The New Guthrie Theatre

Over at "The Bleat," James Lileks takes a look at the new Guthrie Theatre and finds it wanting. Lileks does an amazing job showing us what seems to be an appalling building (I lived in Minneapolis for many years in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, so I know much of what he is referring to).

It is when Lileks examines the building in terms of the surrounding area that he makes, to my mind, his most insightful and damning comments (read the article and, more importantly, look at the pictures). He writes:

It’s every post-war cultural institution in the country: a spare and rational temple for the high cult of art. The only cultural antecedents are to the era in which the cultural antecedents were abolished. That’s what annoys me about the thing, really – aside from its inscrutable façade, ham-fisted massing, coy little smokestack marquees and shuttlecraft bridge. This is where the city began: the waterfront, the falls, the mills. Washington Avenue, now in the midst of a remarkable rebirth, has a mix of old and new, but the new knows enough to defer to the old concrete giants, the stone-walled warehouses, the tumbled ruins. The old world was hand-made, brick by brick. It’s possible all the old mills and warehouses would have been made of blue glass if they’d had enough of the stuff. But would it have been too much to ask of the architect to make the Guthrie looked like it belonged on this ancient plot?

Lileks is talking about community -- about a building, which is symbolically the public face of the institution it houses, that refuses to be a part of the community in which it resides, that refuses to incorporate the community's (architectural) history into its view of itself. It was a building designed by a European architect (an import from outside the community, like the actors that the Guthrie employs) who had no understanding (or at least no respect) for the cultural context of the building. Instead, the Guthrie slams into the surrounding neighborhood.

What is sad is that, in some ways, this actually reflects the Guthrie's (and our own?) view of theatre's part in the community. It slams in, bringing "culture" to the unwashed and unsophisticated masses, without respect or understanding for where those masses came from, where they are, and where they are going. We expect them, like the building surrounding the Guthrie, to adapt to us. Take your dose of culture and like it. We know better, and these imported artists definitely know better than those of you who lack the global perspective necessary to truly be in the know.

It is an arrogance and lack of respect that alienates. It will be interesting to see whether the community actually fills the Guthrie, or whether it will come to sense the hostility embodied in the building and stay away.

Caught My Eye

Creativity guru Eric Maisel, on his blog Creativity Central, wrote a post on April 30th on May Day that caught my eye. I'm not certain why. Somehow, I think this connects to what I have been writing about concerning the relation of the artist to the community.... Anyway, after quoting the lyrics to the song Internationale, Maisel writes:

You can see, I think, why many intellectuals of the first half of the last century fell in love with Communism. Take the French writer Andre Gide. In 1937 Gide traveled to Russia, like many European intellectuals of his time hoping to revel in and celebrate Soviet Communism. The ideals of socialism, an inspiration to a generation of thinkers who felt certain that the growing power of oligarchies and corporations were bound to subvert the western democracies, provoked Gide’s journey, a journey that had become the equivalent of a Leftist Grand Tour.

Janet Flanner, writing from Paris for the New Yorker, recounted Gide’s journey. As did many of his compatriots, Gide came away bitterly saddened and completely disillusioned. As we now know and as Gide learned firsthand, the socialist ideal, as beautiful as it might be in theory, could not withstand the realities of human nature. People were bound to ruin it, and they did. Stalin was only the worst offender in that regard, a titanic tyrant ruling over a multitude of pint-sized tyrants.

Flanner concludes her piece on Gide’s reversal of position with a point of real interest to creative people. “Gide notes,” Flanner writes, “that because of the emotions which Communism arouses, the truth about Russia is usually told with hate and the lies with love.” This rich observation extrapolates. We artists, roused by emotion, often do the same thing. In our work, we end up hating more than we should and loving more than we should. This tends to make our work too cynical, on the one hand, and too romantic, on the other.

We excoriate our small town because our disrespect for its values and its denizens has turned to hatred. At the same time we eulogize the plight of the one poet our small town has produced, turning her into a troubled saint, when in fact she was just a smart anorexic better at words than at life. In the process of hating our town and loving its poet we distort and make unrecognizable the truth about our environment, our neighbors, and our artists. A great gulf is manufactured and our intentions to see clearly tumble into it.

How can we love and still see clearly? How can we feel the legitimate outrage we feel and still see to either side of it? I think that these are harder tasks than anyone imagines. I think that our enthusiasms blind us and our hatreds blind us in ways that confound us. An artist may inadvertently paint unicorns and never stop painting them, or inadvertently paint violent gashes and never stop painting them, exactly because he is trapped in an infatuation, like the intellectuals’ infatuation with Communism. This infatuation, compounded of wishful thinking and raw emotion, does not let reality or maturity in.

Thoughts to ponder...

Hear! Hear! Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout of About Last Night (see blogroll), in his Wall Street Journal column, ends his terrific article on regional theatres with the following sentence: "Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don't know what's hot in "the stix," you don't know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America."

Now that a NY critic has said it, it is time for regional theatres to take the next step. Make a banner of Teachout's words and put it in your artistic director's office as a reminder, and then walk the walk. If you're proud to be a regional theatre (and you should be), then be proud to hire and retain regional actors. Your claim to being a regional theatre is shot to hell if the actors and designers and directors are regularly imported from NYC. How can you claim to be a regional theatre if everybody except your office staff lives somewhere else?

