tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56413981829264910032024-03-18T13:33:07.484-04:00Rick On TheaterMy unmediated impressions and thoughts on, especially, theater and other topics of interest to me.Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.comBlogger1174125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-36078539290321956132024-03-18T10:00:00.064-04:002024-03-18T13:32:35.878-04:00"Audiences Are Back, More or Less"<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The following omnibus
report on the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic and shutdown on
attendance at public events and venues such as plays, concerts, and museums
appeared in the “Arts” section of the </i>New York Times<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> on </i><i>13 March 2024.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a collection of mini-reports by </i>Times<i> writers who cover the various areas of arts,
culture, and entertainment.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Over the past few months,
I’ve published several articles on </i>Rick
On Theater<i> related to the state and background of the regional theater in
the United States: “A Crisis In America’s Theaters” on 13 September 2023, “The
Regional Theater: Change or Die” on 3 October 2023, and “Regional Theater:
History” on 8 October 2023.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In November
and December, I ran an 11-part series on “A History of the National Endowment
for the Arts” because the NEA had a huge influence on the development and
growth of the regional theater in the U.S.</i></span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Because of the seriousness
of this subject, I said when I started this coverage that I’d post on it from
various perspectives from time to time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Below is my fifth report in that occasional series.]</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With shutdowns
over, pop concerts crowds are up, but Broadway is still a bit down.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It was four years
ago — on March 12, 2020 — that the coronavirus brought the curtain down on
Broadway for what was initially supposed to be a monthlong shutdown, but which
wound up lasting a year and a half.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The pandemic brought
live events and big gatherings to a halt, silencing orchestras, shutting
museums and movie theaters and leaving sports teams playing to empty stadiums
dotted with cardboard cutouts.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Now, four years
later, audiences are coming back, but the recovery has been uneven. Here is a
snapshot of where things stand from reporters of The <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">New York Times</span>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Broadway audiences are still down 17 percent
from prepandemic levels.</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On Broadway, overall
attendance is still down about 17 percent: 9.3 million seats have been filled
in the current season as of March 3, down from 11.1 million at the same point
in 2020. Box office grosses are down, too: Broadway shows have grossed $1.2 billion
so far this season, 14 percent below the level in early March of 2020.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">Broadway has always
had more flops than successes, and the post-pandemic period has been
challenging for producers and investors, especially those involved in new
musicals. Three pop productions that have opened since the pandemic — “Six,”
about the wives of King Henry VIII, “MJ,” about Michael Jackson and “&
Juliet,” which imagines an alternate history for Shakespeare’s tragic heroine —
are ongoing hits, but far more musicals have flamed out. The industry is
looking with some trepidation toward next month, when a large crop of new shows
is </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/theater/broadway-musicals-plays-spring-season.html?smid=url-share"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">set
to open</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Many nonprofit
theaters around the country are also struggling [see “Theater in America Is
Facing a Crisis as Many Stages Go Dark” by Michael Paulson (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, 24 July 2023</span>), posted on <i>ROT </i>in “A Crisis In America’s
Theaters”] — attracting fewer subscribers and producing fewer shows — and some
have closed. One bright spot has been the touring Broadway market, which has
been booming.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">michael
paulson</span></span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></i></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Sales for the biggest pop concerts increased
by 65 percent.</span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After a fitful
recovery, the pop touring industry has now reached record highs, enabled by
superstar tours, pent-up fan demand and ever-higher ticket prices.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The top 100 tours
around the world generated $9.2 billion in ticket sales last year — a record by
far, according to the trade publication Pollstar, which tracks touring data.
That was up an astonishing 65 percent from 2019. The average ticket price last year
was $131, up 23 percent from 2022, which accounts for some of the jump. Concert
attendance climbed about 18 percent last year, to 70 million.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Taylor Swift’s Eras
Tour was the biggest of many success stories, estimated at just over $1 billion
in ticket sales, a new high (with dozens of dates still to come in 2024).
According to numbers crunched by Pollstar, Swifties paid an average of $239 per
ticket to see her show.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Not every artist is
celebrating the post-pandemic touring boom, though. Those who operate below the
level of arenas and amphitheaters — and lack the promotional apparatus of a
Swift or a Beyoncé — have been sounding an alarm about skyrocketing costs, and
continuing supply-chain issues, that have eroded profit margins and made
touring riskier and more expensive for non-superstars.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-variant: small-caps; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">ben
sisario</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There are 4,800 fewer movie screens.</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Thanks to “Barbie,”
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the
2023 domestic box office, which includes the United States and Canada, took in
close to $9 billion. That’s a marked increase from 2022 but still not at prepandemic
levels, when theaters reliably sold $11 billion in tickets annually.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">Fewer films were
released in 2023: There were 125 wide releases, down from 138 in 2019, said
David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter [</span><i style="color: #783f04;">FranchiseRe </i><span style="color: #783f04;">(</span><a href="https://franchisere.substack.com/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">https://franchisere.substack.com/</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">)]
on box office numbers. Some films were delayed by the writers’ and actors’
strikes, which shut down Hollywood for close to six months [2 May-27 September 2023
and 14 July-9 November 2023, respectively.]</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The number of
screens across the country has also declined. Some independent theater chains
like Pacific Theaters and ArcLight Cinemas went out of business. And the top
three U.S. chains, AMC, Regal and Cinemark, shut about 1,000 screens
collectively, according to David Hancock, the chief analyst for cinema at
Omdia, a London-based research company. He said that at the end of 2023, there
were 36,369 screens in the country, down 12 percent from the 41,172 screens
before the shutdown.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-variant: small-caps; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">nicole
sperling</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Orchestra ticket sales are up 2 percent, yet
some opera companies struggle.</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Many orchestras are
beginning to return to, or even exceed, prepandemic levels. The number of
tickets that orchestras sold increased by 2 percent in 2023 compared with 2019,
according to a study of 42 medium- and large-size orchestras by TRG Arts, an
analytics firm, in partnership with the League of American Orchestras. Some
continue to struggle, though, and some are giving fewer performances than they
used to.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Philadelphia
Orchestra is averaging 78 percent attendance so far this season, compared with
63 percent before the pandemic. The New York Philharmonic, which completed a
$550 million renovation of its hall in 2022 that made it more audience-friendly
and reduced its seating capacity, is averaging 85 percent attendance this
season compared with 74 percent before the pandemic. The San Francisco Symphony
has had 74 percent attendance so far this season, slightly ahead of where it
was before the shutdown, but it has fewer performances. The Los Angeles
Philharmonic is now averaging 89 percent attendance, back where it was before
the pandemic, even as the number of subscribers has fallen to 6,409 from 8,791.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But the Detroit
Symphony Orchestra said that its attendance had fallen to 59 percent through
March this season, down from 74 percent in the same period during the 2019-20
season, a drop it attributed to a loss of subscribers who have yet to return.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Many opera companies
have had a hard time, as the cost of staging live opera — which requires sets,
costumes, singers, chorus members and large orchestras — has risen. Ticket
revenues at opera houses across the nation were down by about 22 percent last season
compared with 2018-19, according to a recent study by Opera America, a
nonprofit group, which said that so far this season, revenues are up.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the Metropolitan
Opera in New York, paid attendance is about 73 percent so far this season,
compared with 71 percent at the same point in 2019-20, when fears of the
pandemic were already beginning to keep operagoers away. And the Met now gives
fewer performances overall. The pandemic has seriously strained the Met’s
finances: The company has withdrawn about $70 million from its endowment over
the past two seasons.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Many leading dance
companies have largely bounced back from the disruption brought by Covid.
Attendance at New York City Ballet so far this season is at 79 percent,
compared with 73 percent before the pandemic, and San Francisco Ballet is at 78
percent attendance, compared with 66 percent in the 2019-20 season.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-variant: small-caps; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">javier
c. hernández</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Museum attendance is mixed.</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">While some major
museums have been able to regain lost ground, others are still seeing fewer
visitors, which continues to strain their already-stretched finances.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in New York reported nearly 861,000 visitors last year, a 26
percent decline from about 1.2 million visitors before the pandemic, when its
Hilma af Klint exhibition [12 October 2018-23 April 2019] set new attendance
records. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has seen a 15 percent decline over the
same period, to 5.8 million visitors from 6.8 million, which could be partially
attributed to the loss of its Met exhibition space at the Breuer building on
Madison Avenue. And the Art Institute of Chicago said that attendance had also
decreased by about 15 percent since the shutdown with about 1.3 million
visitors in 2023, saying that while it now has more paid local visitors than it
did before the pandemic, there are still fewer international visitors.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The Met Breuer closed in July
2020 for budgetary reasons and the building was turned over to the Frick
Collection while its Upper East Side home underwent expansion. The Frick
vacated the Madison Avenue building on 3 March 2024 and it will be a facility
of Sotheby’s auction house in September.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Some regional
organizations — relying more on local populations than international tourists —
have seen stronger comebacks. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston said that it had
experienced a 20 percent increase in visitors over the last fiscal year when
compared to prepandemic levels. “We have also witnessed a change in the
demographics of our audience, with a larger percentage of younger visitors,
which bodes well for the future,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director and
chairman.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And the Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, which completed a renovation project last year, said
that it attracted a record 277,882 visitors last year, up from 240,706 in 2019.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><span style="font-variant: small-caps; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Zachary
Small </span></i><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">and<span style="font-variant: small-caps;"> Robin Pogrebin</span></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sports fans are back.</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sports fans are
back. All four major sports leagues — the National Football League, the
National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey
League — had bigger attendance in their most recent regular seasons than they
did in 2019, according to a calculation of the leagues’ data by The Times.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The N.F.L. saw the
sharpest increase: 18.9 million people in 2023, up 10.9 percent from the 17
million people in 2019. That is in part because the league added a game to the
regular-season schedule in 2021 as part of a new media-rights package. That
bumped the total number of games played in a season from 256 to 272.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Attendance for Major
League Baseball increased 3.2 percent last season compared with its last full
season before the pandemic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The National
Basketball Association had a 1.2 percent increase and the National Hockey
League had a 1.1 percent increase.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-variant: small-caps; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Emmanuel
Morgan</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">[</span></i><i>This post is also the most recent entry in another </i>ad hoc<i> series: the effect of the COVID pandemic on
the theater and the theater’s response to the crisis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other posts on that topic are:</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">• </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“Theaters Go Dark Across the Nation,” 29 March and 1
April 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“Suzan-Lori Parks on the Covid Pandemic,” 17 May 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“Theater Online – A Preliminary Report” by Kirk
Woodward and Rick, 19 May 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“‘Connecting through art when a pandemic keeps us apart’”
by Jeffrey Brown, 26 June 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“Yo Yo Ma on the Artist’s Role in the Time of Covid-19,”
28 August 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“‘Medical professionals turn to music as a tonic’” by
Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport, 22 September 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“‘At this Virginia theater, the show – and the masks –
must go on’” by John Yang, </i>et al.<i>,
18 October 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“‘Despite the Pandemic, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like
“Christmas Carol’” by Jerald Raymond Pierce, 27 December 2020<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“‘Waiting out a pandemic – and for our “King Lear”’” by
Peter Marks, 11 January 2021<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“The Show Goes On During the Pandemic,” 26 January 2021<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“‘Great Performances’: The Arts Interrupted” produced and
directed by Akisa Omulepu, 3 and 6 June 2021<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“‘As Attendance Falls, Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s
Discontent’” by Michael Paulson, 23 January 2022<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 27pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">•</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>“At the Theater: To Wear A Mask, Or Not To Wear A Mask,”
27 June 2022<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[In addition, there are
many other posts in which Covid, the coronavirus, the pandemic, and/or the shutdown
gets a mention.]</span></i></p><br /><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-7413824531573472872024-03-13T10:00:00.101-04:002024-03-13T14:06:09.691-04:00Music Has Charms<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[On 3 March 2024, I posted “The
Arts & Health” on </i>Rick On Theater<i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It comprised two reposted transcripts from </i>PBS
NewsHour<i>, both dealing with the convergence of the performing arts and
matters of health.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first report of
the pair was “Opera legend Renée Fleming teams up with Dr. Francis Collins to
study how music can improve health,” which aired on the </i>NewsHour<i> on 22 February
2024.</i></span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The topic of that report
was the work of Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health,
and opera singer Renée Fleming on the effect of music on people’s mental
health.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My original intention was to
combine that transcript with some other material on the same topic, but I came
across an entirely different report on another issue of health and the
performing arts, so I set aside my plan and paired those two pieces.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I anticipated returning to
the subject of music and mental health at a later time and pick up the articles
I kept in reserve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then I heard a report
on WCBS news about another application of music therapy on people’s mental wellbeing,
namely its effect on patients with dementia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I decided to post that report with the remaining pieces on the NIH
program.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here is the result.]</span></i></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">“<u>BROOKLYN MUSIC
THERAPIST HELPS DEMENTIA PATIENTS<br /> <o:p></o:p></u></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"><u>BRIDGE THE PAST TO
THE PRESENT</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">by Steve Overmyer<br /></span></span><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-size: medium; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;"> </span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04; font-style: italic;">[This report was originally
aired on 8 March 2024 on CBS 2 New York (WCBS, Channel 2 in New York City) on </i><span style="color: #783f04;">CBS 2 News at 5PM</span><i style="font-style: italic;"><span style="color: #783f04;">; it was updated online on 9 March
(</span><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/dementia-music-therapy/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Brooklyn
music therapist helps dementia patients bridge the past to the present - CBS
New York (cbsnews.com)</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">).]</span></i></span></span></div></span></o:p></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">NEW YORK – More than
6 million Americans are living with dementia, and while there is no cure,
patients can be helped by music.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In this Snapshot New
York, Steve Overmyer learns how melodies help bridge the past to the present.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In a place where the
days unfold with a predictable rhythm, a symphony of kindness is being
composed.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Rafe Stepto is a
credentialed music therapist in the music therapy department at the Brooklyn
Conservatory of Music.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the hallways of
the memory care unit of the Watermark Senior Living Home [Brooklyn Heights],
filled with a lifetime of stories, Stepto has brought a revolution – not with
grand gestures, but with the gentle strum of a guitar.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“We happen to have a
kind of maximum recall for songs. For example, from when we were 13 to 21 or
so, sometimes people call it the reminiscence bump. And so we leverage that
quirk to get people’s best-remembered songs out so that they can be in the
lucidity of those intact memories even in the midst of advanced dementia,”
Stepto said.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dementia attacks a
particular part of our memory dealing with people, places and things. It doesn’t
attack procedural memory, the act of doing things, which is why you can see
those in memory care join in harmony and come alive.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Music and memory –
it’s a powerful, powerful engine,” Stepto said.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Music is more than
entertainment. It can be a beacon that guides them back to a moment of clarity,
the joy of youth or the warmth of love. In these moments, the true power of
music therapy reveals itself. It’s the key to unlocking buried memories.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Their memory of
listening to a song, dancing to a song, courting to songs, socializing to a
song – all of that is in the procedural memory, which remains intact longer
into advanced dementia,” Stepto said.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The truth is we’ve
all been touched by the transformative power of music. We do it almost every
day.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After the class,
Stepto has a private moment with a resident who struggles to find his voice,
but music unlocks that door. Time stands still as they hold each other’s gaze,
reaching out across the divide of forgetfulness and forging a bridge of
validation.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“The moment between
two people . . . . There’s nothing more important,” Stepto said.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Together, they’re
rewriting the narrative of dementia – not as a journey into silence but a
celebration, where every day brings the promise of a new song, a new memory, a
new connection.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We all use music to
help alter our mood, but music therapists are using this clinically and
intentionally, they say with reliable results.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Steve Overmyer joined CBS
2 in February of 2011 as a sports anchor and reporter. He hosts Sports </i>Update<i> every weekend on CBS 2 and WLNY 10/55 (Long
Island, New York; owned by CBS).]</i></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;"> </span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>IS MUSIC REALLY THE MEDICINE OF THE SOUL?<br /><o:p></o:p></u></span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">AN INTERVIEW WITH RENÉE FLEMING AND FRANCIS
COLLINS</span></u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">”<br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Joanna Cross, NIMH</span></span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[This article is from </i>The NIH Catalyst <i>27.4 (July-August 2019), updated on
4 April 2022.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>The NIH Catalyst<i>
showcases the scientific research conducted at the National Institutes of
Health and contains feature stories, essays, profiles, and other news on NIH
research, Scientific Interest Groups (SIG’s), new scientific methods, NIH
history, the Clinical Center, and more.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">What happens when
you get a world-renowned scientist and a famous opera singer in the same room?
A spontaneous rendition of “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and the
establishment of an important collaboration. NIH Director <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Francis Collins [b. 1950; director of
the NIH, 2009-21] and Renée Fleming [b. 1959], who met a few years ago at a
dinner party, realized that they both were curious about how music affects our
minds. And so the “Sound Health: Music and the Mind” initiative, an
NIH–Kennedy Center partnership in association with the National Endowment for
the Arts, was born.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Fleming visited NIH
on May 13, 2019, as the featured guest at the annual J. Edward Rall
Cultural Lecture, named for the former deputy director for intramural
research. She and Collins discussed the creative process, the intersection of
music and science, and the Sound Health initiative, which aims to expand our
understanding of the connections between music and wellness.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Music has been part
of our lives for millennia and may well predate speech. The earliest known
surviving instrument is a bone flute from about 40,000 years ago, and our vocal
mechanisms have hardly changed throughout the years. “Can you imagine a Neanderthal
opera?” Fleming joked. Because music has been part of our society for so long,
it follows that it must have an identifiable impact. Indeed, it has been shown
that exposing children to music can enhance reading proficiency and tends to
lead to higher rates of career success.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Plato remarked that
“Music is the medicine of the soul.” But why is it so beneficial? We can all
understand how a piece of music can influence our emotions, but one study
showed that rhythm may also be important in our development. Fleming showed a
video of a study that demonstrated that when a stranger bounced in time with a
baby, the infant was more likely to help the stranger complete a task
afterwards than if the bouncing was out of sync. This study showed that even
from an early age, music can bring us together, but to find“” out what happens
in the brain, we need to be able to observe neuronal activity.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">Bring in the
magnetic-resolution-imaging (MRI) scanner. In 2017, Fleming experienced the
feeling of being in such a scanner for herself. [This episode can be seen on
the video of the recent </span><i style="color: #783f04;">PBS NewsHour</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> report related to this topic (</span><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/geneticist-and-opera-singer-team-up-to-study-how-music-can-improve-health"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Opera
legend Renee Fleming teams up with Dr. Francis Collins to study how music can
improve health | PBS NewsHour</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.) The transcript is posted on this blog in “The
Arts & Health,” 3 March 2024.] She chose the song “The Water Is Wide,” and
her brain activity was measured as she spoke, sang, and imagined singing the
words. Interestingly, imagining the words produced the most striking brain
activity, but she put this down to the fact that singing is natural to her;
imagining the words was the hardest.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">MRI studies have
revealed the fascinating influence of music. Fleming described an experiment in
which neuroscientist Charles Limb asked jazz piano prodigy Matthew Whitaker [b.
2001] to undergo two tasks while in the scanner. First, Whitaker had to listen
to a boring lecture and, unsurprisingly, very few areas of his brain showed
activity. However, when he listened to his favorite band, his brain lit up like
a Christmas tree. Although Whitaker is blind, even his visual cortex responded,
indicating that music could have very potent therapeutic benefits.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One striking
example, said Fleming, is the case of Forrest Allen [b. 1993], who was left in
an almost lifeless state after a snowboarding accident in 2011 that caused a
traumatic brain injury. Allen’s recovery was long and tough, surgeries to
repair his skull catapulted him into comas, and he couldn’t speak for two
years. His childhood music teacher noticed a tiny movement in Allen’s pinkie
finger when music was playing, as if he was tapping along with the rhythm. As
part of Allen’s rehab, the music teacher began using rhythm and melody to help
his brain heal. Thanks to his doctors, surgeons, and physical therapists, Allen
slowly recovered. Thanks to music therapy, he eventually learned to talk again.
Today, Allen is a college student at George Mason University (Fairfax,
Virginia).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Given that music can
affect us to such a degree, Collins asked Fleming how she manages singing
professionally during emotional moments. She recollected two particularly
emotional moments—singing “Danny Boy” at Senator John McCain’s funeral in
Washington, D.C., in 2018, and performing “Amazing Grace” at the National
September 11 Memorial in New York City in 2013. She said that it was all about
mental preparation before the events. She had to keep reminding herself that
the she was singing for everyone else and not just for herself: The singing had
to be right. Despite being raised in a musical family, it was not an easy road
to becoming a famous singer. Nevertheless, she had the drive to be successful
and became fascinated by the skill and practice of singing, observing that “The
voice is like a horse: You never know when it will betray you and be off!”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Regarding her dreams
for the Sound Health program, she hopes music therapy will become more widely
covered by insurance and that the arts will be increasingly involved in our
general well-being. She concluded by saying that she had been privileged to work
with so many amazing people and takes great delight in performing in all sorts
of ways. At this, Collins picked up his guitar and they wrapped up this unique
event in an unforgettable way. They joined their voices in harmony to Leonard
Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and the spiritual song “How Can I Keep from Singing?” The
audience sat spellbound as the music echoed around the room.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Joanna Cross is a
postdoctoral fellow in the National Institute of Mental Health.]</span></i><i style="text-align: center;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></o:p></i></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>FOR SCIENTISTS ABOUT TO ROCK (WE SALUTE
YOU)</u>”<br /></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Michele C. Hollow</span></span></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[This article was posted on
</i><span style="color: #783f04;">Next Avenue</span><i><span style="color: #783f04;">, a nonprofit, digital publication
produced by Twin Cities PBS for older adults, on 27 February 2019 (</span><a href="https://www.nextavenue.org/francis-collins-nih-music/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">NIH Director
Francis Collins and His Band (nextavenue.org)</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">).]</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When not
overseeing the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins is jamming with his colleagues</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Science and music
are closely connected. Says Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National
Institutes of Health (NIH): “Whether you’re working with another person or a
whole team of people who have different skills, different dreams and different
aspirations and you put them together, you create something magical. Science
does that and so does music.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Collins, a
physician-geneticist, is noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes
and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated
in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA
instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome
Research Institute at the NIH from 1993 to 2008. He was appointed the
16 NIH director by President Barack Obama and was confirmed by the Senate
in 2009.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When Collins came to
the NIH, he was concerned that his passion for music would take a backseat to
science. He soon learned about The Directors, a band consisting of former NIH
senior staff. The name changed to the Affordable Rock ‘n’ Roll Act (ARRA) and
everyone at the NIH is welcome to join.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The name’s not
political. It stems from being affordable, “since we don’t get paid for
performing,” Collins said.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Making Music</span></b><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Collins grew up in a
musical household. His father, Fletcher Collins, was trained as a classical
violinist and worked for President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s New Deal project
collecting folk songs from coal miners in Virginia. About 200 of those songs
are in the American Folk Life Collection at the Library of Congress.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Collins’ mom,
Margaret, sang, and musicians gathered at the family’s farmhouse to jam.
Collins remembers a sullen young man with a scratchy voice celebrating his
18[th] birthday at his house. He didn’t think the singer would go far. It was
Bob Dylan [b. 1941].</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In order not to be
left out, Collins taught himself how to play the pump organ at age five. He
also wrote songs and picked up the guitar around the same time. “My family didn’t
own a television,” he explained. “Music was our entertainment of choice.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Collins played in
high school and joined a bluegrass band at the University of Virginia.
Throughout high school and college, he aspired to be a chemist, but music
remained an important part of his life.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">All NIH Scientists Are Welcome<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Crystal “Crys”
Young, lead singer and post baccalaureate grad from Washington University’s
class of 2017, has been working at the National Institute of Neurological
Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of NIH, and has played music “all my life,”
she said. She’s a classically trained pianist who started practicing at age
four.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I was excited to be
accepted into the program and at the same time was worried I wouldn’t have an
outlet to do music,” she said. “Playing in ARRA is so much fun. I was really
nervous going into it because I’m performing with the top people in their
fields. Music brings us together.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The number of
musicians changes depending on the workload. Currently, there are a dozen
regulars. They rehearse at Dr. John O’Shea’s house. Chief of the
Molecular Immunology and Inflammation Branch of the National Institute of
Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, O’Shea plays guitar and
mandolin. Occasionally, depending on the music and who’s in the group, he has
also performed on violin, bass guitar and drums. O’Shea is self-taught and
picked up the guitar at age eight. He enjoys old-time and Irish music.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The music ARRA plays
is geared towards its audience. When the group plays for scientists, Collins
has been known to take a “Weird Al” Yankovic approach by changing the words of
a song. For instance, Del Shannon’s hit “Runaway” was changed to “Amazing
DNA.” He performed this at the NIH’s National Heart, Lunch, and Blood
Institute.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“In my perspective,
the best rock ‘n roll is from the last century,” Collins said. “We also play
The Black Eyed Peas and songs from Bruno Mars when the audience is younger. We
often meet at John’s (O’Shea’s) house for good food, conversation, and of
course, to rehearse.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Rehearsals can be
one or two times a week if they’re getting ready for a performance. Otherwise,
they’re less frequent. ARRA performances can be year-round, with more during
the holidays and summer. They’ve performed for the National Association of
Science Writers, at the Building Museum, the Library of Congress and numerous
science and medical conferences.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Francis is
supportive of the extraordinary talent here at the NIH,” O’Shea said. “All of
us love playing. I like rehearsals more than performances because we get
together, have dinner, talk and have fun playing together.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Francis also has a
yearly music party at his house where he invites a whole bunch of people over.
Audience members call out a song and we play. The venues vary, too. Francis
would say — and I’ve always felt this way, too — that music creates a sense of
community,” added O’Shea.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Collins has had the
pleasure of performing with YoYo Ma, Jackson Browne, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds
and Whoopi Goldberg. “One of the most heartwarming things is being with these
stars and their roadies backstage,” Collins said. “It’s exciting for us and
they respect what we do.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Researching the Links Between Music and Science</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He and Renee Fleming
sang together as part of an interview on NPR [National Public Radio]. Now,
they’re working together on an initiative between the NIH and the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts called Sound Health: Music and the
Mind, to expand on the links between music and mental health. It explores
how listening to, performing or creating music involves brain circuitry that
can be harnessed to improve health and well-being.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For Collins and the
members of ARRA, life rocks when you combine music and science.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Michele C. Hollow is a
freelance writer, editor, and ghostwriter specializing in health, climate,
social justice, pets, and travel.]<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><br /><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-39535775933366562742024-03-08T10:00:00.092-05:002024-03-08T15:04:24.590-05:00"Austin theater company works to preserve Latin American culture"<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;">by</span><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;"> Journey Love Taylor, Marcos Sanchez,
Natalie Erzal, T</b><b style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">ara Bordeaux and Gil Garcia</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The
following report on the Latino theater troupe Proyecto Teatro of Austin, Texas,
was aired on </i>PBS
NewsHour <i>on 5 March 2024.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Austin, Texas theater company, Proyecto Teatro, aims
to promote and preserve Latin American culture. Its latest project is helping
redefine Latin American history. Journey Love Taylor of our Student Reporting
Labs Academy shares the story as part of our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Geoff Bennett, “PBS
NewsHour” Co-Anchor: </b>The Austin, Texas, theater company Proyecto Teatro
aims to promote and preserve Latin American culture. And its latest project is
helping redefine Latin American history.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Journey Love Taylor of our Student Reporting Labs Academy
shares this story as part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Journey Love Taylor: </b>At
The VORTEX Theater in Austin, Texas, Proyecto Teatro is in the middle of
rehearsal “Cabarex 2,” the second installment of a trilogy of stage plays that
explore Latin American history, from the times before the arrival of Columbus
all the way through to an imagined future.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Luis Armando Ordaz Gutierrez is the longtime artistic
director for the company.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Luis Armando Ordaz
Gutierrez, Artistic Director, Proyecto Teatro: </b>We’re wanting to use this
show to raise awareness of what we can do as a local community to take back our
culture, to take back our art form and our identity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Journey Love Taylor: </b>But
this isn’t just a play. It’s a cabaret, and it’s performed completely in
Spanish.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Luis Armando Ordaz
Gutierrez: </b>This type of work, you don’t really see it so much in Spanish,
and you don’t see this type of work in the Latino community, because cabaret is
derived from European art forms, and so it’s a little odd and a little
different and new to see it in the context of our culture.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And so when people saw it, they were just so happy to be
able to see their stories, their people, their characters in the lens of
cabaret with, like, the musical numbers and the dance sequences and the jazzy
music.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Valeria Smeke, Dancer
and Performer:</b> My favorite part about being involved in this production
specifically, I think, would be the dances.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There’s one with, like, chairs. You have your little, like,
chair dance routine. I love that one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Rachel Rivera,
Choreographer, Makeup, Costume, and Hair Artist:</b> Being a part of something
so impactful in my community feels like a great responsibility, especially
since I feel that I am a leader and someone who creates something for other
people to see and other people that are not part of my culture to see, to make
sure that what I’m doing always carries that intention that I want it to carry
and the intention of respecting and honoring my culture.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Valeria Smeke: </b>I
really don’t get a chance to, like, connect with my roots, so being here and,
like, Rachel teaching us these indigenous dances, just learning about the
history, it’s a really beautiful thing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Journey Love Taylor: </b>For
the “PBS NewsHour” Student Reporting Labs, I’m Journey Love Taylor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">[Proyecto
Teatro was founded in 2007 and is located at 5700 Avenue G, Austin, Texas
78752-4510. </span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">The Principal, or Artistic Director,
is Luis Ordaz.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">The company can be
contacted at (512) 524-8555 or </span><a href="mailto:info@proyectoteatro.com"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">info@proyectoteatro.com</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">;
the website is </span><a href="http://www.proyectoteatro.com/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">www.proyectoteatro.com</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.]</span></span></i><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Because
the </i>NewsHour<i>
report was so brief, I went looking for some other coverage of Proyecto
Teatro.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The two pieces below are both a
little older (pre-pandemic) than the one above, but I found them informative
and interesting.]</i></span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>TEATRO CON
TENACIDAD<br /><o:p></o:p></u></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u>THE SHAPE OF
LATINA/O THEATRE IN AUSTIN</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Emi Aguilar and
Roxanne Schroeder-Arce</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[This article was posted in
the website </i>HowlRound <i>on 19 June
2015.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This is the second of seven posts in a series about the
state of Latina/o theatre in Texas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
this series, each of the contributing writers presents insight into the
happenings, developments, and future of Latina/o theatre and performance in
their respective regions.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Austin, Texas hosts several Latina/o theatre companies, and
each year more historically white institutions are producing plays with
Latina/o themes and characters. In past the few seasons, Austin Latina/o
theatre companies like Teatro Vivo, ALTA Teatro (Austin Latina/o Theatre
Alliance), and Proyecto Teatro have produced and showcased plays from the
Latina/o experience, while other mainstream companies like ZACH Theatre, Austin
Community College, and the University of Texas at Austin have produced plays
with Latina/o themes, characters, and bodies. Additionally, presenting houses
like the Paramount Theatre presented productions from Latin America and US
Latina/o theatres. Overall, the number of Latina/o productions being offered in
Austin is growing, and represent a diversity of perspectives and aesthetics
from Austin Latina/o communities. However, there is still relatively little
Latina/o theatre in comparison to the number of Latina/o-identified people
living in Austin. What exists is sporadic, hard to find, and in some cases
reeks of appropriation and tokenism. In an attempt to paint a picture of the
current Austin Latina/o theatre scene, we will highlight some of the challenges
Latina/o theatre in Austin faces and articulate how the Austin Latina/o theatre
community is responding to such challenges.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One issue faced by Latina/o theatre artists in Austin over
the past several decades is the need for a consistent venue for Latina/o arts.
