2011 Productivity Apps: Evernote

January 18, 2011 by  

Now that I have been back in Los Angeles for four months, things are starting to get into a rhythm. It feels like good timing with it being a new year and new decade. As part of my post a week series, I will be sharing new activities I am undertaking for 2011 and new productivity applications that are helping me achieve these new goals.

I have joined one of the nine Power Groups offered by The Actors’ Network. These are groups of about 30 actors from TAN who get together once a month to discuss goals and progress, share resources, and ask questions. Each group is led by an experienced facilitator. These are a great way to meet other productive actors, and begin to really find a sense of community, one of the hardest things to do in this city, particularly when you first arrive.

A requirement for each participant is to come to the meeting with a laundry list of goals and activities accomplished for the previous 30 days and a list of goals and activities one wants to complete for the 30 days. The two-hour meeting is spent going through everyone’s list, along with discussing any industry-related questions.

Evernote has been the application that has helped me in preparing for my Power Group (PG) meetings. I am able through the month to cross off goals as I complete them, and make a list of new goals. This can be done on my iMac, Macbook, or iPhone and the information is saved to my account. During the meeting, I can easily type up information that I hear other group members talk about and automatically know they are saved for easy access later. I can also upload the calender of events from TAN’s website and scan any handout that I receive in the meeting into a PDF and upload it to my Evernote account.

I am always looking for great applications that would help my freelance work/life. Do you have one that you love and can not live without? Let me know what it is, and if I write about it, I will give you a free half-hour website, or social media marketing, phone consultation.

Filed under: Acting, Los Angeles, Productivity

Blogging Tips

January 11, 2011 by  

I am not one for new years resolutions, though I committed last week to the WordPress 2011 challenge to post at least once a week. While I plan to post more than that, depending on my availability, I am deciding to have a consistent weekly post that will arrive on Tuesdays.

Back to the Basics
Since 2011 is a new decade, and this blog will have been active for seven years this April, I am using this year to get back to the basics of blogging and consistent content. Exploring questions like, who is my audience? What am I truly passionate about writing? What am I bringing to the overall conversation?

One community that I follow, and sometimes contribute, is #2amt on twitter. A conversation started with @DaveCharest throwing out a link talking about basic blogging tips, and why someone might not be reading, or unsubscribe, to your blog. While I agree with most of the points in the blog post, and having done some myself, what got me thinking most was @TravisBedard‘s tweet.

Not That Simple
I started to think of all the blogs I read. My Google Reader is eclectic with folders labeled Acting, Arts Entrepreneur, Community Arts, Freelance, Friends, Money, SEO, Social Media, Stage Combat, Teaching Artist, Theater, Web Design and about ten blogs that don’t fit naturally into any of those categories. I subscribe to 180 blogs in total.

I do agree with Travis, in that, tech writers are writing more for attracting the most amount of hits, to attract advertisers, by giving their readers that one quick piece of information (5 steps of this or how to do this), which seemed to be the type of writer that wrote the post about not reading your post because it was too long. While niche writes, many theater bloggers for example, tend to write longer posts.

For those who are just starting a blog in 2011, or recommitting to blog consistently, know there is no right way. Write as much as you need to say what you need to say. Of course, you should have a goal to be specific, but don’t keep checking the word count. I have read many great posts that felt more like essays and quick three sentence posts that said exactly what was needed. So just keep writing, be clear what you want to say, and those that want to read it will.

Filed under: Blogging, Writing

#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

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.

Filed under: unkown

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

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

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

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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