Theaters’ creative collaborations are signs of real change

When I had my first job as a theater critic, in the 1980s at a daily newspaper in South Florida, I found myself continually surprised at how competitive and suspicious of each other the local theater companies were. 

In spite of being a small and necessarily interconnected community, they did not want to collaborate. I don’t remember them ever sharing resources, especially not mailing lists. The bigger ones did belong to a group called the Florida Professional Theatres Association, which held mass statewide auditions every year and sponsored workshops on administrative and artistic topics, but the members tended to snipe about each other’s shows behind their backs and operate as if each company was a sort of walled city-state with a completely unique audience.

The best (worst?) example I can think of is the summer about 25 years ago when three companies within my paper’s main circulation area all produced Jean Kerr”s “Lunch Hour” during the same summer.  Clearly, they thought no one coming to their own theater would be going to anyone else’s  – and made sure of it, too. You’d think at the very least they would have realized that a bored and exasperated critic is an unhappy and vocal critic.

So I’ve been elated in more recent years to see theaters and other arts groups everywhere slowly discovering the value of working together. Though it’s taken the hardship of shrinking financial resources and the danger of collapse to get them to join hands, a great many groups are not only finding ways to help each other make ends meet, but have also realized that collaborating artistically can create fresh ideas and more exciting projects than one group can by producing stuff in perpetual isolation.  

The Cleveland, Ohio, area has some pioneers of this sort, most notably Cleveland Public Theatre. An alternative company started more than 20 years ago, CPT has always lived the mission of creating theater for and with people on the fringes of society and of art: the daring, the eccentric, and the at-risk, from urban teens to convicted criminals. The company was built to reach out to others and has, with educational and therapeutic programs and special production series featuring emerging, local, theater and dance artists and companies. 

Even so, CPT’s co-production of “Nickel and Dimed” with Great Lakes Theater Festival a few years ago was a shock and a milestone – a sign that CPT’s influence was growing, yes, but a more stunning indication that a change in the theater Zeitgeist was transforming even large, glittering, professional theaters such as Great Lakes from artistically exclusive enclaves into involved, accessible, artistic partners. 

That’s why, for me at least, it was bell-ringing news this week that the august Guthrie Theater - probably the U.S.’s most artistically revered regional company – is showcasing innovative productions by young, emerging Twin Cities troupes that are its neighbors. Instead of regarding upstart companies as insects to be disdainfully flicked from their brocade skirts, maybe America’s greatest arts institutions have finally realized that collaborations and nurturing next generations of organizations will help and not hurt them.

Incredibly, theaters seem to get it now. I can only hope that major orchestras get a clue soon, too.

What the Guthrie plans is a series called Singled Out: A Festival of Emerging Artists that will be presented in the Dowling Studio Jan. 14-24. The companies featured include the Four Humors Theater, Sandbox Theatre, Lamb Lays with Lion and the New Theatre Group. Benjamin McGovern, the Guthrie’s associate director of studio programming, curated the line-up – and his reasons for creating the showcase and for choosing these particular companies represent what I hope is a changed philosophy for American theater.

“When the new Guthrie Theater building was built [in 2006], the Studio (which I program) was meant, in part, to be a place where other local companies would present their work,” McGovern wrote in an e-mail to me Tuesday. “There is a kind of synergy that comes from having such a diverse group of artists under the same roof – emerging talent, new and innovative aesthetics, new approaches to making theater. Our staff inevitably interacts with and is inspired by the artists that perform in the Studio, and that ultimately permeates the entire organization and enriches the work that goes on our other stages.

“There is also a considerable value to nurturing younger theater groups and offering them a wider exposure. The Guthrie relies heavily on the strength of the local artistic community and the enthusiasm of the theater-going public. The more we bolster and inspire both of these, the more effective and relevant the Guthrie’s work will be.”

And what made him select these specific young companies?

