Tony's Blog

As some of you know, we've been working on redrafting our mission statement. While our mission is strong we had a pretty tough time articulating what we do. I think most companies have that issue at times as well.

I'm not one who thinks missions are "blah, blah, something funders want to hear, blah, blah, BS." It should be a company’s reason for existing. It should guide everything the company does. It should speak to people outside as well as inside the company. It should keep a company accountable, as companies should live up to their mission.  That's a pretty tall bill.

When I was at Theatre Wit for their anti-Conference, Martha Lavey spoke about living with your mission.  She said Steppenwolf was guided by three core values: ensemble, innovation and citizenship. She also acknowledged that their mission was "deficient". It actually perked me up a little bit to hear that openly acknowledged. If they're struggling with that, we shouldn’t feel too bad.

After about three months of working on it, consensus building, and a lot of great advice and feedback from pretty smart folks, we had multiple people try to craft a statement. The board took stabs at it, company members took stabs at it and then Seth collated them all into one place to look at them side by side.

At the following board meeting, as a group the board redrafted five versions that were then taken to the company for feedback and testing at the next meeting. Each of the drafts had one sentence that the company grabbed onto and liked, but none of them really nailed it. So we were back at an impasse

Hearing Martha and David Schmitz talk about Steppenwolf's mission and values inspired me to go back and craft a statement. I took the best pieces of each of the drafts and tried to put them together into one statement. It was a bit clunky, but I sent it out the company and board for feedback. From their feedback I made some tweaks, strengthened parts and too out some redundancy and came up with this:

Halcyon Theatre connects people, transforms our borders and ascends towards a more just union.

Halcyon Theatre is dedicated to social justice by creating a community that both respects and celebrates our similarities and differences. We are fiercely committed to making the stage as diverse as the city of Chicago; presenting new voices from inadequately represented communities, as well as recasting classic works to showcase their contemporary relevance. By bridging cultures, celebrating diversity and fostering an open dialogue, Halcyon works towards an enhanced mutual respect and understanding between artists and audiences from across our richly diverse city.

It's still a draft, but I'd love your thoughts and feed back as well. (Here is our old one for comparison.) What do you think?

On a side note: I'm pretty happy that, while I crafted the draft of statement, only one sentence comes from me. And even that one was inspired by someone else. All I did was stitch it together from the groups ideas and words.

Thoughts?

I'm really excited about the upcoming year, our fifth season. On tap is Trickster, Iphigenia ... (a rave fable), and the Alcyone Festival.

For the first time I'm directing both shows in the main season. The last time I directed a show outside of the festival was in May 2007. Trickster is the first full length-play I've written since Tony Jr. was born, and the first play written specifically for Halcyon. I know it may be scoffed at, an AD writing and directing his own play in the season. But in the last four years, I produced 31 plays by (I think) 26 different writers. So, ya know, there's that.

Following Trickster we're planning on doing Iphigenia by Caridad Svich, one of my favorite contemporary writers, and the festival is a pretty huge/scary/thrilling experiment.

The next year is taking a whole lot of faith and leaping in head-first. It might completely blow up in our faces; but, it should at the very least be a hell of a ride.

What's on tap for Season Five:

Trickster by Tony Adams

The Blurb:

A displaced people torn between warlords and the spiritual world receives a mysterious visitor in this powerful re-imagining of Genesis, the legend of Don Juan and Coyote Trickster tales.

The Skinny

The show's a re-imagining of the legend of Don Juan, coyote tales and parts of Genesis. (Adam and Eve and Abram/Abraham + Sarai/Sarah + Hagar.)

It explores the odd societal dichotomy that sexuality and sensuality is bad, yet life is the greatest gift God can bestow; and how people are capable of more brutal things than most of us can imagine and extraordinary tenderness at the same time.

It takes place in-between the spirit world and a war ravaged southwest reminiscent of the dust bowl. The human world of the play is a cross between the southwest during the dustbowl-era and Juárez today. The spirit world will use masks and movement, and the characters on earth will be puppets. (Though not actual puppets, they'll be actors playing puppets.) It's bawdy and brutal, beautiful and brokenhearted. There'll be music and sex and fighting and lots of fun.

