#NewPlay Los Angeles Theater (#LAThtr) Satellite Meetup

January 6, 2011 by  

Janurary 29, 2011 – #NewPlay Los Angeles Theater (#LAThtr) Satellite Meetup

NEW LOCATION: Atwater Village Theatre 3269 Casitas Ave. LA, CA 90039

Circle X Theatre Company and Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA, with the partnership of LA Stage Alliance, will host the New Play Los Angeles theater satellite meetup to coincide with the final day of the national convening, entitled Scarcity to Abundance: Capturing the Moment for the New Work Sector, organized by the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage in Washington, DC.

The Los Angeles event will be held Saturday, Jan. 29 from 9am-1pm. Participants will view the pre-recorded roundtable discussions from the national convening, and discuss the themes within the context of the Los Angeles theater community.

The national convening will focus on the following: identifying the rich and vital activity that already exists in the new play sector, exploring the gaps and challenges facing the field and strategizing the means of continued and closer collaboration to advance the new work infrastructure moving forward. This convening will build upon the outcomes and initiatives that grew out of last year’s convenings: Defining Diversity, Black Playwrights: the Stories We Tell and Devised Work

Circle X Theatre Company and Ensemble Studio Theatre-L is located at the Atwater Village Theater, 3269 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90039. There is street parking.

We need an accurate head count for space, please RSVP at: http://www.meetup.com/2amt/54701/

You can follow the discussion on Twitter at #LAThtr and #NewPlay

UPDATE: To further the Institute’s commitment to documentation and dissemination of all findings, the events of the convening will be live-streamed on #NewPlayTV, with commentary shared by commissioned tweeters (#NewPlay) and bloggers on The New Play Blog. In order to view live-streamed events, please access #NewPlay TV online at http://www.livestream.com/newplay. In partnership with 2AMt, Arena Stage is setting up viewing parties across the country. Plans are underway in Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Minneapolis, DC, New Orleans, and Chicago. All findings from these communities will be published on the 2AMt blog. In addition, along with the final convening report to be published in the spring, the new online journal Howlround: The Journal of the American Voices New Play Institute will release a special edition specifically around the convening. – Full article, with full conference schedule, on BroadwayWorld.com

UPDATE: Bitter Lemons article

Filed under: Devised Work, Ensemble, Los Angeles, New Works, Theater/Theatre
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Exploring the @Seesmic for iPhone app. Excited to have one place to check and post to all my social

January 5, 2011 by  

Exploring the @Seesmic for iPhone app. Excited to have one place to check and post to all my social media profiles.

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WillFul at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

January 3, 2011 by  

This is the show that I am the most excited about for 2011. I am a big fan after participating in the 2010 Sojourn Theatre Summer Institute, and OSF holds a special place in my heart as I attended shows there while in high school and did some training there. It is great to see Michael and Shannon collaborate with OSF on a theater production.

I hope to take some of the ensemble theater students I will be working with this semester up there when the show opens in August. Apparently, I am not the only one excited as the show opens the beginning of August and is nearly sold out for the first month.

show

Filed under: Civic Theater, Creativity, Devised Work, Ensemble, New Works, Theater/Theatre
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General State of Blogging & Writing

January 1, 2011 by  

Tom Loughlin and I seem to be at the same place in regards to our blogging efforts, more specifically the lack of blogging. (Side note: Great news about Loughlin pursuing entrepreneurial theatre degree for the SUNY Fredonia students.)

I know a part of that comes from the feeling that a blog post should be this great source of information on a given topic, with paragraphs flowing and flowing. I usually save the short, quick stuff for Twitter (@dennisbaker). That being the case, I am giving my self the freedom to post smaller messages. This might motivate me to use the WordPress iPhone app more, instead of waiting until I have hours in front of the computer to write a profound post, in which those hours never come.

Spending the first semester as a new adjunct at two universities, as well as family life, has kept me away from writing and performing. As I enter the second semester, two of my four classes remain the same so I hope to have a little more time to get some thoughts down. I am excited to be advising a group of students, and alumni, who are interested in devising, ensemble-based new work. As the advisor, I will take on a more reflective work coming into their rehearsals a couple of times a month (they will be meeting once a week) observing and helping them form and articulate what they want to create. I think this will help sharpen my reflective practitioner skills, as I will be able to help facilitate, while at the same time have some distance to reflect and write more formally on the experience. I need to start submitting to academic journals, and I think this project will be my first article topic. That being said, the actor in me wants to be in the mix of it and part of the physical creation, but unfortunately the timing of the meetings, and the extra finical burden of driving out to the school one more day in the week, will not allow me for deeper involvement.

