What Needs to Happen to Theater

 

Resistance

 "Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit."

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Charm and Charisma

 I found this article by Ian Leslie on his Substack site "The Ruffian" interesting in how it made me start considering my teaching style and writing style. Leslie writes:

In a new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, the sociologist Julia Sonnevend argues that charm has superseded charisma to become the dominant political style of the twenty-first century. Charm thrives on proximity; on a sense that the politician would be at ease with the voter in person. Bill Clinton, who felt your pain and played the sax, had bags of charm. Charisma depends on distance - on the leader being ‘up there’, gazing down at us. De Gaulle was the archetypal charismatic leader. He believed that a leader must never be ordinary, but wreathed in mystique and larger than life.

The comedian Jimmy Carr has also given this question some thought (standup is as much about developing an onstage persona as it is about jokes), and he offers a succinct definition of the difference. Charm is I come to you; charisma is You come to me. Jennifer Aniston is charming; Angelina Jolie is charismatic. Charismatic people don’t care what you have to say; charming people really do. The essential thing, Carr says, is to know which type you are and inhabit it. (He defines his own persona as charismatic, on the basis that nobody could find him charming.)

My sense is that I lean more in the direction of charisma rather than charm, although my students might offer "none of the above" as a viable alternative. I suspect this is why blogging is better for me than, say, hosting a podcast, or if I did host a podcast it would likely have a format that was just me talking about something rather than an interview show. (I've sometimes thought I'd like to do a podcast that is just me talking about a play or book for 30 minutes, which really is a lecture, isn't it?) 

Maybe I'm an Idiot

"Idiot took on its current, mentally handicapped designation only after we forgot what the Greeks used it for: an idiotes was an individualist who had no use for society."

Jay Heinrichs -- Aristotle's Guide to Soul Bending ("Five Lost Words") 

There Is Still Much That Is Fair

 “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."

 J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Fellowship of the Ring”

[Received via Philosophy Quotes on Substack]

Does Literature Help Us Live?

 Tim Parks's essay in the New York Review of Books, "Does Literature Help Us Live?," rang true for me and made me cry...until the last two paragraphs, when Parks seems to take a cynical turn that is the complete opposite of what he'd written. Nevertheless, well worth the read, particularly in his references to Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. 

Sample:

"at the core of the literary experience, as it is generally construed and promoted, is the pathos of this unequal battle and of a self inevitably saddened—though perhaps galvanized, too, or, in any event, tempered and hardened—by the systematic betrayal of youth’s great expectations. Life promises so much, but then slips through one’s fingers."

WHY Theater?

I wonder whether my work to discover HOW to make theater more sustainable, more fulfilling, more rooted ignores an earlier question about why theater at all? 

In some ways, the 20th century, and now 21st century, theater has done the same thing I have done, focusing on "how" instead of "why." 

In 1936, Walter Benjamin addressed the central question in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." My memory is that his answer centered on the concept of an original work's "aura" -- that it carries with it the singularity of its original creator. I must revisit this essay, along with Simon Sinek's Start With Why. 

After which my question is: HOW can art be separated, as much as possible, from commerce without becoming reliant on charity from the rich? Which is rooted in my lifelong moral objection to the very idea of rich people at all, and my sense that anyone who made a lot of money likely did so by exploiting others.

Henry James: Art Lives Upon Discussion

“Art lives upon discussion,” he wrote, “upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development— are times, possibly even, a little of dullness.”

Jed Perl quoting novelist Henry James in his excellent book Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts.

Art as a Resistance to Our Burnout Culture

In her book Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything, F. S. Michaels paraphrases philosopher Isaiah Berlin, writing 

"If you look at any civilization... you will find a particular pattern of life that shows up again and again, that rules the age. Because of that pattern, certain ideas become popular and others fall out of favor. If you can isolate the governing pattern that a culture obeys, he believed, you can explain and understand the world that shapes how people think, feel and act at a distinct time in history."

Our master narrative is all about money. We have turned James Carville's simple-minded directive "It's the economy, stupid" into a motto to live by, along with Gordon Gecko's line from Wall Street, "Greed is good" and Jerry McGuire's "Show me the money!" Shannon Hayes, in her book Redefining Rich, calls this monoculture the Extractive Economy, and proposes its opposite, which she calls the Life-Serving Economy. Her book teaches the lessons she has learned running  multi-generational Sap Bush Farm in upstate New York, but I'd argue her ideas apply in many other contexts, including the theater. The book describes

how to build your work around your family and the things you love the most; how to deepen your understanding of true wealth, capital, and finances; how to extract harmony and order from the chaos and stress of farming, family, and entrepreneurship; as well as how to maximize your rest and ignite your creativity to keep going for the long haul, year after year, generation after generation, through good times and crises, until this life-serving economy is the reality for everyone.

