Sebastian Nubling's staging of Simon Stephens' "Pornography" in Hanover, Germany in 2007.

Director’s Theater: Chris Wilkinson at the Guardian‘s theater blog directs us to British playwright Simon Stephens’s keynote speech at the Theatertreffen Stückemarkt, Berlin’s main new play festival. The entire thing (see here) is a must-read. The playwright, who began making realist-style theater, recounts his ongoing collaboration with German auteur director Sebastian Nübling, who’s directed four (soon to be five) of the writer’s plays outside of Britain. Britain, like the US, is essentially a playwright’s theater–productions of plays old and new largely exist to serve the playwright’s purpose. Nübling comes from the Continental tradition of a director’s theater, a concept almost completely non-existent in the US (to our theater’s continual impoverishment), and Stephens’ embrace of what he learned is fascinating and inspiring. For one thing, I rarely hear a playwright admit that “theater is a physical medium,” because playwrights–being control freaks who often see themselves as the sole meaningful creative input–have so little control over that aspect of production. Stephens even goes a step further and acknowledges that theater–and this is true of all theater-in-production, though we often forget it–is “multi-authored” by virtue of all the diverse creative inputs, of which the playwright is but one. But for Stephens to admit that language is “noise”?”

Hallelujah! Predictably commenters on the Guardian‘s blog go for the jugular (leading Andrew Haydon, whose own response got bumped by Wilkinson, to quip on his personal blog, “having seen the comments…I’m rather glad my piece isn’t on the Guardian Theatre Blog”). But a slightly more subtle reading (actually it doesn’t require much subtlety at all, just a willingness to acknowledge that a play ain’t a damn novel) reveals that Stephens is actually making a much more thoughtful point that at its heart does nothing more controversial than acknowledge that everyone else involved in a production plays a role in conveying the meaning, not just the playwright with his words.

“People receive languages in ways far more complicated than just the literal,” Stephens says.

[Nübling] stages language in a way that releases the subliminal and the chaotic, the playful and the visceral. In his productions language is unapologetically gestural in a way that is simply not the case in England. It’s not that he ignores the meaning of words [emphasis added] but that he fuses that consideration of meaning with a consideration of gesture which few English directors dare. They are too concerned with what the writer is trying to say, a question Sebastian has never asked me. For me as a playwright this is a massive provocation. It makes me ask: why am I writing these words down for the characters to speak? They have to be more than simply a literal gesture. It is as liberating as it is thrilling and has redefined my work.

Mierle Ukeles "Maintenance Art" in the 1970s.

The Art of Failure(?): The Awl, writing about the Kitchen’s gala last week, has a lovely little anecdote about artist Mierle Ukeles, via the editor of Cabinet magazine. Back in 1969, Ukeles wrote a manifesto called “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969.” The document is worth reading in its own right, as it explores a number of interesting ideas about work, practice, art, and job, but the anecdote, about a performance Ukeles proposed, is fantastic. You should read it for the narrative effect, but the set-up is the essentially wanted to perform a janitorial role at a museum, which happens at night. The museum took her literally, which meant that when she did it, there was no one actually there to see the performance. I find it hard to express what touches me so much in this little story, but I think it mostly has to do with the dignity of the act itself, and what that says about the value of art outside the audience-artist dynamic. And the best part? Turns out it’s not really true. Much like there’s value in a performance you can’t see, there’s also magic in stories that didn’t happen.

Young Playwrights Need to be Aware of This Great Resource Called “Culturebot”: There’s an inadvertently funny essay over at HowlRound by Max “Bunny” Sparber called “Bad Influences,” in which he argues that, “I am of the opinion it is as important to cultivate your bad influences as your good ones.” Now I don’t know Sparber or his plays, and I don’t want to hammer him too hard, but this essay is one of the most alarmingly uninformed things I’ve read recently. Sparber lists his “provocative” heroes, ranging from Marinetti (for pissing off audiences) to Valerie Solanas (for dirty words in titles?) to a couple visual artists (my favorite clueless quote: “I’ve always felt that the world of theater would benefit from the experimental lunacy that always seems to be in vogue in contemporary art”) who created really fascinating performance experiments.

Mind you, this is all un-ironic. Mr. Sparber is apparently completely and totally ignorant of the entire world of experimental theater today. The latest of the works he references is 40 years old. In my short life (I’m just past 30) I have seen performances (not all of which I’m claiming were good) involving actual sex, drug use, anal penetration by AK-47, live animals, improper relations with dead animals, blood play, urination, defecation and the incorporation of the products thereof, and…oh God. So many directions I could go I just don’t know what to say.  I applaud the intent, but are playwrights really this uninformed about the rest of the world of their own art form, to say nothing of the larger world of the arts? Sparber lists as one of his Marinetti-inspirations a play he wrote in which the audience is forced the leave the theater before the climax, “a moment that runs the real risk of simply irritating the audience.”

For the poor kid guy’s sake, no one tell Ann Liv Young he’s moving in on her turf. God knows what she’d do to him.

Odds & Ends: DanceUSA on the impact points of technology on the future of dance – George Hunka on the nexus of haute couture and theater – American Theater on tourability and touring – Loughlin Deegan departs the after a lauded tour as AD of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theater Festival -

Popularity: 3% [?]

Salt Horse's "Titan Arum." See below*

NPD is Hell: A pair of pieces on the hell of new play development. In the Brooklyn Rail, Alex Kilgore offers us “The Shame of Theater,” a lengthy essay on the absurdities (and occasional hypocrisies) of the development process. Similarly, over at HowlRound, Aaron Carter offers us “Zombies Limping in Circles, or an Argument for a Taxonomy of NPD Technique.” While the former concentrates on the system itself and the latter on the system’s (often negative) impact on the final product, what both pieces share is a strong perspective that the system is broken. Playwrights compete for scraps from theaters that claim to be focused on artists but which are really presenting institutions tossing around buzz-words in search of grant money. Most commissions don’t get produced; workshops and residencies are often poorly supported efforts offered as sops to funders. And the plays that eventually do make it through the development process are often so gutted by the process–with the playwright cajoled into trying to appease an artistic director rather than do justice to his or her ideas–that the end product is weak, “lobotomized” in Carter’s formulation.

