The Ball is Rolling
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 »
