What is making me happy: Doing
I am a deliberate human being. I am deliberate and I do deliberate… to the point of oblivion
What is making me Happy? : IPF Team
Every day like Puppet Christmas - what’s going to show up today?!
What's Making Me Happy: Ganzfeld
I laugh pretty easily and unabashedly, but there’s a different level of amusement that I don’t often reach that I’ve been calling wonder.
What's Making Me Happy: Overlap
Can I seriously spend an entire blog post shouting how how great Siggis Orange and Ginger yogurt is? Or how great it is to discover that there is such a thing as Orange and Ginger yogurt because it’s been left out with your coffee for breakfast? Which is what Breakfast Christmas would be like if Breakfast Christmas existed.
What's Making me Happy?
I have been busier in this past two years than I ever have been. Mixing theatre and work and life into too few hours and then drinking deep. Busy to the point that the word itself stopped being an adjective for my schedule and began standing in for an emotion: “How are you?” “BUSY”.
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.
Public / Private
I am a non-believing (formerly-believing) son of genuine believers. I spend a lot of time in this strident cultural moment understanding the Christian impulse being expressed while no longer condoning (or working towards) the cultural hegemony that that cohort is so hungry for.
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.