The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center currently hosts four
performance groups, including ALTA, Teatro Vivo, Proyecto Teatro, and Aztlan
Dance Company. Each company has its own artistic and social objectives. This
center, often referred to as “the MACC,” has helped with the need for a
consistent space where the Latina/o community and those interested in Latina/o
arts can find theatre told from the uniquely Latina/o perspective. This
magnificent new facility also provides free parking for sanctioned events,
though it is taking some time for the Austin community at large to become
accustomed to attending events at the MACC.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One resident company of the MACC, ALTA, has been in
existence for over fifteen years. The company’s mission has recently changed,
and it now works as a community of artists and volunteers to foster new
Latina/o theatre talent in Austin. ALTA promotes collaborative productions
among local and international artists. ALTA’s productions are typically written
by Latin American playwrights, and produced in Spanish with English subtitles.
One exception is their annual Pastorela. Conceived and directed by Patricio Villareal,<i> La
Pastorela 2013</i> engaged the Austin community in a way that is rarely
experienced elsewhere in the City. At the end of the play, the young and young
at heart pummeled a Satan piñata in a joyful community ritual.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[<i>La
Pastorela</i> dates back many centuries, performed during the Christmas season
by amateur and professional artists, in theaters and churches, in Mexico and in
Mexican communities since the middle part of the last millennium. <i>La Pastorela </i>changes
from year to year and from production to production, but at its core its always
the same story. It’s the story, usually told with humor and song, of the
shepherds who are visited by angels and told to go to Bethlehem and see the
newborn Jesus. In the course of the trip to Bethlehem, the devils come and try
to trick the shepherds. The details of the story are often changed to reflect
the current state of the world.]</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"> </span></p>
<h2><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Proyecto Teatro also typically produces work in Spanish. The </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">company’s mission is “to preserve and
promote the Latin-American culture through theatre, providing a source of
transformative arts education and quality cultural entertainment.” Proyecto
Teatro strives to offer theatre artists and audience members a space conducive
to human development through the arts. Recently, Proyecto Teatro produced an
original piece called <i>Por Los Mojados</i>, which was devised and
performed by young people ages seven to seventeen, under the direction of the
company’s executive and artistic director, Luis Armando Ordaz Gutiérrez.
Combining visceral dialogue, contemporary dance, and comedic elements, <i>Por
Los Mojados </i>showed the realities of border crossings from the youth
perspective. Working as an ensemble, the young artists courageously implicated
the US and Mexican governments in these violent experiences to put truthful
narratives on stage. The production is set to tour to Los Angeles this fall.</span></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Teatro Vivo produces and promotes bilingual theatre, and
strives to “nurture a window into the community to make theatre accessible to
all audiences, especially those underserved in the arts.” Founded by Rupert
Reyes and JoAnn Carreon Reyes, Teatro Vivo’s mission is to produce culturally
relevant Latina/o theatre that addresses critical social issues such as
colorism, citizenship, and cultural fluidity. Teatro Vivo serves the community
by telling stories that positively reflect the Latina/o community and uniquely
celebrates the vibrancy of the Latina/o culture. A highlight of Teatro Vivo’s
season each year is the <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Austin
Latina/o New Play Festival, produced by Teatro Vivo in collaboration with
Scriptworks. Now in its fifth year, the 2015 festival featured three Texas
playwrights, Andrew Valdez from Austin, Jelisa Jay Robinson from Houston, and
Adriana Garcia from San Antonio. Each playwright was selected through a blind
panel and then given over a month to work with a dramaturg and develop their
play. The process included auditions, a week of rehearsal, and a staged reading
at the MACC followed by a post-show discussion. Teatro Vivo always offers these
discussions as a mode of community engagement through which audiences affect
the shape that each new play takes. Based on what they have discovered
throughout the festival, each of the playwrights has expressed their desire to
continue their own play development process.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">ZACH Theatre, a historically white institution, recently
began consistently staging plays with Latina/o themes, bodies, and characters.
In collaboration with Teatro Vivo, ZACH is producing Latina/o works *through
their Theatre for Families program. <i>Cenicienta,</i> a bilingual
production for young audiences based on Cinderella, features a strong-minded
Latina more concerned with becoming a writer than marrying a prince. Written
and devised by two artists from Austin, Rupert Reyes (Teatro Vivo) and Caroline
Reck (Glass Half Full Theatre), <i>Cenicienta </i>uses object
puppetry to tell a new Cinderella story. <i>Cenicienta</i> marks the
second collaboration between Teatro Vivo and ZACH Theatre.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Educational institutions in Austin have also begun to
produce more Latina/o theatre. The University of Texas at Austin Department of
Theatre & Dance produced <i>Esperanza Rising </i>in 2015, though
their 2014 production of <i>In The Heights</i> faced challenges of
representation in casting which led to student protests. Austin Community
College also recently produced <i>GUAPA</i> by Caridad Svich. The
value of representation of Latina/o stories on the stage is trickling down to
the high schools throughout the state. Edinburg High School’s production
of <i>Zoot Suit</i> from the Rio Grande Valley landed at the <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">UIL state meet at UT Austin a few
years ago, a grand and influential state theatre festival competition. Donna
High School brought their production of <i>blu</i> by Tejana
playwright Virgina Grise to the state meet this year.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As Austin continues to produce a diverse range of Latina/o
stories in a variety of venues, we are hopeful that each company and artist
gains more support and continues collaborations that engage deeply with the
community. In addition to the theatre companies and educational institutions
producing Latina/o theatre, several independent artists known on the national
Latina/o theatre scene call Austin home, like Amparo Garcia-Crow, Adrian
Villegas, and Raul Garza. New work is consistently generated in Austin and
spread throughout the nation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Through a newly founded theatre collective in Austin, <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">TIA: Teatro In Austin, we hope to continue
the dialogue about how each of these works is in conversation with one another
and with the current national Latina/o theatre community’s momentum. Austin
Latina/o theatre companies and artists are tenacious and eager to share their
stories with diverse audiences far and wide.</span></span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>AUSTIN THEATER
TROUPE RECOGNIZED<br /> <o:p></o:p></u></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u>FOR PLAY ABOUT
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Marlon Sorto</span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Marlon
Sorto’s article about Proyecto Teatro’s winning a local theater award was
posted on the website of the </i>Austin American-Statesman<i> on 4 September 2016; it was updated on 25 September
2018.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When the Latino kids in the theatre company Proyecto Teatro
debuted their first play “Por los Mojados” in March, they aimed to expose
Austin audiences to some of the not-so-well-known history of illegal
immigration from Latin America to the United States.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">They did not expect that many months and performances later
they’d be nominated for five B. Iden Payne Awards, which recognize exceptional
theatrical performance, production, and design in Austin.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Proyecto Teatro, a local organization which promotes Latino
culture through theatre in Spanish, also plans to start a tour to perform this
show across the country. The youth company is mostly made up of Latino kids 9
to 17 years old.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Payne Awards nominations committee includes local
theater performers, producers and advocates and nominated the play in the youth
category for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Direction in Theatre. The
production also was nominated for Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding
Choreography and Outstanding Cast.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The awards ceremony will be held Oct. 26 [2016] at the
Rollins Studio Theatre in the Long Center. The troupe will tour with the play
across the country, beginning in Nov. 19 in Austin and before visiting cities
such as San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago
and Miami.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“We are very happy to help change the perception about the
Hispanic community here in Austin and in the United States,” said Luis Ordaz,
executive and artistic director of Proyecto Teatro. Ordaz also wants to submit
the play to the Festival Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2016, he said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Por los Mojados,” which combines theater performance in
Spanish with English surtitles, dance and video, was inspired by the border
crisis in 2014. More than 60,000 unaccompanied minors entered illegally into
the United States, escaping violence and gang threats in their home countries
in Central America, said Ordaz.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The actors spent several months researching and writing the
script, a process guided by Ordaz, he said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The title of the production, “Por Los Mojados” — which
translates to “For the Wetbacks” — aims to reclaim a derogatory term by
reflecting the tough experiences and raw stories of Latino undocumented
immigrants, Ordaz said. With this production, the ensemble has the opportunity
to “highlight the work of Latinos and show that we are not (all) ‘criminals and
rapists’ as a politician said recently, but a community which has a rich
culture and the same artistic potential as Anglos.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ordaz referred to comments made by presidential candidate
Donald Trump.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The show also challenges audiences, explained Ordaz,
especially when it describes some darker passages of history, such as the
Inquisition in Colonial Latin America and United States intervention through
policies like the Truman Doctrine, which critics say was the beginning of a
long process by which the U.S. increasingly played the role of world police
force.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[With
the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972; 33rd President of
the United States: 1945-53) established that the United States would provide
political, military, and economic assistance to all democratic nations under
threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Although we are very young, we are professional actors and
we have worked a lot under our director to create a great script about this
very sensitive and controversial issue,” actress Briana Campos said.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-2987619934610011932024-03-03T10:00:00.087-05:002024-03-13T06:53:24.208-04:00The Arts & Health<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Here are two reports from </i>PBS NewsHour<i> on the confluence of the performing
arts and matters of health.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first report
concerns the beneficial effect of music on the health, particularly mental
health, of people who </i>aren’t<i> musicians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s proof that, indeed, “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast” (William
Congreve [1670-1729],</i> The Mourning Bride <i>[1697]).</i></span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The second report examines
the relationship between the Houston healthcare community and that city’s
performing artists and performing arts institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Performers, including actors and musicians but
especially singers and dancers, are susceptible to many career-endangering
health issues that “civilians” (as one of my teachers called artistic muggles) don</span></i><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">’t face</span></i><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Houston’s hospitals and health-care
facilities have developed a community of care for Houston’s performing artists
that the professionals of both societal groups claim is unique.]</span></i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;"> </span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>OPERA LEGEND RENÉE
FLEMING TEAMS UP WITH<br /> <o:p></o:p></u></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u>DR. FRANCIS
COLLINS TO STUDY HOW MUSIC CAN IMPROVE HEALTH</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Jeffrey Brown and Anne
Azzi Davenport</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[The following story, about
opera singer Renée Fleming and former NIH head Francis Collins working in
tandem on the application of music therapy to a range of mental and emotional stresses,
was reported on </i><span style="color: #783f04;">PBS NewsHour </span><i style="color: #783f04;">on</i>
<i><span style="color: #783f04;">22 February 2024.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">The transcript and
video of the segment is at </span><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/geneticist-and-opera-singer-team-up-to-study-how-music-can-improve-health"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Opera
legend Renee Fleming teams up with Dr. Francis Collins to study how music can
improve health | PBS NewsHour</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Note: The </i>NewsHour<i> transcript of its segments is annotated
with the warning, “Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly
edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In light of that statement, I have edited or corrected mistranscrIptions
directly from the video, sometimes without marking them below.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve also added annotations in brackets to
clarify some remarks.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Giants in their
fields of music and science are merging their knowledge to propel advancements
in body and mind. A recent international gathering of researchers, therapists
and artists took stock of what is known and what is yet to be discovered.
Jeffrey Brown reports for our ongoing arts and health coverage on CANVAS.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Amna Nawaz, “NewsHour” Co-Anchor: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Two giants of music and science are merging
their knowledge to propel advancements in body and mind.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Researchers,
therapists, and artists from around the world gathered to explore what is known
and what is yet to be discovered.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jeffrey Brown takes
a look and a listen for our ongoing arts and health coverage on Canvas.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[Renée Fleming
singing in concert.] She is a singer, one of the world’s most beloved sopranos.
But at times in her remarkable career, Renée Fleming has experienced terrible
bouts of somatic pain [relating to or characteristic of the body as opposed to
the mind or spirit], the body’s way of distracting her from the mental anxiety
brought from performance.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming, Singer: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I was never a natural performer. And so I
just kept reading and reading about the mind-body connection, trying to
understand more about what was causing this, et cetera. And I discovered that
the medical profession and neuroscientists were studying music. And I asked him
[indicating Dr. Francis Collins, sitting next to her] why one day.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">He is the renowned physician-geneticist best
known for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and leadership of the Human
Genome Project.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins, Former Director,
National Institutes of Health:</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">
[26 June 2000, in the East Room of the White House, at the presidential conference,
Decoding the Book of Life: A Milestone for Humanity] Today, we celebrate the
revelation of the first draft of the human book of life.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Francis Collins headed the National
Institutes of Health, the world’s largest supporter of biomedical research, for
12 years until 2021.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I’m a doctor. I want to find every possible
way to help people who are suffering from illnesses or other kinds of life
experiences that are limiting their ability to flourish. I want to make
everybody flourish, and music is such a powerful source of that kind of
influence.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Together, they are leading proponents of a
marriage of arts and health, advocates for research, understanding, and
practice in the nexus of music and the brain.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We talked recently
on the NIH campus [B<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ethesda, Md.]
about their music and health initiative, now in its seventh year.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I believe the arts should be embedded in
health care across the boards.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Embedded meaning?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Meaning, we already have it in many, many
places. Many hospitals have discovered just how beneficial it is to have
creative arts therapists on staff. Children’s hospitals should have a creative
arts studio, I think, available to parents and their children and families. So,
I just think it should be everywhere in health care.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">It’s a growing movement, one we have been
reporting on around the country, including neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins
studying music’s impact on dementia patients, a hospital at the University of
Florida incorporating arts into its care, individuals who’ve suffered traumatic
brain injuries, like former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, playing the French
horn to help rewire her brain and rebuild her ability to speak.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Gabrielle Giffords (b. 1970)
is a retired member of the United States House of Representatives from Maricopa
County, Arizona, from January 2007 until January 2012. She suffered severe
brain injury during an assassination attempt on 8 January 2011, when she was shot in the head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Giffords resigned from Congress on 25 January 2012 to focus on her recovery and,
as of 2016, has recovered much of her
ability to walk, speak, read, and write, though she continues to struggle with
language and had lost fifty percent of her vision in both eyes.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Our understanding of
the brain’s connections and responses is still in early stages, Francis Collins
says, with projects like the NIH-funded BRAIN Initiative [Brain Research
through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies] helping show how individual
circuits connect and respond. We do know some basics, however.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I think you can say the acoustic cortex,
which is where your brain processes incoming sound, and particularly musical
sound, does have some pretty interesting circuits. It’s also plastic [easily
shaped or molded]. It responds to training.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If you look at the
brain of somebody who had intense musical training before age 7, you can
actually see that part of the cortex is a little larger than in somebody who
did not have that. So, our brains are responding to the environment very
clearly in that way.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And then you can
say, OK, if you have a musical experience that affects you, you can see how
that signal that starts out in the acoustic cortex spreads to many other parts
of the brain.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Maybe you have had an MRI? Renée Fleming got
in and sang for two hours.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Singing [in the MRI
machine])</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">When I show this video to people, I always
say, well, no Grammys for this performance.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Laughter)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">One interesting finding [was], that for an
experienced singer like Fleming, her brain circuits were more active while she
thought about or imagined singing than when she actually sang.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Did that surprise
you?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">It surprised me a great deal. It’s also — I
think what’s even more surprising to me is that music actually is in every
known mapped part of the brain. So it’s extraordinarily diverse and throughout
the entire brain, as we know, as we currently understand it.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The research so far has a wide range of
implications for child development, Alzheimer’s, and other forms of dementia,
Parkinson’s, and other conditions and interventions.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Some research goes
on in labs, some in the world, as in a study in which individuals were offered
singing lessons. One group was given individual training, the other as part of
a chorus.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">For 12 weeks, and to just see what happens as
far as their health, the people that had individual singing, they did OK. The
people in the choir, by all kinds of measures, were actually affected in a very
positive way.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Many of them had
chronic pain. Their chronic pain was noticeably reduced. They had various
measures of personal attitudes. Their attitude toward generosity went straight
up, and their oxytocin levels went up too, as another sort of hormonal measure
of good will, good sense of health.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Oxytocin is a hormone released
by the pituitary gland. It plays roles in behavior that include social bonding,
sexual activity, reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">My favorite is, postpartum depression is
tremendously benefited by singing in a choir. I would never have — I wouldn’t
have guessed that.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Narrator: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Having even one risk factor . . . .</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">In fact, you know those advertisements for
drugs we’re all bombarded with?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Narrator: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[Clip from a television commercial] Ask
your doctor or pharmacist if Paxlovid is right for you.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming has one she’d like to see.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Ask your doctor if music therapy is right for
you.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Laughter)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">As a kind of prescription.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Exactly. Exactly.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Crosstalk)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The prescription. Why not?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Yes, but you have to — you’re saying it still
has to be shown exactly in a scientific method . . .</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Yes.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">. . . for a doctor to be willing to prescribe
it.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Sure. That’s our system, and I’m totally
behind it. You need evidence that this actually isn’t just a nice thing; it
actually improves outcomes.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I’m pretty convinced
from the data we have that’s the case for various places, but let’s tighten
that up. Let’s make it absolutely incontrovertible. And then you will have a
better chance with the insurance companies saying OK, because that may save
them money in the long run.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Man: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[Instructor of a music therapy demonstration
in a conference]<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>Let’s listen to
this melody line as it floats all the way up.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">At this recent gathering and others, Fleming
and Collins are advancing new findings through a variety of collaborations,
including NIH Music and Health with 20 NIH institutes, the Kennedy Center’s
Sound Health partnership, and the Renée Fleming Foundation.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Everything you’re
talking about requires a kind of buy-in from your communities, the arts world
and the science world. But is there still pushback?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Francis Collins: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">There’s a bit, but I think were getting some
real momentum going. It doesn’t hurt that scientists are also musicians. At
least, many of them are.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This workshop, we
invited multiple leadership at NIH to come and take part, and they all said
pretty much yes, and they went away saying, that was even more interesting than
I thought.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">A young person now goes to the music
conservatory, you want them to study therapy, science, health?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Renée Fleming: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Well, these would be divisions within a
conservatory or university.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But there’s definite
buy-in now. But when I started, people were saying exactly what you’re saying,
is, well, we have too much to do already with what we</span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">’</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">re doing, in terms of
presenting, and we’re strapped, and the funding is difficult, et cetera, et
cetera.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But I think pretty
much everyone is on board now, because we’re community service providers. So, I
think people who run performing arts organizations and conservatories are
starting to see the benefit of it.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">And these two don’t just talk about bringing
their disciplines together. They have been known to give it literal form, as
amateur musician Francis Collins accompanies science-fascinated Renée Fleming.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For the “PBS
NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,
Maryland.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Music [Fleming on
stage singing with Collins accompanying on guitar and signing])</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Applause)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Amna Nawaz: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">And Fleming has edited a collection of essays
from scientists, artists, and therapists called “Music and Mind: Harnessing the
Arts for Health and Wellness” [Penguin Publishing Group; publication date: 9
April 2024]. That’s due out this spring.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I want to connect this </i>NewsHour<i> report on the benefits of music to anguished souls to some past posts on </i>Rick On Theater<i> that touch on the same or similar topics. The first is “Theater: A Healing Art,” published on 3 September 2023, in which I examine the function of theater as a healing event for those who witness it and those who perform it.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[One example I gave of this phenomenon was a play, </i>The Last Cyclist<i>, written by a concentration camp inmate for his fellow prisoners. In my report, posted on 2 and 5 September 2022, on the play which was reconstructed and staged and then filmed, I observed that it was, first, a healing force for the incarcerated Jews 80 years ago by reducing their dire circumstances to their farcical foundations. Then it was a healing phenomenon for both the modern actors, mostly non-Jews, who performed the reconstruction and the modern audiences who saw it in the present day.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[A more contemporary play that was conceived as a healing event for the participants and the spectators was </i>Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret<i>, a play about combat service in Afghanistan and its effects on the GI’s and their families on which I reported on 10 July 2023.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[On 28 August 2020, I ran “Yo-Yo Ma on the Artist’s Role in the Time of Covid-19,” a collection of articles on the famous cellist’s call for musicians and other artists “to take up a role in the struggle against the pandemic and its consequences. He especially focused on the issues of raising the spirits of Americans who were struggling under the health threat and the psychological burdens of being confined to their homes.” This lines up precisely with the work of Dr. Francis Collins with Renée Fleming, reported above.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In his moe than 30-year
career with </i>PBS NewsHour<i>, Brown’s
served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of
national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and
to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent, he’s profiled many of the
world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his
signature works at the </i>NewsHour<i>: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,”
about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the
creation of the </i>NewsHour<i>’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly
book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the </i>New York Times<i>.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[As Senior Coordinating
Producer of “Canvas,” Anne Davenport is the primary field producer of arts and
culture pieces and oversees all coverage. She’s been leading “Canvas”
since its beginning, collaborating with Chief Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown
for most of her 21 years at </i>PBS
NewsHour<i> as well as with others.]</i></span><i style="text-align: center;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>HOW A HOUSTON MEDICAL CENTER IS<br /> <o:p></o:p></u></span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">HARMONIZING HEALTH AND PERFORMING ARTS</span></u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">”<br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet</span></span></span></span> </h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Before the report on the
use of music to reduce stress and distress, correspondent Jeffrey Brown covered
the Houston collaboration between the health-care facilities and the performing
arts institutions of the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
segment aired on </i><span style="color: #783f04;">PBS NewsHour </span><i style="color: #783f04;">on 2 October
2023 and is online at</i> <i><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-houston-medical-center-is-harmonizing-health-and-performing-arts"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">How
a Houston medical center is harmonizing health and performing arts | PBS
NewsHour</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.]</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Center For
Performing Arts Medicine is an unusual partnership of a world-class hospital
and world-class performing arts organizations. It was founded in 1992 with a
focus on singers, but then something unexpected happened. Jeffrey Brown reports
from Houston for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Amna Nawaz, “NewsHour” Co-Anchor: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">It’s an unusual partnership, a world-class
hospital and world-class performing arts organizations, a model in the growing
field that brings together health and the arts.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jeffrey Brown
reports from Houston for our ongoing series, Canvas.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Woman [Dr. Yin Yiu]: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">We’re just going to get a look at your throat
and your vocal cords. Breathe in.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">We’re up close and personal with 25-year-old
opera singer Emily Treigle and her vocal cords. This is her instrument,
requiring constant care and attention.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Emily Treigle, Houston Grand Opera: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">It’s not like I’m playing the Trumpet or
piano, like, if something goes wrong, you can see it. You know, it’s all in
here. So, you need the professional to be able to go in and make sure that
everything is going well.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">In July, after multiple tonsil infections,
Treigle, a mezzo-soprano, had a tonsillectomy. All went well, and, this day,
she was getting a checkup ahead of the Houston Grand Opera’s new season.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For someone in your
position, what’s the problem? I mean, what’s the thing you have to deal with or
worry about most with your voice?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Emily Treigle: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The short answer is everything. The long
answer is, it’s incredibly challenging to be in a career that there are so many
variables attached to it.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And so our task as
singers is to have such a good, solid technical foundation that we can defy
whatever odds are thrown at us and just continue to be able to produce a really
beautiful sound. And when it’s something that’s outside of our control, our
technical realm, that’s when we end up back here and say, something is not
working. Can we do a checkup and make sure that everything is where it’s
supposed to be?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Yin Yiu, Houston Methodist Hospital: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">We really encourage our singers as vocal
athletes.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Working with Treigle, Dr. Yin Yiu, a
laryngologist at the Texas Voice Center at the Houston Methodist Hospital. As
she puts it, she’s the T in the ENT [ear, nose, and throat].</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She doesn’t sing
herself, though some of her colleagues do, but she loves the challenge of
caring for singers.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Yin Yiu: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">We think about athletes, right, and they have
like this whole team of people that take care of them. And we don’t really
think about performers.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">So, singers, actors,
people who do, like, use their voice in that capacity, we don’t think about
them in that same way. But they can also have injuries, right? So, they can be
performing and have different things happening. The vocal cords can get
swollen. They can have vocal cord hemorrhage or bleed whenever. They’re
singing. These are all things that can happen. And we get to be that team for
them.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The “swollen” vocal cords Dr.
Yiu mentions may refer to laryngeal polyps or nodules, which can appear as
swelling and can cause symptoms including
hoarseness or breathiness, “rough” or “scratchy” voice, decreased pitch range,
and vocal and bodily fatigue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the
condition with which singer-actress Julie Andrews was diagnosed in 1997—although she disputes the diagnosis—and as a
result of the surgical treatment for which, she lost her magnificent singing
voice. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Dr. Yiu has omitted from her
list of vulnerable performers arguably the most susceptible to physical injury—though
not usually to the throat: dancers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
artists are brought up later in the report.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The Texas Voice Center is part of the
hospital’s highly unusual program, the Center for Performing Arts Medicine.
Founded by Dr. Richard Stasney in 1992, it all began with a focus on singers,
but then something unexpected happened.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Todd Frazier has led
the center since 2012.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Todd Frazier, System Director, Center for
Performing Arts Medicine:</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> We
started to get preachers, newscasters, classroom teachers, anyone that would
associate their voice to what they do professionally.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I would add to the list of
potential professional subjects, lawyers, specifically litigators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I was an acting student and then a
teacher of acting, along with the occasional priest or teacher, I saw a number
of lawyers taking acting classes.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And that’s when the
hospital realized that, yes, there really is something special and unique here,
and that’s unique to Houston as well.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The center then grew to support performing
artists of all kinds from Houston’s thriving arts community, as well as from
all over the country. Crucially, it also developed official relationships with
several of Houston’s leading performance art groups.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Todd Frazier: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">There are a lot of unique health issues that
show up in the arts community that deserve a home and deserve a place to be
cared for.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Are you surprised that this is a thing now
between the hospital and arts organizations?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Todd Frazier: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I’m not surprised that its successful,
because I am from the arts community [he’s a composer, trained at the Eastman
School of Music in Rochester, New York, and the Juilliard School in New York City],
and I really knew that the artists were yearning for a home and a sympathetic
place that they would be understood.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But I am — have to
be surprised that a major hospital would sort of take this on in a way that’s
sort of unprecedented. They felt it fit with their values to be supporting the
arts and culture within the community of Houston, which all the hospitals are
in Houston. And the physicians really enjoyed being able to help these talented
people making their lives and homes here in Houston.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">One major partner, the Houston Ballet, which
now has an on-site clinic, giving dancers like Kellen Hornbuckle daily access
to athletic trainers and physical therapists.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Readers may remember some
years ago, professional and college athletes, football players in particular,
were discovered taking dance classes to help them tone and coordinate their bodies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder if it’s still common.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Kevin Varner, Houston Methodist Hospital:
</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The types of injuries that
ballet dancers get are very unique. It’s a very unique population. And while
they are performing artists, they are incredible athletes.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Kevin Varner is the chairman of orthopedic
surgery at Houston Methodist Orthopedic Sports Medicine.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Dr. Kevin Varner: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">It’s interesting to look at how things
evolved over the last 15 or 20 years in terms of dancer health. And, remember,
it’s a big team approach, right? So, you really need a hospital that wants to
be a partner, because you need not just orthopedic surgery.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">You need nutrition.
You need cardiology. You need primary care sports medicine, so people that take
care of the dancer as a whole [and] when you do that, it really does improve
dancer health.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">In this session, Hornbuckle received dry
needling, cupping, massaging, and other treatments to alleviate pain in her
legs and prevent serious injury.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Dry needling is a treatment for
pain and movement issues in which thin needles are inserted into or near trigger
points to stimulate the muscles, causing them to contract or twitch. This helps
relieve pain and improve the range of motion. Cupping is a traditional
therapeutic treatment in which heated cupping glasses are applied to the skin,
supposedly to draw blood towards the surface for relieving internal congestion or loosening and stimulating the
muscles.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The big idea,
according to Houston Ballet executive director James Nelson, change from
reactive to proactive care.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">James Nelson, Executive Director, Houston
Ballet: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">So, when I was
dancing, we never had any on-site care. It was always, wait until you’re
broken, then go to the doctor, then get it fixed.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the end of the
day, it’s a very short career. And so to be able to give an artist a year, two
years, five years more of this precious time is such a gift. And I attribute a
lot of that to this partnership with Methodist. You won’t find this kind of
relationship in most ballet companies.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Back at the hospital, Frazier sees this kind
of focus on the performing arts only growing in the future.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Todd Frazier: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Many universities are starting arts and
health certificates, music therapy degrees.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And even medical
schools are looking at internships in artists health or how artists might be
cared for to develop those skills. And it is growing.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Meanwhile, singer Emily Treigle is ready to
go.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Your throat looks
great. I mean, I saw it.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Laughter)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Emily Treigle:</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> Thank you. Who knew my tonsils were so big?
I had no idea. But now that I don’t have them, I certainly notice their
absence.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I’m very excited
about this coming season and seeing how things change now that I don’t have
this obstacle.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Jeffrey Brown: </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Treigle performs [as Meg Page] with the
Houston Grand Opera later this month in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Falstaff” [27 October-10
November 2023].</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For the “PBS
NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Houston, Texas.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Jeffrey Brown’s bio and
credits are reported above. Alison Thoet is a writer and a “Canvas” associate
producer and national affairs associate producer at </i>PBS NewsHour<i>.]<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><br /><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-51415370499627131142024-02-27T10:00:00.092-05:002024-02-27T13:59:23.258-05:00"Cillian Murphy said yes to ‘Oppenheimer’ before reading one of Christopher Nolan’s red scripts"<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by <b>Scott Pelley</b>, <b>Aliza Chasan</b>, <b>Nicole Young</b>, and <b>Kristin Steve</b></span><div><b><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></b></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[On
18 February 2024, Irish actor Cillian (pronounced </i>KILL-ee-ən<i>) Murphy (b.
1976) was interviewed on the CBS News magazine show</i> 60 Minutes <i>by
correspondent Scott Pelley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Murphy’s
been nominated for a 2024 Best Actor Academy Award (winners to be revealed on
10 March); he’s already won the Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild
Awards.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Here’s
</i>IMDb<i>’s</i>
<i>biography of Murphy, who got his start as an actor on stage in Enda Walsh’s </i>Disco
Pigs<i> by the Corcadorca Theatre Company in Cork, Republic of Ireland, premièring
on 26 September 1996 (I’ve changed the names of plays and movies, and other titles
to roman type for easier recognition):</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Striking Irish actor Cillian Murphy was born in
Douglas [County Cork], the oldest child of Brendan Murphy, who works for the
Irish Department of Education, and a mother who is a teacher of French. He has
three younger siblings. Murphy was educated at Presentation Brothers College,
Cork. He went on to study law at University College Cork, but dropped out after
about a year. During this time, Murphy also pursued an interest in music,
playing guitar in various bands. Upon leaving University, Murphy joined the
Corcadorca Theater Company in Cork, and played the lead role in </i>Disco Pigs<i>, amongst other
plays.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Various film roles followed, including a film
adaptation of </i>Disco
Pigs<i> (2001). However, his big film break came when he was cast in Danny
Boyle’s </i>28 Days Later<i> (2002), which became a surprise international hit.