Intiman Blog

Many thanks to Dorothy over at Freedom Spice in the New Mashup World (see blogroll) for drawing my attention to the Intiman Theatre's blog about rehearsals for Richard III. While I would have liked the blog to be a bit less "perky" and more honest about the rehearsal process, I think this is a good example of a theatre trying to create community by giving the audience a somewhat-honest peek at an upcoming show. As I said, I think such a blog could benefit from a more "warts-and-all" approach that would give insights into the struggles and fears as well as the triumphs -- such an approach might get people pulling for the show. (Of course, the question to be dealt with is the effect on rehearsals of having hurts and conflicts blogged about -- something to work out). Anyway, check it out: http://www.intiman.org/blog/ag1.html

Simple Question

Over at Creative Generalist, Steve Hardy is blogging about things he has learned at a conference in Toronto called IdeaCity. He writes:

Steven Rechtschaffner, former CCO of Electronic Arts, touched on several creative points. When presented with an idea, he says that the best response is the simple question, "What inspired it?" Learning of the inspirational root helps ground the idea, attaches a story to it, and fleshes it out a bit more. He praised the power of naivete, remarked on how art imitates life imitates art, and advised that if you're an idea person you must seek out cultures of "yes" and leave cultures of "no".

What a terrific question to ask first, rather than "what's wrong with this idea?"

The Model (Draft) -- Part 2

As promised in Part 1 of this draft of a model theatre, the topic is now "The Artist in the Community." What I mean by this can be described best by taking apart a sentence in the previous post: "What does my community need right now?"

As a question, it sounds simple, but has several separate parts each with different, but conjoined, ramifications.

First, "my community" indicates that you are part of the community, and it is part of you -- no more Mysterious Outsider. Thus, the term "embedded." I know: the current connotations make me uncomfortable too, so let's try to disconnect them. I mean the broader definition of embedded: To cause to be an integral part of a surrounding whole. MY community means that you are an integral part of it, you claim it as yours, it emcompasses you. To some extent, this is a change from the modernist norm, which placed the artist outside of the community and valorized the perspective allowed by this disconnection. Here, you sacrifice perspective for detail, long shot for close up. This also means that the artist -- and I mean all of them involved in the theatre -- must live in the community they serve. No more drive-by performances. The artists should also be seen at the grocery store, the church or synagogue, the soccer field, the library, the voting site. They need to have a life that reaches beyond the rehearsal hall and makes contact with a diversity people with a diversity of perspectives. Artists have a tendency to live in gated communities where only those who are "in the know" and "one of us" live. As a result, their productions begin to lose richness, complexity, wholeness.

Second, the word "need" requires that you be connected enough to that community to recognize what it already has too much of, and what is lacking. You can feel it, you experience it in your heart. The word "need" is not the same as the word "want" -- usually a community will want more of what it already has and likes. Need requires balance. It is a dialectic: the artist in the community determines what the widely held thesis is and provides the antithesis with the goal of a synthesis. The artist supplies the yang to balance the community's yin. Oppositional complementarity. This is art as a thermostatis activity. I borrow this term from Neil Postman, who uses it in terms of education in his sequel to Teaching as a Subversive Activity, which he called (thermostatically) Teaching as a Conserving Activity. You set you thermostat to a certain tempertaure; its job is to make what is too warm cooler, and what is too cool warmer. As Postman writes, "A thermostat, in short, releases a counterargument." The thermostat does so not out of spite, not out of a spirit of criticism, but in order to achieve dynamic balance. So the artist is not solely focused on expressing a personal vision, but rather on serving the community's needs.

And finally, "right now" means there is no universal solvent, no single aesthetic that applies across time and space. You use the language that will have the greatest impact at that moment, the forms that will be most compelling at that moment, the images and metaphors that will have the greatest traction at that moment. The artist must become a master of as many languages and styles as possible -- he or she must have a sizeable artistic toolbox.

All of this pertains to the plays that are chosen, the stories that are told, and the relationships that are formed.

What's the slogan? Be here now.

Addendum to Model -- Part 1

Thank you, Alison, for this quotation from Australian playwright Daniel Keene, who, in his graduation address to the Swinburne University of Technology's Small Companies and Community Theatre Course, said about the theatres in France that receive public funds:

An important point to note is that these subsidies are granted only if the theatre fulfils a legal requirement that the theatre provide a public service. This public service can take many forms and is often called Social Action (it's what we in Australia would call Community Theatre). The same goes for National Theatres.
There are many kinds of Social Action, ranging from actors and directors running workshops or performing plays in prisons and in hospitals, working with handicapped people, running classes and performing in schools and workplaces and running workshops for specific groups such as new immigrants, the unemployed, single parents, retired people, etc. All of this is offered to the people involved at no cost to them.

What all of this means, of course, is that theatre is obliged to participate in and contribute to the wider social, cultural and political life of the community in which it exists. This is not seen by the theatres as any kind of burden, but as an essential part of the theatre's work; in fact, it is considered one of the fundamental reasons why the theatre exists at all. In France, theatre is considered and has always been considered to be a central part of the social, cultural and political life of its community. What is most important is that the community understand that the theatre belongs to them: it exists for their benefit, to help express their concerns, to celebrate their lives and their culture and, ultimately, to defend and maintain
their right to free and open public expression.

This is an example of what I mean by community involvement. The other aspect, and perhaps the more important aspect, is being aware of what a community "needs." Which means embeddedness...