a poor player

Dunkirk NY – In reading up on this article (another variant here), and after a very quick and instructive Twitter chat with Travis Bedard at Cambiare Productions in Austin TX, I began to ruminate on this question of the “iron curtain” that exists between university theatres and working theatres across the country. This particular incident, where the American Voices New Play Institute is splitting into two entities, with the research arm moving from Arena Stage in DC (along with blog Howlround) to Arts Emerson in Boston, seems to be symptomatic of this problem. Why does this research institute feel the need to move to an academic climate, and why does Arena Stage seem to be so blasé about letting them go? Why can’t the two co-exist?

David Dower, who has been the mojo behind the institute along with Polly Carl, has his explanation here on the New Play Blog. Molly Smith, the AD of Arena Stage, has her say here. The words are encouraging, the conversation polite and gracious, the ideas high-minded – and yet something just seems off in the whole deal. Arena Stage gets to keep the production aspects of the enterprise (AVNPI and its funding), including the playwright residencies, while the research wing now moves to Emerson as The Center for the Theater Commons. Howlround will become the new portal and voice for this institute once the move to Emerson is completed in April.

The only way I think something better can come out of this is if the Center for the Theatre Commons, from its new location at an academic institution, now becomes an advocacy center for encouraging academic theatre departments to produce new plays. Why do I think this is a good direction to go in? Because basically what the Center for the Theater Commons has lost in all this is the ability to get new plays actually staged. They can be a clearinghouse network all they want, and dedicate themselves to providing information about new play production to us all (which is good!), but if they cannot muster the means to help either financially or in terms of putting together playwrights with producers, they lose a lot of influence and effectiveness, it seems to me. Continue Reading »

St. Paul, MN – These days, at almost every conference I attend, I seem inevitably to hit a wall. I get to a point where I believe I have heard enough, and things become repetitive. As I write this, I am sitting in the Macalester College library, having just had lunch, and having found no other interesting sessions to attend. The only session I attended today was not much like its description. It was run by a group of people who are trying to connect their various community projects together in some sort of collaboratory fashion, and then hopefully bring them and the ideas they have together. One woman, an economic geographer (her term), did hit the nail on the head, in that she advocated for using the resources within the community, not imposing ideas from without. Another commentor reminded people not to forget the rural areas, as all the projects presented were urban projects. Again, a good session in a way, because you got to hear what people were up to, but really no time for educating people interested in community arts to ask questions or gain information. Continue Reading »

Minneapolis, MN – So far the Imagining America Conference has been a mixed bag. This is a good conference in the sense that the people here are all in the effort to reform education, particularly in the arts and humanities, and move the focus from careerism to social justice, sustainability, and community-based foundations. It makes for a good collection of people. But I have found that occasionally they tend to talk about “community engagemment” as trying to impose their vision onto a particular community.

The organization has been around for 10 years or so, and I discovered it at a regional meeting in Syracuse NY last year. It’s definintely the place to be to gain ideas if you have any interest in gaining insights into how to re-shape your perspective on higher education. So here’s a brief run-down of each session I attended:

• Tertiary Artistic Training and the Public Practice of Art in the 21st Century. This one tackles the problem of continued training outside post-secondary institutions (“tertiary”) and participants reflected a bit on how they got into the idea of community arts and how they had to re-direct their training towards that. In this session was one of my former students who is now a second-year PhD candidate in Arts Education at Ohio State and very interested in community arts. She talked about how she experiences the disillusionment of pursuing a professional career and giving that up to focus on arts activism. Encouraging to hear. We were all asked to idetify a “burning question” we all had. I mentioned the issues identified by Scott Walters in terms of how we aquire funding and support for rural communities. This was mostly a sharing session with no real answers.

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Minneapolis, MN – I am attending the Imagining America Conference being held in Minneapolis MN this weekend. It’s a new group of people I have found interested in moving academic towards a more civic-engaged approach to higher education, mostly in the arts and humanities. I have been tweeting from the conference from my Twitter account @apoorplayer and will be posting some more in-depth thoughts on the blog. The hashtag for my tweets is #IA2011 on Twitter. Hopefully you can follow along if you’re interested.

Dunkirk NY – I have come to believe that data should play an important part in any discussion of the state of theatre and theatre education today. So it comes as a welcome treat that Broadway producer Ken Davenport has posted some really interesting statistics on the state of musical theatre on Broadway, as well on plays. His blog posts detail the decline in how much theatre Broadway actually produces, and by inference how many fewer jobs there actually are. The numbers are here, here, and here. The statistical reality (no surprise here) is that there is far less of anything being produced today. Size of musical casts went from 69% of musicals with casts over 30 in the 1950s to 27% today. In the 1940s, the number of new plays on Broadway averaged 49.4. In the 2000s, it’s now 11.7 (10.9 in the 1990s). New musicals? In the 1940s the number of new musicals each season was 14.9. In the 2000s, 9.3, an uptick from the 1990s (7.5). Broadly speaking (pun intended), Broadway is about half the size it was in the 1940s.

I came upon these statistics almost at the same time I had a typical visit from a young high school senior-to-be who was out shopping for colleges and musical theatre programs. I took her and her parents on my usual tour and then we spent time chatting in my office and they asked the usual questions. Of course, the topic of future employment came up, as it always does, and I always try to be honest with parents and students on this issue – future employment in the theatre is a slim proposition if you think of trying to make your living full-time in musical theatre. But I went a little beyond that this day, in that I began to mention that, when you really stop to think about it, there is not much work in musical theatre beyond NYC or tours. Regional theatres do not regularly do musicals because of the costs involved, and outside of Florida and a few other isolated regions like Boston or perhaps Chicago there is not much musical theatre being done in this country, especially at levels where one can reasonably make a living doing it. So why spend four years of your young life, as well as the dollars involved, to study musical theatre exclusively as a specialty, when the market is so bad and has been in decline for years?

