How the Myth Is Propagated

The following is from the final paper of a student of mine, who writes:

“I was working on a final project for XXXXX’s acting class, where we had to call a theatre company and find out the audition process and the workings of the company…When I was closing the interview, I was asking the Associate Artistic Director of the company if he had any final comments or advice to add to the paper.  The Director …said, “if you don’t go to New York City in your 20s, your prime age, you’re not serious about this industry.”

This from a man who is making a living in Western North Carolina. Doesn’t he have any sense of the contradiction?

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When you’re stepping outside the well-trodden path and trying to create something new, you often have to find inspiration outside of the discipline itself. I tend to read books on local economics, environmentalism, and small business practices seeking analogous situations that might help to define this new pathway.

To that end, I am in the midst of reading Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (highly recommended). The chapter “A Question of Design” has a segment entitled “One Size Fits All,” in which the authors discuss the Industrial Revolution’s underlying design assumption that “universal design solutions” (i.e., one size fits all) could be implemented to improve the world. They use the examples of International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent to illustrate the flaw in this orientation. I think it is worth quoting at length in order to fully understand that what has happened to the arts is not an isolated and unique historical development that was “organic” and “natural,” but rather part of a larger social movement resulting of a particular way of relating to the world.

First, the International Style of architecture as developed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Groupis, and Le Corbusier:

Their goals were social as well as aesthetic. They wanted to globally replace unsanitary and inequitable housing — fancy, ornate palaces for the rich; ugly, uhealthy places for the poor — with clean, minimalist, affordable buildings unencomubered by distinctions of wealth or class. Large sheets of glass, steel, and concrete and cheap transportation powered by fossil fuels, gave engineers and architects the tools for realizing this style anywhere in the world.

However, the vision of the originators was debased by those who followed:

Today the International Style has evolved into something less ambitious: a bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place — from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows. Such buildings reflect little if any of a region’s distinctness or style.”…Buildings can look and work the same anywhere, in Reykjavik or Rangoon.  (italics mine)

The photo is of the Aluminaire House, and it is, without a doubt, one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen.

Shifting to detergent, the authors write:

Major soap manufacturers design one detergent for all parts of the United States or Europe, even though water qualities and community needs differ. For example, customers in places with soft water, like the Northwest, need only small amounts of detergent. Those where the water is hard, like the Southwest, need more. But detergents are designed so they will alther up, remove dirt, and kill germs efficiently the same way anywhere in the world — in hard, soft, urban, or spring water, in water that flows into fish-filled streams and water channeled to sewage treatment plants.”

In the interest of appealing to as large a market as possible, detergent is disconnected from its relationship to local conditions.

The arts have fallen prey to exactly the same one-size-fits-all approach, not only in mass-produced art such as television, popular music, and movies, but also in art forms that have an intrinsic local orientation, such as theatre and visual art. Plays, for instance, are designed to appeal to NYC audiences and critics. If they achieve a successful NYC run, then across the US regional theatres will produce their own versions during the next couple years, and twenty years later community theatres will do their own reproduction. But is it really true that the stories and styles that appeal to a New York audience will automatically be right for one in Asheville, NC or Lincoln, NE?

Let’s think of this by analogy. Here are two pictures of places in the world:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would these two places not lead, for instance, to very different paintings — paintings that would be created using different palettes, different shapes, different rhythms, different styles, different brushstrokes, different techniques?

And yet when it comes to plays, we see plays such as Rent being performed in Peoria and witnessed by the ultimate New Yorker, Rocco Landesman, who will judge it according to New York values. We universalize those values, and disseminate New York stories as if, like the International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent, they are completely isolated from place, from local culure, traditions, history, and values. People in New Amery WI watch CSI: New York despite the fact that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to their reality. We have become so alienated from our specific place in the world that we no longer even notice that we have been colonized by urban values, urban rhythms, urban styles, urban stories. The gangsta rap music blasting from the car next to mine in downtown Marshall NC is likely to be owned by a farmer’s son out on a Saturday night toot.

The natural outgrowth of this colonization is for the colonizer to see themselves as the pinnacle of quality, as the natural goal of all who labor in the arts.  So nobody bats an eye when Rocco Landesman, visiting Peoria and seeing the aforementioned production of Rent, is noted as having observed “earlier in the day that amateur arts are worthwhile much in the same way that minor leagues and amateur sports have value in relation to the big leagues and professional sports.” There is no recognition that local arts done by amateurs or pro-am artists might not give a tinker’s damn about the self-identified “big leagues,” that the local arts might be a vibrant end in themselves. And artists buy into this value system. Why? Because they are brainwashed with the ideas from a young age. More importantly, what should be commented on is not whether the Peoria production of Rent is “as good as” Steppenwolf (“I’m not going to let you trap me on that one,” Landesman said transparently — har har), but rather whether it makes any sense  for Rent to be performed in Peoria at all.

