Friday Arts Quotes

"A play's got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It's not music, it's not poetry, it's not dance, it's not narrative - it's dramatic...it's about conflict. It's about forces coming together."
- Romulus Linney

"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens."
- Madeleine L'Engle

"Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings."
- David Ives

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: Opening Night Edition

It's opening night for Holy Mo at Pacific Theatre, so in honor of that, this week's arts quotes are all about audience - the theatrical ingredient that gets added on opening.

"The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his life time; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been still-born. The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life....The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words. So there is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for "success," becuase that means that there has been a communication of the vision: that all the struggle has not been invalid." - Madeline L'Engle

"When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, "We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world." If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that." -David Mamet

"You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors & the audience - and each must give something." - Kenneth Haigh

Friday Arts Quotes: Boxing Day Edition

This week's Friday Arts Quotes come to you with a Christmas theme.

Charlie Brown on Directing:

"One of the first things to insure a good performance is strict attention to the director. I'll keep my directions simple. If I point to the right, it means focus attention stage right. If I make a slashing motion across my throat it means cut the scene short. If I make a revolving motion with my hand, it means pick up the tempo. If I spread my hands apart, it means slow down. It's the spirit of the actors that counts, the interest that they show in their director. Am I right? I said, am I right?"

- Charlie Brown, in A Charlie Brown Christmas

And let me give a tiny bit of context to this second quote: Liz is an aspiring actress who has just had her vision of what theatre is shattered by a crass director.

“I’ve always thought about the theatre like a Christmas tree, all shining and bright with beautiful ornaments. But now it seems like a Christmas tree with the tinsel all tarnished and the colored balls all fallen off and broken. That’s a corny way of saying it, but you know what I mean.”
“Sure, I know what you mean, Liz. And it’s both ways . . . Some of the ornaments fall and break and some stay clear and bright. Some of the tinsel gets tarnished and some stays shining and beautiful like the night before Christmas. Nothing’s ever all one way.You know that. It’s all mixed up and you’ve just got to find the part that’s right for you.”

- Liz & Ben in The Joys of Love by Madeline L'Engle

Friday Arts Quotes:

In this week's edition of Friday Arts Quotes: An old favorite & a new find.

I keep a leather bound book on my night table with the word "meditations" on the front of it. Into it I copy any quote that I find particularly inspiring that I will want to look back on and meditate on when I am down. The first quote this week has been in that book since the beginning, and the second just was added this week as I was watching TV.

"What do[es it mean to be] creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint or clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career....Our freedom to be creators is far less limited than some people would think." - Madeline L'Engle

"But our job as artists is to press on: continue creating, because that's who we are. Even if some critic does squash you like a bug. That's who we are." - Joan of Arcadia, "No Bad Guy"

Two ArtsQuotes to Start my Day

"If the work comes to the artist and says 'Here I am, serve me." then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve."
-Madeline L'Engle Walking on Water

"The few seconds before the curtain went up: she called it the Holy Time. But you don't have to be an actor to know what the Holy Time feels like. It's that breath you take just seconds before you become the person you are meant to become. For some people it feels like forever, and for some it's a moment over far too fast."

- Everwood, Season 1, Episode 13 (The Price of Fame)

Feed the Lake

Back in early September, my friend Angela wrote a blog post following her attendance at Bard's production of The Tempest. In it she talks about learning that there is no point in jealousy becuase when one artist succeeds we all end up winning. She said:

The problem is, I have a degree in directing and I've been doing it for a long time but I don't know that I could create a work this accomplished. So for part of the performance I was torn between admiration and dejection - "wow this is really good/wow that's really depressing" -something like that... But when a truly gifted artist creates a work for others to share, we get the present. My life was enriched by the production I saw tonight and as a result, my work will be enriched.

It was a sentiment she echoed after she and I attended Unity: 1918 a couple of weeks back.

But further in the post she talks about an image that appears in Madeline L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art (which is, by the way, one of my top arts reads, regardless of faith orientation. L'Engle was the talented writer behind A Wrinkle in Time.). She discusses an analogy drawn by Jean Rhys in which art is a lake and the artists of the world are various sizes of rivers, streams, & trickles.

She quotes Rhys as saying

"I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."

I love that image. The idea that all of art is this giant lake (actually I'd like to jump in and bathe in it - let it soak into my soul!), and that regardless of the size of our contribute we must continue to feed the lake.

