How to make great theatre:

The director for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern ran across this book at a local second-hand bookstore. subtitled "A handbook for the Backstage worker; a guidebook for the Student of Drama" this book is a joke.


The sample of a "good" promptbook is ridiculous: notes scribbled everywhere & no sense of order to it.

For the actors among us, the book presents the proper way to sit in a chair, the variety of ways one can pose with certain furniture. We've also got the correct & wrong ways to embrace, foot positions & how the first step should be.


One of my favorites is this graph of how a laugh on stage works.


and if you're looking for advice on aging makeup they have that too.

Friday Arts Quotes: Theatre Textbook Edition

If you went through any sort of post secondary theatre training as I did, you probably have a pile of text books kicking around. Of various sizes, shapes, & colors they sit on shelves waiting for their turns to be taken off & consulted as I run into various problems.

For today's edition of Arts Quotes I have turned to that pile & have picked out a few quotes that spoke to me as a student. Some of them I don't find particularly enlightinging today, but when I took the class 5 or so years ago, I seemed to think it was pretty worthwhile.

"We are makers of belief. The director is the one who believes first....He has to believe that he could stand on the corner and sell it, that he could market it, that he could convince people of the beauty, that he could stop passersby and say, "Did you ever wonder about the possibility of this? Isn't this beautiful? Doesn't this strike you as peculiar and wonderful?"
- William Ball, A Sense of Direction

"Playwrights, like all artists, create their works becuase they have something they feel compelled to communicate. Remember that what you come up with should be something you feel passionately about, something you believe in and can get emotional over."
- Buzz McLaughlin, The Playwright's Process

"People tend to dance around the most potent possibilities becuase they fear the monsters that might be lurking there."
- Buzz McLaughlin, The Playwright's Process

"If a performance is truly a collaborative effort, then all the artists and workers in the theatre can be considered performers."
- Oren Parker, Craig Wolf & Dick Block in Scene Design & Stage Lighting

World Theatre Day Planning

Above: Simon Ogden, Rebecca Coleman, myself, Jessica Hutchinson & Nick Keenan on video conference to discuss World Theatre Day 2009

My mind is still racing after this afternoon's meeting to discuss World Theatre Day 2009.  Eight of us from around the world (Texas, Chicago, Vancouver, Australia & London) met online - some with audio & video, others typing - to discuss the endless possibilities for making World Theatre Day a huge success.  

The first chunk of the meeting was taken up with how great it was to all be talking to each other. Travis and I played tic-tac-toe while we waited for others to join the room. It was just neat to be talking "face-to-face" over the computer with theatre professionals from around the world. 

Of course, then we settled down to business to talk about what we wanted to see happen internationally on March 27th.  What each city could do individually & how we would tie the international theatre community together. There are certainly a lot of ideas out there. Kate suggested some sort of flash mob.  Andrew wants to try some sort of twitter-based playwrighting. 

I'm really excited about this, despite the fact that we don't yet know what it looks like. Why? Because it is linking theatre artists from all different disciplines (in our meeting alone we had a stage manager, actors, publicist, sound designer, AD, vocal coach, writers & other theatrical hats) around the world to talk about theatre together and to celebrate what we do.  It is giving us a good reason to build international communities & support each other's art.

Looking for some theatre experience?

(Above: Past & Present apprenti & their friends getting ready for Vintage Valentine)

Pacific Theatre, the company where I am the resident stage manager, takes on three or four apprentices each year. These are not equity apprenticeships, but are apprenticeships designed to produce well rounded theatrical people. The apprentices assist with Front of House and Box Office, they act in a show (if they want to), produce their own work, assist with tech calls, assistant stage manage, do scene studies with artistic director Ron Reed & numerous other theatre-related things. It is all about helping the emerging theatre artists get a footing from which to leap forward into the next step of their lives.



For more information, please head over to http://pacifictheatre.org/involvement/apprenticeships.htm

The application deadline is March 15.

Personally, I love our apprenticeship program. It's how I met my roommate (she was an apprentice last year). We've had apprentices whose focus has been directing, acting, tech work, writing, administration, etc and we work hard to make sure that they get the most out of the program.