Older But Good: Just came across this brief personal essay in Bellyflop from February; a little behind the times, but a personal essay is a personal essay and this one’s worth reading. In “Is This Appetite Healthy?,” dancer Charlie Ashwell wonders about the value of doing nothing rather than something. Having recently finished a show, she retreated from London to spend some time decompressing at home with her mum, and began to wonder about the sense that we have to keep doing things…for some reason. It’s well-advised for artists to ask themselves “why?” these days. Not only are New York curators and programmers telling you “you’re doing too much!,” but as Andy and I have argued previously, the reasons for doing something–often having to do with career advancement, the idea that, as Ashwell puts it, “constantly scrabbling around, notching up brownie points or kudos or eking out the best possible-sounding CV”–much like the reasons we typically argue for arts support in the general culture–ancillary values to economic development, health, and so on–obscure the value of the art itself. We wind up looking every which way to prove why art, and by extension the practice of making it, is important, anywhere except at the art itself. “To feel, to experience, to know what you really want to say, if anything,” Ashwell sagely points out, sometimes requires doing nothing at all for a while.

Future Notes on a Book Club(?): Regular readers will, by this point, be painfully aware that for the past couple months, the theatrical blogosphere has been enmeshed in a discussion of narrative (or maybe story) that goes back and forth without ever seeming to go anywhere in particular. Over at Parabasis, which more often than not has been the hub of discussion, Isaac Butler has proposed a group read-through of a book on the subject: Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot. As discussions have usually (and for good reason more often than not) gotten caught up in debates as to what everyone’s trying to talk about when we talk about “narrative” or “plot” or “story,” I for one think it’s a great idea that could help elevate the level of the discourse, and I’m sure anyone’s welcome to take part. Looks like it’d kick off around mid-June. The book can be purchased on Amazon for all of about $25.

Odds & Ends: My former colleague Michael van Baker reviews Catherine Cabeen’s Into the Void at On the Boards, mentioned last week – Nottingham, England launches a new festival of radical theater – contemporary dance blossoms in the Arab Spring – who knew Cleveland had so much flippin’ theater? – ticket deals for Mark Morris via DTW – quotes on art from the remarkable Tadeusz Kantor – a lit-crit-y but still interesting exploration of social media, performance, and identity from Art Forum – theater that transcends the moment and projects forward

*Just because I love the photo, if nothing else–dancer Allie Hankins, a friend of mine, for Titan Arum, from Seattle’s Salt Horse Performance, which opens May 13. Photo by Tim Summers.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Naming Conventions: Over at Parabasis, Isaac Butler takes strong disagreement with the Deborah Pearson’s Exeunt essay on narrative I linked to a few weeks ago and praised; George Hunka had a pair of more positive takes on it. Butler’s critique is scathing but mostly in an editorial fashion, and in the process he sets up a bit of a straw-man argument, but at heart he’s got a very valid point: one of the challenges I’ve faced trying to make a similar point comes down to how we name things. “Narrative” is far too broad a category, and those of us throwing bombs (myself included) at contemporary theater practices need to learn to be more clear and specific. That said, people who disagree with us might also at some point choose to defend their position, which defines “theater” as the way things are done now in the mainstream–playwright driven, standard production process, using a set of production and performance techniques taught in colleges and studios all over the country and indeed most of the advanced Western world. Everything else is apparently an attempt to radically deviate from what’s in reality just the mainstream conception of performance today. And furthermore, of course, more people need to deal with the reality of theater as a live art, and distinguish the text from the text-in-performance (in other words, Shakespeare today ain’t Shakespeare in Elizabethan England, anymore than Greek drama in an NYC theater is truly akin to Aeschylus at the Festival Dionysus). Point us, read all of these pieces on narrative if you haven’t already, because this is actually a very rich and fascinating discussion, and check out the comments.

O Solo Mio!: Okay, that’s a really bad pun but cut me some slack–yesterday was my birthday and my head’s not really in the game. Over at HowlRound, playwright and occasional solo performer Susan Miller has an essay on how she came to solo performance, and it’s definitely worth the read. I have a real love-hate relationship to solo performance: I’ve seen some truly amazing stuff, and I’ve also seen how it’s often a formulaic, even ossified, form that mainly serves to scream, “Look at me! I AM!” Too much of it is painfully autobiographical, and I occasionally find outright uncomfortable to get to see the artistic process by which violence is done to true-life experience to make it fit a fictive convention that may or may not move an audience. But I always stick with solo performance and subject myself to it because often, it’s solo performance to which creatively stifled actors and writers turn when they begin to realize standard theater conventions today don’t permit them to create the sort of work they want to do (and I want to see more of). In fact, the health of solo performance depends, I’d argue, on how close-minded most theater practice is, but that’s a different story. Also, I’d like to plug at the same time Seattle’s Solo Performance Festival, about half-way through its run. It’s a kick-ass, up-by-the-bootstraps fest of often exciting work performed on a shoestring budget, and my former site The SunBreak is one of its media sponsors this year, and we have coverage of pretty much the whole fest.

Furious Fools: Very cool bit o’ news out of SF–foolsFURY Theater is putting together their own festival of ensemble-driven theater work, one of the only fests of its kind in San Francisco. FURY Factory goes down starting June 7, and features companies like Pig Iron (Philly), Theater Movement Bazaar (LA), and Band of Toughs (Denver). It’s a fascinating and ambitious line-up, and we should all be nice and help contribute to their Kickstarter campaign to fund it all.

Dance Schtuff: We got…nothin’. Really. Come on people, help us out–surely somewhere out there on the Inter-tubes there’s a bunch of bunheads screaming at choreographers about something, working out ideas online and discussing the fine and vibrant art-form of dance. But honestly, this author hasn’t found too much yet. There’s itch journal (not online), Critical Correspondence, Dance magazine, and…? Help us out!