This performance earned him nominations for Best Newcomer at the Empire Awards
and Breakthrough Male Performance at the MTV Movie Awards.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Murphy went on to supporting roles in high-profile
films such as </i>Cold
Mountain<i> (2003) and </i>Girl with a Pearl Earring<i> (2003), and then was
cast in two villain roles: Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow, in </i>Batman
Begins<i> (2005) and Jackson Rippner in </i>Red Eye<i> (2005). Although slight
in nature for a villain, Murphy’s piercing blue eyes helped to create creepy
performances and critics began to take notice. Manhola Dargis of the </i>New
York Times<i> cited Murphy as a “picture-perfect villain”, while David Denby of
</i>The New Yorker<i> noted he was both “seductive” and “sinister”.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Later that year, Murphy starred as Patrick “Kitten”
Braden, an Irish transgender woman in search of her mother in Neil Jordan’s </i>Breakfast on Pluto<i> (2005),
a film adaptation of the Pat McCabe novel. Although the film was not a box
office success, Murphy was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a
Comedy or Musical and he won Best Actor for the Irish Film and Television
Academy Awards.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>The following year, Murphy starred in Ken Loach’s </i>The Wind that Shakes the
Barley<i> (2006). The film was the most successful independent Irish film and
won the Palm[e] [d]’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Murphy continued to
take roles in a number of independent films, and also reprised his role as the
Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s </i>The Dark Knight<i> (2008). Nolan is known
for working with actors in multiple films, and cast Murphy in </i>Inception<i>
(2010) as Robert Fischer, the young heir of the multi-billion dollar empire,
who was the target of DiCaprio’s dream team. His most well-known work is
starring as Thomas Shelby in the British TV show </i>Peaky Blinders<i>
beginning in 2013.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Murphy continues to appear in high-profile films
such as </i>In
Time<i> (2011), </i>Red Lights<i> (2012), and </i>The Dark Knight Rises<i>
(2012), the final film in Nolan’s Batman trilogy.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Murphy is married [since 2004] to Yvonne McGuinness,
an artist. The couple have two sons, Malachy and Aran.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #783f04;">[Much
of what Murphy said about acting was interesting to me, even if I didn’t agree
with it all, so I decided to repost the write-up of the interview by Pelley and
his producing team (</span><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cillian-murphy-talks-oppenheimer-acting-move-career-60-minutes/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Cillian
Murphy said yes to "Oppenheimer" before reading one of Christopher
Nolan's red scripts - CBS News</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">; a video of the interview is included).]</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Cillian Murphy jumped to act in “Oppenheimer,” even before
reading writer and director Christopher Nolan’s script.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The decision paid off. Murphy won a Golden Globe for the
role and he’s nominated for an Oscar for the first time in his decades-long
career. There have been six Nolan films for Murphy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It’s always paid off for me, you know, in every film that I
worked with him on,” Murphy said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Working on “Oppenheimer”</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Murphy did eventually read the script from Nolan, printed on
red paper so that it couldn’t be photocopied.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I did genuinely think it’s one of the greatest screenplays
I’d ever read,” he said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Murphy views it as a miracle when films, including “Oppenheimer,”
get made.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“And then if it’s any way good, that’s a miracle. And then
if it connects with audiences, that’s a miracle,” he said. “So it’s a miracle,
upon miracle, upon miracle to have a film like ‘Oppenheimer.’ It really is.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That miracle came after months of hard work. Murphy lost 28
pounds so that his silhouette would match that of physicist J. Robert
Oppenheimer, often credited as the father of the atomic bomb. For six months,
Murphy read and listened to Oppenheimer’s lectures. He performed for his dog
Scout as he walked on the beach.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I remember at one point, I said to Chris — ‘Chris, there
appears to be, he appears to speak Dutch here. And I think he’s giving a
lecture in Dutch here. What are we gonna do about that?’ And Chris said, ‘You
mean what are you going to do about that,’” Murphy said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Murphy said he put all he learned in the back of his mind
and acted on instinct.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I think instinct is your most powerful tool that you have
as an actor. Nothing must be predetermined,” he said. “So therefore you mustn’t
have a plan about how you’re gonna play stuff. And I love that. It’s like being
buffeted by the wind and being buffeted by emotion.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Emily Blunt, who played Oppenheimer’s tortured wife,
describes being in a scene with Murphy as a “very visceral” experience. She
doesn’t know of many people who can do what he does. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“If you’re as agile as someone like Cillian, and as
vulnerable, and as clever, you can play it all,” she said. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Playing it all </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">While “Oppenheimer” may be the role that made Murphy a
household name, he’s been acting for decades, starting in his hometown of Cork,
Ireland. Murphy and his brother had a band in high school and performing led
him to an acting class and then his first play [presented by the Corcadorca Theatre
Company] in the Triskel Arts Centre, which housed a small stage with 100 seats.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He was 20 in 1996 when he acted in his first play, “Disco
Pigs.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I was very comfortable on stage in front of an audience
from when I was little. I never had any nerves doing that,” Murphy said. “It
felt natural, you know? And thrilling.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Some of his earliest audiences were “drunk guys out of their
mind bashing up against” a fire escape door. It used to energize him.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“So I remember learning about, like, taking whatever you
have — sort of responding to whatever the energy is in the room and using it,”
he said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Today, the former stage is undergoing a transformation so it
can be used by aspiring actors. Murphy, who hadn’t been back to the space since
1996, visited it with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Since that first play, there have been a dozen others and 40
movies. Murphy’s breakout role as a leading man came with 2013’s “Peaky
Blinders” [TV series, 2013-22]. In the series, Murphy plays Thomas Shelby, who
survives World War I and goes on to lead a family of gangsters.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I like to be challenged. And I, and when I read something,
I want to go, ‘I don’t really know how I can do that,” Murphy said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Murphy came into his own during his 10 years acting in “Peaky
Blinders.” Early in his career, he heard from “one of the Sydneys,” either
Lumet or Pollack — he’s not sure — that it takes 30 years to make an actor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It’s not just technique and experience and all that, it’s
maturing as a human being and trying to grapple with life and figure it out,
and all of that stuff. So by the time you’ve been doing it for 30 years, you
have all of that banked, hopefully,” Murphy said. “And eventually, then I think
you’ll get to a point where you might be an OK actor.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">What’s next for Murphy </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Murphy’s newest movie is “Small Things Like These,” which
premiered Thursday at the Berlin International Film Festival. He plays Bill
Furlong, tormented by injustice that he sees on his route delivering coal. His
wife fears his empathy will upend their lives. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Murphy is joined in the critically acclaimed movie by Eileen
Walsh, who’s known Murphy longer than any other actor, having acted with him in
“Disco Pigs.” Walsh has seen how much Murphy will put into his roles.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“From the very beginning, our warm-ups for ‘Disco Pigs’
involved us punching each other quite hard,” she said. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Regardless of how far Murphy’s pushing has taken him, he
still sees himself as an actor, not a movie star.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Oh, OK, am I? I think you can be both. You know, I’ve never
understood that term, really, ‘movie star,’” he said. “I’ve always just felt
like I’m an actor. That’s, I think, a term for other people, rather than for
me.”</span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>DISCO PIGS</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Matt Wolf</span></span></span> </h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Since
this post is about acting as much as it’s about Cillian Murphy and </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Oppenheimer</span><i style="color: #783f04;">, I thought it
would be interesting to see a review of Murphy’s début performance in </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Disco
Pigs </span><i style="color: #783f04;">on stage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Below is the notice
published in </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Variety</span><i><span style="color: #783f04;"> on 21 September 1997 of the London première of the
play (Bush Theatre, 3-27 September 1997), after its début in Cork and its performances at the Edinburgh Festival (</span><a href="https://variety.com/1997/legit/reviews/disco-pigs-1117329465/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Disco Pigs
(variety.com)</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">).]</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Language can be
both the blessing and the blight of the Irish theater, and in the case of
"Disco Pigs," it falls somewhere in between. Written in an invented
patois that suggests high-adrenaline baby talk filtered through Ireland's thick
Cork accent, Enda Walsh's play marks an impressive linguistic feat that
nonetheless reaps diminishing returns. Whereas the novel speech in a play like
"The Skriker" [1994 play by Caryl Churchill] induces a real rush, the
grunts of "Disco Pigs" wear out their not always intelligible
welcome: For a 70-minute piece, it's a fairly long sit. The play was a hit at
the recent Edinburgh Festival [7-30 August 1997], and one can see why, since it
possesses the virtues on which that festival thrives: youth, energy and speed.
But seen in London amid a season that has hosted a virtual flood of Irish
drama, the play looks like a belated addition to the New Brutalism in vogue at
the moment.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Brutalism (more commonly an
architectural style) in literature and drama is characterized by raw,
unadorned, and often unsettling or violent themes and imagery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may be a tactic to reflect the harsh
realities of the world, such as poverty, violence, and social injustice as a
way to give voice to the marginalized and oppressed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can be seen as a way to challenge societal
norms and conventions or to explore the darker aspects of human nature, such as
violence, addiction, and mental illness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“New Brutalism” in literature and drama arose around the 1980s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some examples of New Brutalist plays are: <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">One Flea Spare</span></i> (1995) by Naomi
Wallace, <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Shopping and Fucking</span></i> (1996)
by Mark Ravenhill, and <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bloody
Sunday </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">(2005) by Richard
Norton-Taylor.]</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Runt (Eileen Walsh)
and Pig (Cillian Murphy) — teenagers both — lead abusive, anti-social lives,
yearning for sex and chips and booze (not always in that order) and ready to
fly into a tantrum (and worse) when plans go awry. The two define one another’s
existence and speak of themselves as a Celtic Bonnie and Clyde, weaned on
“Baywatch” and “Never Can Say Goodbye” and yearning for the true release that
their dreary circumstances won’t allow.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On a set by Aedin
Cosgrove that suggests a low-rent arena of sorts (two red metal chairs are the
only props), gawky Runt plays realist to the feisty, mercurial Pig.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Director Pat Kiernan
rightly treats the piece as an in-your-face mood swing shifting between
ferocity and elegy, and he exhibits a real find in Eileen Walsh’s (no relation
to the playwright) awkward, cropped-haired Runt. As the most pugnacious of
soulmates, Murphy has the less engaging role, though it’s a tribute to both
actors that their body language tells its own compelling story long after the
author’s own talking-in-tongues has begun to pall.</span></span></p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span></span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>‘OPPENHEIMER’: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S STARRY <br /> <o:p></o:p></u></span></span></span><u style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">BIOPIC </u><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">IS BIG, LOUD, AND A MUST-SEE</span></u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">”<br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by David Fear</span></span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span><br /></h3><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u> <o:p></o:p></u></span></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[On the other hand . . . .</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Scott Pelley’s interview </i><span style="color: #783f04;">is</span><i style="color: #783f04;"> about </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Oppenheimer</span><i style="color: #783f04;">, so here’s a review of
the film.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s David Fear’s column from </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Rolling
Stone</span><i><span style="color: #783f04;"> on 19 June 2023 (</span><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/oppenheimer-review-christopher-nolan-cillian-murphy-florence-pugh-1234783350/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">'Oppenheimer'
Review: Christopher Nolan Epic Falls Short of Greatness (rollingstone.com)</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">)—just
one of dozens that covered this Oscar-nominated hit of the past season.</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan</span></span></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small;">’</i><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">s biographical thriller film that
chronicles the career of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67),
focusing on his direction of the Manhattan Project during World War II, which
developed the atom bomb. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nolan wrote,
directed, and co-produced the film for Universal Pictures, Atlas Entertainment,
and Syncopy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The studios released the movie
on 13 July 2023 in the United Kingdom and 17 July in the United States.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>Oppenheimer<i> is the fifth highest-grossing movie
worldwide that runs three hours or longer, after </i>Avengers: Endgame<i>
(2019), </i>Avatar: The Way of Water<i> (2022), </i>Titanic<i> (1997), and </i>The
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King<i> (2003).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s Nolan’s highest-grossing non-Batman
film, and his third highest-grossing overall, after </i>The Dark Knight<i>
(2008) and </i>The Dark Knight Rises<i> (2012).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In September 2023, </i>Oppenheimer<i> became the highest-grossing biographical
film of all time, surpassing </i>Bohemian Rhapsody<i> (2018).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the second-highest-grossing R-rated
film of all time, behind </i>Joker<i> (2019) and the highest-grossing World War
II-related film, surpassing </i>Dunkirk<i> (2017), also a Nolan film.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>Wikipedia <i>reports that the film received critical
acclaim, primarily for its direction, cast performances (particularly from
Murphy, Blunt, and Downey), and visuals; it was frequently ranked as one of
Nolan's best films.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On </i>Rotten
Tomatoes<i>, 93% of 496 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating
of 8.6/10. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>Metacritic<i> assigned
the film a score of 90 out of 100.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>Oppenheimer<i>, also according to </i>Wikipedia<i>, was
praised by other filmmakers as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oliver
Stone deemed the film “a classic, which I never believed could be made in this
climate.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paul Schrader called </i>Oppenheimer<i>,
“the best, most important film of this century,” while Denis Villeneuve called
it “a masterpiece.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The film has received 13
nominations (including Murphy’s Best Actor nod) for the 96th Academy Awards to
become Nolan’s most Oscar-nominated film, surpassing the eight nominations
achieved by </i>The Dark Knight<i> (2008),
</i>Inception<i> (2010), and </i>Dunkirk<i> (2017).]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Inception<i>
filmmaker’s extensive, exhaustive portrait of the “father of the atomic bomb”
is both thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and not enough</i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the beginning,
there were simply explosions. Smaller bangs — the big one would come much
later, in the New Mexico desert. But for J. Robert Oppenheimer, the quantum
physicist who would guide the greatest scientific minds of his generation
toward creating a doomsday device, it was all just a constant collision and
coming apart of matter in his head. Put the man in a lab, and he’s hopeless.
Let him roam in the world of theories, and Oppenheimer could hear what a mentor
dubbed “the music of science.” Those symphonies gave him visions of black
holes, collapsing stars, developing nebulae, gaseous eruptions, particles
moving at the speed of light, molecules spinning, atoms splitting. He sees
these things, and then we see these things, rendered in 70mm IMAX. Any
filmmaker can create a cinematic universe. (Many have. Too many, some might
say.) Very few can show you how a genius perceives the building blocks of our
universe, right before that same person imagines something that threatens our
existence in it.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This is what Christopher
Nolan does in <i>Oppenheimer,</i> a biopic on the “father of the
atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject,
these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the
only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there
are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any
given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white,
its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and
the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to
mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who
Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to
communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But those
interspersed shots of cosmic debris and microscopic detonations, some of which
abruptly interrupt exchanges and others that smoothly transition viewers from
one scene to the next, are perfect examples of how to let you experience
someone like Oppenheimer’s perspective by <i>showing,</i> rather than
telling. And it sometimes feels like those two camps — the cinematic and the
chatty-to-a-fault — are fighting it out on Nolan’s massive canvas in a way that
resembles nuclear fission minus the energy release.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Taking its cues from
the exhaustive, Pulitzer-winning book <i>American Prometheus</i> by
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin [2006; Vintage Books; 721 pages], <i>Oppenheimer </i>seeks
to cram as much of the man’s life, his work, his elevation to national hero,
his eventual persecution, and his personal demons into three hours. Just for
good measure, Nolan throws in not one but two competing courtroom dramas as
well. There’s a roll-the-dice sensation throughout: Scenes of people sitting in
rooms talking can seem thrilling or plodding, clarify historical conflicts and
complicated concepts or confuse the hell out of you. Set pieces feel sweeping
one second, and like they’re sucking the oxygen out of the room the next. Then,
suddenly, the movie cuts to a huge close-up of Murphy, his eyes suggesting a
man wrestling for his soul, and you’re transfixed. As with so much of Nolan’s
work, you can feel a truly great film peeking out in fits and spurts within a
longer, slightly uneven one.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s a tough thing
to admit, given that Nolan is one of Hollywood’s few name-above-the-title
auteurs left standing. He can still get an original mega-budgeted film
greenlit, and has taken on the mantle of keeping alive not just film as a
medium but film as a physical means of storytelling. His work is intellectual
yet visceral, philosophical yet pulse-pounding; he’s always managed to smuggle
big ideas into multiplexes via blockbuster templates, even in genres he hasn’t
completely terraformed. Like its better half in the joint entity now known
as “Barbenheimer,” <i>Oppenheimer</i> isn’t afraid to talk up to an
audience (although in <i>Barbie</i>‘s case, the degree of difficulty
in doing that via a decades-old brand of dolls feels damn near revolutionary).
And along with that shiny happy toy story, Nolan’s biography of a key figure of
the 20th century has been burdened with the responsibility of saving motion
pictures from financial instability and existential free fall. Heavy are the
heads that wear the crown, etc.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">So let us now praise
movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. <i>Oppenheimer</i> is
most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the
curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful
of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a
godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars
alike. When Nolan is on, he is <i>on</i>, as evidenced by the early scenes
of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, all
mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small
New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for
a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass
destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to
win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the
gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them
to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Concentrating on the
mounting pressure to deliver, the miniature steps forward with each
behind-the-scenes breakthrough, and the accountability factor causing friction
between the project leader and his patrons, <i>Oppenheimer</i> becomes
its own ticking time bomb. All the while, fractures are happening within the
team, and the precariousness of the situation, along with Oppenheimer’s
willingness to go through with opening this Pandora’s Box, brings things to a
tipping point. These scenes remind you of how Nolan understands the use of
sound and vision as a means of emotional engagement (helped in no small part by
his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig
Göransson‘s score); how his ability to fold complex ideas into presentations of
human behavior, and vice versa, comes through in his writing; how the timing of
a cut and the framing of an image can transform a moment from grandiose or
mundane to sublime. The gent is a genuine filmmaker. He’s a big-screen artist,
the bigger the screens the better.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And these sequences,
in particular, reinforce the notion of Nolan as a great director of actors,
even if the performances overall are across the board in terms of screen time
and effectiveness. Not just Murphy, who’s worked with <i>The Dark Knight</i> director
before and delivers an Oppenheimer that goes far beyond the
there-goeth-the-great-man clichés associated with many biopics. There’s Damon,
whose repartee with Murphy approaches screwball levels. There’s Robert
Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
who turns a perceived slight into a postwar vendetta against Oppenheimer. (It’s
not an exaggeration to say that Downey does some of the best work of his long
career here.) There’s Gary Oldman as President Harry S. Truman, who turns a
single scene in the Oval Office into a damning portrait of the POTUS as a
complete bastard.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There’s Florence
Pugh, and Emily Blunt, and Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Rami
Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine,
Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich… it’s actually quicker to
list who’s <i>not</i> in <i>Oppenheimer.</i> Nolan has said
he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of
who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s
for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so
many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating,
handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to
keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Oppenheimer</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> peaks with the Trinity test, a roughly
10-minute sequence that follows the lead-up to the detonation of the first
atomic bomb, its blast, and the sense of shock and awe that greets this
game-changing “gadget.” Soon after, we see Oppenheimer addressing his fellow
scientists about their victory, and he’s greeted with visions of blinding
lights, burnt corpses, and empty bleachers. It’s a climactic gut punch… and
there’s still another hour or so to go. Which leads us to the less-than-stellar
aspects of Nolan’s A-list A-bomb-creator’s origin story. Threaded in between
the race against time to craft this killing machine prototype are recreations
of a 1954 tribunal over renewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance, in light of
the Soviets now having their own nuclear weapons, and a 1959 congressional
hearing on Strauss’s bid to join President Eisenhower’s cabinet. It’s here that
we get flashback glimpses of the physicist’s career before Los Alamos, his
tenure at UC Berkeley, his marriage to Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, his attempt
to reconcile what he’s unleashed on the world and what turns out to be a
contentious relationship with Strauss.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s also where the
movie starts to waver in terms of storytelling, cutting back and forth to
create a tapestry of the 20th century that’s meant to enrich the scenes of
science being used and abused in the name of warfare (Nolan’s politics are a
moving target in this film, as they are in much of his work, though it’s safe
to say he’s solidly anti-nukes here). They end up drawing both the focus and
the momentum away from the movie, even if they do flesh some aspects out and
give Downey a primo showcase. You suddenly become more aware of Nolan’s
tendency to favor giant compositions and conceptual overreaches over connecting
narrative dots in certain places, which has been a longstanding criticism.
There are some questionable bits of business that play out as well. It’s one
thing to let Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, whose Communist affiliation would still haunt
J. Robert decades after their torrid affair ended, to be the one who hands him
the Sanskrit poem that would be his response to Trinity: “Now I am become Death,
destroyer of worlds.” It’s another to have her do it while she’s writing
topless on top of him, which is… a choice. And the less said about her and
Murphy getting hot and heavy during an interrogation-session hallucination, the
better — we can now say that sex scenes are <i>not</i> Nolan’s forte.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As those two trials
intertwine and paint a picture of Oppenheimer as both McCarthy-era martyr and,
ultimately, the victor over Strauss’s smear campaign during the movie’s last
act, there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails.
In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as
big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the
big picture as a whole. <i>Oppenheimer</i> is one of those
shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and
overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind
the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from <i>Reds</i> to <i>The
Right Stuff,</i> and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with
the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens.
Nolan has made what can sometimes feel like a maddeningly elusive attempt to
make a grand statement about then and now, only to continually drown himself
out in the technical equivalent of the Zimmer Honk. He’s also given us one
of the only movies of the summer that you really <i>have</i> to
see.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><b></b></div>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-53776999077777234682024-02-22T10:00:00.075-05:002024-02-22T14:26:50.036-05:00'Greenwood Pond: Double Site'<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="text-align: center;">Supplement to “Conserving Modern Art”</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[On 11 December 2018, I
published "Conserving Modern Art" on </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Rick On Theater </span><i style="color: #783f04;">(</i><a href="https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/12/conserving-modern-art.html"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Rick On Theater: Conserving Modern Art</span></i></a><i style="color: #783f04;">).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a post
about the conservation and preservation of modern artworks made of experimental
and non-traditional materials and in innovative styles that don’t age well or
lend themselves easily to cleaning.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Last month, the </i>New York Times<i> published an article about Mary Miss’s
environmental installation in Iowa, </i>Greenwood Pond: Double Site<i> (1989-96), that's going to be
dismantled because it’s deteriorating and the museum that owns it doesn’t
have the money to repair it. The culprit is “Iowa’s extreme climate,”
says the </i>Times<i>, exacerbated by climate change.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">
[I'm reposting the </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Times </span><i style="color: #783f04;">report
as a kind of follow-up to "Conserving Modern Art," but I’m going
to supplement it with some thoughts of my own, with reference to that 2018
post, as well as several others on related topics that overlap with the
circumstances in Iowa. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those previous
posts are: “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010 (</i><a href="https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/books-in-print.html"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Rick On Theater: Books in Print</span></i></a><i style="color: #783f04;">); “We Get Letters,” 7 April 2015 (</i><a href="https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2015/04/we-get-letters.html"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Rick On Theater: We Get Letters</span></i></a><i style="color: #783f04;">); and “‘The Future of the Past’” by Evan Moffitt (</i><span style="color: #783f04;">T: The New York Times Style Magazine</span><i style="color: #783f04;">), 26 October
2023 (</i><a href="https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-future-of-past.html"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Rick On Theater: "The Future of the Past"</span></i></a><i style="color: #783f04;">).</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Each of those reports
touches on some aspect of preserving and retrieving precarious but precious
work of human hands and minds, largely because they were made of or relied on
either materials that were innately ephemeral, such as computer-based or video
art and electronic and digital documents, or materials that just didn’t stand
up to the contemporary environment.]</i></span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>HARSH WEATHER AND
ECONOMICS IMPERIL LAND ART</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Julia Halperin</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Halpern’s report on the
potential loss of Mary Miss’s site-specific environmental sculptural
installation ran in the </i><i style="color: #783f04;">“Arts” section (sec. C) of the</i><i style="color: #783f04;"> </i><span style="color: #783f04;">New
York Times </span><i style="color: #783f04;">on 23 January 2024.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was
posted on the paper’s website on 22 January as “A Leading Land Art Installation
Is Imperiled. By Its Patron” (</i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/arts/design/mary-miss-land-art-des-moines-museum.html?searchResultPosition=1"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Leading Land Art Work by Mary
Miss Is Imperiled by Its Patron - The New York Times (nytimes.com</span><span style="color: #783f04;">)</span></i></a><i style="color: #783f04;">).</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Biography
of Mary Miss, excerpted from </i>Wikipedia<i>, updated on 24 January 2024:</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Mary Miss (born May 27, 1944) is an American artist
and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape
architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative
in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public
administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in
decoding their surrounding environment.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Early life and education<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Miss was born May 27, 1944, in New York City, but
she spent her youth moving every year while living primarily in the western
United States.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Miss studied art and received a B.A. from the
University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966. Miss later received an M.F.A.
from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture of Maryland Institute College of Art in
1968.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Influence in public art<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>As a public artist, Miss is considered a pioneer in
environmental art and site-specific art, as well a leading sculptor during the
feminist movement of the 1970s. She was a founding member of the journal </i>Heresies<i>. From her
earliest work, she has been interested in bringing the specific attributes of a
site into focus along with and audience engagement within public space. Miss’
work crosses boundaries between landscape architecture, architecture, urban
design, and graphic communication. Her work creates situations that emphasize a
site's history, ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone
unnoticed. She has been particularly interested in redefining the role of the
artist in the public domain.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>In her influential 1979 essay, </i>Sculpture in the Expanded
Field<i>, art critic Rosalind Krauss opens with a description of Mary Miss's, </i>Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys<i>.
Krauss uses Miss's work to support her examination of sculpture's
interdisciplinary nature between architecture and landscape. </i>South Cove<i>
(1988), a permanent public project in Battery Park, is a seminal project in
Miss' career as it signified new possibilities for artists working in the
public realm. The project, located on a three-acre site at the base of the
riverfront Esplande, was made in collaboration with architect Stanton Eckstut
and landscape designer Susan Child. "South Cove brings the public more
intimately in contact with the water than any other component of Battery park
City or, indeed, any other Manhattan riverside park."</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Miss has worked on the development of the project </i>City as Living Laboratory<i>,
which, according to the project's description, collaborates with artists,
environmental designers and scientists to focus on and explore sustainability
in cities.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Exhibitions<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Miss was included in the exhibition </i>Twenty-Six Contemporary Women
Artists<i> at the Aldrich Museum in 1971. Lucy Lippard was the curator, and
other artists included Alice Aycock and Jackie Winsor. She was also included in
the exhibition </i>Four Young Americans<i> alongside the artists Ann McCoy, Ree
Morton, and Jackie Winsor, curated by Ellen H. Johnson and Athena Tacha at the
Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Along with others, Miss's work has been included in
the exhibitions </i>Decoys, Complexes and Triggers<i> at the Sculpture Center in New York, </i>Weather
Report: Art and Climate Change<i> organized by Lucy Lippard at the Boulder
Museum of Contemporary Art, </i>More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in
the 1970s<i> at the Rose Art Museum, and </i>Century City: Art and Culture in
the Modern Metropolis<i> at the Tate Modern.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Miss has also been the subject of exhibitions at the
Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of
Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard
University's Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Awards and honors<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Miss received the New York City American Society of
Landscape Architects President's Award in 2010, the American Academy in Rome's
Centennial Medal in 2001, and a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of
Architects in 1990. She received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation in 1986. She was awarded grants by the National Endowment
for the Arts in 1984, 1975, and 1974. She was named as a distinguished alumni
of UC Santa Barbara in 1985.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Personal life<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Miss married sculptor Bruce Colvin in 1967, but
later divorced in 1986. She is currently married to George Peck, a New
York-based artist. They live together in Tribeca where Miss also has her
studio.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Here’s
Miss’s own description of </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Greenwood Pond: Double Site</span><i><span style="color: #783f04;">, from her website (</span><a href="http://marymiss.com/projects/greenwood-pond-double-site/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">GREENWOOD POND:
DOUBLE SITE | Mary Miss</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">):</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Initiated by the Des Moines Art Center as one of a
series of artist¹s installations in the Museum park, the project was developed
over a seven year period. Given the number of organizations interested in the
park, I decided to collaborate with various local groups to make a place which
would operate on several levels: a site which could be layered onto another
site and which would have multiple readings. The importance of the park to the
immediate neighborhood is made apparent by invoking and building upon layers of
associations and memories which have collected over time. Walking around the
pond, shifting between overviews and cut-outs within the water surface, the
individual visitor is able to trace an intimate view of the place while putting
together a new understanding of how it operates visually and physically.
Additionally, the makeup and processes of a Midwestern wetlands become clearer
as one understands their role in the immediate environment.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">Paths lead the viewer to multiple ways of seeing
this place. A walkway overhanging the edge of the pond makes it possible to
move out over the water. Proceeding around the water’s edge a ramp disappears
into the water after getting the visitor down to the level of the pond. The
line of this ramp extends in a long arc across the pond marked first by wood
pilings and then by a concrete-lined trough cut into the water. Adjacent to
this arc, on the land the walkway continues around the edge of the pond past a
series of structures, including a pavilion, a mound and a curving wood trellis
to form the other side of the ellipse. A large leaf shaped space is outlined by
these structures affirming and making palpable the connection between the land
and water. The covered pavilion with a seating area inside is built up against
the curving mound, which rises almost to the height of the pavilion and seems
to wrap it into the landscape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Continuing around the edge of the pond a small bridge pavilion allows
the viewer to descend to the water once again in an area filled with water
lilies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Proceeding further there is an
entrance down into a concrete trough<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>where one is able to sit at eye level with the surface of the water;
having been kept to the edge, at a distance, the visitor is able to actually
enter the pond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One feels the protection
of the concrete walls holding back the pressure of the surrounding water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Above the trough, on the other side of the
path, is a series of stone terraces, on a hillside filled with prairie grass.
