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Slaves Of The System And Our Expectations

April 19, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Well The Guardian beat me to it. I was going to do an entry rounding up the multitude of discussions about arts internships, but the Guardian got there first with many of the links I bookmarked for my entry as well as some I hadn’t. Still, it is probably a sign of a discussion that needs to be had when so many people start to participate. So I take some consolation in the fact the internet is doing its job and bringing us all together.

Read as many of the blog links included in the story as you can to get the fullest picture. One thing I think got lost in the discussion. While it is illegal for for-profit organizations to have unpaid internships, according to the NY Times article cited, they aren’t illegal for non-profits because they are allowed to have volunteer work staff.

Now, whether unpaid internships should be illegal is another question. Scott Walters makes a strong case about how internships and the systems that value them, favor the affluent who have the connections and family support to secure good prestigious internships. I was ready to say it wasn’t so except that he essentially describes my college career arc. I worked to pay my way through high school, college and grad school and slaved away for free in the theatre during those times I wasn’t working or studying. I would say the only benefit I had over the person in Scott’s story is that I had a family that valued education and so I knew enough about basic networking to position myself for a good internship—a paid one at that.

Compare that to the daughter of a colleague who goes to an Ivy League University and recently decided she might want to get into arts administration and got an internship at Lincoln Center. Granted, her parents told her to take advantage of every opportunity offered, do whatever she was asked and not to even think about going to parties instead so she could suck the marrow out of the experience. I really don’t know if I could have gotten that internship as easily even having grown up in NY and having been involved in the theatre for a fair bit of time, but not going to an Ivy.

I am not going to rail as vehemently against the system as Walters does. Saying the affluent gain more advantages than the poor seems as self-evident as saying the public transport system of big cities provide more advantages to their residents than those enjoyed by suburban residents. That isn’t to say that people shouldn’t work to change the situation if they see an opportunity to do so. I have a lot of respect for the effort Scott Walters and Tom Loughlin are putting in to this goal. They started a blog separate from their personal ones, Theatre Arts Curriculum Transformation in which they discuss the current situation and how it might be fixed.

I thought it was very timely on the day we opened a show in my theatre about celebrity, Tom Loughlin had an entry on the seductive quality of fame. While there is some misrepresentation about arts careers by training programs, there is a degree of self-delusion that hasn’t existed in the past. (my emphasis)

“The young person who wrote this email is a very nice and very engaging student. But he is not thinking rationally. He is a victim of what I have come to call the “fame factor” in theatre education. It exists not only in theatre, of course, but across the culture. Created almost entirely by the pervasiveness of mass media, young people no longer pursue success; they pursue fame as well. The writer of this email simply believes he will be famous someday and win the Academy Award, and he needs nothing but the simple fact of his belief in that idea to make it come true for him (except maybe a little more help from me with his acting, as if I could make such a difference – another illusion).

I think theatre educators do not take into account the power of this drive in young people.

[….big snip….]

As educators, we should begin to recognize the part that fame plays in the lives of our students. We should understand that they are growing up in a culture where fame is glorified, and that their motivations for studying theatre are not necessarily the same ones that those of us of a certain age had as theatre students. Do we have anything at all to counter this rush to fame? Can we offer them any options at all for careers more rooted in personal self-worth as determined by their own values? Can we educate them for careers in the arts where they can be rooted in communities of people driven by motives other than profit and notoriety? Sure we can, but we have to have the courage to be the kinds of educators no longer willing to send new victims to be sacrificed to the altar of our adoration. We have to find values other than fame in theatre for them, and sell those values more strongly and convincingly.”

I know that I keep talking about the Creative Economy which is supposed to be the next phase of mass employment. There aren’t many overt signs of this coming to pass in these dismal financial times, unless you count the creativity needed to create all those awful financial instruments that brought this all about. One of the things Tom talks about in this entry is the idea that training programs are responding to fill a perceived need for a very narrow segment of the arts. Perhaps if training programs began to teach students about the alternative ways to employ the skills they are using, it could contribute to the development of the creative economy.