Odds & Ends: Andrew Haydon on King’s Head pub theater’s amazing In-Yer-Face Opera, where Mark Ravenhill is updating Monteverdi – Dance magazine profiles choreographer Andrea Miller – Guardian theater blog on contemporary playwrights’ lack of artistic ambition – Upstaged looks back on the history of making Anything Goes PC (we like musicals, too) – Lynn Nottage’s new meta theater piece, on Wicked Stage – Exeunt on the one-on-one theater festival, another cool thing London has more of than the US – Bellyflop interviews emerging performance artist Stacy Makishi

Popularity: 27% [?]

Race & “Contemporary Performance”: Last week, I published a long-ish piece wondering why, given the roadblocks in traditional theater, more black theater artists weren’t creating work in non-traditional modes. The response was actually extremely interesting–J. Holtham (99 Seats) offered a long and very thoughtful response over at Parabasis; Culture Future had a pair of responses (one and two); and in comments, African-American artist Daniel Alexander Jones politely pointed out that (as I kind of expected), I may just not know about the variety of artists making work in these veins, and gave me a host of people I need to check out. Part of the problem I encountered was defining what I was actually talking about, because in the end, “contemporary performance” is a pretty weak term. Still, I think it spoke to the text-centric bias of most theater artists; I was mostly aiming for a negative definition, modes of theater production that fell outside the normal tracks. But overall, all of it is very worth reading, and it’s a conversation that needs to be continued.

In Yer Face: Another fine and thought-provoking piece over at the Guardian‘s theater blog. Although it’s mostly framed as a piece on playwright Philip Ridley (with whom I’m only vaguely aware but now far more interested), what really caught my eye was the author’s almost off-hand analysis of Ridley’s historical moment in the early-Nineties, when a host of groundbreaking playwrights led by the likes of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill (lumped under the name “In-Yer-Face Theater” by at least one critic) burst onto the scene:

That generation of writers was somewhat cast into shadow by two things. Periodically, British theatre is gripped by the thought that playwriting is dead and devising will save us all; these moments usually pass but before they do they tend to lay waste to a few promising writers. The early 90s was such a time.

Given the back and forth in several contexts I’ve had recently over playwriting vs. non-playwright-centric modes, I found myself mulling over this thought. The arts are prone to hyperbole, and we’re always going over why this or that is “dying.” However, I think it’s true that energy shifts around from mode to mode over time. Whether there’s a logic to it, I don’t know. But periodically playwriting seems to fall into a rut, at least in some places and circles, which may or may not be the same elsewhere (America in the Sixties, for instance), and energy and innovation shifts from one space to another. I wonder if my present exasperation with text-based theater has more to do with a sense that most of the major work I see coming out just isn’t that urgent, and that I might be turning a blind eye to the reality that there’s probably a new generation out there chomping at the bit and who will blow up in a few years’ time.

Seattle’s Intiman Theater Dying?: I mention this only in passing because it concerns me in a past life (when I covered theater in Seattle) and because I think it’s an interesting case study in funding, arts management, and so on. The Intiman, one of Seattle’s three major LORT houses, is shuttering its doors for the rest of the season. Why? Well, no one really knows because the backstory is convoluted and theater’s board and management has behaved with varying levels of incompetence and–it would seem–mendacity. The news broke several months ago when a playwright/blogger published as-yet unsubstantiated rumors of the company–formerly AD’d by Broadway darling Bart Sher and currently by Broadway darling Kate Whoriskey, of Ruined fame–forced their hand. Apparently for several years they’d been dipping heavily into the endowment, and declared they needed a million dollars in additional funds to keep the theater open this year. The fault was largely laid with an abruptly departed managing director, and the endowment was emptied to pay back union dues and rent on the theater’s home. Since the beginning of the year, the Intiman leant heavily on the community pony up half a million dollars before the first of several deadlines, and although the first deadline was met, they still recently announced they were canceling the rest of the season based on the advice of their new management guru. In fact, it seems like a standard playbook that was used several years ago to save Seattle’s ACT Theater, and the (largely accurate, with hindsight) rumor mill had it that they were only staying open to beg money off the community and planned to shut down for a while from the beginning. But that was always just a rumor. In fact, no one has any idea how bad things really are at the Intiman because information only comes out piecemeal, a nice reminder that non-profit arts groups are often not actually public trusts but, in reality, just businesses with a non-profit model, every bit as prone to evasion, deceit, and managerial and fiscal incompetence as any other.

Odds & Ends: East of Borneo with a great piece on the correspondence of Roberto Bolano and Enrique Lihn (yes, it involves lists) - Exeunt mag (UK) on the line-up of the 2011 Pulse Fest – Dance/USA’s e-journal’s continuing series on self-producing dance shows – TCG Circle on “transmedia,” complete with serious cultural biases – Critical Correspondence interviews the artists of MGM Grand, whose show opens tonight (April 20) at the Kitchen – Bellyflop interviews Australian choreographer Rosalind Crisp.

Popularity: 21% [?]

The cast and crew of "L'Effet de Serge" with their "zombie visas," photo courtesy of On the Boards.

Money Money Money: As I’ve mentioned before, I’m sick and tired of Big Ideas demonstrating what a Serious Person you are in terms of lobbing arts sector bombs talking about this or that on the financial side, proposing ineffective, unenforceable plans about how to make things better or save the arts (as though saving isn’t really just a resistance to change, anyway). So it was nice over the last week to encounter a series of more philosophical responses. Seattle-based playwright Paul Mullin (a must-read in the theater world, up there with Parabasis) has a great essay up called “Money Isn’t Everything…or Anything,” in which, rather than bombastically attacking anything, he subtly goes for jugular nonetheless, exploring the relationship of art to money, and offers a rather beautiful defense of theater as an amateur endeavor if that’s what’s required.