The first draft of act one currently stands at 73 pgs, 32 Characters, 8 songs, 7 deaths, 5 sex or post-coital scenes, 1 puppet raped, 1-heart ripped from chest and eaten. It's a small light-comedy, really. ;)

Right now we're looking at opening in early Nov., but I have to confirm that with the owner of the venue. (Space continues to by my nemesis)

Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) by Caridad Svich

The blurb: A rave fable inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, this play with music and video spins Iphigenia into dangerous orbit through an un-named Latin American country as she journeys through a meta-hell where she finds her body embraced and destroyed by a rock star named Achilles, and discovers she cannot escape a destiny set forth by myths ancient and modern.

The Skinny:

I've talked a lot how one of the strengths of the company is what can happen if multiple styles and traditions combine into something new, and I think Caridad's take onIphigenia is one of the first scripts I've found that is the living embodiment of that. Caridad has an innate ability to take existing styles and conventions and fuse them in to something new and fascinating. One of the amazing things about her work is how she can almost mainline myths and create something mythic, poetic and completely contemporary through her telling of them in a way that is entertaining and powerful at the same time.

I love the story of Iphigenia. As Travis Bedard said to me not too long ago, she's the only female Greek character who takes control of her own destiny, and doesn't also hack up her family in the process.

The way the video and music intertwines with the story, it's completely embedded in the spine of the play, will be a new technical challenge for us. I love challenges.

The Alcyone Festival 2011

The Blurb:

The theme for the Alcyone Festival 2011 will be Remixed, new works based off of classical texts by women.

The Skinny:

I know it's pretty common to rework the dead men of the cannon. No one is really re-imagining Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda or Elizabeth Cary. (At least not that I'm aware of.) We're looking at works using/adapting/sampling plays written by women from Hrosvita (c. 935 to c. 1002) through 1850. My hope is to celebrate both new and (really) old writers and see how the lineage of female playwrights over the past thousand years can inspire and inform contemporary audiences and artists.

I also want to try something new. Instead of picking scripts that have already been written, we're picking writers and taking off the brakes. While we can't afford to commission, we can commit to producing. And that's what we're doing.

Amongst all the talk of development hell, etc, I'm putting some of my favorite writers in the driver’s seat, and seeing what happens.

The only rules the writers have are: it has to be based in some way off a work by a female playwright written before 1850 and it has to be ready to go into rehearsal in April. No holds barred.

Friday night Jenn, the kids and I went over to one of our neighbors houses for a little bbq. They have a son who was born on the same day as Tony Jr, and they get a long pretty great. While it was still light out Flynn and Tony Jr. took turns hitting a plastic ball with a plastic baseball bat as Flynn's mom tossed the ball to them. Both of them are pretty good at batting for (almost) four year olds. They hit about 25 of the 30 or so balls that were thrown to them between the two of them. It started to rain so they went inside to play.

When we got home I asked Tony Jr. If he had fun. He said, "yeah, but I was a little bit of a bad boy."

"Why do you say that," I asked.

"Daddy, I was a little bit of a bad boy because . . . " he looked down at the floor and with a sad voice said  "I was a little bit of a bad boy because, because, I didn't hit the ball every time."

He's obsessed with good and bad right now. With good guys and bad guys, with being a good boy or a bad boy. In his mind he's trying to learn about the world around him by looking at things through that prism, is it good or bad. Dogs, foxes and coyotes are good. Big bad wolf is, well, bad. Friendly dinosaurs are good, mean dinosaurs are bad. Nice kids are good, mean kids are bad. If he helps his little sister that's good, if he pushes her, that's bad.

I had to explain to him that he wasn't a bad boy for not hitting every ball. The best batters that ever lived missed some balls. A lot of boys miss just about every ball, that doesn't make them bad. You can be a good kid and not be very good at hitting baseballs too.

I was thinking of that when I read Michael Phillips article on Donald Rosenberg.

The same could be said of much of the art being created in America today. There is so much fear and self-censorship, there are so few full-time salaries. You can smell the caution and paranoia in too many shows weighed down by generalities and a devotion to MFA's, Regional Theatres and Critics, which isn't what this endeavor is about at all.

I see many of the same traits in my son as he tries to navigate a world that grows with every new thing he learns. Our ever changing world with an uncertain future must be a lot like what it looks like to young kids. Everything they learn changes the way they see the world. It often contradicts what they just figured out.

