Where the need is greatest. The help is nearest.
We live in a time of radical pushback against the idea of expertise.
Not just that the person in front of you isn't an expert but that experts don't exist in general.
We All Learn Eventually
In 2009 World Theatre Day changed my life.
I am a community minded sort. Often my reaction to any given event is: How could we have involved more people? How could more folks have been helped?
When Rebecca Coleman mentioned on Twitter that Vancouver had celebrated a city-wide World Theatre Day in 2008 and what if we made that happen across cities? I was or course interested. I had no idea what I could do locally. I had no money, no space and no standing company to help me with either. But I could help activate Austin and push other leaders to do something.
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.
Is this Heaven? No, it’s Iowa
Less than. Incomplete. On your way up, or down, or out.
It has a uniquely negative connotation that sort of sums up how the City-States treat the provinces in just about every field now.
Branch Rickey broke it all.
Oh sure, blah blah blah Jackie Robinson, colour line, ripple effect on American race relations… Barack Obama. Mr. Rickey was, as Billy Beane would do generations later, simply leveraging undervalued markets, which is what he had been doing all his career.