Despite not having fulfilled my pledge to add links to the few theatre blogs I have found to my blogroll, I have gone in search of more theatre blogs tonight.
For the most part I was disappointed. Of the blogs I found, most had started with good intentions, but hadn’t been maintained on a regular basis.
This is too bad because Sharpe’s Theatre Blog has elements of what I envisioned when I suggested blogs be used for reflective exercises in learning. The initial entries make some observations about texts and what acting is. Later there is some feedback to other people in the project group which frankly, having been in theatre for a long time, seems to be heavily self-edited so as not to offend. Not that people need to tear into others or air their dirty laundry publicly. It is just conspicous by its santitation.
Similarly, the Applied & Interactive Theatre Blog starts out with a couple promising entries and then fizzles. (On the other hand, the Applied & Interactive Theatre Website proper has many resources of interest to Theatre folk)
Handcart Ensemble in NYC uses their blog to essentially post press releases online. However, there were a few interesting articles interspersed like this one on how to find a rehearsal/audition/performance space in NYC, (none of the stages may be in the same place) what questions to ask, horror stories and how much it may cost.
On the whole, blogs I have found seem to be predominantly focused on providing space for people to post their events- Ohio Theatre, Culturebot
(it does have news and opinion links, but majority are promotional), and the Washington Post’s chic Going out Gurus (actually pretty much newspaper calendar editors posting on line rather than a blog.)
One unrelated, but interesting link I came across was Eric James Stone’s blog on the progress he is making writing his first novel. A therometer bar currently indicates that he has 139,641 out of 150,000 words written. There is actually more reflection on short stories he has written while writing the novel than the novel itself. Some interesting stuff though, including some simple reflections on theatre attendance.