“All art is a conversation—theatre doubly so.  If my former friend is telling me I can only hold a conversation with the upper middle class of the Western World circa early 21st century I am obliged to either politely ignore him, or firmly insist he go fuck himself,” he writes, adding: “Yours is the territory you refuse to surrender.” Well worth keeping in mind more often.

Then, over at HowlRound, Polly Carl has a great piece on the idea of “gifts,” and the power of art within the social framework of gift moments. There’s some cross-over with Andy’s essay here on art as a gift economy, and both are also well worth reading.

Update on France’s Vivarium Studio: Two weeks ago we broke the story that, due to visa issues, L’Effet de Serge, a well-loved piece of theater from France’s Vivarium Studios, would potentially have to cancel their upcoming performance at Seattle’s On the Boards. Privately, I was told that the decision to cancel had already been made and the theater was just waiting to announce after the weekend. It was a surprising piece of news given that the show has already played the US on more than one occasion, including the 2010 Under the Radar Festival, and Vivarium Studios has toured other shows previously. The good news is, due to outcry and the intervention of one of Washington’s US Senators and Representatives, the visa rejection was overturned at the last minute, and the show will go up on schedule. I certainly wouldn’t presume to take any credit, as, you know, that probably goes to the state’s elected representatives, but I know that some readers took the time to write in to the addresses I provided. And indeed, it appears that ultimately Mr. Alejandro Mayorkas stepped in to help deal with situation, so to all the readers who wrote in, as well as the bloggers who helped pick up the story (Parabasis, Infinite Body, Contemporary Performance), give all yourselves a pat on the back.

Waking Up: The Brits are all a-twitter over The Independent‘s theater critic Paul Taylor falling asleep and snoring loudly during a performance. The Guardian‘s theater blog has the story, and it’s an amusing read. But I only mention it in passing, because what I really want to point readers to is Claudia La Rocco’s fascinating essay-lecture in the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail, “Some Thoughts, Possibly Related, on Time, Criticism, and the Nature of Consciousness.” I mention the sleeping issue in tandem because sleeping at the theater also comes up in La Rocco’s piece, but it’s so much more–a lovely, free associative, fragmentary exploration of ideas that says less than it asks. I have nothing to add, but be sure to check it out.

Odds & Ends: Keith Hennesy talking about Joseph Beuys and Crotch in Berlin – Kansas loses their only modern dance company – one of London’s most praised pub-theaters is shut down over stairway concerns – Belarus Free Theater is back in the news (UK) and onstage (NYC) – Bellyflop tallies up the Place Prize winners in London – a Beijing modern dance company tries to teach the Chinese it’s not all just pretty ladies – Ben Brantley defends feel-bad theater – dancer/choreographer Catherine Cabeen on drag performance and Richard Move’s Martha@

Popularity: 3% [?]

Arts Funding & Ethics: Leading off this week’s Digest is a pair of piece from art critic Eleanor Heartney. Back in 1996, following the last dust-up over the NEA and controversial arts, she wrote a piece for Artnet magazine called “Out of the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibility and the Critic.” It turns out, it’s every bit as applicable 15 years later, and she offers a contemporary addendum, “Art & Money: The Umbilical Cord of Gold.” Despite being about visual art, both are very relevant to the current moment, and both should be read in full.

Both pieces raise very powerful questions about the ethics and reality of arts funding, and the relationship of donors to art. I don’t have a lot to add, because neither piece is particularly prescriptive–instead, both suffice to pose questions, questions I’ve been mulling in one way or another for a while. What is the social value of art, for instance, if art is increasingly curtailed to supplicate the ideological whims of wealthy donors? And given the way in which art has become corrupted by dirty money, do we really have a claim to being part of the critical discourse, deserving of limited public funds?

Department of Dumb Ideas: Over at Theaters Ideas, Scott Walters has a suggestion based on the entire #supplydemand issue. He was on Studio 360 and is following up. His suggestion for NEA funding of theaters? One, the NEA should only provide “seed money” for new companies for a total of five years, after which they have to be self-sufficient, and two, only support companies opening in “underserved communities.”

I have four responses. One, five years? How long does he think the average start-up theater company survives? Two, underserved communities? The most recent Americans for the Arts Vitality Report says the number of cultural and ethnic-oriented institutions has doubled in the last decade. “Underserved communities” are where the lion’s share of growth is already. Three, if a community already doesn’t have a theater, why do we assume they’ll ever be able to support one absent government funding? And four, why should everyone else accept the moral argument that only this sort of theater is what should be supported?

Rethinking Audience Development: An interesting thought-piece that doesn’t go half far enough over at the Guardian‘s theater blog. Taking a few contrasting examples from the West End and London’s fringe, the author notes, “Theatre is constantly pre-selecting its pool of potential audience members on the basis of context, timing of performances and venue.” The tension in the piece, never really resolved, is what this means. Is the differentiation primarily a mechanism of how a company or festivals markets itself, or is the reality just that the perceived universalism of good art is itself an illusion. It’s a tricky topic. For a more meaningful discussion of some of these issues, check out Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator.

Odds & Ends: East of Borneo on staging Handke’s Offending the Audience with children – Irish Theater magazine on turning the critic into the emblem of abusive political power – Parabasis‘ series on narrative, installment two – Portland, Oregon’s dance community launches its own newspaper – nothing like a good controversy to move DVDs – Tony Kushner talks controversy himself – Wendy Perron on Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer – Paul Mullin on the continuing fiasco around Seattle’s Intiman Theater – Seattlest.com on why religion doesn’t feature more in the American theater.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Irish Modern Dance Theater's "Fall and Recover" at La MaMa.

They forgot to mention a tip jar: Last week, on March 17, a group called the Collective Arts Think Tank, consisting of the directors of PS122, DTW, the Chocolate Factory, the Field, and others, released a letter addressed to the community regarding the results of a year-long endeavor try to re-think how artists are compensated for their work. The entire thing is certainly interesting and worth reading, particularly because the people involved actually put some actions behind their big ideas (a rare enough thing to see), and I think we here at Culturebot will be returning to it in the near future. But that said, for as much as I appreciate their efforts, I’m going to have to dissent from a fair bit of what they have to say, particularly big statements like: “Art is a profession; and artists who do not get paid are not professionals. Period.”

