PERSONAL: Where Is CultureFuture?

There's a lot going on, and I'll fill you in soon, but mostly, I blame the internet. How am I expected to blog when people have put all the cut-scenes from the game Civilization II online?

 

PRODUCING: Finding Non-Traditional Performance Space

Our friends over at Fractured Atlas have a post up about finding non-traditional performance space. I am not linking to it just because I'm quoted! I am linking to it because it's something very near and dear to my company, especially because of what we've done and what we're about to do.

POLITICS: Only One Conclusion

Geithner needs to resign. Unless he can trot out some incredible self-defense, he needs to resign.

CRITICISM: I Didn't Like It So Do We Need It?

In the same vein as Charles Isherwood wanting to get rid of direct address because it often doesn't work, now we can add to that genre John M Morrison wanting to banish set designers to an island in the sea.

To be fair, in both cases the titles say "Don't Do It!" but the articles say "I'm sick of seeing this done badly". Still and all, it would be more helpful to look at guidelines of what makes some cases work and others not work, rather than to despair.

Still, this appears to be how you get published in major publications, so, here's my submission to this month's Village Voice:

IS ALL THIS ACTING RUINING OUR PLAYS?

You know exactly what I mean. You're sitting in a theater, and out walks an actor, and the moment they open their mouths, you slump deep into your seat. It's another bad actor. Where do these directors find these over-articulating, over-gesticulating performers? And why are they powerless to make them stop?

All of which makes me wonder -- do we need actors anymore?

After all, if reality television has proven anything, it's that you don't need a trained MFA to "Speak the speech." And it's not just the low-brow -- Richard Foreman has proven that with a strong enough director, you can create whatever you want to with performers who are not performers.

After all, the use of "Actors" in theater really only dates back a few hundred years. Before that, anyone could join in and perform....

PRAGMATICS: A Few Notes on Transmedia

A while back, my company created a month-long transmedia performance called In Memoriam. (Entire archive available here). After a conversation with a colleague about our experience, I decided to record a few key lessons we learned.

1. TRANSMEDIA IS A MISLEADING WORD

I hate the word transmedia, although I am resigned to the fact that this is the word of the moment. The reason I dislike the word (like "multi-media" that came before it) is that the emphasis is on the media. Which media are you using, and how are they "trans"ing together.

If you start by focusing on transmedia, you are probably going to create something forgettable. Like any creative project -- theater, or dance, or software, or a legal case -- you have to start with the question you want to probe, or the thing you want to explore. You need to know why you're doing it.

The next step is to figure out what different media have to shed light on this example.

Example: In Memoriam started as part of our Eulogy season (explanation is in our season announcement, here). Taking our cue from This American Life, we decided that each of our seasons were going to speak to a theme, and we were going to start with Eulogies; why we tell stories about the things that we've lost, who tells those stories and how, etc.

For In Memoriam, the question (which we sharpened as we explored) was what does it mean for to lose someone in public. Transmedia has a tendency to treat social media as a medium for it's own sake, but the reason social media was important for In Memoriam is that it makes everything -- even dying -- a public event. That's what we wanted to know about -- what does it mean to die publicly.

From there, the other aspects of the project -- the "vote" to determine whether the character would live or die, the "rallies" that were held as live events, the video arguments characters put forward to make their case, all stemmed from that central question -- what does it mean to die publicly?

2. YOU NEED TO BE REALLY SPECIFIC ABOUT ENGAGEMENT

It's another lesson that applies equally to any medium of creating work, but you need to keep a focus on your audience. In the transmedia world, what this means are people who participate.

A lot of hay is made about theater as being a communal, community art form, but typically that's 90% horse shit -- theater today means people showing up and having a private experience (sitting in the dark, watching a stage) in a public forum. When you get into transmedia, or other participatory art forms, you're asking people to interact in ways that they're not used to.

In this fantastic CreatEquity Arts Policy Library post, my attention was drawn to this diagram used by Alan Brown to show the different modes of artistic participation (I have issues with how the diagram presents the information, but...):

You need to be extremely specific around how each of these types of people will interact -- if at all (more on that in a moment).

