Truth About Theater Education

January 28, 2010 by Dennis Baker 

I am catching up on the last week of theatrosphere blog posts, and while Scott Walter’s whole blog post is a must read, his comment about what he tells his theater students, is what stuck out to me.

I say: “You are getting a degree at a liberal arts university. I am not offering you ‘pre-professional training’ because, frankly, there IS no profession. I am educating you, not training you. I am offering you a lens to see the world through that, should you decide to try to make a life of artistry (which is different from a CAREER in the arts), then you will have four years of reflection and experiment from which to work. If you want to be buffed up for the so-called profession, you need to go down I-40 to Winston-Salem and the NC School of the Arts.” Now, what are others saying? I conjecture that they are selling the Cinderella Myth, pointing at a couple alums who are working occasionally, and teaching their students that what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is that the successful want it more (which is a huge lie, but that shifts the blame for their failure to the students’ shoulders and absolves the teacher entirely). It is a con game, plain and simple.

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Filed under: Acting, Educational Theater, Graduate School, Teaching, Theater/Theatre

NYCHILA Theater At Its Best

January 22, 2010 by Dennis Baker 

NYCHILA is an acronym coined in the theatrosphere to describe the theater ecosystem in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The insanity that is this video is a good visual demonstration the need for decentralization of theater.

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Filed under: Acting, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Theater/Theatre

Artists Want A Theater Home: Thoughts From Outrageous Fortune

January 16, 2010 by Dennis Baker 

I am going to start throwing my hat into the theatrosphere conversation about Outrageous Fortune. An organized group has been formed and you can read more here:

So many people long for a home. I don’t feel like one specific theatre is my home. People are your home, because they move around. That’s how it works now. I know very few people who go, “This theatre will do pretty much everything I write.” It used to be that way. I have a fantasy of having a theatre home. If I had the right theatre home I wouldn’t go anywhere else. Are we loyal to theatres? I would love the opportunity to be loyal to a theatre. I would take it very seriously. In TV and film they are loyal. That’s why people get first-look deals – Playwright, pg.41

While in theory I would agree with this comment, there is one line that caught my attention The anonymous playwright says, “If I had the right theatre home I wouldn’t go anywhere else.” I wonder what this right theater would be for the playwright? One that has sufficient clout within the regional theater community? One that has enough money for his/her plays? On that is regional, but maybe not too rural? Looking at the list of artists in the back of the book, they are plenty of theaters that would love to have anyone of them as their resident playwright, but these are smaller, independent theaters that do not have a budget to pay anyone full-time, or high recognition within the regional theater community.

But then again, per this study, it doesn’t seem like any theater is really paying much of anything for playwrights, and as Chris Ashworth points out NEWS FLASH: ARTISTS GET PAID SHIT. Maybe the idea of making a money as an artist needs to be put aside for awhile and instead of looking for the “right” or “perfect” job as a playwright, actor, or director we look for those local theater communities that are where we are living right now, where we are working right now, and ask those theaters if they have room in their home for one more artist.

Tomorrow, Sunday, January 17th, is the second day of American Voices New Play Institute’s discussion focusing on Black Playwrights. You can follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #newplay. The RSS feed can be found using Twitter search.

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Filed under: Theater/Theatre

When Is Niche Theater Too Niche?

January 15, 2010 by Dennis Baker 

New York theater producer Michael Roderick, wrote a four-part blog series on the concept of iTheatre. He compares an individual indie theater company to an iPhone app:

Consider if you will, that each company is an app. You can find a theatre company that does work inside of swimming pools, a company that only does shows that involve food, or a company that does classical text inside of boxes on the street with homeless people as extras. Yes, this is a bit over the top, but not as much as one would think. As a result of this the iTheatre has the exact same strength and weakness as an iPhone. The strength is in the fact that you as the theatre consumer can find any theatre you want. If you want a show where someone will grind with you in the aisles, “there’s a show for that”, but that’s one company or show out of dozens of choices on any given night. Now look at the weakness, when presented with the thousands of companies that are out there, the consumer becomes overwhelmed and either chooses not to do anything or allows someone else to make the choice for them. Often the loudest choice will win.

The main thrust of his series is the desire for New York producers to unite in creating a system that allows the theater customers the best opportunity to find out about all the niche indie theater “apps” so that audience members can choose the production and theater company that connects to what they want.

2010 can be a season of, “Oh? I never heard of that” or it can be a season of “Oh you like Kung fu and Charles Dickens?” “There’s a show for that”

A very popular niche theater in New York right now is Vampire Cowboys. “Vampire Cowboys is an award-winning ‘geek theatre’ company that creates and produces new works of theatre based in action/adventure and dark comedy with a comic book aesthetic.” I have not had a chance to see one of their shows, but I think this is actually pretty cool, but as one that enjoys stage combat, I am in their target market. While being niche, I think they have enough dynamics (stage combat, comics, original work) to appeal to a broad enough audience that the work becomes sustainable. They are not just another company doing Shakespeare, Miller, etc. They are also doing something that is not being done, which creates scarcity.