Actually, I have trouble imagining how artists actually are professionals, rather than amateurs (in the Olympic athlete sense). Looking over how the various presenters are trying to offer more money to artists reveals a ridiculously low rate of pay. As PS122, this includes $450 per week before opening (for a 40-hour week) and $250 during the run. I’m not criticizing them for the amount they’re paying, it’s just that by no stretch of the imagination is $11.25 an hour actually fair compensation for an artist. Your “job” is always a transaction: you exchange your labor for a certain benefit. Artists accept less money for a reason, and there other economic exchanges occurring simultaneously to simply being paid. The signatories of the letter are certainly correct when they note that we are all “creating an ecosystem that has as its foundation labor paid for by unrecognized sources from outside of the ‘Arts Sector’ [i.e., people's day jobs],” but it’s a stretch to describe that situation as “undervaluing the artists and their product.”

In the broader sense, that suggests that the only “value” the product has is its commercial value, which is obviously quite low; in the narrower sense of this being written by commissioning presenters, I suppose that means they think they should have been paying more. However, they don’t exactly address whether it’s an issue of they should have or could have. And considering that at PS122, for instance, higher commissions and fees are being paid for by reducing the number of commissions by 15 percent, I think we have our answer.

The point is, looking at this critically, what I see is a general sense that artists aren’t compensated properly. Fair enough, but without an existing market mechanism to determine what the level of pay should be, you have artistic curators essentially deciding to do their best to nominally increase payments by decreasing other cost outlays. In practice, what that means is that if Vallejo Gantner, say, likes your work, you’ll get paid a bit more; if he doesn’t, you will in fact have less opportunity to get produced and develop your career because PS122 is producing fewer shows. And nowhere does this address the very complex commissioning process used to support big new shows, often through simultaneous commissions throughout the US tour circuit, as documented by Alyssa Alpine previously at Culturebot.

We just wanted to make sure we weren’t the ones who tortured them: The Journal has an article on the travails international artists face getting visas to perform in the US, concentrating on Irish Modern Dance Theater‘s Fall and Recover, which was meant to open last week at La MaMa but couldn’t due to visa delays (the show now opens Friday). The piece is a collaboration between members of the company and torture survivors who received asylum in Ireland, and I’ve been mulling over snarky headlines directed at the State Department for a couple weeks now. But the Journal article is a must-read just to get an idea of the insane BS artists go through. Here’s my favorite tidbit, from the Citizen and Immigration Service’s (USCIS, part of Homeland Security) review questioning IMDT’s visa applications: “Given the multi-ethnic composition of the group and the universal subject matter of the work to be performed, USCIS is unsure whether the term ‘cultural’ applies in this case.”

So “multi-ethnic” and “universal” subjects don’t count as “culture”? Apparently, America has no culture.

Tempest in a bloggy teapot: Oh, how I love the interwebs for their debates! Really I do, and I love taking part in some of them. Other times, well…I hope people have started to notice my generally sneering disregard for “big ideas.” Case in point: poor playwright Mat Smart, who dared write the piece “The Real Reasons Playwrights Fail.” TONY‘s Upstaged blog has a nice round-up, but here it is in short: Smart argues that “we’re fucking lazy.” The post is, as Isaac Butler well summarizes, “supposedly provocative” but really just “a lot of reinforcement of institutional thinking disguised as Bold Contrarian Truth Telling.”

Arturo Vidich's "Body Island," March 24 at Abrons Arts Center.

The trick is that as Helen Shaw rather sagely pointed out in Upstaged, Sharp’s post was really just saying that success is often a matter of hard work, and that many playwrights (and generally other artists) conflate personal challenges with institutional woes. Of course, he says this rather poorly, and his critics are generally right to point out that, indeed, there are institutional issues which need to be addressed. Desperately. In cases like this, I like to point people to my friend Paul Mullin, a Seattle-based playwright, who has written extensively about what it would take to make Seattle a world class theater town. His critiques and punchy but very smart, and he does (I believe) a good job separating personal challenges from legitimate structural issues.

Odds & Ends: Marc Kirschner of TenduTV discusses social media policy in the arts – Modern dance and ballet come to Abu Dhabi – our pal Zachary Whittenberg on three choreographers bringing politically engaged dance to the Chicago stage – our London chums at Belly Flop magazine wonder if artists actually like sports as London prepares for the Olympics – East of Borneo has a marvelous piece on the films of William Leavitt – and don’t forget that Arturo Vidich’s Body Island goes down tomorrow at Abrons Arts Center.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tim Crouch is one of the playwrights called out by British bloggers as using narrative in a more interesting fashion

Story, Story, Story: So much discussion out there, I don’t even know where to start. Last week, I linked to Isaac Butler’s new series on Parabasis about narrative in theater and added my own two cents; he responded, and that generated both a healthy comment train as well as two other blog responses here and here. Plus, across the pond, theater writers were discussing the same thing. The Guardian‘s theater blog wraps it up nicely, but be sure to read Deborah Pearson’s essay in Exeunt and Andrew Haydon’s blog post, both of which are indispensable (and not just because I think they back me up). Here are some money quotes:

Haydon:

What I find frustrating is the overwhelming prevalence of one particular model for exploring “about”. I don’t think it’s too much to describe it thus: you pick an Issue, any Issue; you then create a small group of characters, usually about six and put them in a situation in which they come into contact with The Issue. The Issue is then explored by the characters talking about It, their relationship to It. Possibly, if you’re lucky, there’s a story, how It changes them. At the moment, I’m struggling to think of a single play I’ve liked which has done the above.

Pearson:

The political problems that narrative throws up are not so tough to recognize. Narratives must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They must have a “controlling idea”, one main point (moral) we can take from the series of events that have unfolded. [...] Narratives are psychologically comforting because they provide resolution, and often impose a logic onto a frustratingly fluid reality. As anybody who has ever had to edit a play or story can tell you, narratives are highly selective, shamelessly omitting facts and events in search of a coherent story. This is all well and good for Oscar bait – but when these rules are applied to a political situation (as in the media they often are) the omissions and cuts are real people with real experiences.