“I chose these four companies based on a number of different factors. Essentially I was looking for companies that had some history of quality work and were exploring a new theatrical vocabulary. I also wanted a mix of aesthetic approaches,” he added. “My goal was to present some representative work of younger artists that are working outside the mainstream, but whose work would relate in some way to the work that we produce here at the Guthrie.”

A few days later, after I asked whether or not the young companies’ types of work had anything in common, McGovern sent this further comment: “I wouldn’t say that the styles and vocabularies of these companies amount to a trend. In fact, I was specifically looking for companies that were focused on developing different aesthetics and approaches. One company is working in an unusual narrative style and a highly visual form of storytelling, while another is working in a fairly traditional theatrical convention, but thematically pushing the envelope. My interest was not in pushing forward any particular trend or style, but in providing a platform for energetic and promising young companies to get their voices heard.”

Twenty years ago, most American theaters the size and reputation of the Guthrie probably wouldn’t have admitted that worthwhile local start-up companies even existed, much less have invited them to share their space and audience.  It looks like, though arts groups in this country may be in growing economic danger, they’re also growing up.

New blog coming Oct. 1

I’m happy to tell you that, starting this Thursday, Oct. 1, Geniocity.com will introduce a new blog about the cutting edge of electronic and traditional mass media including gaming, film, photography and more.

Called Media Man,  it’s written by Charlie Eby, an avid wielder of cameras and digital-game controls who is Geniocity.com’s 2009 intern. His  easy-going personality and fresh, funny take on the universe of screens and images are going to be great  additions to our blog roster and must-read fun for you.

I hope you’ll keep an eye out for Media Man starting Thursday and welcome Charlie into your view of the creative frontier.

Arts education gets – and begets – attention

The struggle to discover a causal relationship between arts-related learning and improvements in general cognition continues.

This may seem an abstruse issue, but it has all sorts of real-world ramifications: For decades, and especially for the most recent one, evidence for and against the arts’ effect on children’s brains, behavior, test scores, career potential and general happiness and fulfillment has swayed school systems, national agencies, foundations, state and local governments and the entire national economic Zeitgeist.

Creativity is the buzzword of the era in economic-development circles, thanks largely to Richard Florida and his “creative class” theory about what’s making some cities grow and others shrink. And what moves the economy these days is what moves the politicians, from your local councilman on up to the White House administration. So it may matter a lot that Michael I. Posner, a Dana Foundation grantee and a psychology professor at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College, finds that arts training – not just exposure to arts, but actual practice of them – increases children’s ability to pay attention to  other subjects and tasks.

Hopefully, that will include picking up their dirty socks.

For more recent findings on arts’ influence on the brain and education, check out the Dana Foundation’s related news roundup.

Vacant properties + artists = creative land use in Cleveland

I was working at the From Rust Belt to Artist Belt II summit in Cleveland, Ohio, on Friday when some exciting action broke through the flow of talk. 

Amid the two-day discussion among artists, community developers, arts agencies and funders from around the country about how to transform aging industrial cities to vibrant arts communities, a three-partner collaboration was announced: The Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (or Land Bank) will work with the nonprofit Community Partnership for Arts and Culture  (CPAC) and Village Capital Corporation, a community-development loan organization,  to provide artists with low-cost properties for live-work spaces. 

The collaboration’s overall goal appears to be having the Land Bank, a new county venture headed by County Treasurer Jim Rokakis,  make a number of the foreclosed and/or abandoned properties it receives available to artists, who would be chosen through a process that CPAC would help develop. Village Capital would provide financing to the artists for house purchases. Tom Schorgl, who heads CPAC, said during the announcement that he estimates the purchase program will take six to nine months to create and be a national model. 

There aren’t many details yet and since I was at the summit as an independent contractor for CPAC (which organized the event) and was helping chronicle panel discussions for its archives, it wasn’t my place to ask journalistic questions. But you can find out more about the organizations involved by clicking on the links above. Also, learn about the successful and precedent-setting property-purchase program in Paducah, Ky., that will no doubt be one of the models for the Cuyahogy County program.