I have also been commissioned by Theatre Journal to write a performance review of the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s production of State of Incarceration that runs January 28th and 29th. I saw a workshop production of it back in November and was struck by the topic of the California prison system filled to 150% capacity and the stories created by an ensemble, some prisoners once themselves. Hopefully all goes well and I will be published by the end of the year.

Filed under: Arts Entrepreneur, Civic Theater, Devised Work, Ensemble, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Community Arts Network Website Closing

August 31, 2010 by  

It was announced today that on September 6th the Community Arts Network (CAN) website will be closing. CAN has been a great resource for me in the past year as I learn more about community-based arts and what was the history of the movement, along with all the great work that is currently happening. I have referred many students to their Places to Study page to see what schools are offering degrees in arts and community/civic dialogue. I am even having my Introduction to Theatre students read field notes about two LA community-based theaters that was written for the Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project.

Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland stated “we have spent much of the past year trying to develop a stable environment for CAN to move forward, but in the current economic environment those efforts have not been fruitful. With no money for staffing or basic operational costs we have no choice but to stop. It is our plan to seek funding for the purposes of preserving the CAN’s content in an online archive so it can be accessible, but until we find such funding the site will be dark. We will attempt to accomplish this task as soon as possible.

We hope this decision does not signal the end of efforts to establish a CAN 2.0 that will build on CAN¹s history and network and provide vital services for the network that has developed around CAN during the past 11 years. There has been much hard and significant work done in that direction by extremely dedicated people and we hope they will continue to move forward with those plans.

It does signal that we, Linda and Steven, will not be in the leadership of that process. We sincerely hope those efforts continue, and we will contribute what wisdom we have as it might be found useful, but we can no longer be a driving force in that process. We have initiated a CAN Facebook page where were inviting folks to post information and to initiate and participate in discussions.”

Filed under: Acting, Chicago, Civic Theater, Devised Work, Educational Theater, Ensemble, Los Angeles, New Works, New York, Theater/Theatre
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Pilots’ Income = Actors’ Income

July 14, 2010 by  

“The only reason people stay flying (or acting) is because they love it and management (theaters with executive directors making $400,000) take advantage of that.”

“I took out $100,000 and by the time I pay it back at this rate, it will cost me well over $500,000 with interest and fees and penalties, it something I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it because it is one way I get down really quickly about my chosen field.”

Filed under: Acting, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Theater/Theatre
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Reflections on 2010 Sojourn Theatre’s Summer Institute

July 3, 2010 by  

To read why I did this workshop read the blog post The Future Of Theatre.

Shelley Virginia, institute participant, summed it up well: “Finished Sojourn Theatre summer institution devising civic theatre, led by Michael Rohd. Amazing! I recommend it to any theatre artist, educator or community leader interested in using theatre to build community and create space for civic discourse.”

The participants were theater practitioners who were doing devised and applied theater work in a various of settings and were looking to learn more from Michael Rhod. The format of the workshop was familiar from my classes at NYU. We would be wearing two lenses while in the workshops. One lens was that of participant and the other lens was that of facilitator. We would first experience the sequence of exercises, or games as they were called, and then afterward we would reflect and ask questions about the facilitation. The experience level of the institute was broad, ranging from undergraduates just starting in the work, to older professors who have had years of experience as facilitators. This lead for great conversations and insights.

Michael Rohd is best known for his book, Theatre for Community Conflict and Dialogue: The Hope Is Vital Training Manual. It is a great book that introduces the author’s “Hope Is Vital” program and methods. It shares his vision and methods for creating performance workshops that actively investigate social concerns. The book consists of a series of gradually intensifying exercises leading from fun warm-ups to image-building bridge activities. While he has moved away from this process work, and into generative production work with Sojourn Theatre, his mastery of facilitation is based on this model and has deeply influenced aspects of the rehearsal process for their current production of On The Table.

