Daily Archives: September 26, 2007

quotes, theater

99-Cent…

Aaron and I have been discussing LA waiver theater and whether it’s better to make art with the resources you have ( a contract that pays no one very much ) or to hold off and advocate / fundraise for better payment. I think you should do both.

I found myself very close to the bone on the argument, having directed 3 LA waiver productions, and knowing exactly how hard it was to raise enough money to pay people – and being a member of a waiver company, and proud of its work in producing new plays and experimental work.

But, just imagine…if there was no 99-seat plan, would theaters all be like Syzygy in LA, and fundraise all year until they could produce a play under an Equity contract? And would that be better than producing 4 or 5 shows a year, where no one gets wages to speak of?

I don’t want to see a world without Theatre of NOTE but I find myself hard-pressed to defend the model of waiver theater as a method of making a living. Which is why I’ve left LA.

I do believe that NOTE’s role in producing new plays and new work makes it ideally suited for a lower-tier contract, and I don’t want to see it or companies like it driven out of business. But should some theaters be forced to go on a low-level Equity contract? Should there be a timespan under which you can operate waiver, and then have to go union?

The best way of instituting more change is probably just to have more union companies in LA, to have more houses make the jump – to make it seem successful, to figure out marketing and survival models for it, not just legislate change and then watch as meaningful, small companies are driven out of the landscape.

Incentive, not destructive.

Keep the waiver model in place until another is working, but put incentives in place for companies that do migrate to a union contract.

I’m very torn about it.

This quote came up in the conversation.

“The artist in ancient times inspired, entertained, educated his
fellow citizens. Modern artists have an additional responsibility —
to encourage others to be artists. Why? Because technology is going
to destroy the human soul unless we realize that each of us must in
some way be a creator as well as a spectator or consumer. Make your
own music, write your own books, if you would keep your soul.”
— Pete Seeger

Standard
Golda

Whose Name I Know

“Golda insisted that Lior keep her abreast of battle results and the number of Israeli casualties as he learned of them. She ordered that she be awakened at any time of the night, as often as necessary.”
(From GOLDA, THE UNCROWNED QUEEN OF ISRAEL)

She was sometimes called eight times in a night.

Standard
Golda

Golda’s (wrapup from Week 3)

Some misc. notes from last week.

Aaron’s teacher Victoria has a warmup exercise with clapping echoes that’s interesting. We try it in warmup, with him clapping rhythms at everyone in the group and them clapping back at him. I would like to try it again.

I spent last week notating Aaron’s various 3rd-week acting notes in a clean script. It was a really good exercise for me. We worked section by section, once through for small notes and once through for connection.

When do you switch to a clean script, if ever?

I realize, in terms of Aaron saving notes, that what he saves notes from are runthroughs – he doesn’t save a page of notes for every single day. That’s probably a good balance. I never would have worked that out without blogging about it.

You can either write down blocking or else be focused on acting and intention – and in fact, the act of writing down blocking, because it is tedious, makes me automatically care less about intention. Chris Bolender had to tell me this.

Instead, I’m trying to be aware of the blocking and the feelings of it, as the overall picture of the play.

Paper tech:
Our front projector will be for more specific settings, for landscape, and back-screen for memory. Do front and rear projection have different feelings or is it just a technical thing? I’ll have to see.

Someone suggests crickets!

Lights is cueing off blocking and projections off language.

Editing is like directing. (As I edit essays.) What are you trying to say? What do you want? And actors are writers.

Is there something to be said for making a point badly? Is there a way for unclearness, or confusion, to be clearly expressed?

Standard
the chorus

Schmorus

I have to write something on the nature of the chorus work I do, for a job, and it’s been too long since I’ve tried.

Some thoughts toward it.

The MOH&H manifesto, which I was hoping to use, was too cute and too show-specific, and also too much about the free radical / spontaneous / improvised chorus only.

Lots of people have choruses, but not everyone is going to be able to, or want to, make the leap to having them improvise.

I think in order to make this work and be useful for other people, not just those with Dan Jenkins to build them an improv light board, but any production using a chorus, I have to differentiate between what I’ve discovered about choruses in general, and what I’m doing with the improv stuff in particular.

The point is that both choreographed choruses and improvised choruses ARE choruses – two different means of arriving at the same thing – and that’s what I have to write about, not just my own way of doing it.

The way to get people to use more choruses in more interesting ways is to be able to talk about a variety of methods of using them.

The point is that I’ve been working as a chorus specialist for eight years, and if someone wants me to advise them on the subject in general, I need to not just tell them about my work in the field of the improvised chorus, but also about ALL the choruses.

I may have finally outgrown my extremism. This shocks me.

I would be sad if the improv chorus exercises became just that, exercises, a means of getting people to have freedoms in rehearsal that they dropped in performance. But if someone wants me to tell them how to use the methods that way, it will lead to better work than it would otherwise. I can’t control how this is used.

It’s all part of a chorus web, I guess, or chorus convergence, or Venn diagram. It’s not a linear progression towards one way of working. I can see my own work that way, but if I want to be collaborative with other people, I have to be open to all the possibilities.

Standard
directing

Notable

Aaron saves more of the notes he takes in their original form than Bill, who used to get rid of paper as quickly as possible, or else type them.

He also gave Camille some notes in person, waiting for her to write them down, which was a good way for them to process together.

With a larger cast it wouldn’t be practical, but it seemed so powerful in this context.

To see the note go from the director’s handwritten paper, to his words out loud, to Camille’s words out loud, to their discussion of it, to her handwritten paper – all the technology in the world, and we’re still seeing how a piece of information is transformed between two humans.

It made me understand how a “note” works, more – and why, if it isn’t worth all that, you don’t give it.

Standard
writing

Intellectual Disgrace

I want to write an article on my worst intellectual digression, counting phonemes in poems, and the value of going way off track. On the ideas that go nowhere that you follow for so long, and that seem, through retrospective-colored-glasses, so dumb.

But it taught me one thing – which is that you never know whether or not the idea is going nowhere until you do follow it.

Standard
Golda

Golda: Week 4

From rehearsal today: “It’s not a monologue. We’re all in the room with you.”

We also learned today the value of starting GOLDA’S BALCONY at the beginning – it’s proving really useful, at least for now, to get the momentum of the start under all our belts before diving into detail work in the less-worked middle and end sections. This is, I guess, still Lisa James’s principle of working the first act more heavily than the 2nd or 3rd.

She once told me that you work the first act until the actors are really eager to move on beyond it – that if the first act is coherent, the rest will flow out of it. This was in reference to BOLD GIRLS in particular.

Standard