When are areas outside of New York going to develop some pride, some sense of individual identity? When are they going to express themselves, instead of compulsively sneezing “Me too” after every artistic twitch on the East Coast? When is a visit to the theatre in different parts of the country going to be a unique experience, seasoned with local flavor and served with pride of place? When traveling, every tourist seeks an opportunity to experience the local cuisine, whether it is barbecue in Kansas City, gumbo in New Orleans, or kringle in Racine WI. But going to the theatre is like going to the mall — once you’re inside the doors, you could be anywhere.

University theatre programs need to stop teaching this generic approach, regional theatres need to reclaim their local roots, and artists need to wake up and reclaim their individuality.

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Spalding Gray: Tell Stories, Listen — Make Art

In an interview in 1991, Spalding Gray said:

“Personal storytelling is very important to me because we’ve become so media-ized that we begin to think the stories the stars tell on Johnny Carson are more important than ours. And whenever I interview people, interview the audience onstage, and I draw their stories out, the audience begins to realize it is a radical move. That everyone has interesting stories if they can learn how to shape them. If I am a preacher, or a proselytizer at all, it’s to say, ‘Get together with friends, tell stories, listen. Turn off the TV, put down the book, listen to a story.’ Because the more we are fragmented and the more people are moved around and are in motion and the bigger this country gets and the more media-ized it gets, tied together only through television, the more healing it is to tell personal stories about your day. It gives you a personal history, and it gives you a sense of existence and place.”

(Jeffrey Goldman, “Dancing with the Audience: A Conversation with Spalding Gray, Actor, Writer, Monologist, and Connoiseur of Neuroses,” Dramatics 63 (November 1991), pp 24 – 29)

If we are in need of testimony as to the importance of participation in the arts, Gray’s words provide it. What he refers to as being “media-ized” is actually the process that turns art into a commodity and the public into passive consumers who buy their creativity instead of doing it themselves.

Study after study shows that after a certain income level (a few thousand dollars over the poverty line), happiness flattens out — no matter how much money you have, no matter how much you can buy, happiness doesn’t increase. By turning the arts into something that is done by a specialized “creative class” and that is sold to a passive audience, we have removed one way to actually increase personal happiness.

Sharing your story, molding your life experience into narrative and sharing it with people,  as Gray notes, “gives you a personal history, and …gives you a sense of existence and place.” When we substitute corporate-created mass art for the stories of our own lives, our own experiences we lose a sense of history and of place. We end up living in some abstract sphere of imagination that has nothing to do with the details of our day to day lives.

When I started on the journey of this project, I was totally committed to finding a way for artists to create their art in a local setting. Now that is secondary. Yes, I think artists creating art is important, but I also think artists need to facilitate the creation of others. They need to inspire people to “Get together with friends, tell stories, listen. Turn off the TV, put down the book, listen to a story.” Or sing a song, or paint a picture, or create a quilt. Within in context, the art that artists create can serve as object lessons, as something that others can learn from and aspire to — not simply something they can buy or consume.

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Business Model: Space

Over the last year, as I have been thinking and writing about this project, I have gone back and forth about the building. One of the things I am committed to with this project is to create a business model that is as green as possible, as sustainable as possible, as locally focused as possible. Not long ago, I thought that the best way to approach the issue of space was to search the community for an existing space that was empty and rehab it for the purposes of the arts center. I figured that most small communities probably have a storefront sitting empty, and filling it would have the benefit of  not only recycling, but also revitalizing a part of town.

However, lately I have changed my mind. Art spaces in general, and performance spaces in particular — especially performance spaces that require a great deal of flexibility — have a hard time successfully fitting into spaces that were designed for other purposes. Ceilings are often too low, sightlines are blocked by poles, and any number of additional problems present themselves, including the cost of retrofitting the space to make it more energy efficient. And no matter what you do, the space always looks like what it was before — a grocery store, a restaurant, etc.

It also occurred to me that the construction of a new, attractive building in town might have a beneficial effect on property values and community image, and at the same time provide a little work for local contractors. However, even with as little experience I have with building a new building, I know that a big portion of the pricetag involves paying an architect and, in essence, reinventing the wheel for each new space. This increases the amount of time it takes to get a project up and running. I wanted to avoid that delay, and the costs. Which took me back to a local company I had talked to a year ago: Del-Tec Homes.