Movement is key to the experience of the project; the visitor constructs an
understanding of the site through the experience the multiple elements and the
relationship created between them.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i><u>[</u></i><i>Let me define some pertinent
terms for readers who aren’t up on art jargon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Site-specific art, for instance, is artwork created for an explicit place.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Habitually, the artist plans and creates
the artwork with the exact location in mind. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Site-specific art can include sculpture,
graffiti, rock balancing, and other art forms, as well as combinations of forms
and materials. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Installations can be in cities,
remote natural settings (like Miss’s </i>Greenwood Pond<i>), or even underwater.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Site-specific
installations can be intended for permanent installation or temporary display,
like the wrapping projects of Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The setting of a site-specific artwork is so
vital that, as sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1938) said of it: “To move the work
is to destroy the work.”</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Environmental
art is work that’s planned to surround or involve the participation of
spectators</i><i> in </i><i>a three-dimensional space to
enclose them and involve them in a whole range of sensory experiences—visual,
auditory, kinetic, tactile, and sometimes even olfactory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, the artist creates an </i>environment<i> into which the
viewer enters.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Environmental
art often evokes ecological concerns—especially in the era of climate change—but
isn’t always so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The artists are
inspired by nature and often use natural materials such as leaves, flowers,
branches, ice, soil, sand, stone, and water as the basis of their artwork. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore, by situating their work in particular
places—that is to say, making it </i>site-specific<i>—environmental art often seeks to
both transform the way that the site is viewed, while also revealing what was
already there.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Closely
allied to environmental art, land art, also known as earth art, means artworks created
within the natural environment—but more than that, they’re created </i>from<i> the environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s art that’s made directly in the
landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in
the landscape using natural materials such as sand, earth, rocks, twigs, and
water found on site.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>Greenwood Pond<i> isn’t so
much land art as environmental art because Miss brought in construction
materials, principally lumber, that wasn’t earthen or indigenous to the
location.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A more precise example of land
art is </i>Spiral Jetty<i> (1970) by Robert Smithson</i><i><span style="background: white;"> (1938-73) on the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah,
or </span></i><span style="background: white;">City <i>(1970-2022) by Michael Heizer (b. 1944)
in rural Lincoln County, Nevada.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
sites of land art are often distant from populated areas and therefore fairly
inaccessible. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Photo documentation is
commonly displayed in urban art galleries and often sold to support the work
itself.</i></span><i>]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">An Iowa museum says
it will dismantle a celebrated work because it lacks the money to repair it.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The American land
artist and designer Mary Miss was traveling in Europe in October when she
received the kind of news that no one in her line of work wants to hear. One of
her most significant artworks, owned by an Iowa museum, would need to be closed
to the public because it had fallen into disrepair and parts of it were at risk
of collapsing.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Six weeks later,
Miss heard from the <a name="_Hlk159459382">Des Moines Art Center </a>that her
environmental installation would be dismantled entirely. The word came from the
art center’s new director, Kelly Baum, who said it would cost $2.7 million to
repair the project, leaving the museum no choice.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Created between 1989
and 1996, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” is one of the very few environmental
installations in the collection of any American museum and is considered to be
the first urban wetland project in the country. Its imminent demolition has angered
landscape architecture advocates and upset Miss, who is part of a generation
of pioneering female land artists receiving renewed scholarly
attention.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“The things that
have become so important in my later work — engagement of communities,
collaboration with scientists, being able to take on something like climate
change as an artist and have a seat at the table with politicians and educators
— it started there,” Miss, 79, said by phone from her home in Manhattan. With
its wooden boardwalk and concrete walkways that curve along the edge of the
water and its cantilevered bridges, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” invites
passers-by to explore the landscape; viewers can climb up a tower to see the water
from above or descend into a sunken structure to experience it at eye level.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The debate over the
work’s fate has highlighted the difficulty of preserving public artworks,
especially in environments with increasingly extreme weather. A wave of
ambitious outdoor projects commissioned in the 1980s and ’90s have, over the
past 15 years, required extensive maintenance or repair, according to Leigh
Arnold, curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, who included
Miss in the celebrated recent exhibition “Groundswell: Women of Land Art”
[Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, 23 September 2023-7 January 2024]. The
case of “Greenwood Pond: Double Site”<i> </i>is “symptomatic of this
greater problem around site-specific installations in that there is this kind
of ‘set it and forget it’ attitude,” Arnold said.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the late ’80s
when artists were rethinking what sculpture could look like outside the
white-cube gallery space, the Des Moines Art Center invited Miss, along with
the sculptors Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, to develop site-specific works
for the city-owned park<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>where
the museum is situated. Miss chose a derelict pond. Over the course of seven
years, she worked with Indigenous communities, a botanist from Iowa State
University, and other groups to restore the area to its original wetland state.
In its contract with Miss, in 1994, under the former director Michael Danoff,
the museum pledged to “reasonably protect and maintain the project against the
ravages of time, vandalism, and the elements.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The museum says that
“Greenwood Pond: Double Site”<i> </i>has been “consistently maintained”
since its opening. In consultation with the artist, the museum completed
extensive repairs in 2014 and 2015, according to Amy Day, its director of
external affairs. But the use of residential deck wood, which has a life span
of around a decade, was no match for Iowa’s extreme climate.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“We understand very
well the desire to re-engineer and rebuild the work,” Day said. “However, Art
Center does not have these resources.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Miss noted that an
outdoor project she made with the same materials in St. Louis has been
incrementally upgraded over time, just as one might replace floorboards on a
porch, and remains in good shape. She led the effort to repair another one of
her installations, in South Cove, a public park in Battery Park City [Lower
Manhattan, New York City], in 2019.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Much of Miss’s work
focuses on making city residents more aware of their surroundings and their
connection to the natural world. For South Cove, Miss, along with the landscape
architect Susan Child and the architect Stanton Eckstut, transformed a concrete
platform above a landfill into a wild seacoast framed by subtle architectural
interventions. Writing in The New York Times<i> </i>in 1990, Tony Hiss
likened South Cove to New York fixtures like Central Park and Carnegie Hall for
its ability to “stretch our understanding of our connections to one another and
to the world the city serves.” In 2008, Miss founded City as Living
Laboratory, a nonprofit that brings together artists, scientists and urban
residents to tackle sustainability issues.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It is ironic that
other examples of Mary’s really ambitious public art projects aren’t in
collections of art museums, yet they are cared for in a way that ensures they
will continue to be a part of the public landscape,” Arnold, the Nasher
curator, said.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The museum said that
its agreement with the city of Des Moines to “remedy and/or remove any unsafe
conditions related to artwork in Greenwood Park” takes precedence over its
agreement with the artist. Ben Page, Des Moines’s director of parks and
recreation, said that the city did not demand the work’s removal but supports
the museum’s decision.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The treatment of
Miss’s installation is symbolic of the art world’s tendency to undervalue
environmental art, said Charles Birnbaum, the director of the Cultural
Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy group. The organization
helped rally support for “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” in 2014 and is leading
the opposition to its destruction. “Landscape architecture is treated as a
second- or third-class citizen,” Birnbaum said. “Sometimes it comes from a lack
of institutional memory — cultural amnesia for what they had.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Miss said she was
“shocked” by the museum’s estimate that it would cost $2.7 million to salvage
“Greenwood Pond: Double Site.” She wondered if the work could be repaired in
stages, rather than all at once, using a less expensive wood that could, in the
future, be replaced at more regular intervals.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Birnbaum suggested
that the museum consult the Des Moines Founders Garden Club or other patrons
who might have an interest in funding the work’s preservation. (Baum, the
director, told Miss she had had “numerous conversations” with the trustees, the
city and individuals who helped fund the work’s rehabilitation in 2014.) In a
letter sent to Miss on Jan. 17, the museum’s board wrote that any avenue that
called for replacing the materials “is not financially feasible and does not
comprise reasonable maintenance.” The museum’s operating budget in 2023 was
$7.7 million.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For Miss, the
decision feels especially ironic given her prominent position in recent
exhibitions revisiting women whose contributions had been minimized by
mainstream art history. Her work was included in “52 Artists: A Feminist
Milestone,” a restaging of a 1971 exhibition organized by the critic Lucy
Lippard at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut [6 June 2022-8 January
2023], as well as “Groundswell” at the Nasher. “Having this acknowledgment
begin to surface a bit again and then again be erased — again? Really?” Miss
said. “It’s just really hard.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In November 2007, I went
to an exhibit of the work of painter Morris Louis (1912-62) at the
Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (see my report on </i>ROT <i>on</i> <i>15
February 2010).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tacked on to the Louis show
was an exhibit intended to offer “insights into the Hirshhorn’s groundbreaking
conservation techniques developed to preserve and restore poured-paint canvases
by various artists.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was the origin
of my report “Conserving Modern Art.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[In that post, I recounted
this occurrence in my own small art collection:</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>I
had a serious problem . . . with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate
because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist
painting, </i>Intermezzo<i> (1958) by
Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of what the issue
here is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily
impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, . . . is one of the most
cherished pieces I have—because I love the painting for itself, because it’s
the first piece of art I ever owned, and because it was a specially selected
present from my parents . . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">In
the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics
were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist
had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large
clumps?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the paint dried, the globs
shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but
causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or
“scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the
canvas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew that if I didn’t do
something, I’d lose the painting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was
frantic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I even went so far as to write
to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now known
simply as The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on
the third floor of the old main building . . ., the school displayed a larger
Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I asked if they had encountered the same
problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>At
the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery
in downtown D.C.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I asked him to use his
contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save </i>Intermezzo<i> and he did . . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1987, I ended up paying five times the
painting’s purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to
stabilize it to prevent further deterioration. . . . <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure
for a New York second.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I’m currently working on a
collection of letters exchanged between my future parents during World War II.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, as I suggest in “We Get Letters,” all
their correspondence would be by e-mail or text, and none of it would have survived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Both my parents-to-be saved
the letters they received, however, and shortly after they were married, my dad
mounted and bound them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, 79 years
after they were written, 29 years after my father died and nine years after my
mother’s death, I can simply read them!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Now, though, I’m
confronted with another, related dilemma.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My transcription of the letters and my commentary, all 180-plus pages of
it, exists only on my hard disk and, eventually, on my blog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both of those are innately evanescent media
and require specific technology to retrieve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I’ve been working on the
letters project since 2016—that’s eight years of work on and off at a very
personally meaningful venture and I would like to preserve it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I read, appraised, paraphrased or
transcribed, interpreted, fact-checked, and commented on 182 pieces of
correspondence, and I’m already 77 years old, so I won’t be around a lot longer
to pass along this effort unless I can put into some form that’ll last.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I’ve been considering ways
of preserving the eventual post, with my commentary and notes,
permanently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One possibility is a
self-published book—though I haven't made any definite decisions yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ironically, that method reverts to an old
“technology” that electronic publication is supposed to have supplanted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In “Books in Print,” I write about the
pleasures of printed books, confessing that “there’s something about a book . .
. that makes me resist the idea of e-versions.”)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[How does this all relate
to Mary Miss and her </i>Greenwood Pond<i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her environmental installation, my Carton,
and the discussion of my parents’ 79-year-old correspondence are all points on
a continuum of perishable human artistic and intellectual accomplishment that
could—or will—soon be lost forever.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[My letters project is
dependent on technology not just for its creation, but for its preservation and
retrievability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m only in minimal
control of that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I pointed out in “We
Get Letters”: “E-mail”—as well as other forms of electronic writing—"is
basically ephemeral . . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s more,
they can’t easily be passed along later to repositories like libraries” or
later family members and friends after we’re gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[As investor, public
speaker, and writer John Coleman (b. 1981) expressed it in a 2004 </i>Harvard Business Report<i>, “Email is ‘permanent’ in
its own way; our electronic messages are easy to keep and search in huge
volumes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they aren’t tangible and
enduring in the same way those old notes are.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[(In 2015, I came across a cache
of letters my father sent to my mother while they were apart for a month in
1962, when my dad was in Germany before my mother joined him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I transcribed them and posted them as “Home
Alone” on 12. 15, and 18 June 2015.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
e-mail or texting had existed 62 years ago, would I have even found those
messages?)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[As for the Carton and </i>Greenwood Pond<i>, they are both vulnerable because of
the materials from which they’re made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Norman
Carton’s painting wasn’t made with experimental pigments; the oil paint he used
was the same as that used by artists for decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was new was the way he applied it to the
canvas: thickly, just as it came out of the tube.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Artists had only just begun to use that technique,
so no one knew how it would perform over time.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I doubt it was something
anyone—artists, collectors, gallerists, curators—was concerned about when
Carton and his contemporaries starting experimenting with impasto.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How could they know that 30 years after </i>Intermezzo<i> was painted, 25 years after my parents
gave it to me for my 14th birthday, and 5 years after the artist died, trouble
would start to appear.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Mary Miss didn’t use
particularly new-fangled materials or innovative techniques to build </i>Greenwood Pond: Second Site<i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, she used basic materials—treated
lumber, metal mesh, steel, stone, and concrete, all easily repaired or replaced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What she and the curators and directors of
the Des Moines Art Center didn’t reckon on was the effects on an outdoor
installation of Iowa’s harsh winter climate, particularly with the added battering
of climate change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On an annual budget
of $7.7 million, the museum says it can’t afford the $2.7 million to repair </i>Greenwood
Pond<i>.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The DMAC announced last October
that “public access” to the work has been “temporarily suspended” while it
undergoes a “complete structural review.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soon after that, however, with no substantial consultation
with Miss, the museum notified the artist of the decision to demolish </i>Greenwood Pond<i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Miss said she’s “shocked that this decision
has been reached so quickly on the future of </i>Greenwood Pond: Double Site<i>.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The Cultural Landscape
Foundation, a non-profit that “educates and engages the public to make our
shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its
stewards,” suggests the DMAC has not fulfilled its contractual obligation to
“reasonably protect and maintain” the work.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="color: #783f04;">[TCLF is calling for the
DMAC to reverse its demolition decision and, instead, to engage in meaningful
consultations with Miss and others to find a solution that restores the artwork
and develops a long-term, ongoing maintenance plan.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">The organization has raised many questions
regarding the DMAC’s decision, laid out on its website at </span><a href="https://www.tclf.org/acclaimed-artist-mary-miss-renowned-land-art-installation-greenwood-pond-double-site-be-torn-down"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Acclaimed
Artist Mary Miss’ Renowned Land Art Installation "Greenwood Pond: Double
Site" to be Torn Down by Des Moines Art Center | TCLF</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">Among these are: what are the DMAC’s
maintenance conservation protocols concerning permanent works in its collection
and how were they applied to this artwork? and how and why did the DMAC permit </span></i><span style="color: #783f04;">Greenwood Pond: Double Site</span><i style="color: #783f04;"> to deteriorate to the
point where demolition was thought to be the only option?</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Julia Halperin is a freelance
arts and culture journalist, writing monthly column for the </i>Art Newspaper<i>, the </i>New York Times<i>,
the </i>New Yorker<i>, and the </i>Financial Times<i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After working her way up through the ranks at
the </i>Art Newspaper<i> to museums editor, Halperin was appointed
executive editor of </i>Artnet News<i> in 2017. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She co-founded the </i>Burns Halperin Report<i>
in 2020, which has become an influential indicator of inclusivity in the art
world.]<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-90069739380594711582024-02-17T10:00:00.049-05:002024-02-17T15:04:29.739-05:00"Minneapolis chamber group performs music written by Polish prisoners at Auschwitz"<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by <b>Fred de Sam Lazaro<i> </i></b>and<b><i> </i>Simeon Lancaster</b></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[On Sunday,
15 October 2023 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church
in Minneapolis, The Isles Ensemble, a chamber music ensemble who present a
series of Sunday evening concerts at the church, presented a concert of music
composed and arranged by Jewish musicians interned at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Fred
de Sam Lazaro and Simeon Lancaster’s report on the unique performance was aired
on the </i>PBS NewsHour <i>on</i> <i>29
January 2024.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>[For
coverage of other examples of performances in Nazi concentration camps, see "‘Prisoners
in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it’s being discovered and performed’"
by Jon Wertheim (2 March 2022), "‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life
and the Theatre in Terezin’" by Bahar Akpinar (7 March 2022), “</i>The Last Cyclist<i>” (2 and 5 September 2022).</i></span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Geoff Bennett,
NewsHour Co-Anchor: </b>Observances were held across the world over the weekend
for the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day [27 January 2023].</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Fred De Sam Lazaro has the story of one effort to preserve
and honor the music performed by prisoners in orchestras that were a fixture in
the concentration camps.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">His report is part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed, The
Isles Ensemble: </b>This is a concert about music and Jewish identity, in
particular, my own.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>An
unlikely theme perhaps in a Minneapolis Lutheran church, but coming just days
after October 7, as violence erupted in the Middle East, violist Kenneth Freed
said a timely one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed: </b>This
is a particularly painful and perilous time for all of us.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>The
works performed by the Minnesota-based Isles Ensemble ranged widely, a viola
and piano duet of the prayerful Kol Nidre and various works highlighting Jewish
experience and musical influence, this string quartet by Felix Mendelssohn for
instance, with a classic Jewish folk song embedded.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then there was one medley that didn’t quite fit in, or did
it? Here’s how it was introduced.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed: </b>This
music you’re going to hear is utterly shocking in its banality. Heads-up, it’s
charming cafe music.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>Banal,
he added, until you realize that it was arranged by members of the orchestra at
Auschwitz, performed by prisoners for the entertainment of Nazi S.S. guards at
the camp, guards apparently briefly setting aside their loathing of the
prisoner musicians.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed: </b>I
can’t even imagine. Let’s put it aside for a Sunday afternoon and we will
pretend that we have this relationship that isn’t based on ethnic cleansing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>Equally
jarring, the cheerful, upbeat tempo and titles of these pieces. This tango was
called “A Dream of Haiti” (phonetic).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">To provide more context or perspective during their
performance, it was punctuated by testimonies from the diaries of the
prisoners. This entry was read by cellist Laura Sewell.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Laura Sewell,
Musician: </b>“The smoke from the crematorium really annoyed my colleagues. It
was polluting the air, and it was hard to see the notes.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed: </b>It’s
unimaginable, some of those quotes. I can’t see the notes, but at least I get
to play. I mean, I get to live another day, right?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>And
the reason I can’t see those notes.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed: </b>And
the reason I can’t see them, because the crematorium is bellowing smoke from
dead Jews.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>The
original manuscripts, the musical arrangements used by the Minnesota ensemble,
reside permanently in the museum at Auschwitz today.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But they were first brought out into the world a few years
ago here at the University of Michigan School of Music.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Patricia Hall,
University of Michigan School of Music:</b> I mean, I personally could not
write a manuscript that is as neat as these are.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>Patricia
Hall is a professor of music theory. In 2018, she discovered hundreds of
manuscripts at the Auschwitz Museum, popular German songs of the ’30s and ’40s
arranged and adapted by prisoners for the camp orchestras.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Patricia Hall: </b>This
prisoner took the time to create this symbol of a bird out of musical symbols.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>In
Nazi death camps, being selected to play music was a much preferred assignment,
an alternative to backbreaking labor. Still, it was a precarious existence.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Patricia Hall: </b>There
was a particularly sadistic guard at the camp who would take prisoners out of
the orchestra and take them to Block 11 and shoot them. So there’s one anecdote
of one of the musicians estimating that up to 50 musicians were executed in
this way.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>Just
on a whim of the guard watching them?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Patricia Hall: </b>Yes,
just a whim. You see this number, 5665. And through that number, we have this
photograph. This is Antony Gargul (phonetic).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>Hall
selected a representative sample of 10, foxtrots, tangos, and waltzes, some
with vocals, to reproduce from modern-day performance, trying to stay faithful
to how they would have sounded in the camp.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With the university ensemble under conductor Oriol Sans, the
music was performed and recorded here in Ann Arbor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Patricia Hall: </b>I
was extremely careful about retaining exactly the instrumentation. I thought
these pieces were going to sound really quirky.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I couldn’t believe how beautiful they sounded. I was
completely surprised.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>Another
surprise, audience reaction. She’d originally planned to simply archive these
recordings in the university’s music library, figuring they’d be too painful to
hear. But Hall says there was strong interest at subsequent concerts, including
one at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage [Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan].</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And it piqued the interest of musicians like Ken Freed and
The Isles Ensemble.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A lot of people, I think, were almost reluctant to applaud,
in a sense.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed: </b>I
felt that too until we stood up. And it was like, I guess we should. But what
are we clapping for here?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>In
the church basement post-concert, Freed saw how the music had taken the
audience, as he put it, to a new dimension.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">1st Woman (in the
basement): </b>I don’t cry. And that stuff in the camps had me in tears.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">2nd Woman (in the
basement): </b>I just have chills. Playing the music would have been one thing,
but really putting those quotes in it, so you really did imagine yourself as in
the camp.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Freed: </b>That’s
kind of the reason I did today’s concert. It was to provide context to —
because you feel music before you start to think about it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Fred de Sam Lazaro: </b>Music
drawn for this concert from the historical breadth of Jewish tradition, he
said, offered as medicine in a world wracked by conflict.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Fred de Sam Lazaro in
Minneapolis.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Geoff Bennett: </b>And
Fred’s reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at the
University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
Isles musicians are Stephanie Arado, violin; Natsuki Kumagai, violin; Kenneth
Freed, viola; Tom Rosenberg, cello; Laura Sewell, cello.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Guest musicians at the performance were
Miryana Moteva, piano; Gabriel Campos Zamora, clarinet.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The
15 October concert comprised </i>Kol Nidrei <i>by Max Bruch (German; 1838-1920), </i>Baal
Shem Suite <i>(</i>Nigun, Improvisation<i>) by Ernest Bloch (Swiss-born
American; 1880-1959), </i>String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13 – I. Adagio-Allegro
Vivace <i>by Felix Mendelssohn (German; 1809-47), </i>Ride of the Valkyries <i>by
Richard Wagner (German; 1813-83), unearthed music arranged by Nazi prisoners
and </i>Music of<i> </i>Auschwitz<i> (German Waltzes interspersed with narrated
letters home from the arrangers) recovered by Patricia Hall (b. ca. 1955), </i>Kaddish
<i>by Maurice Ravel (French; 1875-1937), and </i>The Dreams and Prayers of
Isaac the Blind<i> by Osvaldo Golijov (Argentinian; b. 1960).</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Fred
de Sam Lazaro is director of the Under-Told Stories Project at the University
of St. Thomas in Minnesota, a program that combines international journalism
and teaching. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s served with the </i>PBS NewsHour<i> since 1985
and is a regular contributor and substitute anchor for PBS’s </i>Religion and
Ethics Newsweekly<i>.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>[Simeon
Lancaster is a journalist and videographer. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A 2017 graduate of </i></span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">the </i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">University of St. Thomas, he’s
a producer at the Under-Told Stories Project on </i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">PBS NewsHour</span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">.]</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-55276420114843427772024-02-12T10:00:00.068-05:002024-02-12T10:00:00.127-05:00'El Otro Oz,' Atlantic for Kids<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>El Otro Oz<i> (The other
Oz), a bilingual reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s classic 1900 children’s
adventure fantasy, </i>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, <i>presented</i><i> by the Atlantic Theater
Company’s Atlantic for Kids, the division of ATC that produces programs for
children, opened at </i><i>Atlantic Stage 2 (330 W. 16th Street in Manhattan’s
Chelsea neighborhood) on</i><i> 13 January.</i><i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(ATC’s
main stage is at 336 W. 20th Street.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>El Otro Oz<i> has a book by
Mando Alvarado and Tommy Newman, music and lyrics by Jaime Lozano and Newman,
and choreography by Alessandra Valea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Atlantic production is directed by Melissa Crespo.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The
</i><i>65-minute</i><i> production runs until</i><i>
3 </i><i>Ma</i><i>rch
2024 (it was extended from its original limited run ending on 18 February).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The producers suggest that the play is best
suited for children 6 and up, but can be enjoyed by audiences of all ages.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I’ve
assembled a number of published pieces on </i>El Otro Oz<i> that I found interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m starting with a television news report,
which first brought the play to my attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then a report from </i>Playbill<i> that gives a little background to the
play and its ATC production, followed by two reviews, one of the current Off-Broadway
staging and the other a previous production of the play in an earlier version
when it made its début.]</i></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;"> </span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><u><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“NEW TWIST ON ‘THE
WIZARD OF OZ’ ON DISPLAY IN ‘EL OTRO OZ’<br /> </span></u><u><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">AT ATLANTIC STAGE
2 IN CHELSEA<br /></span></u><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Dave Carlin</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[According
to the Atlantic Theatre, the synopsis of </i><i>Mando Alvarado and Tommy Newman’s version of
</i>El mago de
Oz <i>is as follows:</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Click your heels together </i>tres veces<i> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[</b>three times<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">] </b>and take a transformative journey with this salsa, merengue, and
Mexican folk-infused musical inspired by </i>The Wizard of Oz<i>. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>As
her fifteenth birthday approaches, Dora, a contemporary Latiné teenager,
struggles with her family’s ideas about tradition and dreads her impending </i>quinceañera<i>!
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>But,
when Dora gets swept away to a strange new land, she learns how to celebrate
her unique rhythm and embrace her cultural identity.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The
Dave Carlin report below aired on </i>CBS 2 News at 5PM<i> (WCBS, Channel 2 in New York
City) on 29 January 2024.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s when I first
learned of </i>El Otro Oz<i>.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This story is about the power of live theater to help kids
better understand their communities and culture.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The latest production from Atlantic for Kids puts a new
musical twist on “The Wizard of Oz.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dora is her name—not Dorothy—in “El Otro Oz.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Audiences are whisked away to an alternate Oz, with a
soundtrack of salsa, merengue, and Mexican folk music, and it’s bilingual.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Kids fill the audience, like third grader Lucy Jones.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I think everyone would love to see it,” she said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When CBS New York first met Dora, she was at odds with her
Mexican heritage, but by the end she was perfectly in tune with it. The
director, Melissa Crespo [<i>Bees and Honey </i>(LAByrinth Theater Company, NYC);
<i>Promenade</i> (New York University/Tisch School of the Arts, Artist-in-Residence);
<i>Form of a Girl Unknown</i>, world premiere (Salt Lake Acting Company)], said
she can relate to that.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“This material is what I wish I had when I was a little
girl. We want to see ourselves on stage,” Crespo said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It’s funny. It’s fun. It’s entertaining,” Atlantic for Kids
artistic director Alison Beatty said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Atlantic for Kids is partnering with the [New York City] Department
of Education to provide f[iel]d trips for more than 1,500 students to see “El
Otro Oz.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“After our first show, a mom and a teacher came up to me to
thank me, essentially, and say my son doesn’t wanna speak Spanish at home, and
after the show I turned to him and said, ‘You want to speak Spanish?’ And he
nodded his head,” Beatty said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I think the message is [‘]represent your family,[’]” Lucy
said, “and how we celebrate traditions.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“El Otro Oz” is playing at the Atlantic Stage 2 theater on
West 16th Street. The show runs through Feb. 18 [extended now to 3 March].</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Dave Carlin serves as a
reporter for </i>CBS2 News<i> and covers
breaking news stories and major events in the Tri-State Area.]</i></span><i style="text-align: center;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></o:p></i></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>HERE’S WHO’S STARRING IN BILINGUAL
MUSICAL<br /> <o:p></o:p></u></span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">EL OTRO OZ AT ATLANTIC FOR KIDS</span></u><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">”<br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Molly Higgins</span></span></span></span> </h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Molly Higgins’s </i><span style="color: #783f04;">Playbill</span><i><span style="color: #783f04;"> article appeared on 10 November 2023 at </span><a href="https://playbill.com/article/heres-whos-starring-in-bilingual-musical-el-otro-oz-at-atlantic-for-kids"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">https://playbill.com/article/heres-whos-starring-in-bilingual-musical-el-otro-oz-at-atlantic-for-kids</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.]</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Atlantic Theater
Company’s Atlantic for Kids has announced casting for <i>El Otro Oz</i>, a new
bilingual musical inspired by <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>. Performances begin
January 13, 2024 at Atlantic’s Stage 2, where the limited engagement will run
through February 18.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The cast will
feature Arielle Gonzalez, Eli Gonzalez, Christian Adriana Johannsen, Adriel
Jovian, Danny Lemache, and Nya Noemi. Melissa Crespo directs.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">El Otro Oz</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> features music and lyrics by Jaime
Lozano and <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Tommy Newman, and a
book by Newman and Mando Alvarado. </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Inspired by <i>The
Wizard of Oz</i>, the Mexican folk-infused musical follows Dora, a contemporary
Latiné teenager. As her quinceañera approaches, Dora struggles with her family’s
ideas about tradition, until she is swept away to a strange new land where she
learns to embrace her identity. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The creative team
includes choreographer Alessandra Valea, music director <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Andrew Sotomayor, set designer Rodrigo
Escalante, costume designer Stephanie Echevarria, lighting designer Alejandro
Fajardo, sound designer Germán Martínez, and prop designer Stephanie Gonzalez.
Molly Foy serves as production stage manager. Casting is by Bass/Valle Casting,
Gama Valle, and Gregory Jafari Van Acker. </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">El Otro Oz</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> was originally commissioned, developed,
and produced by TheaterWorksUSA. Then titled <i>The Yellow Brick Road</i>,
the musical played a 2011 Off-Broadway run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.</span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;"> </span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*
* * *<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">
“<u>THIS YELLOW BRICK ROAD LEADS TO HER ROOTS</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Laurel Graeber</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Laurel Graeber’s review of
ATC’s production of </i>El Otro Oz<i> ran
in the</i> New York Times (sec. C: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">WeekEnd Arts”</i>)<i> on
2 February 2024.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’ll see that Graeber
writes of having seen a production of the play two year ago, a different
production from the New York City début reviewed below by Matthew Murray.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[That 2022 production,
which was presented under its current title, </i>El Otro Oz<i>, rather than its original 2011 one, </i>The Yellow Brick
Road<i>, was part of TheaterWorksUSA’s free Family Summer Theater which toured New
York City from 21 June through 10 July 2022.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There don’t seem to have been any published reviews of this mounting.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A reimagined “Wizard
of Oz” follows an angsty teenager who disdains her heritage.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Every dramatization
of “The Wizard of Oz” seems to offer a pilgrimage to the Emerald City. But “El
Otro Oz,” the inspired and imaginative interpretation now playing at Atlantic
Stage 2, introduces additional journeys that are ultimately more poignant and
profound.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When I first saw
this Latin-flavored retelling of L. Frank Baum’s tale two years ago, I was most
impressed by its comic inventiveness. (TheaterWorksUSA presented it then as a
revised, more bilingual version of its own 2011 show [see below] “The Yellow
Brick Road.”) That 2022 production, retitled “El Otro Oz” (Spanish for “The
Other Oz”), included a pet Chihuahua named Toquito, a wizard who’s a disco diva
and, in place of the withered Wicked Witch of the West, the sultry,
flamenco-costumed Bruja del Oeste, whose magical castanets evoke a predatory
rattlesnake.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">None of these
creative flourishes have changed, but whether it’s because of world events or
the nuances of Melissa Crespo’s direction, I found this new production by
Atlantic for Kids (the young people’s division of Atlantic Theater Company) as
tender and moving as it is ebullient and funny.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With a book by Mando
Alvarado and Tommy Newman, and music and lyrics by Newman and Jaime Lozano, the
show focuses on Dora (Nya Noemi, passionate and clear-voiced), an angsty
adolescent in contemporary Chicago. More an admirer of Beyoncé than of
merengue, the American-born Dora deeply resents her Mexican immigrant mother’s
plans for a quinceañera, the traditional celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday.
After she reluctantly dons a voluminous pastel dress for the occasion, Dora
wails, “I look like cotton candy!” (Stephanie Echevarria designed the vivid
costumes.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Before long, a
mysterious healer appears, telling Dora she is only “half of the whole.”
(Christian Adriana Johannsen juggles this role expertly with that of the
seductive bruja [witch].) Then the teenager is swept into El Otro Oz, where,
according to one of its residents, her family’s picnic table has crushed the
witch’s sister “flat as a Dorito.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Once Dora acquires
the enchanted ruby slippers, she must, of course, reach the wizard. But she’s
also beginning to understand that she has embraced only part of who she is. As
she explores El Otro Oz with new friends — the Scarecrow (Adriel Jovian); the Iron
Chef (Eli Gonzalez), who travels with a food cart instead of an oil can; and
the meek Mountain Lion (Danny Lemache) — she comes to appreciate the</span> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">heritage that she has often cruelly rejected.
The score, which blends mariachi-style melodies with emotive show tunes, offers
ample opportunities for Dora to practice traditional dance, and young audiences
may find that Alessandra Valea’s joyful choreography makes it hard to sit
still.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">They also, however,
may have difficulty with the intermittent Spanish dialogue and lyrics. Atlantic
recommends “El Otro Oz” for theatergoers 6 and older, but even adults who
haven’t studied the language may find the mix occasionally confusing.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One point, though,
is always clear: Not all travels end blissfully. In a vision conjured by the
witch, Dora witnesses the difficult migration her widowed mother, alone and
pregnant, made from Mexico. The versatile Arielle Gonzalez, who plays that
maternal role and several others, sings a moving ballad that eventually becomes
a mother-daughter duet. It shows that for many immigrants, a journey is one-way
only. Home remains far away; all they can hope for is to carry its spirit into
a new world for their children.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Laurel Graeber is a contributing
writer and editor for metropolitan New York City arts and entertainment at the </i>New York Times<i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She</i> <i>has covered children’s entertainment at the </i>Times<i> for
nearly three decades.]</i></span><i style="text-align: center;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></o:p></i></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD</u>”<br /></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Matthew Murray</span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Matthew Murray’s review of
</i><span style="color: #783f04;">The Yellow Brick Road</span><i style="color: #783f04;">, the title of
the first version of </i><span style="color: #783f04;">El Otro Oz</span><i style="color: #783f04;">, appeared on the website</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> Talkin’
Broadway </span><i><span style="color: #783f04;">on 27 July 2011 (</span><a href="https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/ob/7_27_11.html"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Talkin' Broadway
Off-Broadway - The Yellow Brick Road - 7/27/11 (talkinbroadway.com)</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">).</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>The Yellow Brick Road<i>, produced by TheaterWorksUSA, ran
at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village from 19 July to 19 August 2011.