At this point there doesn’t seem much risk to pursuing this course. Is it that much worse to train students for jobs that may not exist in the future or train them for jobs that will employ less than one percent of one percent of them? Instead of chasing the areas “they” say opportunities will be, training programs can drive the creation of those opportunities.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

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China Bound In May

April 14, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

I have the opportunity to go back to China this summer. Picked up my visa today so I am all ready for the trip at the end of May/beginning of June. Again, much of my time will be spent outside major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. The centerpiece of the trip is Huangshan -Yellow Mountain.

I will have two days in Shanghai in which to visit Expo 2010. The overall theme seems to be about sustainability, respect and living in harmony with one’s surroundings. I can’t possibly visit even half the pavilions. If anyone hears a buzz about any of the pavilions or exhibitions, let me know.

I promise, this time I will take lots of pictures, especially of any “world of tomorrow” exhibits a la the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I want to know what is supposed to becoming.

General Musings

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Enter The Celebrities!

April 13, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

This past weekend we finally opened our site specific work, The Celebrity Project, over a year in the making. There were a lot of changes that were made since our original conception. It went from being entirely outside at another location to being closer to the theatre with part of the action occurring indoors. From the amount of effort that went into staging even part of the event outdoors, it was probably a prudent move.

To create some atmosphere, we laid down a red carpet from the foot of the stairs up to the ticket office.

You may notice a lot of wires coming out of the ticket office. The little room also doubled as our control room for sound and lights. It was great because it offered good sightlines to our stages. On the other hand it was pretty cramped with the ticket office, technical staff and stage manager all in there at once.

I observed some strange behavior in connection with the carpet. Many times people would come down the stairs and side step to the concrete on the outside of the stanchions before continuing to the ticket office. In one case, a young woman decided to walk on the carpet while her boyfriend insisted on staying on the outside. I guess people decided the carpet wasn’t for them even though it lead directly to their desired destination.

One of the iconic images employed by the performance company with whom we partnered is “Moira” a woman who sits and knits throughout the whole show. For this show, she appeared to the side of the red carpet apparently knitting since the end of her knitting was attached to the carpet. The umbrella is there to keep her dry in case of a passing shower.

In a break from the usual procedure, when the show began the announcer encouraged everyone to take pictures, twitter and live stream the event if they wanted to. He even encouraged them to take their cell phone calls. This was something of a surprise for me since they had filmed me for the interior portion of the show telling the audience not to do any of these things. That bit didn’t appear in the dress rehearsals so I heard it for the first time opening night.

Surprisingly, even though we had gotten the audience pretty riled up and excited in the first half, no one really broke the no recording/photography rules once they got inside. I think the compliance indoors may have been a result of the smaller than usual audience size. Without as many people performing undesirable actions, fewer people felt comfortable trying.

Because the two outdoor stages were so close to each other and because the masks the performers were wearing inhibited any sort of dialogue, the difference pieces on each stage were performed to the same music. Later when the performers switched to the other stage so the audience would see the entire show, the same music played again to accompany the action. Many audience members thought this was pretty clever.

Then we forced everyone out of their seats to witness a wrestling battle royale! We got the audience to shift to the area in front of the ticket office to watch two masked characters participate in an ever escalating battle of plastic surgery enhancements.

Followed by a revival meeting by the Reverend Wolf who got the audience howling and bearing their claws.

Finally, the glamorous celebrities descended the stairs and lead the audience inside for a more traditional experience.

In the end, it was a lot of work but also a lot of fun. We proved that this type of thing could be done. We have been a little too busy in the aftermath to ask whether we should try to do it again. There are things I would definitely change about some of the arrangements. There were a couple times when we asked ourselves if what we were doing was specific enough to the setting to require it to be done outside– the whole purpose of site specific work. Perhaps there could have been more aspects of the experience that were unique to the space.

Also, moving people from a space that limits attendance to a space that allows twice as many might have been a mistake. The audience went from a very physically intimate experience to one that allowed significant gaps between people. I am sure I could have made a case for the alienation effect of celebrity once you move from ad hoc performance spaces to the big time of formal stages, but the truth is it would have been incidental to the purpose.

