a poor player

Fredonia NY – Sometimes it’s nice to hear young people saying what you also think is true. Even if they are in England. Makes you feel not quite so out of it.

Dress One tonight. It’s scary.   -twl

Dunkirk NY – I began this morning’s read purposefully to find something to offer readers for today’s post, as I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have much time to say anything myself today. I did indeed find something, a post from theCommunity Arts Network’s  API blog about the educational component of the Silk Road Theatre Company in Chicago. And it reading it, I was awakened to a fatal flaw in this La Bohème process: at the moment, there is nothing ancillary going on that is of any educational value to anybody. Nothing educational or interdisciplinary is taking place whatsoever connected to this production. All we’re thinking about is producing and mounting the opera; nothing more. That’s a rather limiting idea within a university setting. -twl

Dunkirk NY – Some notes on the upcoming production of La Bohème I’m directing:

• It is a perpetual puzzle to me how undergraduate students cannot seem to present full-blooded passion on the stage. They learn diction, they learn how to make a sound, they learn how to read music, but they do not seem to be able to translate it into actual human experience. The human journey of the opera seems to escape them. Has social networking replaced actual passion with virtual passion?
• the 2D/3D thing has bitten me in the ass again. I have a very difficult time looking at 2D drawings and translating them in 3D. Not only did I misread the floor plan for Act 2, causing me to have to flip all my staging left to right, but the set we’ve rented cuts the sightlines in our house so sharply that sitting on the wings means you can’t see or hear. All my staging that uses the high crossover in Act 2 now is useless because only about one-third of the crossover is actually usable. Sigh.
• One of these days we will devise a system of production so that I get more than 2 days to adjust staging and the actors have more than 2 days to work with the actual props.
• When directing the children’s chorus, you can’t use examples like “be excited like you are in the playground.” They don’t play in the playground anymore.
• What is so difficult about realizing you’re trying to live in 1838, so that you shouldn’t be making gestures which are current in 2009?
• When you’ve been given the same note four times, shouldn’t you be able to execute it?
• Maybe it’s not passion they are lacking, but a sense of romance.
• Tomorrow will be hell. First piano dress. First time moving the sets in and out of place. First full use of props. I can’t wait.

Let it be said, however, that Puccini is a genius, and I’m glad to get a shot at this work. It’s fabulous, and a chance to really dig into a score like this, even for a musical amateur like myself, is quite an opportunity. -twl

Dunkirk NY – The first thing that seems to happen when a person becomes a moderately successful artist is to reject their college education. Perhaps they will cling to the words of one or two individual professors, but by and large the process seems to be one where the education a potential artist receives at the college level becomes less and less valuable or meaningful over time.

College professors don’t often see this gap. Why? Because their education suited them perfectly for becoming college educators. Mine is a clear example. As I consider the question, I cannot help but admit that I am basically doing the same things I have been doing since 1972 – putting on college plays. It’s been the bulk of my artistic life. Yes, I have a résumé of professional acting credits, but in almost every single instance I have been involved with what I can only classify as “more of the same.” All three Shakespeare companies I’ve been associated with have roots in an educational situation. Much of the theatre in Buffalo is very standard in its approach, and three of the major theatres operating in Buffalo are in residence on a college campus.

The theatrical reality is, I think, quite different when you look outside the college experience. What I suspect happens to a lot of students upon graduating is one of three things: either they find a situation which closely matches the skills they learned in college, or they adapt and learn a new skill set, or they find something else to do with their lives. The statistical data indicates that the third choice is the one that prevails.

Theatre education at the university level is in large part a failure because, despite all the evidence to the contrary, it provides students a skill set that is rapidly becoming outmoded and does not give young artists the tools they need to continue being artists. In fact, we actually set them up for failure, because we are creating a myth for them and feeding the unreal dreams and hopes with which they walk in the the door. We add to that myth, not only by the way we talk to them and the pseudo-professional jargon we speak with them, but also by bringing in guest artists who represent only a small minority of our graduates, those we consider “successful” in a professional sense.

We in the universities need to have a much stronger dialog with those who are out in communities creating theatre and art at every level, not just at the professional level. The trouble is, most artists don’t really have a strong feeling or see a need for improving theatre departments. It isn’t on their agenda. If they have some sort of “educational” mission or component, it’s for the K-12 set, because that’s where the money is. Bringing community artists, indie artists, and professional artists together to give us some idea of how to re-structure our educational practices and create young artists who continue throughout their working days to create theatre wherever they are will be a difficult dialog to start.

