Dennis Baker: South Camden Theatre Company

Dennis Baker draws our attention to an excellent example of a theatre embedded within a community. Gotta love the slogan: "Art Will Save Us."

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Jill Dolan on Theatre Education

Jill Dolan has posted her manifesto about theatre education, "Unhappy Thespians: A Manifesto on Training Theatre Students," which she delivered at the recent Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference a few weeks ago.  It ought to be read by every theatre department faculty member, especially those who feel they need to be "training" students for the so-called "profession." Things have got to change, both in the theatre world and in the universities that feed it. As Dolan implies, there is something very, very sick about what we do to young artists.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

School Prep

Sorry, Readers, but I have been very busy lately, first submitting an NEA grant, and now getting ready for classes to start on Tuesday and my auditions for Psycho Beach Party on Thursday. I hope to begin posting again soon.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Karl Miller Is My New Favorite Blogger

Because he just is, that's all.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

And Another: Mirror Up To Nature

All of a sudden, the theatrosphere is awash in thoughtful posts, this one by art at Mirror Up to Nature entitled "Morality Bites." He raises a lot of great questions about morality in the arts, and whether critics should engage their moral values when reviewing. As an admirer of the late Partisan Review literary critic Lionel Trilling, I think that art should be assessed through a moral lens, by the3 way, in case you were wondering where I stand...

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Flyover on a Roll: Science and Art

All of a sudden, there are lots of fascinating posts appearing on Flyover, this one entitled "We have scientists on the arts, but where are the artists on science?" In this post, which starts with C. P. Snow's 1959 essay "The Two Cultures," which discussed the chasm opening between scientists and humanists, there is some talk about how artists have avoided discussing science, and cognitive science in particular. While I can point to a variety of plays such as Copenhagen that belie the argument, nevertheless the question is a good one. I'd just like to say that I wrote about neuroscience in my post, "On Dopamine, Proust, and New Plays," so I'm off the hook! Anyway, overall I think the question being raised is about a certain narrow focus to artists, a lack of interest in engaging in other areas of intellectual work.
   I'd like to bend that off to the left a bit by asking my artist-readers this: do you consider yourself as an artist to be an intellectual? In other words, do you feel as if artists should be part of the Great Conversation of the Western Intellectual Tradition that Mortimer Adler most prominently discussed? Philosopher Kenneth Burke wrote in his book The Philosophy of Literary Form:

“Where does the drama get its materials? From the "unending conversation" that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late.  When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable.  The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

Do you consider the arts part of that unending conversation? Do you consider yourself as an artist part of it? Is that conversation still ongoing, and is it relevant? And who are some of the speakers right now?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

John Stoehr on Whining and the Arts

Over at Flyover, John Stoehr posts provocatively about the baby boomer generation as a "generation of whiners," and how this plays out in the arts. As a boomer myself (born 1958), I have to admit there is some truth in what he says, although unlike many of my cohort I am not pessimistic. That said, I'll ask a question: is the current discussion about a living wage for artists a generational thing? I think Mike Daisey is not a boomer, nor are most of my readers. When I read about the Millennial Generation, for instance, I often see described a desire for a balance between work life and private life, a focus on local action, and a desire to lead a rich, full life. And perhaps the current way of doing things doesn't support these values.

Stoehr goes on to describe the Boomer attitude thusly:

Why compromise when happiness — and many other things, I would argue, like the American Dream itself — is your right? This attitude as applied to the arts: People should care about the arts, boomers say. They should give money to arts organizations. If they don’t, boomers say, then they’re stupid. If they don’t, then artists are victims.

Now, this is an attitude that I think extends beyond the Boomer Generation to just about every artist today. There is a tendency to blame the general public if they don't care about the arts, to say they are stupid, and to figure out some way to deal with that stupidity. True?

What Stoehr seems to be saying is that the younger generation is more optimistic, more willing to compromise in order to get things done.

I'll pull an Isaac here: what do you think?

Blogged with the Flock Browser