Haydon:

[A] good story well told can be just as effective as a non-linear or abstract work for making you think about things if it functions in the same much-less-directional way. It was a bit of a revelation for me [...] Because, the debate does seem stupidly polarised. Either something falls into the “issue play” *about*-a-subject camp, or else it seems to be “bonkers, devised, crazy avant-gardism” or something (yes, I know this is rough, but let’s run with it).

Pearson:

Performance in the UK has its own Kinsey scale of Narrative – most pieces I have seen seem to lie at one of two extremes – well made plays that place Story above all else, or performance and dance pieces that reject storytelling entirely. And then there are those pieces that sit somewhere in the middle – juggling the difficult job of telling a story while not telling a story, aware of narrative without pandering to it blindly.

The point? No one’s against narrative, nor theater tackling complex issues, nor is anyone arguing exclusively for weird abstract performance art. But clearly I’m not alone in feeling that a great deal of theater is failing to challenge its audiences by focusing on telling stories that argue reductive points or fail to engage their own presumptions. There’s a huge spectrum of theater that’s powerful and can find ways to communicate and deal with issues in meaningful ways. My own two-cents again? First, I don’t want to write off non-narrative performance across the board. Narrative is one often extremely rational approach to making sense of experience; there are others. That said, there’s just as much bad dance and performance art as theater. Second, again, I think context is important. Sometimes a straightforward narrative representing someone’s experience is deeply meaningful (Larry Kramer, August Wilson when he was alive); other times, no matter how harrowing or moving, “telling someone’s story” doesn’t rise above edifying entertainment or downright pedagogy , and even risks reinforcing the status quo (Nottage’s Ruined, August Wilson now that he’s dead).

Please, comment away.

Dancers Aren’t People Anyway: Just yesterday I linked to Wendy Perron’s discussion of how ABT dancer Sarah Lane was both literally and figuratively deleted from Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Then what comes across the Culturebot news desk but a report from the Wall Street Journal that the New York City Ballet is going to include social media restrictions in its contracts with dancers, because they shouldn’t have thoughts or opinions, either. You know, dancers should be pretty, soul-dead, preferably emaciated-looking things onstage with no discernible personality. Turns out the main culprit is some jack-ass NYCB dancer named Devin Alberda. The jerk had the nerve to gently mock his boss’s drunk driving arrest, criticize a gauche representation of an Asian in a show, and poke fun at the oh-so-loveable David Koch, i.e. one of the company’s super rich benefactors, i.e., evil incarnate. Oh wait, I think I like this Devin Alberda guy! Meet your new Twitter follower…

Art & Performance: Also from the UK, the Independent has a story on an interesting series of collaborations between visual artists and performers hosted and curated by the Whitechapel Gallery. The “Art Plus” series began as collaborations between artists and choreographers, and has included editions with music, film, and a couple now with drama, featuring texts written by artists using text in their work, but performed by actors. It’s an interesting concept because all too often, visual artists experimenting with performance come off as boring or just pretentious due to the fact that performance is slightly different than static visual art. So the collaborative element seems an interested approach to helping visual artists explore time-based work. This is something I plan to keep in mind this fall, when Performa 11 launches around NYC.

Emerging Artists in the PacNW: Applications are open for Hand2Mouth Theater’s annual Risk/Reward Festival, which goes down in Portland, Oregon in June. For all of Portland’s buzz as the it place to be for young artists, the city suffers from a near complete lack of infrastructure for artists to develop. There are few presenting venues supporting contemporary performance, a lack of access to funds, and that leaves artists to their own devices to push themselves and develop, and we all know how that usually turns out. Even the TBA Festival, a national destination event, only offers a couple slots to Northwest artists, who frequently hail from Seattle which has a stronger infrastructure. H2M, who’ve been making work for a decade or so in Portland, eventually got fed up waiting for someone else to do it and set out to lay the foundations themselves. Risk/Reward, their most notable endeavor on that front, showcases local talent, and frequently pulls in artists from other cities around the area. Applications are due April 15.

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tEEth Performance's "Home Made," at the Fusebox Festival in Austin this April. Photo by Aaron Rogosin.

What’s In a Joke?: Isaac Butler over at Parabasis is starting a new series of investigations of narrative. “Story Matters I” focuses on a joke about a Clown (no, not that sort of Clown Joke), which, in written rendition, utterly flops. Which is precisely his point. “The point of The Clown Joke—like all Shaggy Dog stories—is that the punch-line is miniscule and unsatisfying,” he writes.

The more grandiose the set up, the more dramatic the distance, the more perversely pleasurable the joke becomes, for the storyteller, anyway. For the listener, the point is to be indoctrinated into an inner circle of knowledge via a lengthy trial in which you have no control. You get for this a story good enough to hold your attention and the ability to play this same trick on others for your own enjoyment.

Either way, narrative has a very clearly defined role to play. This is not true in other storytelling mediums. Long have we debated the purpose, value and role that narrative plays in theatre, in fiction, in poetry, in film although the latter two seem to be more resolved on this issue (poetry rigidly against, film slavishly for). Does story serve some other goal or do those other goals serve story?

From my perspective, all too often contemporary playwrights operate like the joke-writer he describes, but with a slight twist: everyone now no doubt knows the Aristocrats, which is the ne plus ultra of the operation Butler describes and the mode most often employed by playwrights. Not only does it set up a miniscule punchline, everyone knows the punchline in advance; the success of the joke is entirely dependent on the narrative which gets you there from the beginning, which tells you where you’re going. Most contemporary plays are very essayistic like this; given the homogeneity of the typical theater artist and audience, we know that a play that starts off about war will have something bad to say about it, that a play that engages with gay issues will be pro-gay. (Someone please name me the last big pro-war or anti-gay play you saw professionally produced.) In this typology, the “narrative,” which is essentially the entire play being produced, exists to narrate a series of points that makes the predictable ending impactful, which we charitably still refer to as catharsis. This is why I generally don’t like contemporary playwriting.

