Love's Labors Lost: March 2012

March 16, 2012

"Tulpa" needs a set designer!

VISIONARY SET DESIGNER NEEDED for TULPA, OR ANNE&ME
Written by Shawn C. Harris, directed by Aaron D. Pratt

Last year, TULPA, OR ANNE&ME made its debut at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity. This year,TULPA, OR ANNE&ME is headed to the Fresh Fruit Festival, with a bold vision and fresh ideas.

Part whimsical fantasy, part realist drama, part gothic horror, TULPA, OR ANNE&ME tells the story of a withdrawn artist whose life gets turned upside down when Anne Hathaway crawls out of her television. With the help of her powerful imagination and two outspoken Guardian Angels of Blackness, she and Anne struggle to find a way to connect with one another. What unfolds is an intimate portrait of a relationship that asks us how race impacts what two people can truly be to one another.

We need a visionary SET DESIGNER who can:

put their creative stamp on the production
turn a bare stage into a vivid, evocative mindscape
do amazing work on a shoestring budget
make a mobile set that can be put up or broken down quickly (15 minutes tops)
be reliable and easy to work with (no flakes! no divas!)
commit to working on the project from now until July

This production of TULPA, OR ANNE&ME will not be yet another living room drama. If you really want to get creative and show off what you can do, this is the project for you.

Although education and experience are helpful, what matters most is your passion, vision, and commitment. A passion for comics (mainstream and indie), anime, manga, and graphic novels would be an amazing bonus.

Because of the play's subject matter and my personal interest in giving opportunities to underrepresented artists, women, people of color, and LGBTQ people are strongly encouraged to apply.

I am hoping to make my final selection by April 1. Please send all inquiries and supporting materials (samples REALLY help) to: Shawn C. Harris at whoisyourtulpa[at]gmail[dot]com.

March 9, 2012

For whom does the Black artist make art?

This has been brewing for a while after watching this video and the responses to it. What's been disheartening about all this is what this reveals about the position of the Black artist. It seems that we can't win for losing. Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of what we create. Everyone, it seems, believes we should create for purposes other than our own. Everyone, it seems, has something to say about what we create. Ironically, these clamoring voices push us from the center of our own process, a process that requires us to be centered and in touch with our own voices.

Granted, many Black artists have decided that it's a sucker's game to pay too much attention to that. I'm one of them. But it still bothers me when I come across this attitude that because I am a Black artist, that I need to represent myself a certain way, represent my people a certain way, or represent my experience a certain way if I want my work to be seen as authentic, valuable, or meaningful. In effect, what is valued about an artist who is Black is not authentic self-expression or the capacity to imagine and create new things, but to put what is created to a specific purpose. It is the mindset that says that the reason why we should learn about Black history, Black culture, Black literature, Black art, Black music, and so on is not because Black people are human beings who have history and culture and create literature and art and music, but because the history, culture, art, and music of Black people are useful to others.

So, as much as I dislike what Tyler Perry does, I can understand him saying that Spike Lee needs to go to hell. As much as I don't like how The Help tells a story about Black women, I can understand why Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer pushed back against Tavis Smiley trying to hold them to a standard that no White artist is asked to uphold.

Don't get it twisted. If you thought I was only talking about Black folks doing this, I wasn't. White folks do it too. I have a post in me somewhere about the 5 types of stories Black folks are allowed to bring to mainstream audiences, but that's for another time.

Are you getting what I'm saying here?

Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932