: a dragon head rendered in green and gold, a colour poster in flat theatre inks, a short video file named for a dragging tail. The production belonged to the company's set of original character-education musicals, the kind written to be performed by professional adult actors in front of gymnasiums full of Pre-K to fifth-grade children. Touring productions like this one lived the same life as a marquee file of touring shows: announced in a season brochure, rehearsed in a borrowed room, loaded into a van, played to a cafetorium, and reviewed afterwards by the teachers who booked it.

What the sheet keeps

The record keeps the dragon in several weights of paper. There is the small headshot-style image the company used as a button, a larger colour drawing used on the CD page, and a Windows Media file whose name translates roughly as the dragon dragging itself across a stage. Each version of the picture was made for a different door into the site: the CD shelf, the song clips, the video clips. The same creature kept showing up wherever the company wanted a child's attention first.

The play's own page survives under two addresses, the long hyphenated one from the rebuilt site and the short fused one from the older pages. Both land here. The sheet also holds the song file the company attached to the production, a RealAudio track meant to play inside a school library's media player.

The story it was built to tell

The company's playbills were written around character lessons, and the dragon production carried the company's signature theme: a character who looks alarming and turns out to need understanding. The material was aimed at children who were still deciding whether the strange kid at the next desk was a monster or a friend. The dragon made that question safe to laugh at.

The dragon's file is thicker than most because the company liked the creature enough to put it on the cover art.

The file names tell their own story

The dragon's media kept the company's working shorthand in their names: a head for the button, a colour drawing for the CD page, a clip labelled with the letters of the title. A small theatre does not have an archivist; it has whoever exports the file that week, and the names they chose are now the only catalogue the production has.

Read that way, the filenames are part of the playbill. They record an organisation small enough that one person kept every picture of the dragon, and practical enough that the files stayed findable across a site redesign. The volume keeps the names as found, because renaming them would tidy away the evidence.

The play also demonstrates how the company's pieces cross-referenced each other. A child who had seen the dragon at assembly could find it again on the CD shelf, hear its song on the clips page and watch its tail drag across the video shelf, all from the same school library computer. The website was built as a second auditorium where the productions kept running between tours, and the dragon held the best seat in it.

How the volume files it

This sheet is bound in Cahier I with the other five playbills. Its neighbours are the eagle, the button, the monster, the moons and the wooden heart. The record did not keep the full script or the touring dates for this production; what it kept is the artwork, the song and the fact that the company thought a dragon was worth its own page twice.

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