the chorus

Chorus WS Tomorrow Evening in Portland

Many Hats Collaboration presents a second workshop on
Improvised Choruses and Experimental Physical Theatre
with Dara Weinberg and Jessica Wallenfels

WHAT: Ensemble Performance, Generative Creation, Physical Theater

WHERE: Performance Works NorthWest
4625 SE 67th Ave.
Portland, OR 97206
503.777.1907

WHEN: Thursday, October 18, 7pm-10pm

HOW: RSVP to jessicawallenfels @ gmail.com por favor.

After the success of our first workshop, Many Hats is offering a second chance to experiment as we continue to investigate a new method of devising theater with improvisation. We will do exercises on the improvised chorus and investigate the text of Edwin Abbot’s FLATLAND, a text about dimensions and geometrical beings, using this method. Actors, dancers, musicians, directors, writers, singers and all artists, theatrical and otherwise, are welcome.

The improvised chorus is a work in progress – come and help us progress!

Donations accepted: $5-$10 sliding scale
No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Please wear clothes you can move in and bring a water bottle.

Don’t forget to RSVP! See you the 18th.

Dara Weinberg is a director and choreographer who works with the free radical chorus, an experiment in improvised choral theater and creating choruses through imitation. Until recently LA-based, Dara directed The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an improvised dance play based on William Blake’s poetry, at the Met Theatre Company. Other Los Angeles directing credits include A Vast Wreck and Brandohead at Theatre of NOTE. She assistant directed the premiere of My Wandering Boy (dir. Bill Rauch) at South Coast Rep. At the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, she assistant directed Romeo and Juliet (dir. Bill Rauch) and Tartuffe (dir. Peter Amster). Other credits include Human Bombing for the Berliner Compagnie as well as choreography for the West Bay Opera Company and Sacred Fools Theatre Company. She assistant directed The Stones (dir. Corey Madden) at the Kirk Douglas. In December, she will assistant direct LYDIA at the Denver Center (dir. Juliette Carrillo). Her website is https://weinberg.wordpress.com.

Jessica Wallenfels (dir. Rest Room, Break, Then Open; choreog. OSF’s Romeo and Juliet, Mutt) and Dara Weinberg (AD on this season’s OSF shows Tartuffe, Romeo and Juliet, see bio below) will be divvying up a couple of hours to experiment and share on ensemble movement and physical theater. This will be on-your-feet actor/mover type stuff in a no-pressure environment. You’ll be creating and working in a group, as well as bouncing off of varied directorial viewpoints, in this evening for novices through experts. Many Hats Collaborators Lava Alapai and Annalise Albright will be on hand and throwing into the mix.

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theater

Local Story Party in LA & Wreck gets Pick of the Week

Theatre of NOTE is, by far, the best small theater in Los Angeles, because it’s connected to its community and its audience. NOTE makes art by, for, and about the residents of Los Angeles, and has been telling wonderful and weird local stories for years. This production, “Local Story”, a NOTE member rental coming up in November is a great example of that.

If you’re in Los Angeles and want to eat some great food, see good entertainment, and support local theater, come out and support the “Local Story” cast and crew this Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at the Oasis Theatre for the LOCALS’ NIGHT Fundraiser: It’s going to be a great party.

LOCALS’ NIGHT
The “Local Story” Fundraiser
Saturday, October 20, 2007
6-10 pm
at
Oasis Theatre
5100 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Admission: $25.00 (Includes food, one complimentary drink and
entertainment) Cash only at the door.
*Included in your evening: Food. Cash bar. Opportunity Drawing.Music. Prizes. Storytelling. Love. Laughs.*

RSVP via email: localstoryplay @ gmail.com

Confirmed Performers: Steve Silverman, Bobby Banuelos, Gina Garcia, Courtney Hoffman,
and Hiwa Bourne.

Please, come wearing a costume representing your own local story, hometown or culture. Even if it’s just your grandpa’s hat or a T-shirt with your favorite sports team on it. The best costume will receive a special gift.

