Independence Day

The displays in the sky are fun, but the real fireworks are on the page:

 When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

(Continue)

Happy Fourth of July!

Creative risk pays off for the Guthrie

Jackpot.

If a well-planned theatrical event were a slot machine, Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater would be up to its roofline in nickels. Its April 18-June 28 Kushner Celebration, which featured three special productions of plays by Tony (”Angels in America”) Kushner as well as talks and classes about the playwright and his work, accomplished something astonishing in this awful economic period: It met goals for ticket sales, attracted 90,000 visitors from around the nation and world and drew press attention from the New York Times  to the Minnesota Monthly. 

The rich rewards of the Guthrie’s creative dare may have an even farther-reaching result: They may startle other arts organizations awake with the realization that hard times are the right times to increase artistic invention and marketing efforts – not cut back on them. 

“Recession, depression … that’s the time to take artistic risks, do work that’s engaging and compelling,” said Guthrie communications director Melodie Bahan by phone yesterday from her office in the theater’s stunning, three-year-old riverfront building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel.

She called ticket sales for the celebration “thrilling” – especially because the Guthrie, like many other theaters, has had to substantially reduce costs in recent months.  

But the company was determined to go ahead with the complex Kushner event that artistic director Joe Dowling had been planning for years. “Ever since Joe Dowling first envisioned this new building, he had the idea that this would be the perfect venue” for a themed festival of plays, Bahan said.

Kushner and his work were Dowling’s first choice for the focus of the event. The Guthrie commissioned the playwright to create The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures and to literarily knit together several of his existing short pieces in a work he titled Tiny Kushner. Those plays were produced, along with Kushner’s 2004 Broadway musical, Caroline, or Change, during the 10-week celebration, which also saw Kushner awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota. 

The programming was first and foremost an artistic project that focused an “unprecedented” level of attention and exploration on one writer, Bahan said. But, she added, even though offering local audiences a unique experience of  intellectual and emotional substance was the top priority, “we also knew something like this would be a theatrical event that would attract attention … outside the Twin Cities.” 

They were right: People came from all 50 states, from Canada, Europe and Japan to experience the Guthrie and spend their money in the Twin Cities; Tiny Kushner was “wildly successful,” Bahan noted; and all over the city, the Kushner Celebration was the topic of conversation. Despite the financial and artistic risks – Kushner is a lot edgier than Rodgers and Hammerstein – the Guthrie board of directors fully supported the project.

 The event’s combination of team effort and terrific art worked so well that the Guthrie is considering doing something else like it before long.  

“Joe was absolutely right,” Bahan said of Dowling. “This building, this institution, works great at this kind of celebration. It’s really exciting to think of doing it again.”      

Photo by Michal Daniel / Courtesy of the Guthrie Theater

Michael Esper, left, and Stephen Spinella in the Guthrie Theater world premiere of Tony Kushner’s play “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.”

Congress needs your creative input

Suddenly, change-course policies are a-borning all over the place. Interesting legislation of many kinds has finally got U.S Senate and House members struggling to address some of the most enormous and urgent issues facing the nation, and it’s clear that laws adopted now are going to have direct and probably immediate effects on whether or not the U.S. forcefully steers away from the brink of disaster or skids over the edge while pumping the brakes.

It feels as if we’re entering one of the greatest creative eras the country will have ever undergone - one, as in other times of great national crisis, in which we all have an active and measurable part in determining our own future.

We all need to pay attention, be informed and push for what we think will work best, so lawmakers will listen.  Here are a few of the most important bills to get familiar with:

American Clean Energy and Security Act, addressing global warming (and jobs); passed last week by the House, it’s now heading for the Senate 

Employee Free Choice Act , addressing business-managements’ anti-union tactics (and jobs), which may pass the Senate now that Democrat Al Franken has been officially declared the winner of Minnesota’s Senate race, giving his party the 60 votes needed to block a Republican filibuster 

Health bill, addressing health-insurance reform (and job benefits), is unnamed and still being constructed by members of Congress on committees including Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means. 

 Educate yourself. And then, whatever your position on these bills, call your Congress members and Senators – early and often.

Grow nothing but relaxed

You have a crop growing in your head. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what kind.

It’s a crop reflective of your own tastes and behavior and maybe even appearance.  (I suspect Dick Cheney’s is Brussels sprouts.) But whatever it is, you keep producing it too long and you deplete your brain. 