It ran just over an hour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[TheaterWorksUSA is a professional,
New York City-based, not-for-profit theater for young and family audiences,
founded in 1961, with touring productions that run through 49 U.S. states and
parts of Canada.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It developed </i>The Yellow Brick Road<i>, which has had numerous productions
around the country since its début.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Almost eight years
on and <i>Wicked</i> is still packing them to the rafters? Assuming
your kids haven’t already graduated from high school, they’re probably as tired
of waiting to see the <i>Wizard of Oz</i> inspired musical as you are
antsy about paying Broadway’s mesospheric ticket prices. But one show playing
in town this summer, Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, makes it
easier to split the difference: <i>The Yellow Brick Road</i>.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Okay, okay, so it
doesn’t have Stephen Schwartz’s dissonant, pop-happy score, or even any
spectacle to speak of. But this cute take on L. Frank Baum’s original novel,
and its even-more-famous 1939 film version of it, has a unique point of view,
plenty of color of its own, and it’s free. That’s not a bad combination in any
season, but it’s particularly ideal when trying to think of original ways you
and your children can fill time together.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Certainly, this isn’t
your grandmother’s <i>Oz</i> adaptation, though given its spiritual
resemblance to <i>The Wiz</i>, maybe it’s your aunt’s. But unlike that
genial African-American version, this one (written by Mando Alvarado, Jaime
Lozano, and Tommy Newman) puts a different ethnic spin on its story of a young
girl launched away from home and into a swirling fantasy world: This one bursts
with Hispanic flair.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This is more than
just a gimmick, however. Librettists Alvarado and Newman have written their
story of Dora (Virginia Cavaliere) to be about a young girl as trapped between
worlds on Earth as in Oz. On her 16th birthday, she chafes against the efforts
of her mother (Lexi Rhoades) to force her to celebrate in traditional style,
completely with an elaborate party and a billowing pink dress—after all, Dora
doesn’t even speak Spanish (and doesn’t want to). But when she meets an
enigmatic, elderly neighbor (Natalie Toro) who thinks Dora needs a change in
perspective... well, you don’t need to be chased by a tornado to guess how the
rest of the story plays out.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At least there are
some lively twists. Here, the Scarecrow (Ryan Duncan, one of the original <i>Altar
Boyz</i>) has a head so full of mixed-up dictionary pages that he constantly
confuses English and Spanish. The Tin Man is now the Iron Chef (Frank Viveros),
who makes a mean paella but is afraid his food lacks heart. The furry feline
the trio encounters is still cowardly, but he’s a Mountain Lion (and played by
Cedric Leiba, Jr.) who feels betrayed by his own size. Dora’s tag-along dog is
now a fierce Chihuahua named Gypsy she keeps in her backpack. Their task is to
defeat the nasty La Bruja (Toro again), who’s upset that Dora has stolen her
sister’s ruby-studded shoes—and their final confrontation comes by way of a
flamenco-fueled dance off.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Lozano and Newman’s
salsa- and merengue-infused score is enjoyable, if a bit exhausting (it packs
12 lengthy songs, plus several reprises, into just over an hour of playing
time), and the numbers are thoroughly and energetically choreographed by
Devanand Janki (who also directs) and Robert Tatad. Cavaliere captures the
necessary sense of open-minded wonder for Dora, and Toro is a belty,
over-the-top delight as the Witch; everyone else slides nicely into their roles
as well. If Janki’s staging could use a bit more invention to summon up the
magic of Dora’s journey, overall it will inspire youngsters’ imagination more
than the sprawling stage effects of That Uptown <i>Oz</i> Musical.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">What’s most
interesting (if more for parents than kids) is the show’s overall outlook.
Whereas both <i>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i> and its movie were
little more than adventure tales, <i>The Yellow Brick Road</i> has
plenty to say about assimilation: when it’s good, when it isn’t, and whether it’s
worth fighting for. Dora’s quest for identity, at the expense of (or perhaps in
accordance with) her mother’s oppressive expectations, is one of the most
sizzling political issues of our time, and addressing it, however indirectly,
is risky in a format this essentially innocent.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But by not hitting
you over the head with their argument, <i>The Yellow Brick Road</i>’s
writers make their analysis of the situation one anyone, of any age, will a
have good time watching and listening to. Even if Dora’s specific struggle
seems, well, foreign, she’s a headstrong girl who wants her mother to recognize
her and her ideals as worthy of not just respect but even admiration. What
child—or, for that matter, what adult—can’t relate to that?</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-22935092429905352602024-02-07T10:00:00.072-05:002024-02-08T15:05:01.222-05:00'Playbill': A History of "The National Theatre Magazine"<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[When I caught WABC’s 22 October
2023 broadcast of</i> Broadway<i> </i>Backstage
Fall Preview<i>, I was delighted to see the brief feature on the printing of </i>Playbill<i>,
which happens in a plant in Woodside, Queens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It gave me the idea of composing a short history of the program magazine
for </i>Rick On Theater<i>, the result of which you see below.</i></span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The reporter on the
segment, Charlie Williams, called </i>Playbill<i>
“the quintessential magazine of theater and Broadway.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a little hyperbolic, I suppose, but it’s
not wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Danny DeVito, one of several
actors in the broadcast introducing plays they’re in this season on Broadway—he
was in </i>I Need That<i>, which ran 2 November-30 December 2023 at the American
Airlines Theatre—said when asked about the first time he saw his name in a </i>Playbill,
“Playbill<i> was always . . . that thing you saved.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Actor Michael Urie, who was
in the revival of </i>Spamalot<i> at the St.
James Theatre that opened on 16 November 2023 (Urie left the cast on 21 January
2024), the co-host of the show with </i>Eyewitness News <i>reporter Michelle Charlesworth, remarked, “This
is one of the theater world’s most prized souvenirs.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Because of sentiments like
those, I’m posting the history of </i>Playbill<i>
on </i>ROT<i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope you enjoy the
read.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If you’ve ever been to a Broadway show, you were handed a <i>Playbill</i>
as you took your seat. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since 1884, the
independently edited and printed <i>Playbill</i>’s been the program magazine for
Broadway theater, and later Off-Broadway, New York City venues like the Metropolitan
Opera House and other Lincoln Center venues, and Carnegie Hall, as well as major
theaters in Boston; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago;
Houston; Miami, and a number of other cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But how did this come to be?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">First, let’s step back about a hundred years before what we
in the United States know as a <i>Playbill</i> was printed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, ‘playbill’ is a generic noun that’s a
synonym for ‘program’ (or, if you’re in the United Kingdom or many of its
former colonies, ‘programme’—a French word the Brits borrowed, meaning pretty
much the same as the American and British words).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Programs were used in Europe for many kinds of entertainment
events as early as the 18th century, such as musical performances, fêtes, athletic
events, and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this post, I’ll
stick mostly to theatrical presentations for my examination.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The earliest programs, also called handbills, were short, handwritten,
one-page leaflets which merely listed the performers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were handed out to patrons as they
entered one of the many theaters that began popping up in almost every town
across England at the time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When inexpensive printing became available, theaters started
distributing these handbills widely around the marketplace and drinking
establishments to entice potential audiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One-sheet playbills flooded the streets, spotlighting the names of top
performers who drew large crowds.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These playbills told audiences what to expect of the offered
performance, such as, perhaps, alterations to a well-known play—say a new
ending to <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> in which the lovers survive to say good-bye
to one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the 18th-century predecessor to music hall, the British
take on vaudeville, theater managers offered a mixed bill of entertainments. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The program would list the evening’s bill, say
a dramatic play followed by lighter fare such as a tightrope walker, a
strongman, or slapstick pantomime, and the order in which they’d be presented.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Across the sea in the U.S., a change was brewing as the 19th
century began.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The programs were made
into little pamphlets with several pages so that advertisements could be
sold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only did the ads pay for the
programs themselves, but they brought in a little extra income to the
theater.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This development proved very popular all around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, of course, the theater benefitted from
the additional revenue—theater is a financially precarious enterprise even at
the best of times—and the patrons got more interesting tidbits on the show
beside the names of the actors, the writer(s), and the creative staff: the
director could put in a statement and so could a living dramatist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Drawings, and later photographs, could be
included.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Theater is arguably the most ephemeral of arts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once the performance is over, there’s nothing
left but the memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This new, expanded
program was a free souvenir of the event—to be taken home and consumed at
leisure and even retained as a keepsake or a memory aid.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(I have hundreds filed away, going back to 1974—and a few
from even earlier than that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not a
theatrical packrat; they’re for reference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I use them all the time as a source of information on plays I saw
decades ago when something I’m writing, mostly for <i>Rick On Theater</i>,
comes up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I only wish I’d started
keeping my programs long ago when I was seeing some of today’s Golden
Oldies!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wrote about that time in “A
Broadway Baby,” posted on <i>ROT</i>, 22 September 2010.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The program booklets before the advent of the New York
Theatre Program Corporation, which eventually became Playbill—I’m coming to
that—were paid for by the theater or, in the case of a touring show, the
producing company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Small theaters, music
halls, and provincial or country playhouses where there were touring companies
or variety acts continued to use the single-sheet handbills.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Incidentally, there was another phenomenon that developed at
this juncture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patrons in Britain pay
for programs—it’s up to <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">£2.50 in
London ($3.15) and as much as €5 in Dublin ($5.40)—whereas, in the U.S</span>.,
we still get them gratis.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">From the early 1880s to the beginning of the World War I (1914
in Europe), the larger theaters in London’s West End saw the commercial
possibilities in the elaborate theater programs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The theater managers produced expensive
programs full of illustrations and photos of the major actors and scenes from
the play to sell to the patrons as souvenirs.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1916, the British government instituted an entertainment
tax on theater tickets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sale of
theater programs not only produced income for the impresario</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">s</span><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 13.3333px;">’</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> pockets, but covered
the tax cost as well, so the theater managers didn’t have to raise ticket
prices.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The U.S. theater industry never
had this burden.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Back in the States, even the advertisers were happy with the
new development: it was a way to make direct and virtually one-on-one contact
with potential customers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mass-circulation
newspapers were unknown in the mid- and late 19th century, and theater at the
time was the only truly popular entertainment—sort of the TV of its day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The theater program was one of the few types of
printed matter that was widely—and freely—distributed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The enterprise was a huge success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paid advertising, principally for local
business, in theater programs underwent a quick and speedy surge and forever
changed the theater program.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also eventually
led to the establishment of the company that became Playbill.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">An enterprising young man who had arrived in New York City
from Ohio as a teenager without money, prospects, or contacts saw that this
development was a real business opportunity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In 1884, Frank Vance Strauss (<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">1863</span>-1939),
who later changed his last name to Storrs during World War I because Strauss
was German<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">, </span>approached the managers
and owners of the larger New York playhouses and offered them a magazine-style
theater program at no cost. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Strauss
made his money from the program from the advertisers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Though the name didn’t appear for decades, this was the
beginning of <i>Playbill</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Every theater that signed up for the magazine got pages with
the cast list and brief information about the performance—such as setting and
time of the action, act and scene breakdowns, and musical numbers—plus a cover in
color. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rest of the program booklet was
the same for every theater with short articles on the New York theater scene,
stage personalities, and other features—plus the ads. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The program magazine didn’t have its own title at this
point; the cover bore the name of the theater at the top.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1911, Strauss named his company the Strauss
Magazine Theatre Program<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and in 1920,
his company took the name New York Theatre Program Corporation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1934, the magazine became <i>The Playbill</i>
and then simply <i>Playbill</i> in 1957.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The title font varied from issue to issue until it was
standardized in ’57, and the current, distinct typeface appeared in about 1974,
with the familiar yellow background having become standard the previous year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yellow was selected for the background to the
logo because it was the cheapest color available.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Since 2000, variations occur to mark special occasions, such
as a green banner replacing the yellow one in October 2008 for the fifth
anniversary of <i>Wicked</i> (and again in 2018 for the 10th), or the rainbow
banner in June for LGBTQ Pride Month, which debuted in 2014.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The contents of the original magazine changed weekly, which
was also how often new plays commonly opened at each theater back then. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The content of today’s <i>Playbill</i>s,
aside from the production details, changes monthly.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When Playbill launched a subscription edition in 1982, the
contents of the magazine delivered to subscribers’ homes was identical to the
copies distributed at the theaters as far as the features and articles were
concerned, but the production information was replaced with listings of
Broadway and Off-Broadway shows and news from touring shows and the
theater scene around the country and abroad.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Over the years, there have been various different regular
features and columns in the magazine, such as “At This Theatre,” a column with
historical information on the theater housing the production, “Ask Playbill,”
which answers questions about theater from readers and playgoers, and a “Theatre
Quiz.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Most major New York theaters used Strauss’s program, but not
all. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Shubert Company (predecessor to
the present-day Shubert Organization), the enterprise of the formidable “Shubert
Brothers”—as Lee (1871-1953), Samuel S. (1878-1905), and Jacob J. Shubert (1879?-1963)
were universally known collectively—for instance, insisted for many years on
publishing its own programs.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1891, Strauss merged his company with his main competitor
and, by 1905, had standardized the appearance of the program so that the layout,
including the advertising space, was uniform.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After World War I ended in 1918, Strauss sold his company to
his nephew, Richard M. Huber (ca. 1881-1965). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Strauss had made a great fortune from his
enterprise, becoming a true entrepreneur and a leading member of New York
City’s social elite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">New York Times</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> obituary (as
Frank V. Storrs, 9 March 1939) described him as “prominent in the field of
theatrical advertising and active for many years in banking and at one time was
the owner of a theatre chain.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Times</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> added that “he
had many financial interests outside the theatrical and advertising fields” and
“also owned property in the midtown theatrical section of Manhattan.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">From 1918 onward, the company started printing playbills for
all of Broadway and by 1924, Huber’s New York Theatre Program Corporation was
printing 16,000,000 programs for over 60 theaters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus began Playbill’s virtual monopoly on
supplying theater program printing for New York City’s commercial theaters.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Although Frank Vance Strauss may have conceived the notion of
the playbill magazine, Richard Huber gets the credit for starting the New York
Theater Program Corporation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The seeds
of today’s <i>Playbill</i> were planted under Huber’s ownership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The eventual iconic look and content of the
magazine began to take shape under Huber.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Under Huber’s leadership, the magazine gained the name <i>The
Playbill</i> and short articles on fashion, automobiles, books, as well as interviews
and even jokes were added to the program’s offerings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The cover art was also standardized in the 1920s,
featuring images representing the theater, which stayed the same from show to
show.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Early in the 1930s, the artwork on the <i>Playbill</i>
covers began to be show-specific, though the title of the production didn’t appear
anywhere on the cover.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That first
started to happen later in the decade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
the mid-1940s, the show’s title began to appear above a production photo and
the <i>Playbill</i> logo.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The artwork on the <i>Playbill</i> covers were black-and-white
production photos until the late 1960s, when individualized cover art appeared,
often drawings or graphic art—though they, too, were black and white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aside from the colored banner framing the <i>Playbill</i>
logo, color wasn’t used for the cover art until after the turn of the 21st
century.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1956, after 70 years as a Strauss family enterprise,
Huber sold the magazine publisher to producer and real estate magnate Roger L.
Stevens (1910-98), who in 1961 became the founding chairman (until 1988) of
what became the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and then in
1965, the first chairman (through 1969) of what became the National Endowment
for the Arts. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Stevens changed the magazine’s name to just <i>Playbill</i> the
year after he bought the company and no longer let a representation of the productions
serve as the dominate image on the cover. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, the cover design was nonspecific with
the theater’s name and the play’s title inside the program. The cover design for each theater didn’t change.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Protests from theatergoers caused Stevens to change his
decision and <i>Playbill</i>’s<i> </i>colorful band across the top of the cover
contained the show's information printed beneath the <i>Playbill</i> logo. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually, the colored strip was standardized
into the yellow band of today’s <i>Playbill</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gilman Kraft (1926-99), a publisher, bought the company in
1960 and hired Arthur T. Birsh (1933?-2021), a master printer, as the manager
of the magazine’s printing plant; Kraft then sold it to the conglomerate
Metromedia in 1968.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Birsh worked his way
up to president of the company under Kraft, but when Metromedia acquired
Playbill, the media conglomerate liked the way Birsh handled the company’s
business and kept him on as second-in-command at the corporate level.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When Metromedia and Playbill<i> </i>parted ways in 1973,
Birsh left the media conglomerate and became Playbill’s sole owner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Playbill’s current chief operations officer
and vice president since 2016 is Alex Birsh (b. 1989), the third generation of
his family to operate the program publisher; he’s the grandson of Arthur Birsh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Alex Birsh’s father, Phil Birsh, [b. 1958]
is the current CEO and president, having succeeded his father in 1993.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On the <i>Eyewitness News</i> broadcast on WABC on 22 October
2023, Playbill COO/V.P. Alex Birsh declared, "We truly are quite simply
the brand of Broadway."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s arguably
so in a certain sense, but there have been competitors and niche alternatives
to <i>Playbill</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>Playbill</i> almost exclusively concentrated on
Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters, while <i>Stagebill</i>, founded in
1927, focused on concerts, opera, and dance.<sup><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playbill#cite_note-showbill-13"></a></sup> By the late 1990s, <i>Playbill </i>was highly profitable while <i>Stagebill </i>wasn’t, so, to increase revenue, <i>Stagebill</i> entered <i>Playbill</i>’s
territory. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Public Theater and Disney contracted
with <i>Stagebill</i> for their shows. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Disney’s issue was control of advertising content. <i>Playbill</i> relies
on advertising revenue that’s entirely under its authority, but Disney’s policy
prohibits the promotion of liquor and tobacco products on its property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Disney owns the New Amsterdam Theatre, where
its <i>Lion King</i> was playing.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In response, <i>Playbill</i> produced <i>Showbill</i>,
a sister publication started around 1999 that conformed to Disney’s advertising
restrictions.<sup><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></sup>With an
alternative available, Disney switched from <i>Stagebill</i> to <i>Showbill</i> for <i>The
Lion King</i> (1997-present). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar situations
occurred at other Broadway theaters and productions.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>Playbill</i> also responded to <i>Stagebill</i>’s
challenge by producing publications for classic arts houses, particularly venues
that were once <i>Stagebill </i>clients, such as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan
Opera, and the New York Philharmonic.<sup><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></sup></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For these venues, <i>Playbill</i> broke from its
typical format and began publishing completely customized programs like <i>Stagebill</i>.<sup>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></sup>Because<sup> </sup>of this action
and <i>Stagebill</i>’s continuing financial problems, it foundered and <i>Playbill
</i>bought up the <i>Stagebill</i> trademark in 2002.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus ended the competition for <i>Playbill</i>’s
hegemony.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">In 1994, Playbill launched Playbill Online (</span><a href="https://playbill.com/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">https://playbill.com/</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">) and has increased its
digital offerings steadily, along with entries into other media, as the new century
unfolded.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">My interest here has been on
the ink-and-paper publication, so I won’t detail this development.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Wikipedia </i><span style="color: #783f04;">has a run-down of </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Playbill</i><span style="color: #783f04;">’s
expansion beyond hard-copy outlets, and I suggest interested </span><i style="color: #783f04;">ROT</i><span style="color: #783f04;">ters
check that out at </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playbill#Other_media"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playbill#Other_media</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Many
people, including me, speak of </i>Playbill<i> as the concrete reminder of the
evanescent theater experience once the curtain drops and the playgoer leaves the
playhouse. I admitted above that I have
been keeping my programs, including those that aren’t </i>Playbill<i>s, for the
past 50 years, and that I wish that I’d kept them from earlier times.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The
fact is that I </i>did<i>
keep my theater programs from my childhood playgoing—I just didn’t keep them
permanently. I brought them home, read
them, looked at the pictures, and then sometimes used them for something. Here’s a case in point:</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The
first Broadway show I saw </i>on<i> Broadway (as opposed to pre-Broadway in Washington,
D.C., or on the National Tour) was </i>Fiorello!<i>; the second one I saw
was </i>My Fair Lady<i>. That would make it 1959, ’60, or ’61—7th
or 8th grade.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[In
those years, my Washington middle school had a music class as a regular part of
the curriculum and all the students kept a folder for our music sheets.
It was an ordinary manilla folder, and we were supposed to decorate it,
presumably with something related to music. </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The
year I saw </i>MFL<i>, I cut up the </i>Playbill <i>and used the still photos from the
show to decorate my music folder! The </i>Playbill<i>’s cover photo,
which was Liza (Julie Andrews, of course) sitting on the steps of Covent
Garden, holding a bunch of flowers ("Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?"), was
the center pic of my folder’s cover, with the other shots from the </i>Playbill<i>
scattered around “randomly.” I can still visualize it! </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Now,
here’s something I’d never put together before 2021: the chronology of this seminal
experience:</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Since
I would have made my folder at the start of the school year, and </i>Fiorello!<i> opened at
the end of November 1959—early in my 7th-grade year—I probably saw it that
Christmas vacation. (I’d have turned 13
during that holiday.) We must have gone back to New York City sometime
later that school year, maybe spring break. (Both sets of my grandparents lived
in NYC.)</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I
suspect my family saw </i>MFL<i> then, since if we’d waited until Christmas of 8th grade, I
would have used something else to make my music folder; I must have
already had the </i>Playbill<i> when school started for 8th grade. So I
must have seen </i>MFL<i> whenever spring break was in 1960 and held
onto the </i>Playbill<i>.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[That
also means I saw Andrews in TV’s </i>Cinderella<i> before I saw her on stage.
I already knew who she was because of all the hype about her appearance
in </i>MFL<i> (which had opened on 15 March 1956), but </i>Cinderella<i> was on TV in March 1957
(see “</i>Cinderella<i>: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March
1957),” posted on </i>ROT <i>on 25 April 2013).]</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-23688602891486678402024-02-02T10:00:00.082-05:002024-02-02T17:25:53.429-05:00Superheroes on Native Land: Supplement –<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">History of Native
American Theater<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>[In my introduction to “‘Staging
Our Native Nation’” on 24 March 2018, the start of a series of articles from </i>American Theatre <i>I reposted, I said that I was
introduced to Native American theater by a script I read in 1996. In that same
introduction, I confessed:</i></span><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>I
knew little about Native American theater before reading </i>Serpent God<i> and I’ve learned only a general outline
of its appearance and development as part of the American theater scene since
then, but I’ve felt that it’s a remarkable cultural phenomenon.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[What I did perceive from
my limited exposure led me to formulate a sort of general characterization of
the theater form devised by Indigenous American writers and directors. In 2018, I wrote:</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">In
a very real sense, native American theater artists have invented our first
truly indigenous theater. Mainstream
American theater, including African-American drama, is pretty much an adoption
of existing European theater forms; we merely put an American stamp on it. Indigenous peoples have taken the basic form
of Western theater (as well as the performance forms of other cultures, I
presume), and adapted it to tell their stories and, what’s more, incorporate
their techniques of storytelling, including traditional music, dance, and
ritual.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[From what I’ve read on the
field then and afterwards, my impression wasn’t far from the prevailing wisdom
of the theater experts and academicians.
(What’s missing from the literature is the descriptive opinions of the
Native practitioners—but I guess most of them are busy inventing their theater
instead of writing about it.)</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[(The play I read in 1996
was </i>Call the Serpent God to Me <i>by
M. Elena Carrillo and I posted my script evaluation on </i>Rick On Theater<i> in
“Two Script Reports” on 20 February 2020.
With my evaluation, I was required to write a letter to the playwright;
here’s some of what I said to Carrillo:</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 13.5pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Reading
your script was a great pleasure! The juxtaposition of Aztec,
Catholic, and Tejano cultural elements provides a unique perspective that makes
reading </i>Serpent God<i> a
constant surprise and keeps the reader—and most likely, an audience—intrigued
and rapt. The incorporation of the images of Aztec gods, as well as
the figures of Domitila’s Lamentation and Fernando’s Diablo [characters in the
play and spirit figures who haunt them], gives the script a theatrical aspect
that is also theatrically provocative. The addition of appropriate
music as you call for should make </i>Serpent God<i> a truly magical
theatrical experience. The only appropriate comparisons for this
piece are non-Western: Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Kathakali—all highly theatrical,
multi-disciplinary forms.)</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I won’t be going deeply
into the structure or content of Native American drama. There are lists of Indigenous dramatists and
collections of Native plays, and the same is true of Native American theater
troupes and companies that present Indigenous dramas. I may reference them, but I won’t make my own
list here. I intend to lay out the
progress of Native American theater, sticking pretty close to the historical
outline.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[A note on usage: </i>ROT<i>ters will note that “Staging Our Native Nation,” the </i>American Theatre <i>series
on Native peoples’ theater, also covers the theatrical efforts of native
Hawaiians and Inupiat (native Alaskans), and in those articles, the term “Native
American” includes those peoples as well as American Indians. For the purposes of this post, however, the
terms Native American, Native, American Indian, Indian, Indigenous American,
and Indigenous will all refer to the Indigenous peoples of North America—principally,
the United States and Canada. (If I need
to make a distinction, I will say so specifically.)</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[For this post, I relied
heavily on Sidoní López and Hanane Benali’s “Native American Theater: A Concise
History” from </i>Miscelánea: A Journal of
English and American Studies<i> v. 54 (July 2016).]</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Although
contemporary Native American theater emerged during the second half of the 20th
century, its origins draw from an extensive oral tradition which was mainly based
on Indian traditional storytelling. Stories
of all kinds about Native tribes and cultures were passed down from generation
to generation for purposes of education, entertainment, and the preservation of
the Native American cultural heritage. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Most of these
stories were performed and dramatized by Indian storytellers for their
audiences, suggesting the first literary, historical, and cultural antecedents
of contemporary Native American theater.
Most Indigenous American cultures didn’t have a written language before
the arrival of the Europeans, so transmission was oral.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Without recapping a
detailed history of the writing systems of the Native peoples of the Americas,
I’ll simply state that no indigenous writing system was known among North
American Indians at the time of first European contact—neither the 11th century
with the Vikings nor the 15th century with Columbus, et al.—unlike the Indians
of Mesoamerica, who’d developed their own writing systems as early as the 3rd
millennium BCE. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(A number of writing
systems for different North American Indian languages were developed in the
early and mid-19th century as a result of the influence of European writing. Several systems, based to one extent or
another on the Latin alphabet, were invented and introduced by European and
Euro-American missionaries, teachers, and linguists.)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When American Indian
writing emerged, Native Americans went from telling stories to writing them
down, using different literary forms, such as the novel, poetry, autobiography,
and short story. Indigenous drama, however,
wasn’t part of Native writing during this period. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Since ancient times,
Native Americans have relied upon a diverse and vibrant oral tradition, often seen as oral literature. This consisted of
stories, accounts, tales, myths, legends, epic narratives, and songs about Indigenous
cultures that were intended to educate and entertain members of the tribe, and to
preserve its cultural traditions. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When the tribal culture
bearers told these stories, they were accompanied by songs, dances, music,
pictographs, wampum (belts woven
from beads used as a memory aid in oral tradition), and dramatic
presentations. Essentially, Native
American storytelling consisted of a solo performer, without props or costumes,
telling a story to an audience and passing down important cultural values and
tribal histories through the generations.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Native storytellers
practiced their art by giving life and voice to different tribal stories and by
making use of certain theatrical elements such as distinct intonation patterns
and rhythms, visual images, introductions to tales, word exaggeration, gestures,
and body movements. Handed down from
generation to generation, these practices show the similarities and closeness
to theater of the performance and dramatization of Native American oral
storytelling traditions. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">(Several examples of
Native American storytelling from various Indian nations are described in “Native
American Theater: A Concise History” by Sidoní López and Hanane Benali, </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Miscelánea:
A Journal of English and American Studies</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> [Zaragoza, Spain: Univ. of
Zaragoza, Dept. of English and German Philology] V. 54 [July 2016]: 94-96 [</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Richard%20Kramer/Downloads/Native_American_theater_A_concise_history.pdf"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Native_American_theater_A_concise_history.pdf</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">].)</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The existence of
storytelling and its performance in early Native American oral traditions and
literature demonstrates that contemporary Native American theater comes from this
tradition. The Oneida/Chippewa
playwright Bruce King (b. 1933) states that “theater is about storytelling,” whereas the American scholar and professor Christy Stanlake talks
about the “close connection between Native American theatre and Native
storytelling.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the same line,
the Cherokee playwright Diane Glancy (b. 1941) suggests that “story-telling in
the oral tradition could be called an early form of theatre, a one-character
play. [It’s probably more accurate to
call storytelling a one-<i>actor</i> play, since the storyteller may personate
many characters.] The action or plot was
the voice telling the story that was integral for survival.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It wasn’t until the
second half of the 20th century that Native American playwrights and Indigenous
theater companies started to write and produce Native plays, leading to the
emergence of contemporary Native American drama. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The proliferation of
Native plays has continued into the 21st century with academic study
starting to be conspicuous in the field, paving the way for the consolidation
of a diverse, vibrant, and evolving genre that continues to expand, making
itself more available to both Native and non-Native audiences.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">While it seems accurate
to label these traditional tales and stories as early forms of Native theater,
the notion of considering or categorizing them as theater is debatable. Although many Native playwrights assert that
storytelling is a central element of their dramaturgy, they don’t categorize or
define storytelling as theater <i>per se</i>. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Storytelling’s a venerable
art form of its own, but in itself, it’s not theater. It’s a different art the way ballet is different. Critics and scholars agree that there are
similarities between storytelling and theater, but they also point out fundamental
differences that set them apart. So, to
be precise, it’s more accurate to see telling stories as the antecedent of
contemporary Native American theater.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">According to Don B.
Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller in their introductory survey in the <i>Cambridge
Guide to American Theatre</i> (1993), there were proto-theatrical performances
in the Americas before Columbus. The
Spanish found “Aztec performances in Mexico that blended song, dance, comic
byplay, and animal imitations.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In North America,
Native tribes performed multifaceted rituals with decided performative elements
with complex stage effects, masking, magic tricks, and clowning, along with
singing or chanting and dancing. The
performances Indigenous peoples of the Southwest and in Canada were even more
elaborate and by the early 16th century in New Spain were acted in Spanish and
by the 17th century, in French in Quebec.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The dramatic
presentation of the American Natives, unlike that of their Western
counterparts, were “charged with cosmic significance that sets it apart from
events in the ordinary world, and the ‘audience’ are participants rather than
passive spectators.” The Native American
theatrical landscape was diverse, covering a wide range of forms.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When Native American
writing emerged in the 18th century, Indian authors began to produce and
compose a wide range of literature in English.
They started to write about their own stories in a diverse and expanding
literary field, including novels, poetry, autobiographies and short stories. However, Native theater was not being
published and thus became the only main literary form that didn’t appear among the
surge of Native American literature in print starting in the late 18th century.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Samson Occom [Mohegan;
1723-92] was a Christian preacher who published his autobiography, <i>A
Short Narrative of My Life</i>, in 1768. William Apess [Pequot; 1798-1839]
saw his autobiography, <i>A Son of the Forest</i>, in print in 1829.