This past Friday night, the apprentices put together a one night musical review called "Vintage Valentines". It ran after the mainstage show and patrons were invited to stay for free for the show. There were also people who came just to see it. And from what I hear it was a great time.

Friday Arts Quotes

Just one quote this week, but a good one.

"All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. But they start off without self-consciousness as they paint their purple flowers, their anatomically impossible people, their thunderous, sulphurous skies. They don't worry that they may not be as good as Di Chirico or Bracque; they know intuitively that it is folly to make comparisons, and they go ahead and say what they want to say. What looks like a hat to a grownup may, to the child artist, be an elephant inside a boa constrictor. So what happens? Why do we lose our wonderful, racketty creativity? What corrupts us?...A lot of my adult life has been spent in trying to overcome this corruption, in unlearning the dirty devices of this world, which would dull our imaginations, cut away our creativity." - Madeline L'Engle

Friday Arts Quotes: Critics Edition

In theatre we seem to have this love/hate relationship with the critics and there is a moment in the show I'm working on that pokes a bit of fun at that. But I'm not going to go into that here. I don't need to. Simon already wrote a great post about it back in spring over at The Next Stage" entitled Critics are your friends. Meet your new friends."

This week's quotes are about critics as they apply to all forms of art: writing, fine arts, music, theatre, opera, dance, and every melding of the above.

"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”—John Steinbeck

"Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works."—John Keats

"The history of criticism begins with the history of art. When the first artist drew his first horse in red chalk on the walls of his cave, the first critic was at his elbow.”—Robert Morss Lovett

"A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded."—Murray Kempton

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.” - Carl Jung

Friday Arts Quotes: Holy Mo Edition

"It isn't easy traveling around the world in a circus wagon with a couple of clowns. The only reason Follie, Bufoona and Guff are still together is because they love each other and need each other, they are family. It hasn't been easy touring all these years, dust in their nostrils as they pull their wagon across windy prairies, through hostile villages, over skin cracking sand dunes and up mad rutted mountain trails. As Follie sings for tomato slinging tavern sailors, she remembers that she could be making a lot more money dong cartoon voice overs. Bufoona pulls out a ratty picture of Cirque de Soliel on nights when audiencese cough, shuffle and move along. When rain starts to fall during the parting of the red sea and soot fingered boys steal backstage props, Guff remembers how much she got paid as a roadie for the Rolling Stones. So why do they do it? The story. They are more than just performers, they are prophets. Sometimes, when they sing around the camp fire, bells will come after quiet thunder and the presence of Yamma will fill the circle. Follie might see a vision, Bufoona might dream a dream, or Guff might burst into ecstatic dancing under the stars. Either way, they seek an undeniable ferociously beautiful Other and their stories are an invitation to the whole world to dance with the Divine."

- Lucia Frangione, Playwright's Notes, Holy Mo (Emphasis mine)

Friday Arts Quotes

"Every real creation of art is independent, more powerful than the artist himself and returns to the Divine through its manifestation. It is one with man only in this, that it bears testimony to the mediation of the Divine in him." - Ludwig von Beethoven

I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least. -Eugene Ionesco

Manifesto on Creating

(Photo by Tristan Brand)

Context: In my first year of university after a one of my first crew calls, I had this real sense of calling to the arts, but I didn't know what that looked like. That night, I wrote in my journal, and what I wrote (with a few edits over the years) has become something of a personal manifesto for me: something that shapes the way I look at the world. At faith. At art. At my relationship to all of those things. And I still don't know where I'm headed, at least not in any concrete sort of way. But I'm certainly enjoying the journey.

I was born to create something. I don't know yet what I am going to be creating, but I know that God has something great planned for me. As a child I wanted to be so many things when I grew up. I wanted to be a nurse, a teacher, a candy store owner, a dancer, a musician, an actress and so many more things. Today I don't know what I will grow up to be, but I know what I will do. I will create. I don't know how I could not create. I think that if I were to stop creating, a part of me would die. To create is to imitate God: a high form of flattery as the saying goes. How could I not create? Creating is my worship. It may not be through music, or prayer, or any other conventional means of worship, but I am worshiping from a part of me that is unique. I am not singing someone else's song. I'm dancing to the beat of my own drummer and I am creating a beautiful dance between me and God.

Would you care to dance?