Del-Tec is a “family-run business that has been providing finely crafted prefabricated round homes to satisfied customers for over 40 years.” The beauty of a Del-Tec is that all of the weight-bearing walls are on the outside, so the inside can be configured and reconfigured according to needs. Furthermore, there are many pre-fab additions that can be made to the basic circular designs — bumped out square rooms (see area on the right side of this photo), corridors that attach to additional smaller circular rooms, multiple stories, decks, etc. These structures have been used for churches in the past, so Del-Tec has experience with public spaces. Best of all, Del-Tecs are easily created using energy efficient, “green” technology in order to make the theatre sustainable in the future. And most important, these kits can be shipped anywhere in the world.

What I want to do is work with a Del-Tec representative and a theatre person to create one or more prototypes that will include not only the floorplan and layout, but also include a lighting and sound system, seating, etc. Right now, I am trying to get in touch with Don Drapeau, a retired theatre professor at Virginia Tech, who co-wrote the book Hi Concept – Lo Tech: Theatre for Anyone in Any Place. I would also like to contact his colleague Randy Ward, who along with Barbara Carlisle published an article in Theatre Topics entitled “Writing for RALPH: An Exploration in the Dramaturgy of Suistainable Theatre.” In this article, Ward wrote:

Since at least 1990, the authors of this article–director and playwright Barbara Carlisle, with scenographer and lighting designer Randy Ward–have been participating in a common theatre problem at Virginia Tech. As a department we pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of execution to provide valid design and technical learning for our students. At the same time we confront increasing materials costs with fixed budgets, intense pressure to meet overlapping production deadlines, and perhaps more importantly, deep discomfort with the unrecycled waste that has gone out the door after each production. In every respect we have balked at the model we were perpetuating for our students–debilitating burnout, financial anxiety, and production panic. In writing the book Hi Concept – Lo Tech*, Barbara and her co-author Don Drapeau (also of Virginia Tech) coined the expression “sustainable theatre” to refer to the need for a mode of theatre making that does not deplete the resources of the theatre makers (174). Yet our theatre at Virginia Tech was not sustainable. We were working off the backs of exhausted students and staff, caught up in a theatre mythology that presumes “if you’re not willing to kill yourself for the art, you better get out.”

In a letter to the VT faculty, Ward wrote:
In an era of constantly accelerating decline of natural resources, are we justified in the consumption of material and the landfill impact of very short-term construction applications? I am disturbed by the cavalier way we utilize wood and wood pulp products. We should find a more ecologically sound approach to theatre production. A university theatre–perhaps any artistic enterprise–should challenge the old modes and set new models, not just propagate past traditions. Try as we might, there is still an unspoken value system that equates tonnage of built scenery with the value or importance of a production.

His proposal was to create RALPH — a name originally chosen as a joke because they couldn’t figure out what to call it, and eventually acronymized to mean “Radically Alternate Limited Production Habitat.” Ward and Carlisle wrote in the Theatre Topics article:

A flexible set of elements, such as those we routinely use in the workshops, would not be sufficient; RALPH must have its own character, its own voice….Our idea was that RALPH would be designed in advance of the season selection, and would, in some respects, inform the choice of season. It would provide a theatrically challenging environment with the possibility of some tailoring to a specific production via lighting, props, and detail elements, or, in some cases, projections. We imagined that every two or three years a new structure would be designed with an altered theatrical emphasis–ladders and doorways, trampolines and jungle gyms, sails and fabric. A new set of tools and a different aesthetic would drive each RALPH…. RALPH was never intended to be neutral, nor a clever framework that would be disguised. Its form would remain a constant from production to production. The individuality of each production would be realized in the way the workbench is spatially used by the actors. RALPH might change over time, and new RALPHs might be built; but most, if not all, RALPHs would involve objects to be arranged by the actors and director into a specific configuration during the rehearsal process. RALPH would offer a physical aesthetic giving tangible life to the performance.

I am interested in the intersection of these two ideas: RALPH and Del-Tec. I believe with some creative thinking in advance, the process of creating a series of beautiful, sustainable community arts centers in small and rural communities becomes a much more manageable, flexible, and quicker process.

In addition, the cost of these buildings are reasonable, and I could see part of the central organization’s duties being to find donors to fund all or part of a building. Because the walls can be rearranged as needed, should the worst happen and the arts center goes bankrupt, the Del-Tec could be converted into a home and resold, which might make it attractive to potential funders.

So in addition to the educational aspect of this project, and the business model aspect, there is the space aspect. If you know of anyone who you feel would have the interest and skills to contribute to this design work, I’d appreciate your letting me know.

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