All proceeds from this event go to support “Local Story”, a new play by Kristen Palmer, produced by Inger Tudor, Karen Smith, Phil Curry and Michelle Hilyard in association with Theatre of NOTE.
Cast: Jefferey Emerson, Jennifer Ann Evans, Elizabeth Liang, Monroe Makowsky, Mandi Moss, Michelle Hilyard and David Wilcox.
For more information about “Local Story”, please go to: http://www.myspace.com/localstoryplay

Also in great things at NOTE, Wreck of the Unfathomable gets Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly.

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humor rhymes with tumor, politics

Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column

“First of all, I don’t think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.”

Brilliant.

And Frank Rich links to a Post article about WW2 veterans who didn’t use torture in interrogation in their day and are speaking out against current practices.

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dance

bodycity returns

Lake Sharp & her fellow members of the dance troupe bodycity have a dance event happening in LA on Oct 26th. Lake also works and designs clothes at Matrushka, where the dance is being performed. She’s a really great all-around artist, and my former co-producer for BRANDOHEAD. I first saw bodycity perform at the Brandohead fundraiser, which was like a mini-marathon: a piece where the members of the group talked about the troubles of cleaning house.
“Oh no! Toilet bowl!”
It was some of the funniest and simplest dance I’ve ever seen.

bodycity IX: through the Glass Mass
A harvest dance to bubble up bodies and fling ourselves, with shirt sleeves rolled and eyes wide open, into the night. Inspired in part by Halloween, private rockouts and alleyway dance-offs.

choreography by Lake Sharp
beats by Mike Meanstreetz
Josh Forbes on singing saw
costume design by Anna Magnuson & Lake Sharp

friday, Oct 26th
reception at 7pm
performance at 8pm
@ Matrushka Clothing
3822 W. Sunset blvd
90026

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workstyle

To Do Or Not To Do

How do you maintain your to-do list? I’m trying having mine on a number of desktop Stickies, which seems better than the paper format – all my efforts at keeping it inside a paper calendar mean that I never open the calendar because I’m afraid of it.

Does anyone do a to-do list inside a computer or online calendar?

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style

Surreality

So, I watched a bunch of episodes of lonelygirl15 last night, in an effort to better understand the conversation Cisco and I have been having about reality television.

If you, like me, are one of the two people on the planet who didn’t already know about this, the series was a Youtube video blog which pretended to be “real” but was actually a cast of actors following a script. It used no improvisation. The discovery of the scripted nature of the series did nothing to dampen its popularity – although a bunch of people were offended, or pretended to be.

Part of the popularity, and the appeal, must have come from the idea of the hoax – like with War Of The Worlds. I think there’s an interesting article in this somewhere about the spectrum of (sus)pension of (dis)belief:

1) entertainment which pretends to be completely unscripted, even though it is completely scripted, and which actually wants to convince people that it isn’t (lonelygirl15, War of the Worlds, Blair Witch)

2) entertainment which pretends to be scripted, even though it’s not. (Improv comedy.)

3) entertainment which is proudly scripted (Shakespeare, Shaw, things explicitly stylized)

4) entertainment which is proudly UNscripted (does anything really fall into this category? The nature of recording something for other people’s consumption implies some kind of forethought – even just turning on the camera means you’re going to think about it…I suppose hidden camera series do. Punk’d. Or wildlife shows where the animals really don’t know they’re being filmed. )

5) And then, here’s the issue: (that Cisco and I were debating) things like Survivor, Kid Nation, etc., entertainment which straddles these categories, which finds itself somewhere between 1 and 4.

I have a lot more thinking to do about this. But the thinking isn’t ethical, although I find myself resorting to ethics sometimes to explain why I don’t like Category 5. I think that in order to be in accordance with the train of thought I can actually defend, I have to explain the problem with Category 5 on purely formal grounds.

