Dancing With Myself
I’m almost as busy as you are. In that rush of “on to the next thing” I currently get most of my news on the fly from my Twitter and Facebook feeds. On a quick scroll through Twitter I caught my friend Reina Hardy crowing about her pending crossing of the border for something called Monologues for Nobody. I chased it down through a few links, saw that this was a Toronto Fringe project curated/commissioned by longtime #2amt contributor Jordan Mechano, read just a little about it and got excited to share this project more broadly. I asked Mechano a batch of questions I had about Monologues for Nobody and I hope you enjoy his answers as much as I did.
Peel Out the Watchword
The Chicago Reader published as careful and deliberate a piece of investigative journalism covering the arts as I can ever remember reading. In the piece Aimee Levitt and Chris Piatt laid out a history of mental and physical abuse and cultish insularity at Chicago’s Profiles Theatre that mirrors much of that theatre’s intense production history. In an era of hot takes and sound bite reporting I want to thank the authors for doing the leg work, and taking the time and real estate that digital print offers to not cut corners. It seems that most of the theatre world has read it already, but if you haven’t I recommend you take the time. If you are sensitive to stories of abuse it’s going to be a tough read.
The Tyranny of Me and You
I’m fascinated by observing chefs interacting with food. Unlike most folks who create they can’t avoid their work outside their “studio”, they need to eat after all. They are cursed to combine all the creativity of a visual artist with the what-about-me demands of an IT person visiting their family… “you’re going to cook aren’t you?”
So it’s instructive to eat with them, to spy out the sorts of things a pro chooses. Speaking generally? They choose comfort food and simple food made well. They also find the seams in the menu, the places where another chef has obviously added something fresh or something they love mixed amongst the regular offerings, the “kitchen item”.
I don’t find culinary folks to be particularly evangelical. They may go on a prolonged brussels sprout kick or extol the joys of farm to table or tongue to tail but mostly they’re not going to deride your jalapeno bacon mac and cheese for not being authentic enough.
Repeats
The linked blurb seems to ask what some of our best modern art makers are thinking putting up chestnuts like Dionysus in 69 or Einstein on the Beach. To answer Culturebot’s open question: what this says about the health of the field is that the best companies in the country are humble enough to know that they are following a path and that someone created that path. If you want to break new ground anywhere it’s imperative to know (really know) how others have done it.
Dionysus in 69 was a turning point for performance art, and what the Rude Mechs have done (and are continuing to do) is mine the history of their field to illustrate for their audience what has come before. This interleaved retrospective adds depth (and context) to the form defying work, such as the recently closed genre jumble NOW NOW OH NOW, that they are creating.
Just Another Day
Theatremakers work hard for small tangible reward and highly variable intangible rewards. We fight for the scraps of municipal budgets that are literally too small to be full line items in municipal construction budgets. We work ridiculous hours, many at more than one job, to feed our energy into an art form that even its adherents mostly consider an anachronism.
Let’s Get Vertical (Vertical)
On my own blog some time ago I wrote about smaller and regional theatres being considered “minor league” in the pejorative sense and the broken ideas around that vocabulary in a post called “Is this Heaven, No It’s Iowa”.
The happy upbeat ending for those of you too good to click through is the idea that rather than everyone trying to cram themselves into the most expensive cities on the continent to learn how to create professionally in the most expensive, least hospitable creation conditions we can muster, they find a comfortable place they like living with people they like creating with and get really good at being on stage rather than auditioning. Then rather than shipping all of our raw materials to population dense urban areas we can ship product.
I’m nobody! Who are you?
I am Michael Kaiser’s nightmare.
I don’t have an MA, MFA, BFA, JD, MD, DDS, P.E. CPA, MSCE, or HVAC.
And yet I have opinions.
Opinions unformed by the cultural canon Mr. Kaiser has professed in the past. The Canon of his Youth. Not just a dead white male canon, but the dead white male canon of his specific formative years.
Opinions I foist on a range of professional, semi-professional, and amateur theatre makers as though I had some right to their ears.
Opinions shared as though, uninformed as they are by Higher Higher Education, I feel them to be correct and will sometimes publicly defend them, even when attacked by ‘names’, or the statused.
And isn’t that the magic of now?
I get to share my opinions freely without land or title, and Michael Kaiser gets to blandly disapprove of the notion of me.
A Little Conspiracy
The theatre niche of the social media stream operates much like any other Animal Farm and in this particular backwater Animal Farm I am a donkey who has lived a long time. Hang around long enough and one sees the patterns of people entering and leaving or the ebbs and flows of the heat of the conversation. One also sees topics come and go, but there are gestalt topics that come up daily or near daily, chief among them: “What’s the point?” The theatre-makers’ equivalent of “why are we all here and what does it mean?”.
There is a common push in this question of theatre’s relevance to prove real world payoff or in the buzzword “return on investment”. For purveyors of traditional narrative theatre it can be a tough sell. Proving hard value in collective experience is voodoo statistically, which is why I think the reaction around #2amt and 2amTheatre.com to Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) and to Conspire Theatre has been so positive. These programs demonstrate a clear, visible social benefit to these skills we share.
I have been a fan of Conspire Theatre for some time as they have grown and become a core part of the Austin theatre community. As they take the next steps toward expanding the program I reached out to Kat Craft, Executive Director and Lead Workshop Facilitator, to gain a deeper understanding of how Conspire operates their program and what their plans are for the future.