In In Memoriam, the different modes of participation had different ways of following the project:

1. Ambient -- If you friended the characters on Facebook, they would crop up in your news feed unpredictably.
2. Observational -- If you wanted to follow the whole project, the archive contained everything that had happened.
3. Curatorial -- We didn't target curatorial folks, but the ability to share posts from the characters or tag them in photos was available.
4. Interpretive -- Those interested in interpreting what was going on could directly engage the characters or share their interpretations -- most effectively in their comments on the vote.
5. Inventive -- We created a space for the inventive (fan fiction), but it wound up being mostly ignored. Instead, some of our audience members started attending events in their own characters.

3. YOU NEED TO COMMUNICATE EXPECTATIONS CLEARLY

Relating to the previous point, once you know how you want your audiences to interact with you, you need to communicate this to them clearly and directly as possible. Otherwise people will be confused, and people don't like to feel lost in a work.

People are a lot more willing to try out new things, so long as they have the sense that you know what's going on. This isn't the same as dictating to them what they must do -- people don't like to feel bullied and may not react the way you think/expect they will (they may decide to, instead of paying attention to your characters, perform their own characters and ignore yours...) and if someone is really interested in pursuing an avenue of engagement, you'd be a fool to block that intention.

But it needs to be straightforward how to engage.

4. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON THE WRONG AUDIENCE

Even some of your artist friends will frown when you tell them that you're doing something participatory or interactive. The observational will not want to be inventive; there are also people in the world (even artists) who do not like to engage with things that don't fit cleanly into definitions.

Do not waste your time attempting to repackage your thing into their thing. If you weaken the interactive element of the work so that the observational people enjoy it, you might wind up weakening it for both. If you can accomodate different ways of engaging, please do -- but don't let your most hostile audience dictate how things should be for your most passionate audience.

5. INSTEAD, SET YOUR OWN CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESS

When you first set out into this, you may not know exactly how many people to expect at events, or what the rate of engagement is. We came from a background of 99 seat theaters, and thus we had a bar in our brains for what a successful event is.

But without the need to fill a 99 seat theater, we didn't actually need 99 people to recoup our costs. And, if we were honest with ourselves, the events may have been worse with 99 people -- less intimate, more over-crowded.

So for these events or engagements, you need to have a plan to scale to the size of the people who attend. If an audience of 10 show up, they need to feel like that's the amount of people that were intended for the event. If an audience of 60 show up, they need to have that same feeling. Until the day where you've done this enough where you know exactly what will happen, you need to have that flexibility.

REVIEW: I Don't Want To Kill Myself

I DON'T WANT TO KILL MYSELF

Northside Film Festival’s DIY Competition
June 20th, 5:40 PM
(IMDB)

I didn't write the review I was intending a while back, but I spotted that the movie is being screened later this month at the Northside DIY Competition, which will be screened on June 20th at the Nighthawk Cinema. So, I can tell you about this fantastic movie. Hooray!

WAIT DO I HAVE TO THINK ABOUT SUICIDE?
OK, so straight up, the extremely bleak title (perhaps an heir to Wristcutters: A Love Story) is not as bad as it sounds. The story is this: The young main character, James (Luke Humphrey) pretends to try to kill himself to cover for a DUI for his friend Coop (Mike Steinmetz), and is sentenced to go to a suicide support group, run by the good-hearted but eccentric Vanessa (Carleigh Welsh).

There, he makes close friends with the glib jokester Aaron (Luke Sacherman) and forms a relationship with the frosty and jaded Emily (Martini Connelly). At first, it all seems like a joke, but as the reality of what a suicide support group can be like, it disrupts all of those relationships in radically different ways.

And along the way, it's absolutely hysterical (sometime bitterly so, but sometimes just plain funny), and absolutely real. It threads the needle very well, because it takes suicide seriously -- never making light or being offensive towards people who have deep issues in their lives -- while still finding what's funny and absurd about this world.