Where to start? I’m not sure. There are many things going on now across numerous circles, such as Scott Walters and I trying to refine and develop our presentation to the SETC Conference we gave last March. But one thing I do know: these ideas are not confined to theatre education alone. All of higher education is facing the same general dilema.  There’s a lot of work to be done to transform a 13th century institutional model into something more adequate for the 21st century. -twl

Dunkirk NY – Yesterday I had a day off from rehearsal as I prepare for the final push. The set has arrived, the costumes have not (we hope they get there today). When we do an opera here it’s the only show we rent out, as our schedule does not allow us to build the show from scratch. Nothing is more nerve-wracking that waiting for all these elements to arrive and looking at what you really have. The set is more worn than perhaps I’d like, and I have to stress-test it to see exactly how many people can fit on the upper platform. Pictures and ground plans never tell the whole story.

My morning routine has for many years now been coffee, check email, and the morning “read.” I check headlines, check blogs, find an article or two here and there. In trying to do the Nov. blog-a-thon I have deleted the morning read, but this morning it just so happened that in my email was the daily digest from the Association of Teaching Artists, a Yahoo! group I joined a few years back as I became more interested in developing a curriculum for preparing teaching artists at the college level. I want to pass on to you two interesting reads I received in the email. One is by Arlene Goldbard, a well-known community arts activist, and another by Janet Brown from Grantsmakers in the Arts. Both of them express a frustration at the inability of community arts in this country to make any headway. Arlene looks at it from the national level, Janet from the personal level.

From Ms. Goldbard’s post:

But since [the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities] is closest thing we have (which is not to say very close) to the type of public-sector collaborative other countries may seek in a coordinated cultural ministry, it becomes necessary to point out that despite community artists’ and teaching artists’ support of and role in the Obama arts platform, despite their active, energetic commitment to cultural recovery and its role in national recovery, despite all of their contributions to actually practicing cultural democracy, their commitment to embodying the values that got President Obama elected, there is not a single appointment reflecting the knowledge and perspective they bring. Nor is there anyone who is known for a body of work on the important issues of culture, community, democracy and equity that ought to inform the deliberations of any such body. Nor is there anyone whose work focuses entirely on art in the service of social justice.

And from Ms. Brown:

I’m no arts education expert.  I learned what I know in the trenches. I was a theatre teacher. I was married to a teaching artist. I ran a statewide arts advocacy organization and developed programs to train generalists where there were no specialists and to help specialists network with each other. I brought arts integrated schools based on Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory into the state.  We trained entire staffs at the elementary level to implement the program.  I helped write state standards and fought for graduation fine arts requirement credits. We trained students, parents and arts groups to become activists.  I wrote op-eds and gave speeches about creativity and work-force development in the 21st century.  I was chair of a performing and visual arts department at a small college whose primary graduates were arts educators.  This does not make me an expert.  It makes me frustrated.

Artists who create art as a consumer product should be interested and alarmed by this. I believe there is a very, very wide gap between practicing artists and arts educators of all stripes. This gap is something which continues to exacerbate the situations these two people speak about. I hope I will have the opportunity in coming posts to discuss this question further. For now, give them a read and see if they resonate with you. And if you have time, take in Ms. Goldbard’s immediately preceding post, which dicusses assumptions we have about arts funding. -twl

Dunkirk NY – The real trouble with being busy is that, when you really start to crank up your day and move from one part of the day to the next, all the moments in your day start to crush themselves together and become such a blur that it all feels like one big nothing. Yesterday was a good example of that. I know that I did many thing – taught a class, advised a student, uploaded a video, wrote a post for the TADA blog, got the curricular paperwork out the door, had lunch, taught another class, cut Hamlet for that class down to 90 minutes, sent out notices for Learning Assistants for next semester, assigned ticket takers for this weekend and next, got my glasses fixed, had dinner, ran a 4-hour rehearsal of La Bohème, came home, went to sleep. That’s a lot.

And yet, when I sit to reflect this morning before I start another such day, it feels like nothing. A lot of tasks adding up to not much. To-do items checked off. Then I get to wondering – how did I let myself get into this position? Again? -twl

Dunkirk NY – Only one thing to talk about this morning, people! Twenty-seven World Championships!!!