In 1883, Sarah Winnemucca [Paiute; 1844-91] wrote about her tribe’s first
interactions with European Americans in <i>Life Among the Paiutes</i>,
and in 1854, John Rollin Ridge [Cherokee; 1827-67] published what’s
considered the first novel by a Native American, <i>The Life and
Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The
Celebrated California Bandit</i>,
about a Mexican figure of disputed historicity, 1829-53, called “the Robin Hood
of the West” or “the Robin Hood of El Dorado.”)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Among the reasons
for the dearth of Native plays during the period of European settlement
are colonialism itself. Most of the
Native American languages, traditions, customs, rituals, ceremonies, and
religions were suppressed. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Entire nations were
destroyed, along with them, their culture, language, history, philosophies and
religions, and arts. The loss of tribal
lands, forced resettlement, and confinement to reservations left them without a
sense of belonging, which was the basis of much of the Native peoples’
literature, oral or written.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The dominance of the
Western culture suppressed, both intentionally and circumstantially, the
Indigenous lifestyle, making the Indians strangers in their own land, the
foundation of much of their beliefs and their art. As Western consumerism and capitalism came to
dominate the Americas, and poverty in this unfamiliar economic environment
overtook the American Natives, time and inclination to make art was supplanted
by the need to subsist and survive. The
development of Native American theater was suppressed for more than two
centuries. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Indigenous writer,
video producer, storyteller, popular
theater worker, and actor Cat Cayuga (Onandaga/Mohawk Nation) points out that “when
the first colonists arrived they considered our art forms crude and primitive. They had the idea that no form of Native
Theater existed prior to the ‘discovery.’
It is this attitude which has made the development of our art difficult
for us. The dominant society has always
used its own terms to define art.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During the first
years of the 20th century, there was no publication or production of Native
American plays, but there were some Native American theatrical
performances based on traditional storytelling, which again could be considered as
being among the antecedents or predecessors of contemporary Native American
theater. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The effects of
colonialism explain the relegation of Native theatrical traditions to the
fields of anthropology, religious studies, and ethnology. Consequently, Native performance traditions
weren’t explored as theater, and treating them as products of other disciplines
contributed to the silencing and displacement of Native theater until the 20th
century. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The only drama possibly
written by a Native American author before 1900 is <i>Wep-ton-no-Mah,</i> <i>The
Indian Mail Carrier</i> by Go-won-go Mohawk (1860-1924), a Seneca playwright
and actor, and Charles W. Charles, her husband, who served as a captain with
George Armstrong Custer. <i>Wep-ton-no-Mah</i>
was first performed in Liverpool, England, in April 1893, and became incredibly
popular. A copy of the script is held by
the Library of Congress and has been digitized.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As the new century
dawned, Te Ata’s one-woman performances of Native American traditional stories
and legends made use of Indian props, such as a drum, a bow and arrow, and an
Indian costume. Although Mary “Te Ata”
Thompson Fisher (1895-1995; Choctaw Nation) had difficulties as a Native
American performer, her career went on for over 70 years. She educated Euro-American audiences about
Native America by presenting accurate information about Native cultures and Indian
storytelling was again performed and dramatized.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It wasn’t until the end
of the century’s first third that Native American plays were produced in
professional mainstream houses. Rollie
Lynn Riggs, a Native playwright of Cherokee origin, wrote <i>Green Grow the
Lilacs</i> (1931), the play on which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II
based their musical <i>Oklahoma!</i> (1943), but Riggs (known professionally as
Lynn) first saw his <i>Big Lake</i> and <i>Roadside </i>staged on Broadway
(1927 and 1930, respectively).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Riggs’s play <i>The
Cherokee Night</i> was staged in 1932 at the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley,
Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. It’s a
theatrical piece offering a portrayal of Native life in eastern Oklahoma during
the 1920s, but Broadway producers said that New York audiences weren’t ready
for the non-chronological, episodic play. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Although the author
gained nationwide popularity with his plays—he had three other plays (not
counting <i>Oklahoma!</i>) on Broadway after <i>Roadside</i>—he often neglected
to point out his Indian heritage, which was not generally known. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The rise of the
Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a reawakening
of Native cultures since it appeared as a movement in which minorities and the
societally marginalized demanded an end to discrimination and the right to
speak for themselves. In addition, there
were a series of social and political incidents that helped increase and renew
Native American cultural and ethnic pride. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This period of
social and political upheavals is widely known as the Red Power period and
includes major events such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San
Francisco Bay on 20 November 1969, the so-called Trail of Broken Treaties from
6 October to 3 November 1972, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(BIA) in Washington D.C. from 3 to 9 November 1972, and The Longest Walk across
the United States from 11 February to 15 July 1978 (3,200 miles).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Within this context
of self-expression, social and political movements in favor of Native American
cultural traditions, performances and ethnic renewal, a period of literary
brilliance for Native literature emerged under the name of the Native American
Renaissance, a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln (1983) that
refers mainly to the literary works following N. Scott Momaday’s (1934-2024; Kiowa)
1969 Pulitzer Prize for <i>House Made of Dawn </i>(1968). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During this literary
period, indigenous writers were not only telling their stories in novels,
autobiographies, poetry and short stories, but also bringing their storytelling
and performing traditions to the stage through the writing and production of various
contemporary plays.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When these
contemporary Native plays started to be written during the 1960s and 1970s,
many of them were performed and produced for and by various Native American
theater companies. Since their emergence
in the 1960s, these Native drama companies have been relevant to the
development of contemporary Native American theater, having promoted and
produced numerous theatrical works by Native dramatists in the United States. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The first to form
Native companies with indigenous actors was Arthur Junaluska (1912-78; Cherokee)
in New York during the 1950s. One decade
later, Jay Silverheels (1912-80; Mohawk), George Pierre, Noble ‘Kid’ Chissell (1905-87)
and others created the Indian Actor’s Workshop in Los Angeles, a company
intended to coach Indian actors to work in film while also staging some
productions. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In addition, the
foundation of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the 1960s is
also considered one of the earliest and most significant contributors to Native
American drama. The IAIA “sought to
balance the education of students with training in both Native American and
European theatrical forms, and was dedicated to developing a contemporary
Indian Theater which has meaning to contemporary Indians.“</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Institute of
American Indian Arts also created an amphitheater for the performance and
representation of plays, such as Monica Charles’s <i>Mowitch</i>
(1968), a play about Indian Shakers, and Bruce King’s <i>Evening at the
Warbonnet</i> (1989), which deals with political issues, especially those
related to the American Indian Movement.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Several years later,
in 1972, the American Indian Theater Ensemble was founded by the Kiowa/Delaware
dramatist Hanay Geiogamah (b. 1945) in New York City with the help of Ellen
Stewart (1919-2011) of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. Later known as the Native American Theater
Ensemble (NATE), this Native theater company was founded upon Geiogamah’s
belief that “plays for and about Indians, their past, their despairing present,
their hopes and dreams and daily lives, presented by Indian artists could be of
inestimable value in uniting and uplifting the 850.000 Indian people in the
United States.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One of the most
prolific Native playwrights and a crucial figure in the history of contemporary
Native American drama, Geiogamah created the first all-Indian repertory
company, which produced his first play <i>Body Indian</i> (1972). Dealing with the problem of alcoholism and
self-destructiveness among Native Americans, <i>Body Indian</i> became the most
highly acclaimed of Geiogamah’s theatrical pieces and was later included in the
first collection of Native plays, <i>New Native American Drama: Three Plays</i>
(1980). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This collection also
contains Geiogamah’s <i>Foghorn</i> (1973), a play dealing with Indian
stereotypes, and <i>49</i> (1975), a theatrical piece that provides a blend of
contemporary and traditional elements in Native American cultures. Both plays were performed and
produced by NATE along with Robert Shorty’s and Geraldine Keams’s (b. 1951; Navajo
Nation) <i>Na Haaz Zaan</i> (1972), focusing on the Navajo myth of creation;
Geiogamah’s monologues <i>Grandma</i> (1984) and <i>Grandpa</i> (1984); and
Bruce King’s ghost story <i>Whispers from the Other Side</i> (1985).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">By the mid-1970s,
the Kuna/Rappahannock Muriel Miguel founded the Spiderwoman Theater, a feminist
theater company which recruited various groups of women from different ethnic
backgrounds and that mainly intended to promote and foster Native women’s
contribution to Native American theater. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Based on the
story-weaving technique, which “combines the philosophies and styles of
feminist theater with a traditional understanding of the power of storytelling
and oral history,” Spiderwoman Theater in New York City created and produced
several plays that combined traditional Native storytelling with the procedures
of contemporary Western theater. Examples
of these plays include <i>Women in Violence </i>(1977), <i>The Three
Sisters from Here to There</i> (1982), <i>Reverb-ber-ber-rations</i> (1991) and
<i>Power Pipes</i> (1992), which mainly focused on gender issues, oppression,
poverty, racism and violence.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">By the 1980s, the
Colorado sisters of Mexican-Indian ancestry created the Coatlicue Theater
Company at the American Indian Community House in New York City. Taking inspiration from Spiderwoman Theater,
Elvira (1931-2016) and Hortensia Colorado (Chichimec/Otomi) wrote and produced
plays that bridged both traditional and contemporary stories. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These plays include <i>1992:
Blood Speaks</i>, which deals with the significant role that Christianity
played in the oppression of Native Americans, and <i>A Traditional Kind of
Woman: Too Much, Not ‘Nuff</i>, a play that centers on the stories and
experiences of Native women as they struggle with issues such as alcoholism,
violence, and rape.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the 1990s several
other Native American theater companies emerged in response to the needs of
individual playwrights. Such is the case
of the Red Eagle Soaring Theatre Group, which was founded in Seattle in 1990
and aimed particularly at advising young Indians about AIDS and other current issues. Another troupe is the Red Path Theater
Company in Chicago, which was founded around 1995 and produced plays mainly
focused on contemporary American Indian urban life.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Alongside these
Native theater companies, there were also festivals of Native American plays. The Native Voices Festival was first held at
Illinois State University in Normal in 1994, becoming the resident theater
company at the Autry Museum of
the American West in Los Angeles in 1999. In the following years, Native Voices hosted
festivals developing and producing plays by Native American writers from both
the United States and Canada. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In addition, one of
the most important initiatives in Native American theater was the creation in
1996 of Project HOOP (Honoring Our Origins and People Through Native American
Theater), which emerged as “a national, multi-disciplinary initiative to
advance Native theater artistically, academically, and professionally.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Project Hoop aims at
“establish[ing] Native theater as an integrated subject of study and creative
development in tribal colleges, Native communities, K-12 schools, and
mainstream institutions, based on Native perspectives, traditions, views of
spirituality, histories, cultures, languages, communities, and lands.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The emergence of all
these Native American theater companies, the celebration of festivals, and
initiatives in Native American drama helped promote the great proliferation of
Native plays across the United States.
There are currently over 250 published and far over 600 unpublished
plays by some 250 Native American and First Nations (the Canadian designation
for its Indigenous population) playwrights and theater groups in North America. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the wake of this diversity
and proliferation of Native American plays came a considerable body of
scholarship in the field that started to be noticed at the beginning of the
21st century. The first book of essays
on Native American theater appeared in 2000, published and co-edited by Hanay <a name="_Hlk157755799">Geiogamah </a>and Jaye T. Darby under the title <i>American
Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader</i>.
This book represents the first step towards the development of Native
American theater as a field of study. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Geiogamah-Darby collection
was followed by Birgit Dawes’s <i>Native North American Theater in a Global
Age: Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference</i> (2007), a monograph
that addresses the most relevant theoretical aspects of contemporary Native
North American theater, including an historical overview of the genre, its
categorization and definition, the controversies about its geographical,
political, and cultural boundaries, while also providing in-depth analyses of 25
plays by playwrights both Native American and First Nations. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Contemporary Native
American theater has been promoted not only by the availability of plays in
publication and scholarship in the field, but also by various institutions. Such is the case of New York City’s Public
Theater, an institution that has been active in this promotion through the
celebration of an annual Native Theater Festival in which the works of Native
playwrights, actors, directors, and musicians are highlighted as part of the
Native Theater Initiative initiated in 2007. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Similarly, OKC
Theatre Company in Oklahoma City launched an annual Native American Play
Festival in 2010, offering Native playwrights the opportunity to submit new
plays, from which some are chosen for staged readings and one is produced and
given a two-week run. That festival is
now housed at the Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company on the campus of the
University of Central Oklahoma. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In addition, Native
Voices at the Autry, America’s leading Native theater company devoted
exclusively to developing the work of both emergent and established Native
playwrights, continues to offer an annual venue for the stage, production and
performance of Native American plays.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Native American plays have
been included in several collections and anthologies. Among such works are Hanay Geiogamah’s </i>New Native American Drama:
Three Plays<i> (1980); The Institute of American Indian Art provides three
plays written by its own students in </i>Gathering Our Own: A Collection of
IAIA Student Playwrights<i> (1996); and Diane Glancy’s </i>War Cries: Plays by
Diane Glancy<i> (1997) offers nine plays, which combine both a vision of
contemporary life and traditional aspects that connect Indians with their
past. </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Two anthologies appeared
in 1999: </i>Seventh
Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays<i>, which includes five
theatrical pieces by Native American authors, one play by a Native Hawaiian
dramatist, and another play by a First Nation (Canadian Indigenous peoples) playwright;
and </i>Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays<i>, which
contains eleven plays by Native American dramatists.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In 2003, the first
anthology of Native women’s plays was published under the title </i>Keepers of the Morning
Star: An Anthology of Native Women’s Theater<i>. This was followed by another anthology,
entitled </i>Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in
English<i> (2003), which was the first collection to be published in
Canada. </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In 2009, the second volume
of </i>Staging
Coyote’s Dream<i> was published, including seven plays by Native Canadian
playwrights and one theatrical piece by Spiderwoman Theater’s founder, Muriel
Miguel, and another play published by her daughter, Murielle Borst.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The Native American Women
Playwrights Archive also brought out some anthologies during the 2000s. </i>Footpaths and Bridges: Voices from the Native
American Women Playwrights Archive<i> was published in 2008, the second
collection of Native plays by indigenous women in the United States and
Canada—including a play by a Native Hawaiian dramatist as well. </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The NAWPA 2007 conference
“Honoring Spiderwoman Theater/Celebrating Native American Theater” also generated
the publication of another anthology entitled </i>Performing Worlds into
Being: Native American Women’s Theater<i> (2009), containing several plays, interviews, production histories and academic articles.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Several authors saw their
works published not only in these anthologies but also in individual
collections of Native American plays:¨William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s </i>Where the Pavement Ends:
Five Native American Plays<i> (2001), which combines stories of the hard lives
and experiences of Native Americans in Fort Peck Indian Reservation with comic
relief, in matters dealing with Native identity, tradition, and oppression; E.
Donald Two-Rivers’s </i>Brief-Case Warriors: Stories for the Stage<i> (2001)
offers a series of plays focusing on the contemporary lives of urban Indians
who are especially concerned with their survival from alcohol problems and
discrimination. </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Occasionally alternating
between prose and poetry, Diane Glancy’s </i>American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays<i>
(2002) contains different plays with a great poetic sense that include
traditional and contemporary stories about Native Americans, while being mainly
concerned with themes of gender, acculturation, survival, generational
relationships, and the tensions and confrontations between Native American
traditional values and white American values, customs, and religious beliefs. </i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Equally important to note
is Bruce King’s </i>Evening at the Warbonnet and Other Plays<i> (2006), an individual
collection of plays that includes great moral content and a sense that the
characters are struggling between good and evil. In addition, King offers a combination of
traditional and contemporary elements such as humor, music, debate, histories, and experiences, which take the reader on an impressive journey through Native
cultures.</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[In addition, Alexander
Street Press’s North American Indian Drama, a collection of digital plays which contains more than 250 plays by both Native American and First
Nations playwrights is another resource for theater by Indigenous Americans. The collection starts in the 1930s with Lynn
Riggs’s first Native American plays to be published and produced in the United
States, and progresses through the 20th century.]</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></p><div><div id="ftn10">
</div>
</div><div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
</div>
</div>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-14868634527008277152024-01-30T10:00:00.082-05:002024-01-30T15:08:40.397-05:00Superheroes on Native Land: Supplement –<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Biography of Larissa
FastHorse</span></b><b style="text-align: center;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[After
“‘Superheroes on Native Land,’” Part 3 on 27 January, I promised to compose a
biographical sketch of Larissa FastHorse, the Native American writer who
created </i>Wicoun<i>,
the play at the center of Todd London’s </i>American Theatre<i> account.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, here it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope it will introduce readers of </i>Rick
On Theater<i> to this special artist.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[My
original idea was to do a short bio and pair it with a brief history of Native
American theater and post one supplement to London’s three-part chronicle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It turned out that there’s more to say about FastHorse
than I had anticipated, so her biography ended up longer than I figured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The upshot is that I’m posting the bio on its
own first, and will post a second supplement with the history of the theater
form a few days afterward.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[To
be honest, I’m not being entirely accurate when I say that FastHorse was more
interesting than I anticipated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
thought she would be, but in a cursory look for biographical coverage, it
seemed that the material I could draw on would be minimal and I wouldn’t find
enough to be more than superficial.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
was what turned out to be wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found
more detail than I had feared, and was able to say more than I
anticipated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>ROT<i>ters are the
beneficiaries.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa FastHorse (b. 1971; Sicangu Lakota Nation) was born
in San Francisco, but didn’t stay there long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She explains that her birth mother, who was of Norwegian extraction, was
from the Bay city—FastHorse makes a clear distinction between her “birth
parents” and her “parents” who adopted her, as we’ll see—but after her birth
parents broke up, her birth father took her back to South Dakota—and that’s
where she grew up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She says she didn’t
know her birth mother until she was an adult.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When she and her birth father, a full-blooded Lakota who lived
on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, returned to South Dakota, her birth father
wasn’t able to care for her by the time she was 11 months old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He asked Edmund and Rhoda Baer, a childless
older couple Larissa’s birth father knew in the neighboring town of Winner,
just off the reservation, to take care of his daughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Baers, who adopted Larissa, became her
Hunka family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She explains what this
means among Lakota people:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the Lakota culture it’s one of
our seven sacred rights. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s called
“the making of relatives.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody has
a family by birth, obviously, but a family by choice is something rare and
special, and if you are blessed to get a family by choice, somewhere in your
life, which can happen at any time, if you find that, then you take them on and
put them above your biological family. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You
are considered especially blessed because you found a Hunka family. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so that’s what I was given at 11 months
old, my Hunka parents, which are my parents.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I find this significant with respect to how FastHorse feels
about her playwriting and, specifically, the work she has done with the
Cornerstone Theater Company as recorded in the foregoing three-part report,
“Superheroes on Native Land” by Todd London (21, 24, and 27 January 2024).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When the <i>Wicoun</i> project was winding down and FastHorse
and the play’s director were reviewing the accomplishment, FastHorse noted that
the end result of the work wasn’t a boost to her career—the only people who saw
<i>Wicoun</i> were Lakota people in the plains of South Dakota—but the effect
that it had on her community, the people from whom she came.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s not trying to be anything but
community-serving. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the stuff
that makes me the happiest. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It fulfills
me the most. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also I feel like it’s
actually doing some kind of real good in the world—as much as you can with
theatre.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This, it seems to me, is also “making relatives.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">(FastHorse is the dramatist’s birth father’s name.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">She explained how Lakota family names came to
be at the instigation of the European settler government because Lakota people
traditionally didn’t have family names.</span><span style="color: #783f04;">
</span><span style="color: #783f04;">The story’s in an interview with Tim Sanford of Playwrights Horizons at </span><a href="https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/trailers/artist-interview-larissa-fasthorse/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Artist
Interview: Larissa FastHorse - Trailers + More : Playwrights Horizons</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">FastHorse grew up as an only child in a lower-middle-class
home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her FastHorse relatives, she said,
were “pretty notorious in a lot of negative ways,” so, in order for her to grow
up free of the negative associations, her adoptive father took a job in Pierre (pronounced <i><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal;">peer</span></i>),
the state capital, 100 miles from the reservation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">FastHorse had a congenital malformation of her lower legs. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An orthopedist prescribed physical therapy and
recommended several activities to accomplish this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pierre being a small city (population under 12,000 in 1980), the choices were
limited, so the Baers put their adopted daughter in ballet class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A “really intense tomboy,” FastHorse hated
it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She started as an 8-year-old second-grader, five years older
than the three-year-olds who were her classmates, and said it was hard and
painful for her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She improved, however,
and by fifth grade, she was doing well in ballet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That year, her aunt have her “one of those
chick empowerment books” on successful women.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Maria Tallchief was in there and I
saw that she was half Native American, half white, and she’s from the middle of
nowhere Oklahoma, and she became America’s leading prima ballerina. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I was like, “That’s me, obviously! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Laughs.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s what I’m gonna do.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I remember my parents being like “Okay,
great.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Maria Tallchief [1925-2013] was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, a
town of about 1,700 residents in 1925.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
town is on the Osage Nation Reservation and Tallchief’s father was a member of
that tribe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her mother was of
Scottish-Irish descent.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(A serious dance student from the age of three, when Tallchief was eight, her family relocated to Los Angeles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She moved to New York City at 17 to find a
spot with a dance company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She spent
five years with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and then met George Balanchine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He launched what became the New York City
Ballet in 1946 and Tallchief became its first star.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(She became world famous, performing all over the globe with
the world’s premier companies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was
considered America’s first important prima ballerina.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She retired in 1966, having collected the top
honors of her profession and beyond.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ballet, FastHorse noted, was the first thing she wasn’t good
at and so it was the first thing she enjoyed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“I had to work at it,” she explained, “and that’s what I love about it.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think this response, too, is telling: she
loves a challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was headed for a
career as a professional dancer.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At 19. FastHorse became a dancer with the Atlanta Ballet,
her first contract.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She left quickly
because, she explained, she met sculptor Edd Hogan, who would become her
husband.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was based in Los Angeles, so
she moved back to California and danced with all the companies in L.A. for 10 years.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">FastHorse adored dancing, but she suffered frequent injuries
because of the problem with her legs. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
she’s a performer, so she worked consistently when dancers who were better
couldn’t, because people wanted to watch her on stage and, she asserted, “that’s
what I know how to do well.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She had to face a choice, however: either surgery or quit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I didn’t want to hobble out over years of
surgery and maybe it works maybe it doesn’t, and I’m like ugh. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stop while you’re ahead.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Well first I thought, like many
dancers, that I’d do musical theater. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
did a musical in Europe, a horrible musical, that I had a principal role in. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got the best possible experience because it
was a super popular musical. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I toured
for a year and hated it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The show was very successful and FastHorse brought her
husband to Europe while she toured for a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But she couldn't stand doing the same part in the show time after time
for months on end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In ballet, she
pointed out, the troupe did different pieces and started new ballets every
couple of months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Artistically, I was
just so depressed and felt like I worked in a factory,” she complained.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The future dramatist tried teaching ballet next, which she
did for a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wasn’t ready to put
performing aside for teaching. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I’m way
too selfish to be a teacher,” she confessed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, while endeavoring to become a dance
teacher, FastHorse tried acting in L.A., principally in film, but she found</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">just the whole world of that is
just not me. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know that endlessly
presentational selling yourself thing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You
can’t possibly go to the grocery store without your hair and make-up done
because you could meet the director that’s going to change your life and
needing to be at parties, and that’s just not me at all.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At 30, she retired from dancing and found script writing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When she was auditioning for acting roles, she’d
found it hard to get scenes and monologues. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because she wasn’t “a theater kid,” she didn’t
know where to find audition pieces; so, she wrote her own. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When the people hearing the auditions asked FastHorse what her
audition pieces were from, she’d say, “Oh. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s from this play I found.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then she realized, “Oh! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
can do this. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can write this format.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She made up a film-writing program from which
she’d “graduated”—"Hollywood is the one place where lying your way in
makes you even better. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re like, ‘Amazing! That’s the best story ever’”—and got a
paid internship at Universal Pictures.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">While at Universal, FastHorse wrote TV pilots for Fox and TeenNick
(none seem to have aired) and got into the Sundance Native Film Program; her
first film was shown at Sundance and other film festivals (though I haven’t
been able to identify it).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She went from
Universal to Paramount Pictures, but left that for writing for TV, then left
that too because she “hated it.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
proclaims that “the whole point of television is that it was created as a
glorified commercial to sell products.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then, in 2007, Peter Brosius, artistic director of the Children’s
Theatre Company of Minneapolis, asked FastHorse to write a Theatre for Young
Audiences play. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He then produced her
first play, <i>Average Family</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
event started the novice writer on her present career track.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Before <i>Average Family</i> was even produced, FastHorse
had three more commissions: The Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences,
Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles, and History Project Los Angeles. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I jumped into theater hard and fast,” she
declares.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first it was TYA
commissions, but after a few years, FastHorse moved into adult fare.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I think the incipient playwright’s venture into writing for
children is another significant development in FastHorse’s artistic foundation,
beside her devotion to family and community, and her love of a challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We see these all play out in the kind of work
she’s done with groups like Cornerstone, as described by Todd London.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I love writing for intergenerational audiences,” she says, “which
is very much part of my culture, that we live in intergenerational families. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I try to write things that people can come to
together.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">FastHorse’s first “adult” play was <i>Cherokee Family
Reunion</i>, July and August 2012 at the Mountainside Theatre, the 2,800-seat
amphitheater in Cherokee, North Carolina. (That’s where <i>Unto These
Hills</i>, the outdoor pageant play that the playwright choreographed from 2008
to 2011, has run for 73 years.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was
followed by <i>Landless</i>, presented by the Alter Theatre in January and
February 2015, first in its hometown of San Rafael in Marin County, California,
and then in San Franciso.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">FastHorse figures she started writing plays in 2006 and has
been doing it full time, without a bread-and-butter job as backup, since
2010.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last spring, she became the first
known Native woman writer to have a play produced on Broadway: <i>The
Thanksgiving Play</i> presented by New York’s Second Stage Theater at the Hayes
Theater, 20 April-11 June 2023.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(I found it curious that FastHorse is always labeled “the
first known Native American woman playwright to have a play on Broadway.”
Every reference includes “known” and “woman” or “female.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(The “known” equivocation, I can understand. Records
for that sort of detail were pretty thin, especially before, say, World War II
or the ’50s/’60s. Politics and prejudice being what they were—and are—people
were often loath to identify themselves in those kinds of respects.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(But if she’s the first Native American <i>woman</i> writer
on Broadway, that suggests there was a <i>male</i> playwright before her on the
Great White Way some time. I was curious, and I came across only one
mention of a possible Native male writer with a Broadway connection.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(I recognized the name . . . but I didn’t know it was a man
or a Native American: Lynn Riggs, who wrote the play <i>Green Grow the
Lilacs</i>, which was musicalized in 1943 as <i>Oklahoma!</i> I
always thought Lynn Riggs [Claremore, Oklahoma; 1899-1954] was a woman!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Riggs received no credit as a book-writer for <i>Oklahoma!</i> at
the time, but, of course, before the musical was conceived, <i>Lilacs</i> played
Broadway in 1931.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Riggs’s first play on
Broadway was <i>Big Lake</i>, presented by the American Laboratory Theatre in
1927, so, even if his Native heritage wasn’t publicized—he was part Cherokee and
his tribal allotment subsidized his writing—he was the first “known” American
Indian writer to have a play presented on Broadway.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>The Thanksgiving Play</i> was written in 2015 and had
its world première in that year at the Artists Repertory in Portland,
Oregon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The play made its New York première
in 2018 Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and went on to become one of the
most produced plays in the U.S., finding homes at universities, community theaters,
and regional groups. FastHorse was the
first Indigenous writer at Playwrights Horizons, and is the first Native
American playwright in the history of American theater on the most-produced
list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In recent years, FastHorse created a trilogy of community-engaged
plays with Cornerstone Theater Company (see Parts 1-3 of “‘Superheroes on
Native Land’”). The first project was <i>Urban Rez</i> (2015)<i>, </i>the
second, <i>Native Nation</i> (2019)<i>, </i>was the largest Indigenous theater
production in the history of American theater with over 400 Native artists
involved in the productions in association with Arizona State University’s arts
center, Gammage. The final project, <i>Wicoun</i>, is set in FastHorse’s
homeland of South Dakota, where it went on a year-long tour. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The writer’s other produced plays include <i>What Would
Crazy Horse Do?</i> (Kansas City Repertory Theatre)<i>, Landless </i>and <i>Cow
Pie Bingo</i> (Alter Theater)<i>, Average Family </i>(Children’s Theater
Company)<i>, Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders: a Class Presentation </i>(Native
Voices at the Autry, Autry Museum of the American West, L.A.)<i>, Vanishing
Point </i>(Eagle Project, Marymount Manhattan College, N.Y.C.)<i>, and Cherokee
Family Reunion </i>(Mountainside Theater).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Additional theaters that have commissioned or developed
plays with FastHorse include the Public Theater in New York City, Yale Repertory
Theatre, Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Geffen Playhouse at UCLA, Kennedy
Center Theatre for Young Audiences in Washington, D.C., Baltimore’s Center
Stage, Arizona Theater Company in Tucson and Phoenix, Mixed Blood Theatre
Company of Minneapolis, Perseverance Theater Company in Juneau, Playwrights
Week at the Lark in N.Y.C., the Center Theatre Group Writer’s Workshop at the
Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, and Berkeley (California) Repertory
Theatre’s Ground Floor. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The playwright’s a 2020 MacArthur Fellow; award-winning
writer/choreographer; and co-founder of Indigenous Direction, the nation’s
leading consulting company for Indigenous arts and audiences. Along with
partner Ty Defoe, their clients include Roundabout Theater Company, American
Association of Arts Presenters, Western Arts Alliance, Guthrie Theatre, Oregon
Shakespeare Festival, Brown University, and many more. Their
groundbreaking work is redefining Indigenous art representation and education
in America.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2020, Indigenous Direction produced the first land
acknowledgement on national television for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
on NBC. A land acknowledgement is a formal statement that acknowledges
the original Indigenous Peoples of the land, spoken at the beginning of public
events. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The custom is a tradition that
dates back centuries in many Indigenous cultures.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The land acknowledgement featured in Macy's Thanksgiving Day
Parade consisted of a Wampanoag blessing and a traditional rattle song,
featuring Indigenous Ambassadors from the Northeast region. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The presentation acknowledged the Lenape
territory of Manahatta (the original name of Manhattan).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Her inclusion process with Indigenous tribes has been
honored with the most prestigious national arts funding from the MacArthur
Fellows Program, Creative Capital, MAP Fund, NEFA (New England Foundation for
the Arts), First People’s Fund, the NEA Our Town Grant, Mellon Foundation,
Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and others.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2019, FastHorse entered the film and television sectors with
a series at Freeform, a movie for Disney Channel, and a special for NBC.