That said, I like that Butler is interrogating and asking questions like this; a nice companion piece on the function of jokes came up in February’s issue of The Believer and can be read online.

Belarus Free Theater: Well, they’re not exactly “free” anymore, if by “free” you mean “free to return home,” which makes them a bit less Belarussian. Maybe. (I’m trying to be too witty. Apologies.) The point is, the Belarus Free Theater, a courageous collective of theater artists from Minsk who spent nearly a decade producing samizdat plays in the repressive state have been in the US since January, when, with the help of fellow dissidents and the international community, they managed to sneak out of the country to perform at Under the Radar. In February, they were in Chicago, and now they’re coming back to New York to produce a trio of shows at La Mama starting on April 13. Whether they’ve returned home in the interim I do not know at the moment, but I kind of doubt it. Several members were detained following the latest rigged presidential election in December, when dictator Sasha Lukashenko “won” yet another term. Government provocateurs helped incite protesters to riot, providing a thinly veiled excuse for the security services to brutally crackdown. With the world’s attention elsewhere (read: the Middle East and Africa), Lukashenko is comfortably out of the news and back to his wacky dictator stuff (did you know he nationalized the fashion modeling industry? Yup, he’s that crazy), leaving Belarus’s future as bleak as ever.

Fusebox Festival Line-up Announced: Woo-hoo! The Fusebox Festival, one of the nation’s premiere contemporary performance destinations, has announced the line-up of this year’s festival, which goes down in Austin, Texas from April 20-May 1. The fest features the work of some New York mainstays, including Young Jean Lee‘s The Shipment and choreographer Faye Driscoll‘s well-reviewed There is so much mad in me, as well as some other pieces we’ve recently seen, including Jerome Bel’s Cedrix Andrieux. But Fusebox definitely has its own treasures, some of which I will be catching the first weekend of the festival. First off, Austin’s own Rude Mechs, whose amazing The Method Gun closes at DTW this weekend, will be debuting a new work, I’ve Never Been So Happy, which plays in rep at their own theater The Off Center, with the also-local Rubber Rep‘s The Biography of Physical Sensation, an interactive biographical work that plays out for all five senses. And it looks like curator Ron Berry is one of the first nationally to hip to Portland, Oregon’s tEEth Performance, who, if I understand correctly, have only been seen once in NYC at the Joyce Soho in ’09, despite being embraced in Northwest and making repeat appearances at Fusebox. Home Made, their newest work, which is coming to Fusebox, recently captured first-prize excerpted at The A.W.A.R.D. Show! at Seattle’s On the Boards, and my sources tell me it’s amazing.

More on Looking at Dancers’ Bodies: Not had enough of “Sugarplumgate” yet? (Really? That’s what we decided to call it?) Well, over at DanceUSA’s eJournal, Houston-based writer and teacher Nancy Wozny weighs in with a personal, reflective essay, “My Eyes, Your Body,” where she admits that at a recent performance, she found herself “fixated on the circumference of a dancer’s thighs.”

“Watch the dance, not the legs,” I silently yelled at my brain. What’s wrong with me? And me, of all people, a thick-thighed somatic educator, who spent two decades teaching people to accept their bodies. This can’t be true. At war with my own attention, I missed the performance entirely by trying not to be bothered by a pair of less-than-perfect legs. Too distracted by so-called imperfection, I became a victim of my own learned blindness.

It’s a generally lovely, thoughtful, and remarkably self-excoriating piece, but what troubles me about it is the degree to which she faults herself for being, well, normal. We’re not always proud of ourselves and the way in which we look at and judge other people, but declaring your intention to force yourself to think differently seems to kowtow to political correctness. What I find fascinating is that a writer has revealed something personal about the way she experienced a show, which would likely never make it into a review. Personally, I think we need more “I” in reviews and a willingness on the part of the reviewer to reveal their actual experience, not hide behind a veneer of authorial arrogance. Does it seem mean to admit that the way a dancer looked in a performance distracted you? Maybe, particularly if you take the Alastair Macaulay route and make it a joke. But if Wozny was reviewing the performance she mentions, it’s probably worth admitting. Is it really any more mean to say so (revealing your own shortcomings in the process) than it is to give a show a bad review, and tear down someone’s hard work and a massive investment of time?

In fact, I’d argue that it’s deeply important to be that honest. Far too often, artists live in a world of positive feedback loops, where anything negative is swept under the rug. In the end, the artist is responsible for his or her choices, from casting to costuming.

Body-blind casting is as naive and problematic as race-blind casting. We’ve all seen choreographers who choreograph for dancers of a certain type and then have to make do with what pick-ups they can manage. Context is everything, of course, but I’ve been insulted on a dancer’s part more than once seeing them forced to do something they’re not built to do. Choreographers do not always choreograph in a way that supports the essential human dignity and inherent beauty of the body, and that is something they need to be held accountable for. (On a side-note, I want to point out that one of the choreographers whose work has most impressed me for her capacity to work with diverse body types in beautiful and meaningful way is none other than Angelle Hebert of tEEth, noted above.)

As for critics, we (hopefully) enter the theater seeking to experience what the artist wants us to, which is easier for people who are more familiar (like us) with the vocabulary of the art. But we do always need to take a step a back and ask how successfully they achieved their goals, and call out problematic issues. The truth is, it’s more a fear of exposure on the writer’s part that keeps us silent than anything else, and that’s disrespectful to the artists. They expose themselves in ways most of don’t have to; the least we can do is take them seriously and offer an honest response.