Phillips adds:

Approached the wrong way criticism is an inherently arrogant and narcissistic pursuit, yet what I'm left with, increasingly, is how humbling it is. It's hard to get a review right for yourself, let alone for anyone reading it later. It's even harder to be an artist worth writing and reading about, because so much conspires against even an inspired artist's bravest efforts.

The same could be said about creating art, or about childhood. Along the way you're going to miss a lot of balls. It doesn't make you a bad critic, or a bad artist, or a bad kid. You can be a good adult and not be very good at art or criticism too.  A previous editor decided Rosenberg was good enough to keep his job. The current one decided he wasn't. Is that a little bit of a bad thing?

We often like to talk about how ticket prices keep people away from the performing arts. I've been guilty of that myself. But what if that's not actually the case, what if price has little to do with the actual reason people attend or don't? Price is one factor, but not the only factor in someone's choice on what to do with their time.

There' s been lot of discussion of tickets above $60 each, but according to TCG's just released Theatre Facts 2009, the average single ticket price last year for TCG theatres was $30.06.

For comparison:

• the average major league baseball ticket : $26.64
• the average NFL ticket: $ 75
• the average movie ticket: $7.50
• the average music ticket (from top 100 tours):  $60.77

Are theatre tickets overpriced? If people want to see or do or buy something badly enough they will. People will pay for things they want. They will pay more for a restaurant they perceive to be high quality, or less for a hole in the wall diner.

We can argue about ticket prices until the end of time. Some are way too expensive for the shows themselves. Some are way cheaper than the shows the ticket is for. Suiting the price to the show can make a difference, but it can't make people go if they don't want to.

"If people don't want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?"

-Yogi Berra

What happens if you can't blame price for people staying away? How would that shift your thinking?

Over the years I've heard many people tell me about the sacred spaces. Theatres, they hold, are a sacred place.

If you believe in that idea, that theatres are a sacred place, what makes them sacred?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Something I've been thinking about for a while is the intersection of architecture and performance. Most of the historical eras of theatre have an accompanying architectural style. The shape of the stage dominates most of our productions.

The Greeks

Most of what I know of Greek theatre consists of sprawling epics. Over pronounced masks, music and dancing, deus ex machina's. Huge stories to fill a huge space in a centralized location. The religious overtones showed up in the continual presence of gods. Man struggling to find meaning in a vast, difficult to understand world.

Medieval Theatre

The medieval theatre world was more fractured. Plays were just getting back on their feet. Sprawling out of the monastic rituals, they were performed where ever they could be: palaces, churches, rolling carts, what ever was clever. They became pageants. The various guilds of the day competed for the glory of the guild God. Massive structures were built by master craftsmen. Angels flying from the heaven stage to the hell pit, must have awed medieval audiences the same way a falling chandelier, or a hovering backlit witch does today. The sprawling site specific nature of medieval theatre is matched by the existing texts.

Elizabethan Theatre

The Elizabethan Theatre is where a lot of folk’s knowledge of theatre begins. Most of us think of the outdoor thrusts, like the swan and the globe. The work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson--the soliloquies and lack of scenery are a perfect fit for a small thrust. Though there were indoor theaters coming into prevalence as well.  Looking at the plays performed by children’s companies vs. what we normally see as Elizabethan it is clear that they were written for two different types of spaces.

Courtly masques begin to be performed and begin to alter how texts were written as well. Courtly masques began to reflect the spaces that were built. Soon opera arrives, and with it the Proscenium, that will dominate for the foreseeable future.

For pretty much all of the plays we remember, they were written for a very specific space.

Which brings me to today. When I was at the TCG Conference, Jonah Lehrer spoke at the keynote about several things. One caught a lot of folks' attention, on mops.  

Chad Bauman recaps it:

The story goes that Procter & Gamble decided they wanted to invent a new soap to make mopping more efficient. After several months of failed attempts to create this novel soap in house, they hired a creativity firm to work with them. The firm spent nine months studying homemakers as they mopped their floors, and in the end, they concluded that a new soap wouldn't revolutionize mopping because mopping as a means of cleaning was essentially flawed in itself. After observing one woman cleaning up coffee grounds on the floor with a damp paper towel, an idea emerged--what about getting rid of the mop entirely, and fastening a damp paper towel to the end of a stick? And the Swiffer was born.

Bauman Asks

After more than 50 years of success, where should the resident theater movement look to throw away a mop, and replace it with a Swiffer?