She has developed projects with Apple TV, Taylor Made Productions, and Echo
Lake. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Native artist’s other awards include the PEN/Laura Pels
Theater Award for an American Playwright, NEA Distinguished New Play
Development Grant, Joe Dowling Annamaghkerrig Fellowship, American Alliance for
Theatre & Education Distinguished Play Award, Inge Residency, Sundance/Ford
Foundation Fellowship, Aurand Harris Fellowship, and the UCLA Native American
Program Woman of the Year. She was vice chair of the board of directors
of Theatre Communications Group. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">FastHorse is represented by Jonathan Mills at Paradigm NY
and her plays are published by Samuel French and the Dramatic Publishing
Company. She lives in Santa Monica, California (16 miles west of L.A.),
with her husband, Edd Hogan.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I
remarked on Larissa FastHorse’s focus on “community” in her life and work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the playwright, community means her
family, the Lakota people, and the Indigenous people of American and around the
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She focuses her plays on the
lives, traditions, and customs of her Lakota extended family, explaining,
revealing, and demonstrating them to us outsiders.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[This
brings up a dichotomy in FastHorse’s writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Does she see herself as an </i>educator<i> or an </i>artist<i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are the two perspectives compatible or
contradictory?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the Playwrights
Horizons interview, she says: “I think of my artwork as art first. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I use my work specifically to fulfill these
artistic visions and ideas that I have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
always there’s this parallel, indigenous part of me that is using the art to
infiltrate and open the door.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[While
she fervently wants “to create an artistically satisfying experience” with her
writing, at the same time, she asserts:</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">In Lakota culture every action we do today, we have
to always be thinking seven generations ahead. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right now I’m the first Indigenous person to
be in this theater. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seven generations
from now, I hope that there are indigenous writers walking in and out of this
theater not even thinking about the fact that they are indigenous because it is
so common and normal for them to be here.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Through
her plays, she’s inculcating not only what makes us different and special, but
what’s universal and makes us fundamentally the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And she’s teaching this to both her Native
kin, as well as to the rest of us who don’t know or misunderstand the truths
FastHorse is trying to reveal.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[On
top of that, the dramatist acknowledges that there’s a political side to her
work.</span></i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i> Los Angeles radio host John Horn asserted on LAist’s The Frame that “the job title that probably best describes her is ‘theatrical activist.’</i></span><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">”</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">For me – there’s this whole side of talking about me
artistically, but there’s this parallel side of me that’s a member of the
Lakota nation, right? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So everything I do
is in relationship to that. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything I
was trying to do with TV shows or indigenous characters and social justice work
through television, was watered down so much. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And by the time we got the fifteen notes and
the sponsor and the worry and the product placement, it was just sad.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[FastHorse’s
response to a question about her 2016 play </i>What Would Crazy Horse Do? <i>(première, 2017
at Kansas City Rep) reveals this aspect of her artistic persona.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The play’s about two contemporary Native
Americans who are facing the extinction of their tribe just as the first female
leader of the KKK is poised to introduce a gentler version of the Klan. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the two groups are brought together, they
find that sometimes they are asking the same questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>FastHorse observes:</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>. . . </i>What Would Crazy Horse Do?<i> is very much the
rage side of me that is always lying below the surface but that I keep
contained. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m always ready to go off on
something and I’m always trying to keep that down to a certain level.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[All
of this comes together in what the Native theater artist sees her position in
the American theater to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
explains:</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">. . . I’ve realized that—well, being Indigenous, but
having this white family, being middle-class, but dancing in this aristocratic
art form, doing all these things—my gift and burden is that I’m a bridge. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know how to bridge cultures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know how to code switch like nobody. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I know how to make those two sides
understand each other. . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I operate
in that space in a different way where I’m learning how to keep a very strong
lid on my rage and express it differently in that room and people hear me. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Same with work on stage. I’ve been given, for
whatever reason, these opportunities. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So
I have an obligation to continue to get myself in those rooms and be seen as—as
some people might say “the good Native.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one who isn’t offensive, the one who isn’t
scary. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one that’s not going to flip
out. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The good one that we can have in
the room. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because then I can slowly keep
opening the door and I get new people in the room. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m going to be pointed, I’m not going to let
people off the hook, but I’m not going to completely alienate them. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I try to give people a way forward to be
better people. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so, all of what I do
is very strategic in the way I present myself in the world, in the way I move
through this larger theatrical space that I’m in.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[FastHorse’s
conclusion returns to </i>The Thanksgiving Play<i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a
script calculated to make it easy for a standard American theater troupe to
produce: four characters, all white (so the company doesn’t have to find
Indigenous actors), one room, and a topic with which all Americans are innately
familiar: Thanksgiving and its origin myth.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I
think all of us, once we’re old enough to know that Santa Claus isn’t real and
that the Tooth Fairy didn’t really leave that quarter you found under your
pillow when you lost a tooth, know the Pilgrims-and-Indians story is a
myth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of us may, though, not know
how damaging the myth can be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So,
FastHorse proffers this challenge: “‘American Theater, if you can’t do this,
then you really don’t want to work with a Native artist and you don’t want to
work with Native issues.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then it’s
clear. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then we’re dealing with a different
issue with open prejudice as opposed to laziness, which I think is what we’ve
been dealing with up until now.”</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[For
</i>ROT<i>ters
who are looking for my promised history of Native American theater, my plan now
is to compile that post for publication on Friday. 2 February.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope readers will come back to this blog
then for the completion of this extended series.]<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-913159504302762842024-01-27T10:00:00.079-05:002024-01-27T10:00:00.135-05:00"Superheroes on Native Land," Part 3<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;">by</span><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;"> Todd London</b><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In the first
installment of <a name="_Hlk157168180">“‘Superheroes on Native Land,’” </a>posted
on 21 January, </i>ROT<i>ters met Lakota
playwright Larissa FastHorse, the Cornerstone Theater Ensemble, and the Oyate—that
is, the people of D/N/Lakota nations across what’s now known as South Dakota. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second installment, published on 24 January,
they met the cast of Native performers and got to know a bit about the
play, </i>Wicoun<i>, the story of protagonist Áya’s transition into a male
superhero named Ahí. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now it all must
come together and hold together—for a month and across 2,000 miles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the topic of Part 3 of the series,
posted below.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[“Superheroes on Native
Land, Part 3” originally ran in TCG’s </i><span style="color: #783f04;">American
Theatre </span><i style="color: #783f04;">on 19 December 2023 (</i><a href="https://www.americantheatre.org/2023/12/19/superheroes-on-native-land-part-3/"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">AMERICAN THEATRE | Superheroes on Native Land, Part 3</span></i></a><i style="color: #783f04;">).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since Todd London’s
“Superheroes” is a continuous story, I strongly recommend that readers who are
just encountering the report go back and read Parts 1 and 2 before reading Part
3.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the series’ final installment, Cornerstone tours
Larissa FastHorse’s play through the D/N/Lakota nations, with quietly, joyously
transformative results—and learns to say goodbye.</span></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Touring Without a Net<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></b><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">May, 2023</b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the heart of
this story: More things go wrong, some tragic, some comic, some elemental.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Áya and Khoskala make it to Rapid City, and so does the
show, </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Wicoun</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">. [See Part 2 for the identification of these characters,
as well as ither details of the play and its production. </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Wicoun</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> is
pronounced Wich’oon and means ‘way of life’ in Lakota.]</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In Áya’s quest to become a superhero, the archenemies are,
“Um, the same as everyone: Racism. Poverty. Drugs. Capitalism. Colonial
societal structures. Destruction of the environment. Land back. Humidity.”
Cornerstone’s obstacles, by contrast, seem pretty tame: wind, rain, lightning,
noise, distance, last-minute confirmations from venue partners. Also humidity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The whole time <i>Wicoun</i> is rehearsing in
Placerville [the retreat camp in Rapid City, S.D. where the company is
rehearsing]—and for months prior—the company tries to lock down performance
sites and timing. It’s a small band touring, but trying to cover the whole
state and hit almost all the reservations is still a massive undertaking. The
play will ultimately perform in 17 venues across the state in 23 days, but just
two weeks before the first show, only 10 are confirmed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s notable that, in this ensemble context, every member of
the Cornerstone Theater Company [L.A. experimental theater troupe, the
production company] team understands every piece of the puzzle. The daily
production meetings at Placerville involve [playwright] Larissa [FastHorse] as
well as director Michael John Garcés, Cornerstone managing director Megan
Wanlass, the designers, ensemble members Peter Howard and Kenny Ramos, company
manager Paula Donnelly, as well as the production staff. The logistics are
mind-bending: When will we have a second car? What if, on the day we reserved
the <i>only</i> cargo van at the Rapid City Penske, it isn’t there?
The hotel in Sioux City won’t return our calls; what if they won’t give us the
group rate for our block of rooms? We’re 10 days…eight days…five days out, and
(fill in the blank) won’t call back to confirm a performance!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>Wicoun</i> needs to rent each venue for four
hours—90 minutes for arrival and load-in, 60 for strike—but no one’s sure yet
how long the show will be. Seventy-five minutes? More? Less? What if they have
to wait for audiences to arrive, especially on the Rez, where folks don’t work
with the same urgency or on the same clock and where “curtain time” doesn’t
mean shit? Where should flyers be dropped and posted in Crow Creek for people
to see them—the two gas stations, the casino? Will people on the Rez respond to
digital invitations? Is one performance venue, Little Wound [tribal K-12 school] in
Kyle, preferable to another two miles away? “It’s only two miles, but gas costs
money,” someone helpfully points out.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It seems like “divine providence” that sound designer Talon
Bazille Ducheneaux joins one meeting that producer Michael Garcia encouraged
him to “save himself” from: Talon’s partner has valuable connections in Okreek,
plus a sister at Sinte Gleska University [public tribal land-grant
university in Mission, S.D., on the Rosebud Indian Reservation], where they’re
hoping to perform but don’t have a strong contact. “Good luck getting anyone
there unless you have a feed or grill off,” Talon cautions, echoing the warning
of a comic nerd in the play who says, “Rule one when gathering Indians: There
must be food.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s hard enough to plan, but it’s impossible to create back
up plans without understudies, equipped and weather-protected spaces, clear
seating (though reservation folks are used to bringing their own camp chairs to
gatherings), or presenting infrastructure at the venues. Will the weather gods
return their calls?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The set-up on day two couldn’t be more different than in the
bucolic Black Hills where they did the show’s first preview [Placerville Camp,
25 May 2023]. The van and scenery fill the parking lot outside Racing
Magpie, a small but mighty Lakota arts center and residency program in Rapid
City, which put out the call out for local artists to work with the show.
(Painter and retired Lakota language teacher Matt Uses Knife—Matthew—responded
at his daughter’s urging). At Black Hills Playhouse the day before
there were rolling forests; now there are rolling trucks, cars that slow on the
street (or is it an alley?) to watch the show before driving on. Tables of
local arts and crafts—jewelry, paintings, printed shirts, and tote bags—add to
the feel of an urban art fair. The condenser on Papa’s Frybread Wagon, the food
truck parked on one side of Racing Magpie, keeps running through much of the
performance. Camp chairs mix with the folding ones Larissa and Michael fetch
from inside the low-rise building. The actors need extra projection to get the
sound out, and it’s harder to read the audience as city sounds drown their
laughter. The wind is noisy too. Rural outdoor drama one day, street
performance the next. This isn’t the kind of theatre that keeps life out behind
four walls. It’s theatre whose very essence is to let life in.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Despite the challenges, there’s something so right about the
Racing Magpie lot, like the way the set, adorned with graffiti artist Focus
Smith’s spray-can art and Matthew’s landscape painting—together with the comic
book signs and bold costumes and puppets—jibes with the wall mural covering the
adjacent building. The sprawling city mural with stenciled letters and bison
heads under the words “Oceti<i> </i>Sakowin Territory” offers visual
counterpoint to the panoramic backdrops, horizons of a different color. This
vibrant stylistic profusion is visible everywhere in these Native communities;
on streets, in galleries, at outdoor fairs, alleyways, and powwows, you’ll see
drawings, prints, paintings, photographs, quilts, beadwork, regalia, sculpture.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #783f04;">[Part
1 introduces the Lakota term </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Oceti Sakowin</i><span style="color: #783f04;">, but doesn’t actually explain
or translate it.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">(</span><i style="color: #783f04;">Wicoun</i><span style="color: #783f04;">’s subtitle
is </span><i style="color: #783f04;">A Play With and About the</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> Oceti Sakowin.)</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">Instead, playwright FastHorse and Cornerstone
artistic director Michael John Garcés insist that readers look it up
themselves: </span><a href="https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/plains-belonging-homelands/oceti-sakowin"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Belonging
to the Land - Oceti Sakowin | Teacher Resource (si.edu)</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">(I found this site frustrating to peruse, but
there are others online, so feel free to google the phrase.]</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A word about scenic designer Nephelie Andonyadis’s work with
local artists. Her first design project with Cornerstone, back in the mid-’90s,
was part of a long engagement the ensemble had with the Watts section of
Los Angeles. She was looking to do with design what Cornerstone did with story
and performance: Engage the community in the making. Nephelie designed an
all-white projection surface, then created workshop projects with 4-H Club kids
and residents of a senior center in Watts. With the kids she made mandalas and
foamcore mazes from stuff found at Materials for the Arts and “hauled around in
the back of my car. We would walk in—30 kids in a room—share the set design,
ask if they would help us make the set.” With the elders she made paper birds.
She collected everything they made. The set became an installation made from
“all of that.” The mandalas and mazes became the walls, and the birds the
ceiling. “People came to see the play and they could find the piece of the set
they had made,” she recalls.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
Watts project to which Andonyadis refers was <i>The Central Ave. Chalk Circle</i>,
adapted by Lynn Manning from Bertolt Brecht’s <i>The Caucasian Chalk Circle</i>
and performed at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee Center, November
1995. Mandalas are geometric figures representing the universe in Hindu and
Buddhist symbolism.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Foamcore
is a lightweight, easily cut material used for mounting photographic prints, as
backing for picture framing, for making scale models, and in painting. It
consists of a board of polystyrene foam clad with an outer facing of paper on
either side.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Materials
for The Arts, now known as L.A. Shares, was created in 1991 by the City of Los
Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. It’s a nonprofit program that receives
donations of reusable goods and materials, both new and slightly used, from the
local business community and redistributes them free-of-charge to nonprofits
and schools throughout the city.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This first project became the model for much that followed,
right up to her work with Focus and Matthew on <i>Wicoun</i>. “It was me
designing something and bringing materials and asking people to join in
co-creation, so they could make a piece that was their own,” Nephelie explains.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>Wicoun’s </i>painted backdrop was Matthew’s idea
from the start. As an older man, he didn’t connect to the comic book aspects of
the play, but he instinctively knew there needed to be a backdrop of the Black
Hills, the heart of Lakota culture and site of its creation myth. “I learned so
much about the mountains from the way he chose to paint them,” Nephelie admits,
adding that she also “learned a lot from the way Focus paints,” including the
use of special paints and spray caps. His work is “all about representation and
literally changing the environment and transforming the walls within which
people in the community live. He thinks of it as transformative art. Wow.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Like Larissa waiting for the script to emerge from the
community, and professional actors “working alongside somebody who maybe hasn’t
performed before but who is authentically right for their role,” Nephelie knows
this work isn’t about her. It trains her for “letting go of ego and for not
being at the center of it all, and for flexing and figuring out how to make it
work and what’s really important.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This process of community co-creation extends to other
production elements as well. The show opens with a song commissioned from and
sung by Tiana Spotted Thunder, a much-loved Lakota recording artist from
Pine Ridge [an Oglala Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska].
Costume designer Jeanette Godoy turns to a Lakota Cultural Bearer [a member of
a community or society who keeps its traditions alive by teaching them or
modeling them for the younger generations] named Anthony KȞaŋgi TȞaŋka to
design the traditional regalia Áya dons to become Ahí. And though she draws on
her own Mexican indigeneity as she goes, Jeanette consults with Oglala Lakota
fashion designer Tosa Two Heart—who also happens to be Kenny’s best friend and
the source of his finest threads—to get things right.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If words seem to have been lost in the city racket at Racing
Magpie, an encounter after the show makes it clear they weren’t. An excited
little girl, maybe 5 years old, approaches several performers in turn, her
mother hanging back. She still has baby teeth on one side of her mouth and
mostly gums on the other. She tells each actor the same story: She recently
lost a tooth—and had a cavity! Her favorite part of the play was when Áya
threatened the cousin-sibling children that if they didn’t go to sleep immediately,
there’d be no Cheerios for a week, only oatmeal! And with no sugar! “No sugar!”
the little girl repeats, giddy with delight. She imitates the horrified puppet
children before they conk out to rescue themselves from that dreadful,
unsweetened fate. She bursts out laughing each time she tells it: “No sugar!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That night, after the Racing Magpie show, it rains. The next
morning, production manager Ash Nichols and stage manager Maria V.
Oliveira discover that the cargo van leaks. Rather than trying to wrangle
another—Penske in Rapid offers just the one—the troops empty the van, find the
suspected leak in the upper corner on the passenger side of the cargo bay, and
cover the corner inside and out with tarps, also tarping everything
cardboard—i.e., pretty much everything. The set pieces and puppets have stayed
dry, but many of the costumes are soaked inside their hanging bags.
Fortunately, there’s one more day at Placerville, so Jeanette, the designer who
doubles as dresser for the tour, airs the clothes on the copious lodge porches.
She irons and dries where possible.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Main Street, Rapid City<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That evening, though, as the company arrives for another
Rapid City performance—this time at Main Street Square in the center of
town—several superhero costumes are still damp, a bad omen. I drive into town
with Michael and Larissa, and when we arrive, the square is still full of
families, kids playing in sprays from a water park on one side. Other company
cars pull up and report having driven through rain. A few heavy drops spatter
us. Soon we’re all staring at our phones, each with different weather apps,
each with different forecasts, though almost all predict heavy thunderstorms
between 6 and 8, the hours at which load-in begins and the show ends. The only
contingency plan is cancellation, because with sets, props, and puppets made of
cardboard, and no covering for the audience—their chairs will rest on Astroturf
between a bandshell and the water playground—there’s no way to stay dry.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Company manager Paula Donnelly gathers us together on the
bandstand, but everyone’s in wait-and-see mode. No one has an actual plan.
Nephelie makes a proposal: Use the raised bandstand as a large backstage area.
Lay the puppets on tarps over the cement platform instead of the usual tables.
Cover them for now. Let the actors carefully climb and descend the steps to
change clothes or grab props. Meantime, set everything up with sandbags and
clamps.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Load-in begins, interrupted immediately by an emergency
signal shrieking out of the square’s overhead speakers, warning of severe
thunderstorms throughout the nearby counties, with winds up to 60 miles an
hour. Michael says he’s “short on optimism and long on hope.” Everyone checks
their apps again, calculating the chance and timing of rain and wind. Scenery,
props, costumes, and sound equipment get unpacked and set. The clouds are dark
and full, but the wind is calm and the chance of rain (on my phone at least)
has fallen to 30 percent and shifted to 8 p.m., near the show’s end. Intrepid
audience members gather in camp chairs and on blankets in the square. We track
cloud movement and watch for breaks in the sky, praying this part of town
catches one. At 6:55 my phone predicts thunderstorms starting in 13 minutes and
lasting two hours.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The performance begins, even as lightning intensifies in the
distance and rolling thunder creates an ominous soundtrack under the opening
chorus of hate toward the two-spirit cousins. Over my shoulder I hear
Clementine Bordeaux say, “It’s tornado weather.” Right—we’re still in the
Midwest, Toto.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">More wind. Horizontal lightning rings the Main Street
Square. Elder Superhero enters, slow-talking the zombie characters, and as the
cousin-siblings Khoskalaka and Áya settle down to their schoolwork, the rain
comes—first in a drizzle and then, after Michael calls hold, in a downpour. The
audience packs to go, the pause becomes cancellation, and the company scrambles
to cover the cardboard pieces and the sound equipment. Large hail falls next,
bouncing off the cement plaza, and we all work to move the whole caboodle under
the overhang. I climb a ladder and, with Kenny and Nephelie’s guidance, untie
the backdrop curtain and unscrew the long pipe that holds it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I’m afraid of the lightning. I think: <i>This is how
I’ll die, on a ladder in a storm at a Cornerstone show I’m here to chronicle,
electrified on the highest point in the square clutching one end of a steel
pipe while Kenny holds the other; the journey we began two years ago by
traveling the state in the back of an SUV with Michael and Larissa up front
will end with us both fried while striking the set in a storm in Rapid.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We don’t die. The scenery gets struck and brought to the
concrete floor of the bandshell until there’s a lull, and, as one, the group
decides to take advantage of the relative calm to haul the stuff to the truck
in the alley behind us. We hand the damp everything up to Ash and Maria as they
pack in as orderly a fashion as possible. And then it’s done, many hands making
lightning work of it. The rain quiets.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Mark Valdez, Cornerstone’s exuberant board chair and
artistic director of Mixed Blood in Minneapolis [Mixed Blood Theatre Company, a
professional, multiracial troupe founded to explore race through theater],
who’s been catching real-time pictures of the rainy mayhem on social media,
texts Michael to say, “At least the set isn’t made of cardboard!” </span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The Road to St. Francis</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The next morning I will tag along for a youth workshop
Larissa and Michael have planned in Crow Creek. It’s the first of several
scheduled for the tour, a way to keep training, community-building, and
empowerment going with young people, outreach to which Larissa has been devoted
since she left the state for ballet school. It’s the kind of give-back
Cornerstone has worked to provide since its infancy too: an ongoing, possibly
lifelong relationship with places and people, not the extractive work sometimes
called “engagement”—i.e., taking stories, talent, and resources from a place
and offering a short-term, one-time return. We’ll leave at 7 a.m. and get
breakfast on the way, at Michael’s favorite place in Rapid, Black Hills
Bagels.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Around 6 p.m., I’m rewatching Stephen Ives and Michael
Kantor’s <i>Cornerstone: An Interstate Adventure</i>, the inspiring 1999
documentary about the company’s early days. Larissa knocks on my door. Tomorrow
morning’s workshop has been canceled without explanation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the kitchen sink after dinner, I talk to Brandon Sazue,
the Hunkpati Dakota actor who plays three roles in <i>Wicoun</i>: comic
book nerd Chris, a meth zombie, and Marcus the “Native Party Dude.” Brandon is
from Crow Creek [Indian Reservation in central South Dakota] and is a
three-time tribal chairman of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe. He speculates that
the workshop was canceled for funerals tomorrow. There have been several deaths
in that small Dakota community lately, including a teen suicide and an older
friend of Brandon’s who drank himself to death. The last time he was there, two
people he knew died in a car crash. The town tends to close down for funerals.
I think of something his cast-mate Gina Project Celebrity Mallory said about
personal loss on the drive to the Black Hills Playhouse some days before: “When
you have a large family, you have to expect it.” This whole land of Native
nations can feel like that—a large family in a state of almost continual,
expected loss.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The next youth workshop takes a more comic turn toward
cancellation. The morning after the Main Street rain-out, the company leaves
Placerville for the Rosebud Quality Inn & Casino, 200 miles away on the
western edge of Rosebud reservation. In the parking lot of the casino, you can
physically step across the Nebraska state line into Valentine. A couple days
later, Larissa, Michael, and I head to the St. Francis Indian School for
theatre games and a playwriting workshop. A large, modern K-12 campus rooted in
Lakota values and language, St. Francis was originally affiliated with the
Catholic mission where we met Harold Compton two years before [see Part 1].
Unlike on our earlier visit, in which we took a Jeep, we’re driving a Toyota
Camry—the first time in years the creative duo hasn’t had a four-wheel-drive
vehicle. We make the mistake of following Google Maps and turn off the highway
onto an unpaved road that alternates dirt with gravel, wet from storms the
night before. Then we hit sand. Not quicksand, but the kind of soft sand you
sink into, and, without the right kind of car, stay sunk.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Michael and I push while Larissa revs. Larissa and I push
while Michael rocks. Remembering lessons from the Chicago snowstorms of my
youth, I drive while they push. We find a remnant of a board and slide it under
the back tire. Still stuck. It’s hot. The closest signs of human existence are
way distant farms. We’re in full prairie. The caption of the photos will read:
“Well, at least they still have reception.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa calls AAA. She calls—and cancels till another
time—the workshop at St. Francis School. Michael calls company manager Paula,
because rehearsal for the next performance will begin in the Todd County Middle
School’s gymnasium early in the afternoon. Two-and-a-half hours later, Paula
pulls up in the kind of SUV we should have been driving. She ferries Michael to
rehearsal while Larissa and I wait for the AAA driver to finish a job in
Mission, an hour away. We chat in the blazing sun at the edge of fields of tall
grass.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These plains were always grazing land for bison, so when the
U.S. instigated slaughters of bison in the 1800s and mandated that the Natives
of the area change from hunters into farmers, it never really worked. Soon 6.5
million acres reserved by treaty for Native tribes were whittled down to 1
million acres as the government revised or ignored the treaties, gave
homesteading rights to whites, grabbed land back, broke it up, and encouraged
sale of the parcels. Very little of the checkerboard that’s left is fertile
farmland. Too sandy, maybe.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Finally, a black 4X4 approaches with a man who looks to be
about 19 years old and a small boy, maybe 6. (His brother? His son? Larissa and
I debate.) Carson attaches his tow chains and pulls us out. This time I’m at
the wheel as the Camry heaves and heaves while I accelerate in reverse. It’s
like being hauled over the craters of the moon in a plastic saucer sled. We’re
out.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa hands him a flier for the show—he lives in Kyle,
near an upcoming performance—and slips him $20. “What’s this for?” he asks. She
tells him it’s just a thank-you and they should buy themselves a good meal. As
they’re leaving, the 6-year-old gives us a piece of advice. “Next time you guys
come up here, you should bring your four-wheel-drive pickup.” He glances at the
sandy, mucky car and, as if anticipating problems with the rental agency,
offers another parting shot: “You should take that to the car wash and don’t
tell anyone.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Four-and-a-half hours after we left the Quality Inn, we
arrive at Todd County, where rehearsal is in full tilt. I’ve never been so
happy to see a middle school gym in my life.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">9A Transformed<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the heart of
the story, people change. Maybe worlds can change too.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Everything crashes in on <i>Wicoun</i>’s lead
character, Áya. The Indians at the Blow Up the Faces Rally, a Native protest at
Mt. Rushmore, grow hungry and restive after the delivery car with free food
gets a flat. Áya is angry too, and, enraged to learn that their sibling-cousin
Khoskalaka secretly applied to a college several states away and has been
offered a “full ride,” sends him away. Crowds at the protest, played by
puppets, become violent and threaten our heroes. The Indians are turning on
each other, what comic book nerd Chris calls “this crabs in a bucket mentality.
Tearing each other down…Expecting someone to save us when we have the means to
save ourselves.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The three superheroes Áya has previously summoned—Wóohitike
(bravery), Wówachiŋtȟaŋke (perseverance), and Wówačhaŋtognake (generosity) [see
Part 2]—aren’t enough. With Chris’s guidance, Áya calls on the fourth cardinal
virtue, Wóksape (wisdom), but no one appears. Maybe book-smart Khoskalaka can
help? Wówačhaŋtognake fetches him back at super speed, but no, Khoskalaka’s not
the answer. This virtue has to come from within Áya. Wisdom will allow Áya to
incorporate the other powers: bravery, perseverance, and, with a nudge from
Wówačhaŋtognake to be as charitable to the white folks as to the Native,
generosity. Áya can assume their powers and fulfill the quest of becoming—but
first must acquire wisdom. This means, according to historian Joseph Marshall,
“knowing what to do with what you know, when to do it, and how to do it.” Or,
in Khoskalaka’s words, as he and Áya reconcile with a little help from their
super friends, “Wisdom is honesty. The old ways. It’s harmony with all things.”
But to find this wisdom, as Chris explains, “You have to be in harmony
with <i>you</i>.” Khoskalaka brings the lesson home: “Be you. All of you.
No more fighting with who you are.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Many
American Indian societies don’t see disease as biological, physiological, or
psychological maladies, but as a reflection of disharmony in society or the
world. This is then manifested in a person’s illness. The healing
rite requires repairing this environmental disorder. The Navajo healing
ceremony, for example, includes prayers, songs or chants, sandpaintings, sweat
baths, ritual bathing, face- and body-painting, and other practices dedicated
to accomplishing this. (See my post on <i>ROT</i> “‘My Mind Restore For Me’:
Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” 15 May 2013.)]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Before our eyes, as Larissa writes, “Áya makes a grand
dramatic gesture to shed the female expression of themself and transitions
before our eyes to a trans man, with a little flair that holds their female
power too. It’s Clark Kent into Superman. Instant and awesome. We wonder why we
didn’t always see it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Áya becomes Ahí. It helps that, as we watch, Ahí is arrayed
in beautiful regalia, head to toe. From this point through the play’s final
minutes, Ahí will speak only in Lakota and Dakota, promising to use their new
powers for all of the people together, using the old to be new, and to “look
incredible while we do it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After the fact, it seems inevitable that 9A [nee-nuh; see
Part 2] was cast as Áya, but it wasn’t. An Oglala Lakota singer-songwriter
based on Pine Ridge Reservation, 9A has earned multiple honors from the Native
American Music Awards and more than 17,000 followers on TikTok for
her “Lakota pop.” As the creative team sorted out specific casting among the
company of actors they’d assembled, and as Larissa and Michael worked to suit
the characters to those who might play them, 9A expected to portray a
superhero. Once rehearsals began, Áya beckoned. Drawn to the idea of being a
trans actor playing a trans character, 9A fixated on the role and “somewhat
intentionally showed a bit more enthusiasm” when reading that part. <i>I
can do it, I know I can do it</i>, she thought. <i>Let me show you that I
have the capability</i>. She could and did.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Áya’s quest mirrors 9A’s in many ways, including the
deepening connection to Lakota values. She grew up in Humboldt, Iowa, where her
Lakota mother and aunt had been “adopted out” in infancy to a white Catholic
family. Fortunately, her grandparents, having traveled the world as a
missionary minister and nurse, had a greater tolerance of cultural difference
than many of the families who “scooped” children out of Native communities. In
2015, just before her 21st birthday, 9A moved back to South Dakota, where she
met a man at a construction job. He invited her to a traditional “sweat,” and
thus began a journey of discovery, post-traumatic stress healing,
self-emergence, and, with that man, a life-changing relationship.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">9A’s gender transition has been a reflection in reverse, as
she transitions to a man onstage and a woman in life. The opportunity has been
powerful. Playing Áya/Ahí, she said, “gave me that opportunity to reconcile a
lot of qualms. In regards to my own gender, it made me feel a bit more content.