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Josephine's Echopraxia, "stifle," part of the Seattle edition of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! L-R Rosa Vissers, Marissa Rae Niederhauser, Meredith Horiuchi, Meredith Sallee, Allie Hankin. Photo by Ryan K. Adams

Republicans Don’t Care About Saving Money–They Just Hate Us: One of the big things that’s got the arts & culture world a-twitter is the recent news that some evil Republican party satraps, in a dark conference room somewhere, billowing with the smoke of illegally imported Cuban cigars made of actual Cubans, have concocted a wicked plan to balance the federal budget by eliminating the NEA, NEH, public broadcasting subsidies, and a host of other things that liberals everywhere love. This has predictably led to plenty of hand-wringing amongst arts supporters, who proceeded to try to defend federal arts dollars (no easy task given creatives’ infamously poor math skills). LA’s Culture Monster piped in with the rather extreme claim that the $1.6 billion in total annual federal arts and culture dollars feeds $30 billion back into federal, state, and local tax coffers (I have no idea where they get their figures, but if the arts actually gave you a 1,800 percent ROI, we’d all be rich).

Now, far be it from me to ever to suggest arts and culture funding is a bad investment (actually, I do have a problem with the idea that it’s an “investment” at all, but that’s a different story), but no matter how you try to justify the investment, it won’t work for the Republicans because they don’t care. This has nothing to do with anything other than partisan hatred; no matter how good your math, you won’t win. They just happen to hate us. We’re “elitists” and they want to take us down. There’s a fantastic essay in the current issue of n+1 magazine on just this topic. And how much is the Republican “plan” nothing but partisan b.s.? Well, amongst other things, it calls for eliminating subsidies for organic farming, but not non-organic farming despite record cash revenues. So don’t even bother, people, and don’t worry about brushing your math skills–this isn’t about budgets or economics, this is just the latest front in the culture war, from the people who really like waging it.

Tragedienne: Horrible news coming out of Russia. Among the victims of the suicide bombing of Domodedovo Airport in Moscow was Ukrainian playwright Anna Mashutina, who wrote under the name Anna Yablonskaya. Unfortunately, I”m unfamiliar with Yabloskaya’s work, but remembrances have poured in from all over, from John Freedman at The Moscow Times to The New York Times to the Guardian in the UK, where Natalia Antonova described Yablonskaya’s work as “about family life, love and sex. Never the type to try to shock her audience, her writing was very subtle, feminist but not overtly political.” Yablonskaya’s most regarded play Pagans is scheduled for a reading at the Royal Court in London on April 7, 2011, as part of their international playwrights season.

Dance Critic Critique: Over at the DanceUSA blog, former NY Times dance critic John Rockwell offers his thoughts on the role of the dance critic. I have to admit that I’m oddly ambivalent about what he has to say. On the one hand, it’s all by-the-book true, even the parts at the expense of people like me (“Right now, a print critic is different from a blogger in that there is usually still at least one major daily newspaper per town, and hence its critic assumes a disproportionately influential role in the local community”). His sentiment that “[W]e see the critic’s role as a noble one–trying to encapsulate in resistant prose the artistic experiences we encounter, maybe helping to educate our readers and provide them a sounding board for their own opinions, advancing the standards of an art form we love,” is a perfectly noble way of putting it. It’s also J-school by-the-book unreality, which is my other hand: first of all, Rockwell’s adorably out-of-touch if he thinks most towns still have a “dance critic,” as opposed to some freelancer who occasionally gets to cover something besides the ballet, and as a blogger whose career path seems predicated on the eventual collapse of traditional publishing, I call b.s. on all the high-minded sentiment about how being an arbiter of taste (the traditional role of the critic) really adds to discourse.

The truth is, critics are a dying breed because they exist largely outside of a discourse, which is where people like me come in–people who actually believe in trying to generate discourse–and yes, I’m rather proud to not be above being an “institutional booster, especially of fledgling companies,” or serving “the dance community or particular artists.” Why shouldn’t I support artists whose work I believe in? Why shouldn’t I try to support the community?  So let’s all get over ourselves and admit that the only reason Alastair Macaulay’s job still exists is because ballet companies areabout  the only people in the dance world with money to advertise in the newspaper, which is why the Times thought it was worth it to send him around the country to see The Nutcracker ninety-billion times.

A.W.A.R.D. Show Seattle: On to supporting the community: this Thursday night, The A.W.A.R.D. Show! kicks off in Seattle at On the Boards, and anyone interested in a brief guide to Seattle dance should, ahem, feel free to read my preview. Really, the program includes most of the really interesting artists from the region, from Zoe Scofield (whose newest work premieres at Jacob’s Pillow in a few months) to Waxie Moon, Seattle’s most innovative queer performer, to Portland, Oregon’s experimental dance-movement company tEEth, to the work of choreographers I respect and have been enthused by, from Ellie Sandstrom to Olivier Wevers to Marissa Rae Niederhauser.

East of Where?: East of Borneo is a fantastic online visual art magazine out of LA, and it’s one of the most-visited sites on pretty much every computer in the Culturebot newsroom. Seriously, we love this site and you will too. So, just because, I’m linking to the latest little treasure a reader has uploaded to their site: the publisher’s note-cum-manifesto in the first issue of Little Caesar magazine from 1976. Written by Dennis Cooper before he was a darling of the downtown scene, or a resident of Europe, the note casually announces that “We’re not fifty year old patrons of the arts. We’re young punks just like you.” It’s a page of history, and worth checking out along with everything else East of Borneo presents.

Odds & Ends: If you happen to be a reader from LA–welcome!–be aware that one of New York’s finer devised theater companies, The Civilians, will be presenting a cabaret evening of songs from a work-in-progress musical commissioned by the Center Theatre Group on Feb. 5. “A Pretty Filthy Evening” will showcase songs that the company has developed through their documentary theater approach, centered on the adult entertainment industry. Mmm…porny! Here in NYC, Jordana Che Toback and Clarinda Mac Low are this season’s SPLICE over at DNA, where Jan. 27-30, their a dinosaur attacks a lighthouse is playing (tickets here). And speaking of dance, DFA’s Dance on Camera Festival is…entering its last week! Damn! Should have been on top of that a little more (emails help people). Fantastic work being showcased daily–for the line-up, see the website.

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