The creative dimension

Albert Einstein understood time and space.

No duh, you say. But I’m not talking about theoretical physics, at which Einstein was probably our most celebrated genius. I’m talking about another kind of genius he had: the twin gifts of understanding that time and space are valuable and of making sure he had plenty.

I’ve been reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Einstein, who was (I think few would argue) one of the most creative humans the planet has ever produced. What impresses me the most so far is that Einstein instinctively knew how to get what he needed and what he needed was opportunities to think.

How many do you have? Likely not enough.

Me, either. Our culture isn’t conducive to it, which means our culture isn’t conducive to creativity. We’re all frantically sending and answering e-mails and texts, updating our statuses (stati?), cruising the Web, downloading stuff, watching stuff, reading stuff, working, driving, dealing with each other. We really don’t have time to absorb information, slowly process it, experiment with it and invent big ideas from it.  

Instead, most of us produce what feels like the mental equivalent of carbonation – a lot of little fizzy notions bubbling out of the turmoil in our heads, as if our skulls were constantly shaken cans of Coke. Those ideas seldom last long. 

Einstein’s, on the other hand, seem likely to last eons. They were the result of years of concentrated thought, thought that was remarkably impervious to distractions from daily work, children, spouses and the state of the world, but that also demanded a great deal of time alone. He eventually arranged his life so that thinking was what he was paid to do, and the privacy to do it in was insured by indulgent universities and his motherly second wife, who had a separate bedroom and took care of all the day-to-day household business so his thoughts didn’t have to include laundry.

Most of us will never have gigs like that and are maybe even glad of it. The truth is, Isaacson explains, that Einstein was a person who never allowed his emotions to get  too deeply embroiled in relationships or events; he cared, yes, but there was a kind of inner fence around his feelings, protecting him from investing too much psychic energy in things that didn’t ultimately matter to him as much as science. Probably most of us wouldn’t want to be like that, at least with our families and friends.

I wouldn’t. But I still envy him the long, uncluttered hours he had in which to create and I worry that my e-mail will become such a time pit that I’ll end up never getting to eat, shower or sleep, much less think.  Maybe the hardest part of being creative, in the end, isn’t pushing our intellects to the limit, but finding the willpower to shut out the din of a world too in love with its own noise.

Creativity that reaches for the moon also saves the Earth

The year 1969 was an important one for the chronically dissatisfied. That was the year in which the Apollo 11 mission set humans down for the first time in the silvery dust of Earth’s satellite, allowing the grumblers among us to grouse for 40 years, if not forevermore, that “they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t cure the common cold.”

Or make a ballpoint pen that doesn’t glob. Or dental floss that doesn’t shred. Etc.

And yeah, ballpoint pens still glob, usually on the most important checks and letters I have to write. But it’s also true that the scientific research generated by the space program has resulted in a ridiculously varied collection of new or greatly improved products, from microlasers and breast-biopsy technology to better athletic shoes and enriched baby food.

There are so many of these products and processes and so many people who think funding the space program is the moral equivalent of buying a mink coat with the money from the Salvation Army kettle that NASA has felt obliged to justify its own existence by putting up a page on its website listing all the things it’s developed that benefit everyday people: (http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html)

It’s too bad they’ve had to do this out of defensiveness instead of pride. Back in the ‘60s, everyone was so excited about space exploration that they were even proud of Tang, for god’s sake, a kind of astronaut orange juice that had to be the worst-tasting instant drink since Linus in Peanuts dipped a brown crayon in hot water and called it cocoa.

I remember, as a kid, being thrilled when my father, a doctor employed by a pharmaceutical-research firm, brought home a tiny bottle of the banana-flavored pellets his company had developed to nourish the monkeys sent up in test space-flights. They tasted like something that had been lying on the bottom of the produce bin for three weeks – and could break your teeth. But they were space food!

Forty-five years ago, there was nothing cooler.