A big component of the book is the purposeful sequencing of games in order to parse out a theme, idea or concept that the ensemble would be willing to explore. This was demonstrated through out the whole workshop. The first set of exercises we explored how can a new ensemble begin to connect to one another through using a common, physical vocabulary, which lead into a discussion of how an ensemble works through collaboration, aesthetics and dramaturgy. In the afternoon, games were played and the theme of responsibility emerged and the ensemble agreed upon wanting to explore that further. With the partner we had for the previous game, we shared personal stories of responsibility (or lack there of). From there we shared to the whole group one sentence summaries of the stories we heard, and then each pair picked a sentence they remembered someone else saying and created a physical presentation of that sentence. From there we discussed in small groups how one or two of the same stories were picked by each group and how we would could further explore those themes as facilitators.

The evenings were spent observing the rehearsals for their production of On The Table that opens July 15th. Most of the rehearsals that week were spent working on act one. Act one (read more about act two and three here and here) consists of a four person cast, each in Portland and Molalla. Through the research the actors have done, they created fictional characters that have come to together at a memorial service in 1980. The memorial service is also for a fictional character in the town, that is in some way connected to the fictional characters the actors are portraying. The goal of act one is to set-up the idea of people and place. During the performance, the actors pop in and out of being the narrator telling about the research and portraying characters in scenes they created. During rehearsals the teams set up the presentation of act one as a game where there are rules the actors follow, but the order in which the stories are told is kept open and fluid. It was interesting to see the same game structure used in the workshops being used in the rehearsal process. The teams were creating the script on their feet and exploring how structured the content needed to be in order to be clear to the audience, while at the same time fluid and conversational. This lead to some frustration as the week continued as some actors were eager to keep exploring the rules of the game while it was clear others wanted to have a set script and/or outline. What I connected to most was that is was truly an ensemble of people creating the show. While it was clear that Rohd was directing/facilitating, many times it was his role of asking the actors what they needed or wanted to explore that determined how a rehearsal was structured. The lack of hierarchy seen in a rehearsal of a traditional commercial, narrative script was refreshing.

Due to the type of institute participants that were present, the theme of leadership was strong. The last day and half Rhod talked more about site specific theater work. We were then broken into four small groups and picked an outside location in which to present a site specific devised work around the theme of leadership.

Filed under: Acting, Arts Entrepreneur, Civic Theater, Creativity, Devised Work, Educational Theater, Ensemble, New Works, Theater/Theatre
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Herbert Blau

July 1, 2010 by  

There is, moreover, politics aside, a certain repression involved, a censorship, in the effort to separate the artist who suffers from the one that thinks, stripping the intuition from the theory. It is a repressive force which follows … the romantic disjuncture between heart and head

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Don’t Think, Act.

June 12, 2010 by  

Doing a lot of reading in preparation for the Sojourn Theater Summer Institute. Here are some that are sticking with me:

Educating the Creative Theatre Artist by Sonja Kuftinec
“Should we be training students more pre-professionally, undergraduates for performance jobs and graduates for teaching jobs? Or should we focus more on interdisciplinary collaborations across fields that would redefine students as inquirers and artistic entrepreneurs? Surveys…suggest a focus on redefining undergraduates as artistic entrepreneurs, while experience with graduate students…suggests a model for more explicit teacher training.”

“…when asked what they would teach and what they wish they had been taught, reveal what might be lacking in some of our undergraduate training: collaboration, ensemble building, idea development, interdisciplinary approaches to creating art, listening, conflict resolution, community engagement, and application of artistic skills in a wide range of settings.”

“Conventional [undergraduate] production (and I would add BFA pre-professional) training tends to recycle a system that emphasizes the passivity of the individual actor rather than graduating students who can think critically and creatively about the value of theatre in society and who act upon those thoughts.”

Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and, Civic Engagement in Theatre, and Performance Studies by Jill Dolan
“A member of the acting faculty in my department at the University of Texas at Austin has a decal pasted on his office door designed in the ubiquitous Ghostbusters symbolic style that transliterates as “Don’t Think, Act.” Although I very much respect this man and his work with students and department productions, walking past this declaration of his values each day challenges everything I believe in as a theatre educator.”

Filed under: Acting, Arts Entrepreneur, Educational Theater, Graduate School, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Helen Nicholson, applied drama: the gift of theatre

June 2, 2010 by  

Applied drama is not one of ‘transformation’ but of ‘transportation’.

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