The Albert Theatre in the Goodman

When I was sitting in the Goodman's Albert theatre, listening to Lehrer speak, the thought that came into my head was "what if we're sitting in a 50 million dollar mop?".  The way it was told to me, The Albert was built to resemble Broadway stages, so transfers would be easier. This post is not intended to pick on the Goodman, but look at that space. It is a lot like many of the main stages across the country.

The next time you are in a theatre's proscenium main stage, look around you. Take in the height, the volume, the size of the stage and house. When is the last you saw a show that was built to fill that space. What was the last story you saw on stage that had any intention of filling that void?

The proscenium is the dominant stage of the past couple of centuries. The stages that have been built and are being used across the country don't fit the plays that are being produced. A forty-foot proscenium crushes a two-hander. People have been rebelling against the proscenium for over a century. Proscenium theatres have continued to proliferate; they've been the dominant stage format for centuries and will probably continue to be so. The problem is not in the shape of the stage. New plays are not being produced to fill those stages. And yet we continue to build them. The stages get larger, the houses get larger--the casts and scope of the stories have gotten smaller. There is a profound disconnect between the most visible houses, and the most visible plays.

What if many of the problems that are frequently cited are as simple as a disconnect between architecture and performance? A disconnect between audiences and houses? A disconnect between scale and scope?

At the Dance Magazine site, (via "You've Cott Mail") Editor-in-Chief Wendy Perron writes about "an annoying new trend of blogging about the process"

I realize a blog is a good way to keep your website alive and to involve your potential audience. But explaininghow you make a dance, the problems you encounter and how you solve them, is not going to help either you as the choreographer or your potential audience. To dig into your imagination enough to make a dance, you need to be embroiled in a place where there is no explanation. As Igor Stravinsky once said, you have to dig underground, in the dark, like a mole, groping for what comes next. You have to be willing to sink into that layer of not knowing in order to come up with something you’ve never seen or done before. During that beginning period, putting it into words denies the groping phase. You should be utterly at a loss for words, just feeling your way. After a while, you can start to justify your decisions to yourself, to your dancers, or to your audience if your presenter so wishes. But first, you have to be willing to be lost in that pre-verbal place.

I think she completely misses the boat. 335 BCE. A book about making art is written. It is the earliest know work on how to make art. Aristotle's Poetics has influenced western culture since.

Perron closes with "And no one can tell you how to transform that necessity into art." That may well be true, but it hasn't stopped artists from trying. The internet is little different from papyrus in that impulse.

Polykleitos spent a great deal of time consciously justifying his decisions. Figuring out how to make his work. Groping for words to describe his work. He wrote a book about it, Kanon (though now lost.) He looked at mathematical proportions for the perfect sculpture. He's also considered one of the greatest sculptors the world has seen.

Artists have been writing about how they see the world, and their art, for as long as artists have been able to write. They have been writing about how they create just as long. Choreographers have long written about dance.

Can she truly feel that attempting to write about the pre-verbal place compromises someone's creative process? There are mountains of work that would directly contradict that. I can't fathom an editor of a dance magazine not having read The Notebooks of Martha Graham.

Is she trying to play gatekeeper? Is most of what she's read simply boring? What is Perron getting at?

Not having the ability to comment on a blog shows they don't understand how most of the internet works. So of course they wouldn't understand why people would want to write about their process on the internet.  Fair enough, there's more than enough stuff out there that doesn't add much to a conversation.

I am talking about young choreographers, anxious to be in the public eye, who think that writing about what happened that day in the studio will somehow 1) bring them a wider audience and/or 2) make them a better choreographer.

To think that attempting to explain and search for the language to describe someone's process is ignorant of how humans are wired. Connecting with "that pre-verbal place" and trying to communicate out of that is the base of the artistic impulse. Simply looking inward, hiding underground like a mole is only one part of the equation.

Attempting to translate into language doesn't deny part of the process. Following the Trail, finding how to communicate your way out of the cave of wonders is the most important part of the artistic process. It is in that part of the journey where an artist connects the imagination with the created work or piece. Attempting to write about that transformational process doesn't weaken to process. It helps you learn.

I would have though a dance magazine editor would be in favor of writing about art.

Hey all, we had some issues with our server today. All should be fixed, but I apologize for any trouble this may have caused. 

And for those subscribed to our feed especially, sorry for the inconvience. I think all is fixed, so there shouldn't be anymore randomness clogging up your feed.