See, creativity is like farming ideas. (Well, at least, the fertilizers are similar.) A tour of the Internet reveals that there are a lot of people out there trying to help you figure out how to grow creative ideas more often and more efficiently in all kinds of fields,  from education to business to dance. Whole systems resembling irrigation networks have been developed to permit you to be creative on demand, as many of us have to be in our particular occupations.

And yet, as any farmer can tell you, you can’t keep raising the same thing in the same spot for years and years without wearing out the soil. And you can feel when that soil has about turned to gravel, can’t you? All those pathetic little gray cells surrendering,  piling up in strata of calcified corpses. Nothing but weeds going to be coming out of that wasteland.

This is why people in their 50s  flip out and start entirely new careers or  sell everything they own and take to the highway in campers. They know instinctively that they better rotate those crops, let the south 40 go fallow or become mental brownfields.  

It’s better not to let yourself get to that  level of sterility. I don’t know how many of these get-creative philosophies and regimens admit the success of this tactic but, frankly, sometimes – and more often than you’re letting yourself – the best way to be creative is not to think at all.

Luckily, it’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and the impulses and opportunities for flatlining are  rich, indeed. We just have to take them. None of your half-hour meditations or 10-minute power naps or 30-second screen breaks, either. Those are important only during the other three seasons when there aren’t hammocks to lie in, beaches to read on and bright sun to bake our empty skulls like clay pots.

It’s time to slowly, indulgently and unconsciously refill those skulls with impressions and experiences to quietly feed the seeds of thought that will only later sprout into fresh ideas. That’s why it’s a terrible idea to make children go to school nearly year-round, and an excellent plan to make like the French and just shut down for an entire month. 

So go see junky movies and soak in the pool and drink icy stuff from frosted glasses until you slosh. Let the gray matter recuperate.  Your imagination will be a lot more fertile by September.  

This is your brain.

This is your brain on vacation.

Public Art: Change appearance, change destiny

Public art can revolutionize the look, atmosphere, significance and fortunes of a community. Americans for the Arts recognized some good examples for its 2009 Public Art Year in Review. Here are some other cool creative ones:

“I See What You Mean,” by Lawrence Argent at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver 

“Cambier’s Quilt,” by Mark Fuller at the Municipal Parking Garage in Naples, Fla.

“Long Wave” by David Rokeby at Allen Lambert galleria, Toronto

Check out FestLab – and see what’s on the slab

In the United States, we have incubators for artists and arts projects of all kinds, from dance and theater to popular music and digital design. Why not an incubator for festivals?

Europe has one. It’s called the FestLab for Creativity and Innovation.

Set up by the European Festivals Association as part of the European Commission’s European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 - a multinational effort to encourage awareness of the personal, social and economic benefits of creativity and innovation and promote better education and training in related skills – FestLab aims to draw attention to the important role of festivals in creative social and cultural processes and help individual festivals fulfill their artistic missions.    

The European Year site currently features a conversation with Ruta Pruseviciene, executive director of the 13-year-old Vilnius Festival, which has resisted catering to popular tastes and trends and set its own artistic agenda. We all need to learn how to do that better, no matter what creative enterprise we’re developing.

Innovation makes winners of public artworks

Western states including California, Washington and Arizona did well this year in the Americans for the Arts ninth annual Public Art Year in Review selection of the best and most innovative public artworks in the United States  – but Cleveland, Ohio, will be happy to find that it made the list, too.

From 300 entries, independent public-art experts Janet Echelman and Mildred Howard chose 40 works – representing 32 cities in 15 states - worthy of recognition at the 2009 Americans for the Arts annual convention this past weekend in Seattle, which was home to a lot of the winning artworks. The pieces could be either permanent or temporary, but had to be created or unveiled in 2008.  

The artists and commissioning organizations whose pieces were chosen will receive congratulations and letters of recognition from Americans for the Arts President Robert Lynch.

If you click on the Public Art Year in Review hyperlink above, you can get to the pdf that lists the 40 winning artists, their pieces, where they’re located and for whom they were created. To save Clevelanders some time: The winning piece was The Verdant Walk by Toronto artists Peter North and Alissa North of North Design Office, a temporary work commissioned by Cleveland Public Art for Mall B downtown.

The Verdant Walk. Photo courtesy of Cleveland Public Art

The Verdant Walk in daylight. Photo from elaur

Creativity: Nerves redirected?