This year, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing has revived the debate about the worth of our space research, a debate that has alternately shrunk and expanded America’s space program over the last three decades. A lot of folks still think paying for rocket ships and all-terrain Mars rovers means taking bread and milk from the mouths of starving children. 

And maybe NASA is so underfunded now that it can’t do decent public relations about its own successes. But here’s the message the American public needs to get: Investing our tax money in creative and innovative research is like teaching ourselves to fish. When we do that, we’re funding the gaining of knowledge and the development of skills that will let us make life better for billions of people – not just for a day or two, like handing out food, but permanently.

It’s the same as making a long-term investment, rather than living paycheck to paycheck – we’ll never get out from under unless we do.  

There will always be suffering and want and inefficiency unless we keep underwriting programs that find better means of curing these ills. So we have to keep donating peanut butter and penicillin and water purifiers and working on making even better food and medicines and technologies.

Maybe we’ll end up with a globless pen, too.

A good knight’s work

Barack Obama seems to be setting a good example of not letting fear stymie creativity.

In his speech to Congress last night, the U.S.president countered the absurd rumors circulating about health-care reforms (death panels, incipient communism) by bluntly calling them what they are: lies. He also made it pretty clear that he’s not going to cave on the innovative elements he wants to see in a revised health-insurance program, such as a “marketplace” of insurance options, including government-sponsored plans, for individuals and employers of varying means to choose from. He also pointed out – not insultingly, but unmistakably – that supporters of the Bush administration are in no position to question the cost of providing health care to the American people when they’re the ones who overwhelmingly supported spending billions on the Iraq war and cutting taxes for the extremely rich.

It was a speech that rode in, took an unshakable moral and policy stance and delivered knockout offensive blows while simultaneously conveying fresh ideas and the hope and expectation that  left and right will unite in an effort to think up even more.  

Whether or not you like the ideas or Obama himself, you’d have a hard time claiming that it wasn’t a bold speech. And boldness – guts, spine, heart and brains – is what we need more of in our thinking and our actions. It takes courage to invent new ways of solving our problems, but it take even more to make sure the best ones are put to use, in spite of other people’s reluctance, resentment, knee-jerk opposition and attempts at sabotage .

P.S. And how nice to see a president act boldly in the interest of actually helping people. Maybe before Obama’s term is up, all of us will be able to afford annual check-ups.

Fear freezes minds, but opens lungs

In any discussion, you can be pretty sure that when the volume goes up, the  level of thinking plummets. So it seems obvious from all the shouting coming out of the health-care-reform town-hall meetings that quite a few Americans have surrendered their brains to their all-conquering emotions and, like babies, are throwing tantrums in hopes of panicking the remaining adults into doing what they want them to do. 

Which is nothing. Nothing new, anyway.

And why? I refer you to the three smartest and most honest words I’ve heard anyone say so far about why some people oppose revising our messed-up health system or revising anything at all:

“Fear of change.” 

Toby Cosgrove said that.  He’s a physician and head of the Cleveland Clinic, but I don’t think it takes a medical degree for the rest of us to understand the psychology he cites. People frequently resist the unknown. The unfamiliar scares us. We want to be in control of our situations at all times so we don’t get 1) eaten; 2) humiliated; or 3) trapped into making a speech. We don’t wanna try the slimy green glop, even though Mom says it’s only pea soup and we actually like peas.

 Trouble is, fear of the new means you’re too afraid to be creative. And so you’re stuck with whatever you’ve already got, no matter how awful it is. But some people actually choose being stuck. They say they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t, totally ignoring the likelihood that their bad situation won’t stay the same, but get even worse if neglected. 

Our ultimate problem is, therefore, not getting health care and health insurance to be affordable and available to anyone who needs them, although that’s a biggie. Our real problem is how to get people to stop being afraid of the changes required by creative thinking and action. 

And how the heck do you do that?