However, in terms of engaging the audience, the design was pretty much on the nose. We moved them from passively watching to pressing forward to see– which is what the red carpet experience is all about. We had people howling, whimpering, growling and baring their claws on cue. People had a good time and even returned a second night because they hadn’t brought a camera the first go round. Next time, I will want to encourage more of that to see where we can go with it.

General Musings

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The Hidden Hands And Slow Brains of Creativity

April 12, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Rod Dreher had a couple interesting entries about creativity and the unseen entities at performances on his Beliefnet blog last week. The entries aren’t about religion except in the broadest sense in which any communal endeavor in which the final result is due to the efforts of the many in support of a goal.

Although the article about backstage workers Dreher links to does appear in In Character which is subtitled, “A Journal of Everyday Virtues,” so perhaps I shouldn’t discount the efforts of backstage workers as not having an element of religious like devotion. It isn’t new to those of us in the business, but it is gratifying to have it acknowledged by someone from without. I especially appreciated that the writer included the observation by the technical director that he isn’t a frustrated actor just awaiting the opportunity to make a star turn. I guess from the outside, performance is such a defining quality of the arts that many people have no conception that anyone would far prefer to be involved in other capacities.

And there can be ample psychic income in the commitment to the craft of play-making, from sewing the costumes to hanging the lights, as well as in contributing to an artistic endeavor that may have a lasting impact on the culture.

Still, much of the activity in the beehive of theatrical life goes on without even a minimal sort of public acknowledgment. It’s a strange dichotomy. For an art form so reliant on applause, most of those who work in the theater only hear it as muffled noise from another room. Propping up a star’s halo, the behind-the-scenes folks hardly bask in a sliver of reflected light.

It takes a special kind of humility to devote yourself to being backstage for the creation of a play, to knowing from the outset that you will receive little of the credit. There is, of course, a certain safety, too, in being out of the line of fire. But we are a culture that more and more seems to define success as the aggregation of renown, as the cachet of a boldface name, as the catalyst for a gazillion clicks of a mouse and qualifying for a sizable personal entry on Wikipedia.

So toiling anonymously in a public profession such as the theater translates for me into something rather noble. You know from the outset that there will be no fanfare for you, that the satisfactions will on some level always be vicarious. The good of the whole is what matters. Absorbing this reality requires an acceptance of modest status — a true spirit of deference.

The second article Dreher linked to was immensely interesting to me–the hypothesis that creativity might be a slow neurological process. We also think of high achievement being related to speed of thought. Solve a complex problem quickly, ring your buzzer and beat the other guy. However, as one of the scientists quotes in the piece points out, speed is not generally seen as a component of creative work.

The results are surprising, given that high white-matter integrity is normally considered a good thing, says Paul Thompson at the University of California in Los Angeles. He acknowledges that speedy information transfer may not be vital for creative thought. “Sheer mental speed might be good for playing chess or doing a Rubik’s cube, but you don’t necessarily think of writing novels or creating art as being something that requires sheer mental speed,” he says.

After performing MRI scans on people whose creativity had already been tested, Dr. Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico found:

Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers.

Jung suggests that slower communication between some areas may actually make people more creative. “This might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity,” he says.

Unfortunately, lower white-matter integrity is also associated with mental illness. “So the result also strengthens the link between creativity and mental illness. One of the triggers for Jung’s study was the finding that when white matter begins to break down in people with dementia, they often become more creative.”

I remember about a year ago I blogger was complaining that the depressive/mentally ill artist was a stereotype that needed to be broken. But if what Jung gains more evidence for what he has found thus far, it may be more of a physical reality than we would like.

Intelligence and creativity aren’t mutually exclusive though-

“Each appears to be controlled by white matter in a different region. So theoretically, there’s no reason why someone might not have high integrity in the cortex, producing intelligence, but low integrity between the cortex and deeper brain regions, leading to creative thinking. “They appear to function relatively independently,” he says.”

Which makes me realize I know less about the brain than I thought because I initially assumed the integrity would be generally uniform throughout. Though if I thought about it a bit longer, it does make sense. Overall, some things to ponder.

State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas

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