Many theaters try to do too much to reach as many different audience members as possible and create seasons that include a musical, Shakespeare, American classic and one new work (or variations of the sort). While in one way this might make sense, current information shows that it is not working. What ends up happening is the average audience member goes to the one or two shows they know they would like. Or theater companies commit to producing only one genre (Shakespeare/classical, all musicals, etc.), but then that model becomes unsustainable because there are many theaters doing the same thing.

With niche theater like VC, the audience still knows that they will always get some sort of combination of stage combat, comics, and original work in every show. This consistency creates a specific core audience, and a few people who come to every show to check it out, who either enter into the core group, or move on because it’s not their niche.

When is niche theater too niche? How big of an audience is out there (even in New York) for plays that deal with Kung Fu and Charles Dickens? But when does it become too much about just one thing? Does niche theater work outside of major metropolitan areas? The first thing comes to mind is the Shaw Festival, and there niche of only producing work during the late 1800s-early 1900s. Could there be a niche not based around genre, but other concepts? Can a regional theater’s niche be that they hire one artist a year as their resident, but it changes each year. If any resident artist is hired for the season, it is usually a playwright, but can that artist change every year to include directors, designers and actors? In the obvious issues that are being brought to light in Outrageous Fortune, and as theaters continue to re-think their structure to survive, how will the niche mindset play out?

Image by Allison McCarthy via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

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Filed under: New Works, Shakespeare, Stage Combat, Theater/Theatre

Missional Arts Entrepreneurship

January 12, 2010 by Dennis Baker 

I’m not certain that entrepreneurship is the right model. That still requires a capitalist approach. and capitalism in theater leads to middle brow dreck. – Comment by Uke Jackson, in Arts Entrepreneurship post

For some artists, the term entrepreneurship has negative connotations, as it is a term used mainly in the business field. For some, it means more about the focus on making money above anything else. Travis Bedard comments, in the same post as Jackson, “Folks [theater practitioners] who aren’t trying to ignore that we don’t have a widget to sell but rather are trying to adapt their model to monetizing what we DO have.” Theaters might not have a tangible product, but they are selling something. They are selling ideas and have a specific mission through which they are building relationships with their audience members. This requires innovation, creativity, teamwork, and the handling of ambiguity, all traits of an entrepreneurship mindsent. (Essig, 118)

There is a great journal article in the September 2009 issue of Theatre Topics entitled Suffusing Entrepreneurship Education throughout the Theater Curriculum by Linda Essig. Essig is director of the School of Theatre and Film at Arizonia state University and director of ASU’s p.a.v.e program in arts entrepreneurship.

The article proposes the definition of entrepreneurship to be “the spirit and process of creative risk taking”. With this definition in mind, entrepreneurship becomes mission-based, one that is designed to advance a mission rather than generate profit for shareholders. Essig links entrepreneurship to the arts by the themes of taking risks (artistic, financial, or personal) to create one’s own opportunities. “This idea differs from arts management programs which focus on how to run an arts organization, arts entrepreneurship focuses on how to manage innovation, ambiguity, and change required to launch an arts-based venture or support creativity in the performing arts.” (118)

When I was a freelance designer without academic affiliation over two decades ago, my actor friends and I used to wait for the proverbial phone to ring while waiting tables or working temp jobs. In a good year, the phone might ring often enough. But times change and the climate for theatre artists changes as well. There is more competition and fewer opportunities in traditional theatre forms in the major theatre cities of New York, Seattle, and Chicago than there were then. Yet, as small and medium-sized cities [with possibly less than 100k?] build performing arts facilities [read Don Hall's great post on government subsidized theater buildings], new opportunities arise to produce, perform, direct, design, or teach theatre as these new venues seek community-centered programming. (119)

While Engig goes into how artists need entrepreneurial skills like marketing a freelance career, negotiations, legal and tax issues, in the light of the topic of self-producing, the starting of an arts-based business is an aspect that I want to look at in the article. Through the performance arts venture program (p.a.v.e.), this arts entrepreneurship incubator selects twelve students to form a collective board that produces a season of plays in a black-box theater. These students, with guidance from the faculty, create a season of plays and run their own theater. Each take on the speicific roles needed like general manager, marketing director, literary director, etc. The student led theater has become very popular and generates 80% audience capacity for its productions. This mindset of creating opportunity filters into the type of entrepreneurial art classes provided at ASU. The arts entrepreneurship class itself was first taught in the fall 2007 semester:

This trans-disciplinary course relies heavily on guest arts entrepreneurs, who share their start-up stories with the class. The case-study approach is a common method for teaching entrepreneurship in business schools, and is adapted here for the arts-oriented student constituency. Another focus of the class is development of mission and vision: the culminating project of the course is not a full-blown business plan, as one might expect from the business school model of entrepreneurship education, but rather the development of a thoughtful and well-articulated mission and vision for an arts-based venture. (122)

The Phoenix Fringe Festival and Progressive Theatre Workshop are two projects created by students while in the p.a.v.e. program. The students applied and received up to $5,000 dollars in seed money to start each project. I agree with Essig that entrepreneurship is not a dirty word and that a theater artist is not selling out to business interests. Instead, in a field where opportunity is low, now is the time for artists to build up their business knowledge and skills to create opportunities for creative work. Below are some other programs that teach entrepreneurship with the arts:

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Filed under: Arts Entrepreneur, Theater/Theatre

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