I think the long-term answer is a better and more creative educational system, one that encourages imaginative thinking and develops the skills of invention – in math, arts, sciences, engineering, physical education, everything - in every student. One that helps people overcome their fear of the unknown and learn to relish the adventure. If we turn out people who are more creative, confident, calm and courageous, we’ll be able to fix a lot more of what’s wrong  with the world. And without all the shouting. 

But we’re no likelier to sensibly and effectively overhaul our educational system than our health-care industry, at least right now.  Maybe what we have to start with is only this: a determination to keep our public discourse civil. If we insist on tougher and better-enforced rules about disruptions and raised voices in public meetings; an organized array of impartial fact-checkers and debunkers, such as nonpartisan panels of experts sponsored by nonprofit organizations, to immediately counter outrageous propaganda with facts; and a pledge from all elected officials to set an example by listening, thinking and by speaking quietly when – and only if – they have something constructive to say,  the national tone will moderate, tempers will subside and usable ideas will develop.

Usually, it takes a world war to get Americans working together for the public good.  If we try, we might be able to convince ourselves that a prosperous peace is worth the same effort.

Copyrighting creativity and just … copying

Interesting bout last night at the Cleveland Institute of Art. The final score?

Cheaters – 2, poor creative people – zip

I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet I find myself dumbstruck all over again that those humans who invent and express are essentially helpless to prevent all the others from making off with the fruit of that creative work and draining the profitability from it . .. unless the inventive, expressive people are already rich. And how many of you are? Uh huh. That’s what I thought.  

The occasion was a forum on intellectual property and the arts presented by the COSE Arts Network  and its leader cum Geniocity.com arts blogger, Matt Charboneau. It featured guest speakers Mark Hosler of the band Negativland;  Cleveland-area intellectual-property attorney Sharon Toerek; and Peter Friedman, professor of law at Case Western Reserve and Detroit universities and also Geniocity.com’s law blogger. Hosler spoke about the process and effect of creating Negativland’s audio and video collages from bits of other people’s work. The two legal experts explored the questions of what can be protected by copyright and what can’t, why, and what to do about either scenario.

What bothered me was not the fact that artists and inventors copiously borrow ideas and styles from each other and always have. Building on earlier ideas and discoveries allows inventors to progress farther faster. Influences and allusions add profound cultural value to works of art and serve as a kind of shorthand, efficiently and effectively conveying meaning to an audience or market with shared experiences.

No issue about that here. Ditto the notion of using identifiable snippets of existing works, as Hosler does, to create quite  new and different ones, or satirizing or parodying whole works as Weird Al Yankovic and the National Lampoon have. That’s all good.

What bugs me is bootleggers. These people – I use the term loosely – take artists’ and inventors’ painstakingly imagined and created works, make cheap, usually illegal, direct copies and circulate or sell them, reducing demand for the  originals and income for those whose mental and physical efforts generated them. And they have since art began, making unauthorized folios of Shakespeare’s plays, faking Rembrandts and Picassos and clandestinely taping concerts.  

I know that many artists these days think this is actually just fine – they believe that music or whatever should be free to all, especially now that the Internet exists and none of us can stop the world from getting access to practically everything. They regard all this sharing as free publicity, which it certainly is. But at what point do the sheer love of creating and the thrill of getting known cease to be sufficient benefits to artists who make something for which there is evidently some demand? When do artists and inventors – so often expected to donate their work and be satisfied with a rich soul – deserve to insist that they be paid for their creativity and labor?

It’s hard enough to to turn art or invention into a living without pirates duplicating your unique creation so thoroughly that it becomes as common and monetarily worthless as dirt. As Toerek explained last night, artists can protect their work by copyrighting it, but two facts make this less reassuring. One: officially registering a copyright – the legal process that allows a creator to collect punitive damages from pirates – costs $45 a pop, Toerek said, which may not sound like much unless you’re broke or prolific, like many artists. And two, the fact is that only rich artists can really afford to sue pirates or - coincidentally - to give their work away on the Internet. 