Often, as a Stage Manager, I forget that I am also responsible for feeding the lake. I want to leave that role to the directors, actors & designers whose work is so clearly art. But creating a space in which it is possible for those artists to produce (and even better: to thrive!) is an art all its own, and I need to remember that when I get down about my role in the process.

Feed. The. Lake.

(Edited by SMLois, Dec. 3, 11:15pm)

15 Questions with Lois

Date & place of birth:

May 2, 1986; Vernon, BC

Lives now in:

Vancouver, BC

Education:

BA from Trinity Western University with a double major in Theatre & Communications, and a certificate in Media Studies.

If you hadn’t become a stage manager, what might you have done professionally?

I've changed my mind about my career goals many times: the first plan was to do PR in the music industry, but I think that if I were not stage managing, I'd probably go back to school and get my masters in television studies and end up as a professor.

Favourite plays:

Metamorphoses (Mary Zimmerman), Esspresso (Lucia Frangione), Proof (David Auburn), Jake's Gift (Julia Mackey), The Mistakes Madeline Made (Elizabeth Meriwether)

Favourite TV shows (currently airing):

Pushing Daisies (ABC), Dexter (Showtime), How I Met Your Mother (CBS)

Favourite TV shows (no longer airing):

Veronica Mars (UPN/CW), Arrested Development (Fox), Wonderfalls (Fox), Six Feet Under (HBO), Slings & Arrows (Movie Channel/The Movie Network), Joan of Arcadia (CBS) & Dead Like Me (Showtime)

What was the last thing you saw on stage that had a big impact on you?

The last thing I saw on stage that had a big impact on me was UBC's production of Unity: 1918 a couple of week's ago. It is an award winning script (and with good reason!), but this production was so visibly stunning. The image of a spinning lantern dangling from the ceiling, a wounded soldier returning on a train (done with the actor standing on a chair on a revolve while a train track was flown in from the ceiling), a giant bonfire and revival meeting behind a cyc, a room full of dead bodies, a scene done entirely in the dark. Each image had the potential to fail hugely, but rather than fail, they inspired.

And the first?

The first play I ever saw was a local production of Annie when I was about six which sort of set up for me the fact that theatre was out there, but the first play that really had an impact on me was the Art's Club's 2001 presentation of Axis Theatre's Flying Blind. My high school was very arts focused and each semester the theatre teacher would take approximately 60 kids on a trip to either Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton to see mulitple productions and learn about the education opportunities in each city. The 2001 Vancouver trip was my first of three, and it was a very eye opening five days in regards to what theatre is capable of. We saw Elizabeth Rex at the Stanley, The Edible Woman at the Playhouse, some terrible musical review at the Gateway, & Flying Blind. What stuck out for me about Flying Blind was it's use of design to help shape the world. I've never been an actor - though I can recognize and appreciate good acting - but I've always been impressed by strong visual elements. I remember after the play going out for pizza with the rest of the people on the trip and discussing the show. I was one of only two students who enjoyed it (along with the two escorts). Everyone else "didn't get it" or thought that it was too abstract. I didn't care whether or not I "got" it - I just wanted to do that - create a world similar to our own, yet not our own that causes people to converse.

Favourite books:

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeline L'Engle, the PostSecret books by Frank Warren, & Life After God by Douglas Coupland

Favourite after-show haunts:

Anywhere near Pacific Theatre that still has it's kitchen open when the show gets out: lately that's been either Earls, Cactus Club, or Cafe Barney. We used to always go to Ouisi's but the service there has gotten atrocious and the kitchen has been closing much earlier (besides, who really wants to eat alligator all the time?)

What do you expect to be doing in five years?

I've told myself that if in five years I am bored or burnt out from Stage Managing I will go back to school and do my masters in television studies after all.

What are the personal things that you do in your life simply because they make you happy?

Spend a whole day on the couch watching old TV episodes on DVD even though I've seen them 10+ times, try to laugh as much as possible, take photographs whenever I'm having fun so that I can look at them later and smile.

What would you advice would you give the government to secure the future of Canadian theatre?

I would advise the government that first and foremost, "Ordinary Canadians" really do care about the arts, I would advise reversing the millions of dollars in cuts to arts funding, I would advise the leaders to go take in some of the local theatre - independent, ground-breaking work so that they get a glimpse of the magic being created in their own backyards.

Last but certainly not least, what are you working on, now?

Jesus, My Boy is running at Pacific Theatre until Dec. 27 and I've already begun prep for Holy Mo, which begins rehearsals mid-January.