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Dunkirk NY – Here it is, New Year’s Eve, and it has been a long, long time between posts. I have been busy, and there is really no other way to put it. When I put it that way, though, it feels more like an excuse than a reason. I think what truly happened is that I became involved with so many things that, at the end of the day, the thought of writing a blog post just felt like “one more thing” to do after a busy day. Since no one would ever accuse me of being a major league blogging presence, I decided it would be best to let the blog go fallow for a bit rather than beating myself up about not writing in it.

To some degree, that worked. I really never felt too guilty after about 10 days of not writing. As the weeks passed, I found that my desire to write did wane a great deal, and it gave me some pause. You really do get to learn how insignificant all that information and writing is. The world of theatre moves on with or without you, and in the larger scheme of things there is very little chance of having any major impact. I discovered that paying attention to my own slice of the theatre world was about the best I could hope for, so as I began to do more of that, I began to feel less guilty about writing.

What have I been up to, then? Most of my time has been spent in what I would call the “usual manner” – teaching classes, directing a production of The Altruists, and chairing my department. I took on an extra honors course this past semester, looking at Greek plays for their relevance to modern culture, so that added a bit to my workload. And I was also on the “visioning committee” for the creation of our upcoming College of Visual and Performing Arts, to be inaugurated in Fall 2012. I am also on the steering committee for the planning of a new addition to our arts center, which they say will break ground in as little as two years. October-November was particularly intense. I took a quick trip in NYC the weekend before Thanksgiving, but did not see any shows, concerning myself rather with meeting with alumni and other family matters. Continue Reading »

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 have been up this evening preparing a number of items for the upcoming retreat for the department that I have scheduled for Wednesday 8/18. In the afternoon I plan to lead an open discussion on the topic Theatre Education and Training for the 21st Century. It’s designed to be a kick-off for some long-range planning, getting the faculty to think about the theatre curriculum as a whole as we come to grips with the shifting theatrical realities around us.

One of the items I’ve prepared is something I loosely called “Theatre Facts Today.” Essentially it’s a big list of data culled from the various reports that have been released over the past five years or so. Once I had compiled it, it seems like quite an interesting list, and I could not think of a place where all these facts had been collected in one location. So I thought I would post my list here and on TACT and share them with you for your inspection and reflection. I am making no attempt at analyzing all this data for the moment. I’m just putting it out there in one big list.

Sidenote – I recently had a discussion with a member of the chemistry department who is interested in getting more participation from the arts departments on campus for her Earth Day events in April. During the conversation I happened to bring up the notion that I had been looking at the data as a means of assessing theatre curricula and reforming its approach to training artists. She looked at me and said, “You are the first artist I have ever heard speak of using data to assess a condition.” Maybe I am on to something .

The following is nothing more than a listing of some facts that represent what is happening in the real world of theatre and dance today. These facts are presented as a jumping-off point and context for our discussion “Theatre Training and Education in the 21^st Century.” Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – There have been a slew of articles this past weekend on the state of higher ed. One would expect that during the traditional start of the school year. But this year seems different, as a lot more of these articles are starting to peel away the secrecy surrounding many of higher education’s dirty little secrets. I’ve chosen a few excerpts for your consideration.

This first is from the NY Times, an article entitled Why College Costs Rise, Even in a Recession. The article details why it’s so hard to contain college costs. Three reasons predominate: you can’t fire professors, you can’t cut departments, and professors teach less while doing more research. It contains insights from Mr. Lawrence Weiss, President of Lafayette College in PA. A small quote:

About all Mr. Weiss will say about this is that he agrees that Lafayette needs to do a better job of discriminating between the things it can and cannot do well. He is too good on the politics to single out any department. But there is little doubt that he and administrators like him will need to give up on some foreign languages, minor sciences or parts of the arts pretty soon.

Note the comment about reducing the arts. I’ve said before that the arts make a tempting target for college administrators as the economy worsens. It still could happen. Continue Reading »

The Antoinette Perry Award

Dunkirk NY – The Tony Awards will soon be given out. It’s the cap of the awards season that starts at the beginning of the year and goes through a succession of the arts: movies, music, and now theatre. I thoroughly dislike awards in the arts. They glorify one of the things I think has caused the theatre to become disconnected with people – the desire for recognition and fame. They also promote a certain amount of corruption. The objective of some productions is clearly to win some sort of award so as to have it make more money. I think Christopher Guest caught this aspect of human behavior most perceptively in his movie For Your Consideration.

But I shouldn’t pick on the arts alone. I live in two worlds, and I see the same thing in both. Academia is not immune from this process. While there are many academics worthy of recognition for their work, there are also many more academics who like to collect awards as résumé builders and ego builders.

Just this past week I discovered a situation on my campus which defies belief. On my campus we have several types of awards, ranging from local campus awards to awards given by the Chancellor at the statewide level. Some award-winners have been worthy, others questionable. Some probably got their awards deservedly, and some probably because they had the right connections and influenced the right people. In academia, of course, everyone will deny any hint of corruption or influence-peddling (or they will talk about in the hallways), because academia must always defend the perception that it is above the machinations of the outside world, even when such types of influence-peddling reach this level.

We will be awarding the SUNY  Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creativity to a professor on our campus who, during the nominating process, has been “investigated” on a charge of plagiarism. The “inquiry” determined that it had all been just an “honest mistake” on the part of this professor, and determined that while a certain “similarity” may have existed between the professor’s work and that of someone else in the field, the similarity was “unintentional” and can therefore be safely disregarded. Continue Reading »