NEAspeak

The NEA language is a perverse class of speech all its own, but after working with it for weeks, I find I’m starting to sound like this myself.

“The “Attachments Form” is not a form in the conventional sense. Rather, it is a place to attach documents that you have completed and saved elsewhere on your computer.”

And, my favorite: “Use clear language that can be understood readily.”

It’d be fun, or maybe it’d be perverse, to create a grant application for a grant that doesn’t exist, and through this application to tell the story of a society that no longer exists, either. I’d like to see what grant applications looked like in the CCP.

location, travel

proverb of place

Welcome to Chicago (and to my weblog, if you’re new here.)
I will try to keep it interesting.

I didn’t know I was coming here till just a few weeks ago, but I’m glad to be here. The place feels like Ithaca, with thunderstorms rippling through the trees. The air breathes with you.

In honor of the move, which now feels official since we signed a lease on Tuesday, here’s William Blake on the unbelievable:

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

art, theater

jump in

Tonight, riding my bike home along Montrose Avenue, I go by a tiny art gallery, Swimming Pool Project Space, which is lit and set up to look like it’s actually a pool. It’s a really intriguing front – the idea of there being a swimming pool in a storefront on a busy street made me pull over. This description of the interior makes it seem like the entire thing is as visually whimsical. Astroturf and so on. I want to be part of a theater like that – that you can’t help but get off your bike to look at.

I think this is the kind of thing I was trying to do with the x restrung cortex reading in LA – a free reading, combined with music, with people dressing up – something very funny and absurdist. Something enjoyable. The same play three times. People giggling like little girls. Fun. Makes you remember why you love theater.

I wonder if SPPC would be interested in some performance art too. I wouldn’t mind restaging the x restrung cortex experiment exactly as it was – 3 readings of the play interspersed with songs from a jazz/poetry band. I think that could work well in this city. Isn’t that what performance artists do, anyway – restage works? Why not?

grants & fundraising, theater, writing

(technically unlimited) access to artistic excellence

I’ve been working for over a month now as a freelance grantwriter for a theater company in Los Angeles on a NEA Access to Artistic Excellence grant. It’s been a humbling process. I really wanted to work on this one in particular so that if, in the future, a company I was with wanted to apply for NEA funding, I’d have some experience.

The checklist for the grant contains eleven separate items, each of which is a discrete document – and then there are also three artists’s statements and three work samples. Also, in order to apply for NEA funding, you have to be registered as a contractor with three different online entities, which maintain data.

In contrast to the convoluted bureaucratic process, if you actually call the NEA and speak to the two-person staff of Theater Specialists (as I have done a few times) you get some of the most helpful, nice people you’ve ever talked to on the phone, who really care about theater and want to help you get through the grant.

One thing I thought was interesting, which I learned from one of the Theater Specialists, is that there is no annual budgetary minimum for applying organizations. No matter how small you are, you can apply within the Access to Artistic Excellence category. We learned this when we were asking about our consortium partner, which has a much smaller budget than the lead applicant.

Although I’m sure it’s hard for small theaters to manifest an interesting enough project or a committed enough staff to complete this intensive grant, I’m glad that technically, if you work hard enough, it’s still open to everyone.

the chorus

They’ve occupied the Acropolis!

I had a good conversation this morning with my friend J from Q School, where I’ll be co-leading a week-long workshop on choruses in the play LYSISTRATA in September. J was one of my classmates at Harvard-Westlake, and she played the part of Lampito in the production of LYSISTRATA which I directed. She’s been teaching drama at Q since we graduated, four years ago, from college, and she’s directing LYS as their fall play this year.

We are going to try, in the course of a week, to touch on the following things:
– choruses in unison: how to do this without losing emotion
– choruses in variety/harmony: how to do this without losing the meaning of the text
– building a variety chorus by adding one person at a time to a single speaker
– a separate day of work on the men’s choruses
– a separate day of work on the women’s choruses
– having them show their work to each other
– adding movement in to a selected chorus from each group
– building by the end of a week to a men’s vs. women’s dialogue chorus.

I’m also doing some dramaturgy for J, helping her find the references for various things in the text. It’s really fun to work on this play again, which was the first full-length show I ever directed, and the source of my obsession with choruses.

To return to each of its choruses again is an interesting challenge, and a way for me to check in with how my thinking has developed since 1999. I can hear my seventeen-year-old self commenting and saying things like “You should just cut that!” I am trying to honor J’s intention of sticking with one translation (we are using a really lovely older one, by Patric Dickinson, which has a nice idiomatic flavor despite being Britishized) and, when possible, justifying text rather than changing it. I like Dickinson’s loose use of rhyme and meter – this excerpt below is a good example.

CHORUS OF MEN
Now
Let me tell you a little story
I heard when I was a boy:
How
There once was a youth named Melanion, who
Was so appalled at the prospect of women he flew
To the mountains rather than marry.
And he hunted hares
And he set his snares,
With his dog there,
And never came home for anyone!
That was the way
He detested women
And we’re no less
Wise in our ways than Melanion!

The variation between short and long lines is a nice nod, too, to what would have actually been happening in the Greek.

Although I usually get frustrated with chorus translations that try to maintain the historic varying line lengths, because they become completely free-verse and lose their sense of rhythm, unison, and dance, this is a really good take on the idea. You can imagine it with music. It could work in unison. And so on.

quotes, writing

time as we know it

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily, perhaps not possibly, chronological.

The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow.

– Eudora Welty, ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS

location, self-blogerential

I’ve got the adequate committee

I’ve just relocated to Chicago. Signed a year-long lease in Humboldt Park today. This isn’t the end of freelancing, but the end of doing it without a home base. I didn’t want to blog again until this was official.

Chicago is one of the most interesting cities, and best theater communities, that I have found in this year, and also home to many of my friends – and some of my family, too. I’ve been here exactly one week today.

I have a backlog of old posts from the drive through Nevada and first impressions of this city, which I will be putting up gradually.

Thank you, Sufjan, for the title.

Dara Weinberg

writer // teacher // director // los angeles

Monthly Archives: August 2008