Love's Labors Lost: Something I wanna do next Sunday and Monday (some preliminary notes)

November 2, 2013

Something I wanna do next Sunday and Monday (some preliminary notes)

Inspired by Cafe Onda, I want to do my own part (via Crossroads Theatre Project) to pursue the values of diversity, social justice, and inclusion in the arts by bringing people together to start talking and organizing.

I want to move beyond current institutional models (such as "submit your work and we'll tell you if it's worth showing it in public") because they really aren't in a place to meet most of us where we are right now. There has to be a better way, but the first step is to get everyone together and talking.

Like this.

WHO CAN COME

Artists: people who make stuff
Audiences: people who go to stuff
Critics: people who analyze and evaluate stuff
Administrators: people who work for organizations that create/present/promote stuff
Not rigid categories (on purpose); people can be more than one thing

WHAT WE'LL BE DOING
Having a virtual get-together to talk about supporting arts that represent people who don't fit the straight, white, middle-class mold: what we're doing now, what we'd like to do, how we can make that happen.

WHY DO THIS?
To create a digital community that energizes underrepresented artists, audiences, critics, and administrators to connect, collaborate, and create

WHEN IS IT?
Sunday, November 10, 2013 at 8PM EST and Monday, November 11, 2013 at 1PM EST

WHERE IS IT?
Twitter (no hashtag just yet, so ideas appreciated)

WHAT WE'LL BE TALKING ABOUT

Current and future projects
Representation
Audience engagement
Organizing
Intersectionality

HOW WE'LL DO IT

Facilitated conversation with everyone present
Not a panel! No experts sharing divine knowledge from on high
Not a workshop! No Screenwriting 101 or Drawing for Dummies
Raising questions to the group and watching/listening to answers and helping move conversation forward

OBJECTIVES

Share and evolve collective knowledge and wisdom (Don't forget to document! Storify is our friend!)
Facilitate relationship-building among artists, audiences, critics, and administrators
Explore social media as a way of facilitating vital conversations and organizing
Examine challenges and opportunities for representation in the arts
Identify ways to show leadership no matter who and where we are
Encouraged continued conversation and organizing beyond the event

THE BIG PICTURE

Advance a grassroots movement of artists, audiences, critics, and administrators working outside the system to create and support art that represents those of us who live and work outside the straight, white, middle-class mold

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Show up! Bring your questions and ideas!
Keep bringing this up on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
Encourage other people to show up
Continue talking after the event

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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