Monday, March 31, 2008

Goal of Theatre Tribe: More Work!


From one of my new favorite books, Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:
"The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous painting reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas. The point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work, and a great many of the pieces you make along the way will never stand out as finished art. The best you can do is make art you care about – and lots of it!”
In many ways, this stands at the center of what I am trying to accomplish through the theatre tribe concept. When I read many of my fellow bloggers, I get a deep sense of how difficult it is to keep making work. Playwrights have the best deal, because at least they can keep writing plays even if they can't get them regularly produced. (That's cold comfort.) But actors, directors, designers are stuck.

The ultimate goal of the theatre tribe is to create a business model that allows theatre artists to create lot of work, so that the likelihood of the creation of "artwork that soars" increases.

1 comment:

Dan said...

In Chicago, designers tend to be in the most demand. I've been extraordinarily lucky (and, in some cases, not too picky), and have been fortunate to work (albeit for free) pretty consistently. But directors are pretty screwed. Anecdotal evidence suggests the number one reason new theatre companies get formed is because a director wants to direct, and the perception is there is no other avenue. (Putting actual research into this theory is a project I'm tabling until the summer, but it's in my mind.)

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