Another book to check out is philosopher Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society, where he argues that our relentless "achievement society" of constant improvement teaches us to "exploit ourselves passionately until we collapse. We realize ourselves, optimize ourselves unto death." 

I would argue that such a monomyth works against the creation and appreciation of the arts, and that reading a book or poem, watching a play, visiting an art gallery has become an act of resistance to our extractive, burnout society. Even more revolutionary is to actually create works of art as an end in themselves, not as a means to fame and riches. 

More from Alan Jacobs

 Quoting Alan Jacobs may become a weekly feature! Here's the context for the discussion Cory Doctorow's concept of the Memex I wrote about below. This is J R R Tolkien's concept of "The Mathom-House" from "Concerning Hobbits."

"So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort."

Not There Yet...

 ...but I'm trying.

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
- Toni Morrison

Broadening Our Definition of Wealth (Formerly "Eating the Economic Orange")

 I posted this in 2012, and it seems particularly relevant at this time, when so many people are obsessed enough with The Economy that they're willing to hand our country over to an immoral, unprincipled, and greedy fascist.

Leo Hwang-Carlos does a great job explaining why the economy is more than the numbers reported by economists. I was particularly impressed by his description of all the ways he participates in the economy, and wonder how young people in high school or college might be educated to think of different ways of making ends meet than simply using a paycheck to pay for goods and services. A more varied approach might free up time for creativity.

It also might remind us that defining our lives according to our bank account is ultimately bankrupt in itself. I'm not talking about living on the brink of disaster, but I am talking about other ways to live an abundant life. I wrote about this in Chapter 22 of Building a Sustainable Theater, borrowing many of the ideas from Shannon Hayes's fantastic book Redefining Rich.

Peter Marks and the Need for Critics

 

Theater has become instrumental -- a means to profit, not an end in itself. This ultimately leads to stupefying shallowness. Yes, we need a new group of theater idealists who restore theater to its rightful place as an art form.

It Doesn't Have to be This Way

 “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” -- David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World: Essays

French Farming and Theater

[602 words.]

I recently came across an article in David Byrne's nonprofit online magazine Reasons to Be Cheerful that I thought had interesting possibilities for theater. Reasons to Be Cheerful publishes articles that are "stories of hope, rooted in evidence" that are designed to "inspire us all to be curious about how the world can be better, and to ask ourselves how we can be part of that change," and I encourage anyone to subscribe (free) .

The article, entitled "Cultivating the Next Generation of Farmers in France," described "an initiative in the southwest of France that is helping young people become the country’s next generation of farmers via low-risk, small-scale and closely-supported projects — and thereby helping create ultra-local networks of organic, seasonal and low-carbon produce for city-dwellers. The so-called “Green Belt” project, which began in the French municipality of Pau, rents out modest, two-hectare plots of farmland near the city that are already prepared and equipped at an affordable rate for fledgling farmers."

The problem that is being addressed is twofold: an estimated 70% of current farmers are expected to retire in the not-to-distant future, usually without family members ready to step in and take over the farm; on the other hand, there was a generation of young people who were interested in being small, usually organic, farmers, but who were being prevented from doing so by the high cost of farmland and the prohibitive entry costs of equipment and materials. The Green Belt project is addressing the problem by buying farm land from retiring farmers and breaking it into 2-1/2 acre plots. "Each farm," author Peter Yeung writes, costs €200,000 ($220,000 US) to set up—half subsidized through Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy and the other half through a loan, which the farmers pay back over time through rent, making the project in theory self-sustaining." The new farmers sign "an annual renewable contract, with the right to remain on the site for at least 18 years." Meanwhile, the project provides education for the young farmers, and also endeavors to make sure that there is a ready market for the produce that is grown. Because they recognize that it will take a couple years to get the farm fully functional, the new farmers "pay a monthly contribution of a few hundred euros that progressively increases until the third year, at which point the rent is fixed for the rest of the period."

So what does this have to do with theater?

What if there was a program that did the same thing for young theater artists who want to start a company? A foundation would be created to provide with a small, fully equipped theater space that is paid for half through a grant and half through an interest-free loan. Company members would be required to go through training in building and running a theater--maybe my book Building a Sustainable Theater could be part of the curriculum! Their monthly rent would start out low and gradually increase over the three years it would take to find an audience and a functional business model. After three years, they would provide a report of their progress toward sustainability.

I was reminded of Muhammad Yunus's book Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs. 

I don't think we need a new generation of theater artists taking over the existing massive regional theaters with their legacy audiences and traditions; I think we need to give young artists a chance to start over and develop their own visions of what theater ought to be in the 21st century. They need seed money.