Of course, my argument about form is, and always has been, that all forms are valid and that the only way to argue against anything is formally.

Meredith just walked in and we are brainstorming on “reality theater.” More to come.

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directing

the nature of the beast

I’m at 2319 today, working on the projects from yesterday: the poem for Ellen and FLATLAND. I gave Shiyan a sample FLATLAND pitch in the car.

I find myself wanting to leave certain concepts in the realm of FLATLAND pleasantly vague, to be worked on “in the room” – at the same time knowing that I’m never going to get into “the room” unless they are clearer.

In order to convince people that you can direct something, you have to have very clear ideas. You have to describe the show as if it were finished. You need to be able to convince (with some degree of truth) a group of producers that you can bring, out of thin air, the exact show you describe, with very little variation.

In order to actually direct it, you have to be able to discard those ideas entirely, in favor of the best and most original impulses generated in the room. You use verbs like “play” and phrases like “let’s try it.”

Your designers have gone forward based on your (original) clear ideas, which are now modified. You have to keep them, and everyone, able to move forward with their work (which means making choices) while trying to be open to the best work possible (which means making changes.)

Then, just at the last minute, you have to find some accord between those impulses and your ideas – between changes and choices – between the designers and the play, between the reality and the dream of it.

And then you get to do it all over again.

This process of indecision is actually one of the best things about theater. It forces all participants to abandon their egos in favor of the best ideas in the room. When it doesn’t work, it’s either a hollow shell of control or an incoherent mess.

You have to let it stay messy as long as you can.

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employment, theater

there’s nothing forbidden about this planet

I finished a big project today – a draft of various lists of projects I am and am not interested in taking on, for another grant, this one multi-year. I called it “Planet Admin” and “Planet Art,” and there was a sub-list called “Forbidden Planet” of things I no longer want to keep doing in the theater world.

It was actually a lot of fun to write, as testimony to the weirdness of the last two years – from the Open Fist to the Matrix to NOTE to the Met to the many lives and theatres of Bill. It included things like:

“- Cleaning the premises of the theater in any way, or killing rodents or insects which have infested the theater, or dealing with fire or health inspectors.
-Organizing other people’s files, throwing out other people’s trash.
– Reminding people about phone calls, appointments, etc.
– Laundry or dry-cleaning.
-Cooking, bartending, food or alcohol preparation, serving, transportation or storage.
-Building management, facilities operation (lightbulbs, carpets, toilets)”

What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done for your “art”? Have you distributed buckets around the floor of an ancient shell of a vaudeville stage, to catch the water during the show?

Have you used a ShopVac to suction water, standing a foot deep, from the floor of the women’s restroom, and pumped it back outside – even as rain was coming in through giant holes in the wall?

If not, why not? 🙂 And would you do it again?

But the Planet Art list was a lot of fun to write. It’s good to be clear that I want to be moving forward on directing one show a year, writing one play a year, going abroad, and doing chorus workshops.

I think I should remind myself that I have already achieved all those goals for this year, and if I do nothing more for the rest of 2007, I will have already done more than enough. How about directing one show, assisting on five, (MWB, RnJ, T, GB, L) and traveling throughout the US? And teaching more darn chorus workshops than I ever have, before, in one year? The style in which I live my life is a style of overwork.

Tasks for the rest of the day include adapting the right page from Flatland and getting back to Ellen with a poem. If I can do those things, I think I can spend tomorrow watching movies.

It’ll be nice to have a few days in Portland. I leave on Tuesday, after another understudy rehearsal with Joan.

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travel

Cities In Flight

Caitlin having sent me sidestep.com, a search engine that finds the location of the cheapest ticket possible for you, I have booked all the travel anyone could possibly want.

October: SF, Portland, SF.
November: SF, Indianapolis, Ithaca, Los “Thanksgiving” Angeles, San Antonio.
December: Denver.
January: Denver, New Orleans.

The more things change, the more you get on a plane.

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