a poor player

Dunkirk NY – This week is the in-between week for me. The university closes almost all its academic buildings during the period in between the submission of final grades (or the day before Christmas Eve) and January 2. This is in an attempt to save energy and thus save money. So I’m sort of doing odds-and-ends sort of  activities, such as writing letters of recommendation for students applying to graduate schools and and summer theatre, answering other assorted queries, cleaning up my work space at home, etc. Here are just some random thoughts floating around the brain with no particular context:

• Theatre Blog of the Year – If there were such a thing, my vote would go to Lucas Krech at Light Que 23. His blog is a model of what I think a blog ideally should be (and what I wish mine was but often is not). When he is working on a lighting design, he lets you into his creative process. He is not a polemicist. He writes pretty much from his own point of view and sticks with how he is reacting to his own work and creative situation. Here’s a sample post which illustrates why I like his style.
• Another favorite blog of mine is Scooter in the Sticks. The author is a photographer and rides a Vespa LX 250 (could be a 150 based on his URL but I think he wouldn’t ride where he does on anything less than a 250). He lives out somewhere near State College PA and combines his love of riding and photography with meditations about life and simple living. His photographs are pretty cool. I have always envied the life of artists who can create art all by themselves, without the need for collaboration. Can an actor truly act without at least an audience? Unless there is a live audience present, I have no art to create. So jealous.
• I love snowblowing, and the last two days have given me ample opportunity to pull out the snowthrower and go to town. It has the same feeling on completion as does lawnmowing. Once completed, there is a certain symmetry to the paths neatly cut into the layer of snow covering the rest of the ground. I am not very mechanically inclined, and apparently over the summer my snowthrower got some water into the muffler and carburetor, so I had to pony up $90 to get it going again ($70 for labor and $10 for taxes). But there is something so satisfying about watching that plume of snow fly out from the chute and fall 15 feet away. And it is so much easier on my back. The purchase of this machine was, of course, necessitated by advancing age and the lack of children living in the house. There are so many times, such as when I clear the driveway or do my wash, that I am grateful for certain types of mechanical inventions, even if I do lack the mechanical skills to engage in their maintenance and repair.
• I found out last week that I have a fractured  sesamoid bone in my right foot. That’s the bone that essentially connects the big toe with the rest of the foot. It’s the result of the scooter accident I had last November. I had not thought I had done any serious damage to the foot, but as the foot was slow to heal and become pain-free, I went and had it checked out. So now my right foot has a small boot on it which I wear as often as possible, and always in the house. I am planning on participating in the broadsword class one of my colleagues is offering in the spring semester so that I can get certified as an actor combatant in broadsword, and I need the foot to be able to take the stress of that kind of movement. So a little resting up is in order.
• I’ve never quite understood the fascination with New Year’s Day. It always seemed so arbitrary to me.
• Two projects are sitting in limbo, and I don’t know what to do to bring them up to speed. It’s been a year now since I created the Acting In America website, and while I realize I have not done one iota of publicizing the site, it still surprises me that, the internet being what it is, no one in over a year has submitted any stories or even made an inquiry. Not one. I’ve no idea what this means other than the idea is bad, or my marketing is bad (probably both). You’d think there would have been at least one person somewhere out there in cyberspace willing to share their journey as an actor in this country. I also have been toying with starting a web site focusing on reviews and feature stories of the Buffalo theatre scene, but when I consider the amount of work involves, I tend to take a step back. Perhaps, with no show to direct this semester, this is the ideal time to begin it.
• A musical featuring The Addams Family? Really? And I guess Jerry Zaks must now be considered the replacement for the late George Abbott.

That should do it for now. And Happy New Year, if you go in for that sort of thing.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – You must read this. You must. The author of this blog, Barry Hessenius, has written a remarkably objective, trenchant and perhaps even prophetic blog post, concerning how the last five years’ worth of predictions about the state of the arts in this country have turned out, and what the future may possibly hold. He writes at a national level, as a proponent for local arts organizations and art educators nationwide. A few key paragraphs to whet your appetite:

“Last year’s election and the Obama Campaign model generated considerable excitement and optimism in the sector that real “change” was in the air, and certainly systemic, dynamic change seemed, if not inevitable, then, at least, possible. Early hope that we might somehow replicate the online success of aggregating huge numbers of small and individual supporters has fallen by the wayside as somehow we seemed content to wait for it to just happen of its own accord. It did not. If there was a window of opportunity to tap into that feeling across America, it was a very small window and we neither had the know-how to even begin to capitalize on it, nor were we in any position to do so in terms of people or infrastructure. While we celebrated the inclusion of the arts in the stimulus package and believed that under Obama our fortunes would now change, campaign enthusiasm is axiomatically very difficult to sustain in the electorate post an election, and much of that energy has dissipated under the weight of the continuing economic plight, the seemingly never-ending American foreign involvements and the threat of those that want to harm us, and, perhaps most of all, the now more pronounced than ever partisan divide that increasingly makes cooperation and working together virtually impossible. Again, the reality of our sector was survival mode and nobody was charged or empowered with the formal pursuit of any of these larger enterprises. The Administration, it seemed, has larger and more pressing matters on its plate.”

“While we have recognized for some time that there is a divide and disconnect between making and consuming art in the new technologically empowered private (or amateur) sector as compared to our nonprofit arts organization ecosystem, we have yet to get any kind of handle around how we can deal with that challenge and it continues to loom ominously out there like some dark star. At the same time, we now have verifiable studies that confirm that our audiences continue to shrink, yet our reseach hasn’t provided us with real clues how to stem that downward spiral in the short term. And while we know our traditional funding and revenue streams – from philanthropic and public sources, earned income, audiences, and from individual donors — are all undergoing sea changes, we still don’t yet know where all this is going or where we will end up, and we have only band-aid solutions so far. If the bleeding gets really worse, many of us may be in big trouble.”

“Despite official designations to the contrary, nowhere is art thought to be a core subject. We have to make it a core subject – legally as well as within people’s consciousness – and in that order if we wish to succeed. This is a losing game without substantial political clout – which we do not have. Arts education that is not mandated will forever be subject to outside parental and community support to survive. At the core of the belief that the arts are just a frill is that arts education is not on a par in importance with math and science. This is more than an issue of educating the public. It’s highly political.”

Plenty more where that came from. H/T Ian David Moss.  -twl