Most of the rest, like any car-part manufacturer or baker – would like to support themselves decently by selling what they make to consumers, whether those consumers are audiences, collectors, shoppers or mass-producers such as publishing houses. 

I’m not saying that the world owes creative people a special living. Like anyone else, they should have to use their skills to compete for gigs, commissions and pay. But also like anyone else, they should have the right to try to create a profitable market for their work. 

They don’t. Not anymore, because the Internet by its very nature discriminates against creators of  original work that can be downloaded and/or mass-duplicated. And unlike Disney or Gucci or U2, most artists can’t do anything about it.

Well – there’s one thing they might be able to try. Hosler explained a bit about Creative Commons, a recent and growing attempt by artists to take back some control of their work by licensing it to people online in return for being credited with authorship.  I don’t get the impression that it will help guarantee artists proper payment,  but it looks like an imaginative start in the right direction.

OK, one more time … creatively

At Geniocity.com, the whole month of August was a nightmare of waking up every day and hitting the reset button.

For weeks now, we’ve had to more or less start all over – and over and over – again as some really charming people out there in faraway places tried to bring down our site for good while we were in the middle of some planned technical changes. It became a terrible mess, but we’re coming out of it much stronger, thanks to help and moral support from our whole team, but primarily from one talented, patient, generous and heroic person who knows who he is. He saved Geniocity, pure and simple.

And even though I wish very much that we hadn’t needed to go through the agonies of post-war reconstruction because our digital London was blitzed, the fact is, we’re going to be in better shape because of it.

By an odd coincidence, I happened to be reading Kurt Andersen’s new book, Reset, just as Geniocity.com was being reduced, metaphorically, to ashes. It’s a small volume – an extended essay, really – with one big point to make, and here it is: The crises that occur in America when the political, cultural or economic pendulum has swung too far in one direction are painful and yet good, because they are opportunities for important and creative change.

This is probably true of any crisis, including Geniocity’s. Problems unsuspected or ignored will eventually lead to trouble – and then you have a choice either to do the arduous work that leads to real and lasting improvement, or to slap some bobby-pin-and-bubble-gum patch over what’s gone wrong and leave whoever comes along next to find that it’s horribly – maybe even fatally - festered.

But in regard to the United States, Andersen convincingly argues that we have always swooped from one excess to the other – from thrifty, can-do  team spirit to obscene and absurd self-indulgence; from rigid, repressive morality to free-wheeling intellectual and social experimentation; from courage to cowardice. And each time we’ve pushed the limits so hard that the American Zeitgeist turned into a poltergeist – the Gilded Age to World War I, the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression, the Depression to World War II, on and on -  we’ve been given a chance to rebuild and reform. Or at least compensate.

Sort of like The Corrections  on a national scale.

And we do it better in some eras than in others. But as Andersen traces our reactive ups and downs, he makes a good case for our coming out of our current economic and confidence crisis in better and wiser form. What I liked best about his undeluded but upbeat assessment of our situation was his expectation that America will, as it so often has, rediscover its own amateur spirit  – not amateur in the sense of unskilled, but in the sense of someone enthusiastic and idealistic who undertakes a demanding pursuit out of sheer love for it.

He writes, “Amateurs are passionate. They do the things they want to do in the way they want to do them. They don’t worry too much about breaking rules and aren’t paralyzed by a fear of imperfection or even failure. They embrace new challenges. And it’s that attitude, infusing our occupations as much as possible with the joy and excitement of avocation, that will get us through this wrenching time of creative destruction, confusion and change.” 

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what I think Americans need to think about and do a lot more.  That’s what this site is all about.

As a writer, Andersen has long been a bright light. I first started reading him when he was at Time decades ago, and he has lived exactly the kind of amused, enterprising and creative professional life that his craftsmanship and humor bespeak, co-founding Spy magazine, serving as editor-in-chief of New York magazine, co-creating the Studio 360 radio show and writing novels.

He’s a master of reset. Though I hope he never has to do it to a website.