The House That Jeter Built

Dunkirk NY – It’s Election Day, and this is a “dogcatcher” year for elections, meaning there are only local candidates for local positions to city council, county executive, and the like. I will probably make my way to the polls, but over the years I must confess I have become more and more apathetic about voting.

I have become pretty much apolitical, largely because I do not believe that elected officials in this country have any more independence. Given the large amounts of cash that passes hands during campaigns, no one gets elected to any public office these days without being beholden to somebody. I never feel as if I’m voting for someone who will be in a position to take an independent stand on the issues.

I also believe that the people who actually run this country are not the politicians. It’s an illusion that politicians have any power at all. The real power lies in corporations. One only need look at the TARP bailout to see how that works, where corporations get more protection than a single mother trying to raise a family and make a living. And nobody votes for these people. They can just help themselves to $800 billion in corporate welfare from the federal government by claiming they are “too big to fail,” and then have the last laugh on everyone as they hand out their bonuses.

And also, the way campaigns in this country are conducted I just find to be an insult to my intelligence. The shouting, the negative campaigning, the falsification of facts and issues, the fear-mongering that goes on; all these things just make the entire process uninteresting and uninviting. I feel like I’m being asked to participate in a food fight every election year. No thanks.

Voting is one of those great American myths that allow people who actually have power to control the thinking of people who actually don’t have power. Many people believe you can change things if you vote, but eventually it comes down to powerful interests with lots of money who control the power. Voting just makes you a stooge in this process. One need only look at our state government in Albany, the most corrupt in the country, to see this process play out in reality. More than 50 years of voting has done nothing to stem the corruption and concentration of power in New York State. Albany is living proof of the ineffectiveness of the voting process. Yes, the people in New York State are actually that stupid.

My home city of Dunkirk has changed hardly at all in the 21 years I have been living here. It’s still mostly poor, no new businesses have moved in of any significance, no major construction or renovation has taken place, and there is no visible long-range plan promoted by any politician to change this. My local grocery store left the city last year without so much as a whimper from the local politicians. Will my vote get me any change in this status quo? Not likely. I like a good illusion as much as the next person; just don’t ask me to believe that the sleight-of-hand taking place is actually real.

Final thought for today as you contemplate voting? From Paddy Chayefsky, writer of the movie Network:

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those *are* the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that . . . perfect world . . . in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Happy Election Day.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I have come to like morning light better than any other kind of light. Having an 8AM class for the first time in my teaching career at Fredonia has awakened me to this experience. This morning was an unusually wonderful morning light for this time of year in western NY (I don’t know what season everyone else in the country is in, but once we get past Halloween here we call it “winter”). The greatest challenge of living here is that the amount of light during the winter months can be quite limited, making the quality low. But if you get a nice a high quality of morning light to start the day, it can be all good from there.

I am sure others will point to this article in the NY Times this morning on the closing of Brighton Beach Memoirs after only a one-week run. The article talks about the many possibilities as to why this happens, and in doing so makes an interesting, if not compelling case, as to why what I guess I would call “just plain theatre” is struggling so much. Mr. Simon himself has the money quote:

“I’m dumbfounded,” Mr. Simon, 82, who has won a Pulitzer and three Tony Awards, said in an interview. “After all these years, I still don’t get how Broadway works or what to make of our culture.”

It’s easy, Mr. Simon – in this culture, ya gotta have a gimmick. See Gypsy.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I’m going to try this. It’s National Blog Posting Month, which is an offshoot of National Novel Writing Month. I just don’t have the time to write a novel, but I may have time to write a blog post every day for the next 30 days. Not being a joiner, I did not sign up at the website promoting this effort, but it seemed like something I could try.

Right now the Yankees are beating the Phillies 2-1 in the top of the fourth. The Yankees are my team, and what looked to be a slugfest at the end of the first has become a pitching duel. Odd.

As to quality in theatre, it seems that regardless of how one would define the word, educational institutions should have some responsibility for insuring that theatrical quality gets spread across the country. Almost every college and university in this country has a theatre department these days, and simply by the fact that they are spread out nationwide, have generally good to great facilities, and purport to educate people, educational institutions neglect their responsibilities if they cannot bring good quality theatre to their area, and welcome their community to join them in the creation of quality art and theatre.  -twl