Creativity remains a mysterious byproduct of the wiring in our heads. Maybe what has happened to the woman in this CBS news report from last Friday is something like the “creative explosion” that some scientists postulate may have changed the human race somewhere between 200,000 and 45,000 years ago, when people began to create artwork and establish religions – possibly because of brain development that made new neurological connections between areas of the brain that had been previously been unlinked.

Watch CBS Videos Online

If Equity got creative, could stage actors earn a better living?

It seems like a good time to ask this question: Why, when theater companies and stage artists generally have trouble surviving even in the best of economic times, is Actors Equity Association still preventing them from making potentially lots more money off their own work  by selling recorded versions of it?  

It’s an issue that’s bothered me for some time, specifically since the First National Performing Arts Convention that took place in Pittsburgh in 2004. I was there reporting on the convention for a newspaper and, at many of the workshops, heard discussions about how nonprofits were having to explore for-profit-style ways of earning income because  – and this is even more the case now – there were no longer enough private grantors and donors or government funding sources to keep all the organizations alive. 

Many, such as orchestras and opera companies, had been doing this for a long time, making commercial recordings that earned them revenue for years afterward. Dance troupes were beginning to think about it, too.

The only performing discipline that apparently couldn’t plan to take advantage of this source of income was professional theater. And that’s because the stage actors’ and stage managers’ own union forbade the making and distributing of recorded stage performances. 

The original idea behind this, I gather, was to prevent artists and their work from being exploited by the mass media – i.e., denied pay for their own recorded work – and also to protect the vital live quality of stage performance that keeps at least some people buying tickets to theater productions. It seems Equity didn’t want America to be able to see plays performed on TV, because it was thought that if stage shows could be accessed there by everyone for free, no one would come to the theater anymore.

This is a position still held by some professional theater artists, I find. Even the unionized Norwegians subscribe to it. Or did. I have to say I think it’s outmoded. And I don’t think I’m alone: In recent discussions with theater artists around the nation, I’ve detected a rueful kind of resignation – numbers of them really wish they could record and sell their productions, but don’t think Equity is going to budge.   

It was an e-mail I received today from Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater that got me wondering again why Equity doesn’t change its mind. The message announced that, through the NT Live  broadcast series, a live stage version of Phedre produced by Britain’s National Theatre would be screened twice at the Guthrie as a high-definition re-broadcast on July 8 and 9 (and as a re-broadcast or live simulcast on other dates at other selected stage theaters across the U.S.).

Now, why can the National Theatre do this mass-media thing apparently without danger, but American theaters have to be protected from it? 

National Theatre Director Nicholas Hytner, who is also directing Phedre, says in a release, “The NT Live events are designed to bring what we do on the stages of the National Theatre to a far greater number of people than we would ever be able to reach otherwise. Through high-definition broadcasts, we have the technology at our disposal to present our productions beyond the four walls of the National, to reach passionate theatre-goers all over the world, and to do it really well.”  

Do Equity members disagree with that?

To me, the pros of selling recorded shows appear far greater than the cons. First and most obviously, the better-known theaters could make a lot more money and the lesser-known theaters could make at least a little more money and also raise their profiles. Second, all theaters could reach global markets made up of people who will never be able to get to most of the in-theater performances in faraway places, but might yearn to see the work of companies they’ve heard about – theaters’ followings and paying audiences would grow and their likelihood of survival would increase. Third, safeguards could be put in place to protect theaters from losing audiences that could actually come to see the live shows on stage – how about releasing the DVDs only after the run of the production or tour has ended?  Four, to paraphrase The King and I, might Equity not be protecting actors out of all they own by refusing to adapt contracts so union members could get residuals from recorded work? I mean, the film industry does it – why can’t theater do it, too, and let its artists make better livings? 

And five, a lot more great productions would be preserved instead of lost, providing unique artistic, entertainment and educational experiences to countless numbers of people who otherwise would never get to benefit from them.  

It might be a bit painful for the theater industry to go through the thinking, negotiation and adjustment periods necessary to get a policy and new contracts in place, but unions are adapting to changing member needs and industry circumstances all the time. It took a while, but symphony orchestras and the musicians’ union finally got around to dealing with streaming performances on the Internet. 

Finally and most obviously, if the likes of the National Theatre and New York’s Metropolitan Opera can find ways to get their work to the world through mass media, there has to be a way for American theaters to do the same.

Or does Equity really want most of its members not to be working in their field full time and most theaters to be in constant danger of closing?

Not just being, but making the change we want to see

I can’t believe I found this. It’s about everything we need to do to change the world and about how creativity can help us do it. All told in a lovely British accent. With Legos.