a poor player

Dunkirk NY – Finally, a quiet morning to write. There may not be many more of these for the next few weeks as I head on into rehearsal for The Altruists on Monday. Nicky Silver’s send-up of pretentious liberalism is quite a funny play, with enough F-bombs to choke a horse. I am hoping that its theme of self-absorption in the midst of ineffective do-gooding will be a message that will ring home for those in attendance.

Things on the re-structuring front are going pretty well. I had a very encouraging lunch with the director of the School of Music here, who had a more open view of creating a community-centered focus to the proposed College of Visual and Performing Arts than I would have expected. he very much likes the idea of making this college have on integrated arts focus into bringing art into the community and then growing the participatory aspect of it better. I say surprised because he is a composer by training, and I would have thought that something like an entrepreneurial approach to arts training would not be his style. But if he is on board with this idea, then I think we have a very strong focus going into the planning stage of this new college.

We even talked about the possibility of gaining use of an outside space as a community arts center. There are so many unrented, unused building in our area that is seems not only a natural but eminently doable. This taps into Scott’s ideas of creating spaces where communities meet to participate in and create art that reflects the community. I tend to gravitate to re-cycling already available space rather than building new ones because I think it’s a faster route and because I think a level of sweat equity can create more ownership. I have this idea that if we can hold of one of these spaces, it can be a place where students learn to do all the re-furbishing of the interior as well as learning how to make second-hand equipment work for you. Just about any innovative theatre in NYC does this, and training students right here to do that is something I think is eminently more practical than getting a good headshot. On this idea, I got a nod from the VPAA/Provost that if I wanted to explore this notion, it wasn’t out of the question for me to do so. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – I cannot remember when I have ever been so busy. Well, actuallly, I can, but not in quite such a concentrated way. I am very, very busy.

This will no doubt be The Year of Reconstruction. Every day brings a new development in terms of shaping my future course. It’s exciting in many ways, but in other ways it is mind-boggling. I’ve got my hand in many different things at this point, and the challenges are such that keeping up with other things are tough.

I’ve been told by several people with experience in higher education administration that once you become an administrator, your creative life diminishes. I am beginning to feel that in many ways. To begin with, keeping up this blog has become hard. I do not intend to stop writing in it, but I have to say that keeping it updated will now become harder. It’s been ten days since my last post, and I cannot really determine if I can even write in it on a regular basis of any sort. So if you have been a faithful reader, I would expect less updates.

But it’s also a good thing, because one thing I can say is that I think I am coming into a position where I can stop writing about making changes in theatre education and actually doing it. I’ve been swamped with information and opportunities all of a sudden that have the potential to really make some difference. They are:

• A change to work on a theatrical project in India. Our university is working on establishing a working collaborative relationship with a university in Punai, India, and their focus in the arts is decidedly community-oriented. They would like a collaborative performance based on the work they do in their own “Discover India” project, where students go out and do some sort of artistic project based on a cultural aspect of Indian life. This may come about January.
• After attending a conference in Syracuse NY sponsored by Imagining America and seeing some community-oriented work, I felt energized in terms of bringing this kind of work to our department.
• The beginning of a project for our Earth Week festivities in April. This project is bringing together faculty in the sustainability movement on campus and artists from music, art, dance and theatre to create an artistic event on Earth Week themes. The energy of the young faculty in the room has been infectious.
• An uptick in students talking about “creating their own work.” A lot of this talk has come from students who were not cast, admittedly, but it has brought the conversation to the forefront.

There are a couple of other things as well, but these make a good start. All I can say is that it’s nice to be able to have the opportunity to get this kind of change going. I have many other projects that have nothing to do with theatre itself in terms of re-shaping the department, and most of them have to do with things like assessment and policy revision, but all in all I see a lot of potential. I have a great deal of hope for some interesting projects, and while it is good to be writing about them, it is better to be doing them.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – My daughter and her partner are moving back home. The economy has hit them both hard, with the loss of his job and as a consequence the home they purchased and could no longer make payments on. While my daughter has her BA, he has realized he has to get some sort of college education to have a career, and so in order for him  to come back to school they are returning here to gain a better economic foothold and get themselves restarted.

In what is clearly a case of unfortunate timing at the cosmic level, their dog is dying. When they arrived to move in the first load of their belongings, they took the dog to the vet because he had become rather listless and lacked energy. The diagnosis was stomach cancer; there was a big tumor in his stomach discovered via ultrasound. He will have to be put down soon. The dog is ten years old, and my daughter’s partner has had him since he was a puppy.

While they are back in MA this Labor Day weekend packing up the rest of their belongings for the return trip back, I am taking care of the dog. He no longer eats on his own, so I am force-feeding him twice a day. The goal is to keep him alive until they return (hopefully tonight) so they can have a few more days with him and then put him down.

Force-feeding consists of taking his food in small chunks, opening his mouth, and shoving it back behind his tongue so that his swallowing reflex moves it down his throat. It is not too difficult a task, because the dog is a super mellow dog and makes no effort to bite. But it is not fun. Given his choice, the dog probably would not eat and eventually starve himself to death. Continue Reading »

Fredonia NY – The following link is courtesy of The Onion, America’s Finest News Source. Presented without comment (although I think presenting it is comment enough).

8.4 Million New Yorkers Leave New York .