WAIT DO I HAVE TO CARE ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE'S PROBLEMS?
Is there room for another bitter-sweet comedy about young people thinking the world is ending? Turns out, if the movie is this one, yes.

EVERY ROLE INVESTED

The great thing about both the screenplay (by Colby Day and Nathaniel Katzman) is that you're not watching generic characters go through this story (with the possible exception of James, who seems like the everyman entry into this world). The characters are vividly painted and crafted, and the moments -- which flow in a very true to life pace -- shine lights on very small aspects of life that are just pleasing to watch.

Take, for example, the character of Coop. He's not actually one of the main characters of the piece, and his relationship to James is at best a side plot. Luckily, the filmmakers have brought together some of his moments together into a 5 minute clip:

Watching Coop's relationship to this sign-flipping job, and how he relates to his friend through it; watching Coop's perverse reaction to other peoples' suffering, watching how he relates a story at a party -- it all has a great rhythm that makes even content which is not the world's most heightened drama enjoyable and worth sitting with.

Another great example is Vanessa, the group leader. Her character begins the movie as a running joke -- a purely comic character whose eccentricity provides some great laughs. But as James' relationships deepen from a superficial understanding of other people around him, so too does Vanessa become truly three-dimensional -- still extremely funny, but from a place of truth. She's not just eccentric -- she's driven to extremes because of the extremely high stakes. She needs one -- just one -- of these suicidal young people not to kill themselves.

Lastly, I couldn't close out this review without talking about Aaron's incredible performance. Like the movie as a whole, he manages to be exceptionally funny until those moments when he needs to reveal a deep serious pain, and without him, the third act of the movie probably fall short.

ALL THESE SMALL WORLDS

It's always interesting to see a movie like this, because I have a tendency to forget how many small worlds there are inside of this world; each of which reveals the broader world through the areas which it takes to extremes. The world of rehabilitation (which I also enjoyed viewing through the lens of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) is useful, because it grapples with this central question -- how much can people expect to change themselves, and what do we have to hope for? The only answer the movie can proffer is that it's really just a trust in other people and a connection to those people that can bring us through.

See, it's not all just jokes about how hard it is to hang yourself properly.

CHANGE: Steady State, and The Pace of Change

From 99 Seats at Parabasis:

So the question that comes to me is: what if this is it? A lot of us invest a lot of time in being semi-professionally upset about things. We want change! We want it now! What if, though, there won't be any significant changes? What if the new movement in theatre is here, it's now established and this is it? We've landed at Steady State: Broadway is a place for mass entertainments at a price set for tourists, Off-Broadway and the regionals will continue to cater to an aging, upper-middle class audience with the occasional feint in the direction of diversity, the indie scene will remain largely segregated by class, race, gender and sexuality with occasional cross-pollination, and theatre will, in general, continue to hover in this place, this narrow, wobbly space between being a luxury good for cultural elites and something that connects to a wider audience. What if that's what we can expect for the duration? It does seem fairly resistant to change. Oh, we have our little flare-ups, dust-ups, scandals, donnybrooks, but pretty quickly, order is restored. The natural order of things re-asserts itself and the whole system spins on. 

So. What if this is it? What do we do then?

That's the question that anyone who wants to create change will always wonder -- whether what we want to change can actually change, or whether we're running down the game clock.

I've wondered it about theater. I've wondered it about personal relationships -- addictions, personal failings. I've wondered it about politics.

In politics, we often see a lot of strongly engrained systems that seem difficult, if impossible to move. The United States political system remains largely driven by monied interests, even in the centuries that have passed since only landed white gentry could vote. And yet, from time to time, surprising things happen and things change. Unfortunately, there's a 50/50 chance you won't like that change.

The real question is, what's the pace of change? From year to year, everything seems remarkably resistant to change. But within 100 years, we can see some pretty big changes.

Personally, I'm not afraid that what we have is a Steady State. I'm more afraid that I'll have to wait a long time for change, and once we've waited for that change it won't be what we wanted.