Even something as simple as Áya saying, ‘I don’t hate being a girl.’ It was
kind of the same thing for me; I didn’t hate having the body I have.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ahí’s final monologue, while feeling natural to 9A in
Lakota, is also poignant because, as the character stands as the man he’s
become, 9A experiences the moment as “part of the goodbye of owning that
[masculinity] fully in order to move on from it. As a trans person, I never
despised having a male body or hated men or anything. All I ever wanted was to
see our men be healthy and prosper and get better and work through their
stuff.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She sums up the remarkable convergence. “It’s just sort of
beautiful how I’m reconciling my transness and figuring out being Oglala Lakota
and everything else—that I’m having this opportunity of my first paid acting
gig playing a trans lead character written by the first Native woman to get a
play on Broadway. That doesn’t feel subtle.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I think back to the community story circle, where her answer
to the prompt “My superpower is…” was, “I feel powerful when…I just am, when
I’m me, exactly as I’m supposed to be. When I embrace myself to a T and others
match me.”</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Brandon Makes History</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The first performance of the state-wide tour is scheduled
for three days after the Main Square thunderstorm. The company has relocated to
the hotel and casino in Rosebud and will perform in Ft. Thompson, part of the
Crow Creek reservation, where the youth workshop had been canceled without
explanation. This is Brandon Sazue’s home, and it promises to be his big day.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The notice for <i>Wicoun </i>auditions leapt out
at him from the website of Sinte Gleska University. Brandon is a student, along
with his 29-year-old daughter, at Lower Brule Community College [on the Lower
Brulé Indian Reservation in Lyman and Stanley counties, central South Dakota],
an arm of Sinte Gleska. Though he’d never acted before, he thought, “I could do
this. I <i>can</i> do this.” He took a break from his day job as a
school janitor and, because he also drives a school bus, drove home to audition
on Zoom. He auditioned for Elder Superhero, even though, at 49, he doesn’t feel
like an elder yet. So he was happy to be cast as nerdy Chris. With his wife’s
blessing, he took the job.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He had a powerful instinct to do the play—an intuition that
it would change his life, and help him recover from several recent hellish
years that began, I later learn, at the Standing Rock protests in 2016. As
thousands of Indigenous protestors from dozens of tribal nations gathered to
halt the Dakota Access Pipeline that would deliver oil from North Dakota to
Illinois, Brandon worked the encampment, driving people everywhere, working so
hard to support the ongoing gathering that he missed seeing “all the famous
people who came.” When police violently broke the protests, he was arrested and
put into prison. “I was so broken,” he says, though he keeps details to
himself. “I did so many great, awesome things in my life. Then Standing Rock
happened and everything went to shit after that.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The play, he explains, “is giving me my life back. Giving me
something to look forward to, to live for, something to inspire myself to say,
I can do this—just to think about something else, being in a different world.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The night before the Crow Creek performance, we’re talking
in the room we share at the Quality Inn. He’s already told me about his
military service as a young man and being discharged early for drunkenness, a
past he’s surmounted. He doesn’t linger on his three terms as tribal chairman,
though he does say, “Politics will eat you alive.” He currently works seven
days a week at three jobs. Having been a paraprofessional in an elementary
school, he switched to being a janitor to earn 30 or 40 more cents an hour—and
then, days later, the pay scale for paraprofessionals jumped to $20 an hour,
over $4 more than he makes as a janitor. He also drives a school bus and will
soon test for a commercial license so he can drive larger buses. Weekends he
serves as a kind of dorm parent for the boarding students. On top of this, he’s
father to five children from a first marriage, including the daughter he will
graduate beside two months after the tour ends, and 4-year-old twins at home
with his second wife.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But tomorrow he’ll return to his community <i>as an
actor.</i> “They think of me as a janitor, but tomorrow they’ll see I’m an
actor.” He is so proud, and it’s infectious. “We’re making history. Nobody’s
ever brought theatre to the tribes like this. Ever. After we’re there and gone,
then people are going to realize: <i>Holy shit</i>. Of course the first
Native American woman on Broadway was there. Yeah.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The show takes place on a grassy lot between the offices of
the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, local home to Great Plains Tribal Leaders
Health Board and the Tribal Opioid Response project, among
others, and the larger hangar-like building where Brandon spent three two-year
terms as chairman. It’s a hot day, so the audience of just under 30 people
plant their chairs in the shade alongside the office building, which means the actors
will have to skew stage left throughout. The show holds for half an hour.
(Brandon is used to folks here showing up an hour late.) The volunteers from
the Opioid Response project hand out popcorn and “Reach for Life” bags
containing flyers and wrist bands embossed with a suicide prevention hotline
number.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Brandon’s performance seems particularly strong today,
confident. The laughs on the reservation erupt at different moments than in
Rapid City and Custer. (There’s a “Rez dog” sound cue the audience loves, as
they do Wóohitike’s offer to crush the Rapid City cop who harasses Áya and
Khoskalaka.) When Brandon is onstage his twins, who turned 4 the day before,
settle and watch him, transfixed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He and I ride back to Rosebud with Michael and Larissa that
night, stopping for dinner at Mi Pueblo in Chamberlain. From 9:30, when we
leave the restaurant, until midnight, when we arrive at the hotel, the skies
are full of the most intense lightning display I’ve ever seen: 180° of sky lit
by a constant crash of zigzag, horizontal, devil-fingered, and full-sky bursts.
Brandon claims this extreme weather is common here, but we marvel and gasp. I
watch his calm face in the storm as a way of stilling my own panic. At each
electric blast, Larissa lets out a demonic laugh, watching gleefully out the
passenger window. As the rain begins and swells, Michael pulls over, and they
switch seats.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When we reach our hotel, Brandon confesses that the
lightning storm raged on longer than any he remembers. (“It was terrifying,” I
say, still shaking.) He quietly notes that city drivers—i.e., Larissa and
Michael—drive much faster in the rain than locals would to keep from
hydroplaning. (I’d been thinking the same thing, as I watched the speedometer
in mounting dread.) None of it fazed him, though. He’s feeling great about the
day. He heads to the casino to see if his luck will hold, determined to make only
coin-sized bets. I head to bed, my stomach in vomitous knots.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Once in bed I feel drops of water on my face and realize
it’s raining into our Quality Inn room. (It’s raining into other rooms too, I
later discover, the rez franchise being low on the hotel chain’s list of
priorities.) I make my way to reception to ask for a room change and then to
the casino to let my roommate know. Brandon’s sitting at a slot machine aglow.
His great day just got greater: He just won $500 on a quarter bet. He exits
alongside me and doesn’t return to the slots all week.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This is what he says: “Bringing the theatre to Crow Creek,
to my hometown, coming back to the casino and winning $500—it just doesn’t get
any better than that. We made history.”</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The Sense of an Ending<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the heart of
this story: a 10-year collaboration between a playwright and director, and the
end of an even longer collaboration between that director and an ensemble.</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On that windy night at Racing Magpie, the second performance
of <i>Wicoun</i>, Michael John Garcés, a different kind of hero, earns his
cape. It’s a blue-and-white star quilt, really, presented in a surprise
ceremony before the second show begins. Larissa, Kenny, and Clementine drape it
over his shoulders in recognition of all the work he’s done to give theatrical
voice to the Indigenous people of the U.S. This tour, this show, will be
Michael’s final production as artistic director of Cornerstone, 17 years
after he took the job. Two weeks after the tour ends, he will step down.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Michael’s quilt was commissioned from Gladys Thunder
Hawk-Gay, a local artist and grandmother of design consultant Tosa Two Heart.
Coincidentally, the colors match the star quilt Larissa has at home. It’s not
surprising. There’s a striking symbiosis in their relationship, a collaboration
of a decade that has extended beyond the trilogy to productions of Larissa’s
other plays at regional theatres, including one scheduled for the Guthrie
in Minneapolis and one at L.A.’s Center Theater Group. (This latter show
gets canceled, along with the entire season at CTG’s Mark Taper Forum,
just as <i>Wicoun </i>concludes.) They’ve also both been appointed as
professors of practice at ASU [Arizona State University; see Part 2] for the
coming year.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Long-term playwright-director collaborations develop their
own brand of intimacy and openness. Add to that tens of thousands of miles on
the road, in shared community and housing, navigating perpetually new
circumstances, and you have a constant conversation-in-progress. “Some spoken
and some not,” Michael says. “We work together pretty instinctually at this
point.” What he calls the “fluidity” of their collaboration means “we don’t
really define the separation between church and state, between writer and director
quite so concretely.” The credit on <i>Wicoun</i>, as on the other two
projects, reads “By Larissa FastHorse In Collaboration with Michael John
Garcés.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">What started with Michael as artistic director, then
director of her work—he directed all three of her Native projects with
Cornerstone, though he wasn’t originally slated to do so—became a process and
partnership that “just keeps growing and deepening as we go,” according to
Larissa. It also keeps changing. By way of example, she jokes, “I found out
that he can type 10 times faster than me. He hid that from me for many years.
Now he gets to do the typing.” They are currently writing things together.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Through miles and hours in cars, stockpiling favorite candy
and sharing meals on the fly, listening to rock ’n’ roll of different eras,
replaying inside jokes, disparaging each other’s musical tastes, their
relationship emanates the snarky, loving codependence of brilliant siblings
forced to share a bathroom well into their 50s. They know each other too well.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When Michael struggles to describe the “particular feeling”
of coming to the end of his time leading Cornerstone, Larissa offers a word:
“Poignancy?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Yeah, poignancy,” Michael responds. “It feels emblematic of
my tenure at Cornerstone to be doing my last project in South Dakota, a project
that virtually nobody in L.A. will ever see. And yet the methodology is at its
purest, and also the commitment to mission is at its purest.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Why is it emblematic to do the final show where people in
L.A., Cornerstone’s home base since 1994, won’t see it?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It’s just not an L.A. show,” Michael says. “I didn’t go to
Cornerstone to further my career. I had a career. It wasn’t a steppingstone to
something else. My time at Cornerstone has been about deepening connection to
community.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa elaborates: “This is only going to be for a few
weeks. Except for a couple of friends, the only people going to see this are
actual community members. Peter’s been talking about how this is the most
Cornerstone work Cornerstone is doing. It’s not trying to be anything but
community-serving. This is the stuff that makes me the happiest. It fulfills me
the most. Also I feel like it’s actually doing some kind of real good in the
world—as much as you can with theatre.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There has been, for Michael, the “sense of an ending”
with <i>Wicoun</i>, and “moments of surprising emotion in saying goodbye
to the ensemble <i>as</i> an ensemble member.” Still, a lifetime in
theatre, building “an emotional framework” to deal with “having short-term,
intense relationships in collaborations on- and offstage and then moving on to
the next one,” has taught him how to say goodbye. It has also taught him to
focus on the work ahead. “There’ve been a lot of beginnings in my life lately.
I got married in September, and I became a grandfather recently. I’ll be
writing another play for Cornerstone in Portland, though not as artistic
director. I feel like I’ve accomplished what I wanted to. If I could have known
coming in that my tenure would have been <i>this</i>, I would have felt
pretty fucking happy about it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa, on the other hand, doesn’t know if, after these three
projects, she’ll be invited to work with Cornerstone again. She’s not an
ensemble member, and the future direction of the company will depend on the
next artistic director. Michael’s departure, however, won’t affect their
ongoing work. Their engagement in South Dakota will also continue, including,
they hope (and plan to fundraise for) a return of <i>Wicoun</i>. To that
end they have stored all the scenery and puppets.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I talk to Cornerstone folks and realize they’re having a
different moment than he and I are,” she says. “We’ve got a lot more work to do
this year and next, and we’re continuing in South Dakota, so it’s part of a
continuum for the two of us. In terms of collaborating together, it doesn’t
feel like the ending of anything.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Contrast this with Kenny Ramos, who has figuratively and
often literally been along for the 10-year ride with Larissa and Michael. As
part of the American Indian Community Council of Los Angeles, Kenny first
met Larissa and the Cornerstones at a Council meeting and later in the week
joined a story circle that would lead to <i>Urban Rez. </i>Disenfranchised
by a “racist American theatre,” he had stopped acting and managed a program
called Retention of American Indians Now! (RAIN! for short) at his alma mater,
UCLA. Soon he was working as a community partner and then as an actor in the
show. Ensemble membership in Cornerstone followed, while making <i>Native
Nation. </i>He has since been a major connector in each new Native
community, a kind of pan-tribal matchmaker, finding friends or friends of
friends everywhere they go, bringing more and more Native people into their
orbit. “Now I’m like, ‘Wait, Mom and Dad are leaving?’”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He’s excited to see what the company’s next chapter is, but
he’s especially “passionate about the work in Indigenous communities, which has
been very specifically with Michael and Larissa,” he notes. “As challenging as
this is, touring around South Dakota, I would love to do this in all kinds of
tribal communities. Let’s go to all the villages in Alaska. How crazy and hard
would that be? Can we fit it all on a little plane and, oh my God, do it in
winter? Can our cardboard sets last on ice?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For Kenny the “good” Larissa speaks of them doing with
theatre lives in the realm of “sovereign justice. People talk about social
justice a lot,” he says, “and I think with American Indians it’s different. Our
sovereignty is at the center of how our communities operate and also at the
center of how our communities experience what it is to live in the United
States, a nation-to-nation relationship.” Sovereign justice, then, is “all
about our ability to govern ourselves, to determine our futures, to create nations
that thrive, that are centered on our values.” What will the future of this
work be for him as an actor-activist now that Mom and Dad are moving on?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When I ask Michael and Larissa the question they’ve asked
hundreds of others—what is your superpower? —Michael, in the front passenger
seat, grows mum. The silence stretches on. I threaten, “I know you guys don’t
want me to write, ‘They ask people questions they’re unwilling to answer
themselves.’”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Michael says, “One of my superpowers is my intransigence.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa leaps in: “His ability to make endless jokes out of
poor grammar,” adding, “I was naming his superpower. My superpower is
describing Michael’s superpower.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“He has better ones,” she says, getting real. “It’s
beautiful to watch how you uplift people and they don’t know it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If 9A’s comments are any indication, others <i>do </i>know
how much Michael does. “What I’ve loved about Michael is that he’s put an
effort to actually show he cares,” 9A tells me. “It’s cool to see, especially
from somebody on the outside of my community. Just being fully cognizant of how
much trauma there is, but also of what we can do and our own resilience when
our backs are against the wall.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">What makes Michael feel powerful? His jaw clenches and he
crosses his arms. He looks out the window. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">An antelope runs in front of the car, and we wait.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Michael speaks: “I’ve spent the last 17 years at Cornerstone
getting away from the paradigm of feeling powerful. I’m a six-foot tall,
straight, white-presenting dude in the United States. I came to Cornerstone
because I was sick of the power dynamics in rehearsal rooms and bored with it.
I try to do a lot to shift the power dynamics of any creative situations I’m
in.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“That’s why we have an ensemble, right?” he continues. “And
that’s why we do the work in this way. You don’t come to South Dakota to do a
play with community to feel powerful, honestly. There is feeling powerful when
you are part of a collective of people doing a project because they want to do
it. That is a very powerful feeling, of collectivity in power. You can be a
conduit to doing something beautiful.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa elaborates. “When you and I are standing backstage
in the dark somewhere, and the community is out there, and they don’t need us
anymore—I guess that’s what I would call powerful. That’s when I feel good,
when we’re not needed anymore. When they are telling their stories and their
strength and their passion and their way and their confidence, and we are
forgotten somewhere in the dark in the back. Really, that’s the best moment. We
could just walk away and they wouldn’t ever notice.” In other words, the
greatest superhero is the one who can walk away, while those who remain have
the power to save themselves.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Summer 2023</span></b><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large; text-align: left;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The tour ends on June 16 at the Cheyenne River Youth
Project Art Park in Eagle Butte. There are too many stories to print here.
Some I witnessed, like the night Michael, Kenny, Larissa and I stopped in at
the bar outside our motel in Kennebec and a woman, hearing the name FastHorse,
introduced herself and revealed she used to live with Larissa’s grandfather;
she’d had two children with him.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Or stories I heard: how kindly Peter Howard spent 15 minutes
in a police car outside Wagner in 5° weather, getting background checked on the
suspicion that, like his character, he was running drugs or human trafficking,
a problem with white outsiders in rental cars in this region. He told the
officer about community-engaged theatre, discovered they shared a birthday, and
got released with a warning for driving (a little) too fast.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And of course all the stories of the performances and the
people who came to see them, the people who almost auditioned, then backed out,
or who auditioned and couldn’t do the play because this or that happened.
Stories of how the actors felt at each new destination, especially, like
Brandon, when they played at home. Christopher Alexander Piña, whose Lakota
name is Generous, said that everyone <i>has </i>a story and <i>is </i>one.
So many stories converge in this work, each needing to be told.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa, whose superpower is “seeming trustworthy,” knows
this in her writerly bones. “For some reason people feel the need to tell me
their life story,” she muses. “People on the bus, people in the store.” This
attentive approachability is very useful in her work. Though she’s an
introvert, she’s able to talk to strangers and inspire them to “tell me very
long, very intimate stories about themselves. I’m very honored that they do.”
Because she actually is trustworthy, she in turn feels “a lot of responsibility
in holding these stories.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In an email to the company, she tries to express “how
emotional it makes me to hear Lakota being spoken every day while standing
under Lakota paintings and wearing Lakota clothes on L/Dakota actors. It’s a
dream I’ve had for a very long time. Wopila for making it come true—not for me,
but for all L/Dakota people who are invisible or feared or persecuted or
struggling or successful on our homelands. Wopila for helping us be seen. It’s
the best of what art, and especially Cornerstone, can do.” [<i>Wopila </i>is a
Lakota expression of gratitude for all that life has to offer, for all of
existence, and the blessings inherent in each moment.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I left before the tour ended, so I ask her about the parts I
missed. There’s so much more than she can put in an email: All the people who
wanted the company to stay longer or come to their town, the show with 12 dogs,
how “bizarre and special” it was to play in her hometown “with people from all
parts of my life in one place.” 9A already landed her next acting gig, as Danny
in <i>Bear Grease </i>[Indigenous take on the classic 1971 musical <i>Grease
</i>by Crystle Lightning and Henry “Cloud” Andrade]<i>.</i> “I wish you
could have been there for all of the kids,” she writes. “They are the most
amazing part of this.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Children have been central to Larissa’s lifelong project
from the days when she came back, barely out of high school, to lead dance and
writing classes, to the recent summers at Lakota Youth Development [Herrick, S.D.;
mission: “Reclaiming Lakota language, culture and spirituality by promoting
education and healthy lifestyles for our youth through culturally based
strategies”]. In June, she helped arrange a New York trip for the kids from LYD
to see <i>The Thanksgiving Play </i>on Broadway, where they met with
the cast, attended <i>& Juliet</i>, and toured city sights. They not
only saw the city for the first time; they saw the first play by one of their
own, a Lakota woman—someone they know—on Broadway.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Running parallel to <i>Wicoun</i>, Larissa and Michael
scheduled as many youth workshops as possible at stops along the way. Some
never happened, as in Crow Creek, or had to be scaled back after, for example,
a car got stuck in the prairie sand. Each was, as Michael puts it, “its own very
particular adventure.” Originally, as Tony Awards season [11 June 2023; nominations
announced: 2 May] approached, it seemed likely that Michael would be leading
these alone, so that Larissa could be in New York. When <i>The
Thanksgiving Play</i> went inexplicably unnominated, it meant that Larissa
would not only be present at all the tour shows, but that she could join
Michael and the kids. At a May staff huddle, she quipped: “The upside of not
getting a Tony is that I can now force 7-year-olds to write plays.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">They create a show with LYD early in rehearsals, <i>Learning
Wolakota</i>—another superhero piece with a lot of Milks Camp history in it. [<i>Wolakota</i>
means peace, balance, and coming together. It is the traditional way of life
and culture of the Lakota people] They have the concept for another short play,
a template to be workshopped briefly in visits to some of the tour spots. They
will have the children insert their own stories and perform it as a staged
reading. Ultimately it’s presented only at Marty Indian School on the Yankton
Reservation ([easternmost 60% of Charles Mix County, southeastern South Dakota]
also a future performance site), thanks in large part to Dakota elder Faith
Spotted Eagle, and in Eagle Butte before <i>Wicoun</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In Rapid City the night of the rainstorm, Larissa talks to a
little boy who is tearing around Main Street Square on his Razor scooter. She
invites him to the play, telling him it’s about Lakota people.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I mean, his face—just the concept of it happening in his
town was incredible,” she recounts. “But I’m Lakota!” she says he cried. “He
was not a child who had the capacity to sit still and watch something, but he
couldn’t leave until the rain drove us all away. Seeing his face and the way it
lit up, and seeing that again and again in the shows we’ve done for Lakota
people, because of the incredible invisibility we have here—invisible in plain
sight—it’s really beautiful. A little person who does not even understand what
a play is, but couldn’t leave because it was about Lakota people and that’s who
he is.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The children have always been at the heart of this project,
this story<i>. </i>They are the heart because they are the future: the
camp kids emerging from their hoodies to run around as prairie chickens who are
really ducks, the little girl at Racing Magpie laughing at “No sugar!” while
waiting for her permanent teeth, the LYD kids at a Broadway play by their own
teacher, the boy on the Razor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The name of the play Larissa and Michael dream up for the
youth workshops? <i>The Further Adventures of Ahí.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[This
completes Todd London’s chronicle of the development and production of Larissa
FastHorse’s </i>Wicoun<i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve decided to compile a short biographical
sketch of playwright FastHorse to introduce her to </i>ROT<i>ters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m also going to put together a short history
of Native American theater, which, as I said in my introduction to the first installment
of London’s report, I think is “a remarkable cultural phenomenon.”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="color: #783f04;">[I
plan to have the supplement to “‘Superheroes’” ready for posting by Tuesday, 30
January.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I don’t make that deadline,
it will appear on </span></i><span style="color: #783f04;">Rick On Theater </span></span><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">on Tuesday, 6 February. (Another post will run on 1 February—not 30 January—if
I don’t keep my schedule.)]</span><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-73637200356169679272024-01-24T10:00:00.077-05:002024-01-24T15:51:08.021-05:00"Superheroes on Native Land," Part 2<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="text-align: center;">by</span><b style="text-align: center;"> Todd London</b></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Welcome to </i>Rick On Theater<i> for the second part of “</i></span><i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">‘</span></i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>Superheroes
on Native Land.'” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the first
installment, posted on 21 January, readers met Lakota playwright Larissa
FastHorse, the Cornerstone Theater Ensemble, and the Oyate—that is, the people
of D/N/Lakota nations across what’s now known as South Dakota.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Author Todd London also covered some Native
and theatrical history, and traced the first inklings of a play that would
speak in the voices of D/N/Lakota communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From those communities, </i>ROT<i>ters heard, among other things, a call
for Native superheroes.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[Part 2 of this series was
originally published on the </i><span style="color: #783f04;">American
Theatre </span><i style="color: #783f04;">magazine website on 8 December 2023 (</i><a href="https://www.americantheatre.org/2023/12/08/superheroes-on-native-land-part-2/"><i><span style="color: #2b00fe;">AMERICAN THEATRE | Superheroes on Native Land, Part 2</span></i></a><i style="color: #783f04;">).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The three
parts of “</i></span><i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">‘</span></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Superheroes on Native Land</i><i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">’</span></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">” are connected, three installments of one
story. For the sake of continuity, I suggest
reading Part 1 before reading Part 2.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>[ROTters may be interested
to know that I have reposted previous articles</i></span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> on Native American theater from </i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">AT</span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">, “‘Staging Our Native Nation,’” from 24 March to
8 April 2018.]</i><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After years of community work and some COVID setbacks,
Cornerstone Theater assembles a cast, a set, and a tour for Larissa FastHorse’s
‘Wicoun.’</span></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The Play Begins<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></b><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the heart of
this story, a troubled Lakota trans youth becomes a superhero.</span></i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">First came the COVID outbreak, then the playwright’s
breakthrough. Then came the play, <i>Wicoun</i> [pronounced Wich’oon], a
draft of which would be read three months later, in December 2022, for
community audiences in Rapid City, S.D., and Kyle, S.D., with a statewide tour
scheduled to begin the following May. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>Wicoun </i>is an origin story about the making of a
male superhero named Ahí. We meet Ahí as Áya, a teenager struggling with gender
transition and a recent sexual assault. Assigned female gender at birth, Áya
lives in a two-spirit or non-binary space with their gay cousin-sibling
Khoskalaka, hoping one day to become fully Khoskalaka’s “brother.” Played by 9A
(nee-nuh), an Oglala Lakota singer-songwriter who lives on the Pine Ridge
Reservation, Áya’s journey mirrors 9A’s, as a trans woman for whom this project
represents a way of “to say goodbye to the part of me that was like a man.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In <i>Wicoun</i>,<i> </i>Áya spends the days
fending off local predators—specifically a white tweaker named Todd—and
suicidal thoughts that led to at least one previous attempt. The world spins
threateningly around her and Khoskalaka, as we see at the top of the play, when
a chorus of voices assaults the pair: “Why do you have to be such a freak?
What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be a normal girl? Get away from me, fag.
Don’t be a sissy. You need a real man to make you a woman.” A final phrase is
repeated twice: “Why don’t you just kill yourself?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The teens have taken charge of a wild litter of children, a
blurry brood of cousins, siblings, half-siblings, and, in the case of one boy
named Bradley, a kid they’ve never seen before, who each assumed was related to
the other. With no adults to be found and no models for “normal,” Áya and
Khoskalaka are the only family they have. The teens are white-knuckling it,
feeding the pack as best they can, putting them through school, and keeping
them safe from neighborhood meth addicts, sexual predators, and other
reservation dangers. First, though, they have to get them to bed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That’s where Khoskalaka, played by Cornerstone ensemble
member Kenny Ramos, comes in: A budding graphic artist, he produces homemade
comics each night so that their charges have bedtime stories. Tonight’s story
features zombies modeled on the neighborhood’s meth heads, as the teenager’s
actual lives and the superhero version converge. Like the nightly cartoons
themselves, playwright Larissa FastHorse’s comic play blends hilarity of
approach with urgency of concern, entirely avoiding what director Michael John
Garcés calls “reservation poverty porn.” Also much like FastHorse,
Khoskalaka connects modern tales to traditional teachings of the
Dakota/Nakota/Lakota nations, out of the belief that, when it comes to the
problems of the day, “The Oceti Sakowin have lots of answers that we
just don’t use anymore. I mean, think about the old stories. Our people had
real power. Super power.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Enter Elder Superhero. Very, very slowly.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Though “real life” superheroes will help Áya on her hero’s
journey, the first to arrive as part of Khoskalaka’s comic book is Elder
Superhero, whose task is to rid the neighborhood of zombies—i.e., tweakers
pushing “methicine” on children. The idea is Áya’s: “It should be an elder that
talks really slowly for a really, really long time…Tweakers are all anxious,
right? The elder talks them into submission. The more stressed the tweaker
gets, the slower the elder talks, until they fall asleep.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Rosetta
Badhand-Walker</b>, who plays Elder Superhero, met Larissa and Michael in 2018
when they were in Arizona collecting stories for a previous Cornerstone
residency. She knew nothing about the playwright or about Cornerstone but was
“really intrigued,” then “pleasantly surprised,” by the way Larissa sat and
listened as she documented the community’s concerns. Rosetta had never been in a
space “where people from the outside came in and genuinely wanted to hear what
we had to say.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">At that time she was a grassroots advocate to spur action
from the Arizona House of Representatives on House Bill 2570, “Establishing
A Study Committee on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” Rosetta,
like the character she ultimately played in </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Native Nation </i><span style="color: #783f04;">[2016;
see Part 1], was working to spread awareness about an epidemic of violence
against Indigenous Women “to non-Natives that really had no clue, no idea what
was going on in Indian country across </span><a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/turtle-island"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Turtle
Island</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.” At 7 p.m., after a very long day at the House of Representatives,
where she was part of the last group to give testimony, members of her
committee dropped Rosetta off at Steel Indian School Park in Phoenix to
audition for </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Native Nation</i><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It was a long day, and I was so invigorated, so <i>charged</i>,
so emotionally connected that I walked into that audition and it just spilled
out, how I felt about it,” Rosetta recalled. She got cast and made her advocacy
on behalf of the MMIW [missing and murdered Indigenous women; see Part 1] part
of the play.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Stories are the elder’s superpower—tale-telling that brings
cultural awareness to their community. At Lakota Youth Development in
Rosebud, S.D., its founder, Marla Bull Bear, informs the Cornerstone folks that
when community elder Jerome Kills Small enters one of their rehearsals or class
sessions, they should stop whatever they’re doing so that the children can
listen to his stories. He will talk as long as he wishes to, and they’ll have
to remain flexible around that cultural priority.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Rosetta’s personal origin story sits within a painful
history. Born to Indigenous parents, with a father from Rosebud and a mother
from Standing Rock, she was part of what’s called the “Sixties Scoop.” Leading
up to and through the 1960s—until the passage of the Indian Child Welfare
Act of 1978—as many as 35 percent of Native children were regularly removed,
usually by force, from immediate and extended Native families and placed in
predominantly non-Native homes. In fact, state efforts to remove these children
and place them with white families and religious groups were sometimes funded
by the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I was one of those children,” Rosetta recounts. “When I was
2 years old and my half-sister was 4, we were physically removed from our
Native mother and father and placed in white foster care. So I grew up without
my language, without my culture, in a farming/ranching community in McIntosh,
South Dakota.” Her foster parents were “caregivers” at best, but not what she
considers true family. Whereas Larissa, raised since she was 11 months old by
adoptive white parents she loves and fully considers family, returns home to
South Dakota as often as possible, <i>Wicoun</i> has brought Rosetta
back to her homeland for the first time since 1983. “I’ve really never had any
call to come back.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Until there was an actual call. In the years after <i>Native
Nation</i>, Rosetta followed Larissa on social media, up to and including her
historic Broadway debut with <i>The Thanksgiving Play </i>[see Part 1]
earlier this year. That’s how she knew that Cornerstone was about to rehearse a
new play in South Dakota. Still, it was a surprise when her phone rang during a
staff retreat at Arizona State University, where her title is Elder
Residents Program Aide and her job is to foster Native student retention
at ASU. “My phone is on silent, but it vibrates,” she recalls. “I look at the
number and it comes up: Cornerstone Theater.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She stepped out of the meeting and took the call. <i>Wicoun </i>producer
Michael Garcia asked her, “Would you be interested in joining our cast as an
elder superhero?” Recalls Rosetta, “I didn’t hesitate at all. I was like, ‘Oh
yes! Please tell me more.’” She worked out a brief leave of absence with her
supportive program director at ASU to join <i>Wicoun </i>rehearsals,
flying out on Mother’s Day in May and returning on Father’s Day in June.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Rosetta is just one of five actors in this story who will
travel from far-flung reservations, rural communities, cities, and towns,
leaving home and family for two months to work on a play they haven’t yet read
and perform whatever roles they might be assigned. Several have never acted
before. They are here to change their lives. They are here to give back to the
people they love.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Vicki the Brave</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Áya needs help to become the superhero Ahí. Lots of it. This
journey entwines a superhero origin story of coming into one’s power with that
of a gender transition. Both threads require Áya to cultivate the bravery,
perseverance, and generosity to overcome the dangers of the world and be born
anew. Each of the qualities—or “requisite virtues,” in historian and
educator Joseph Marshall’s phrase [Part 1]—comes to Áya in the form of a
superhero teacher. They arrive one at a time, not in bedtime stories like the
Elder Superhero, but in life.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">First comes Wóohitike, who possesses “super strength.”
According to Joseph Marshall, Wóohitike translates as “having or showing
courage” in the face of life’s challenges. “Ultimate adversity produces
ultimate strength,” the Lakota historian writes. Yes, Wóohitike means
“bravery”—and much more. “English is so limiting,” the superhero laments. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Once on the scene, the mighty Wóohitike helps Áya overcome
predatory neighbors: meth-head Todd (“white guy”) and “Native party dude”
Marcus. Powerful enough to lift a car or really big boulders (“I mean, if they
want to be lifted”), she can spin Marcus overhead, WWE-style, and toss him
“pretty far.” She can twist “rez-neck” Todd like a pretzel till he vows
to stay off the reservation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Wóohitike the strong is played by <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Victoria Picotte-Sunbear</b>, who lives on Rosebud Reservation and
whose chance to audition for <i>Wicoun</i> starts as a joke. Her
father forwards her the link announcing auditions because he knows she’s scared
of public speaking. “He’s like, hey, you should try this. Ha ha. LOL,” says
Vicki, as she’s known. She lets the notice sit in her Messenger before
discussing it with her husband. Vicki has never acted before, though she worked
backstage a little in high school. She’s a formerly certified nurse’s aide and
a stay-at-home mom with 1- and 4-year-old daughters from whom she’s never been
away. Also, she’s pregnant again, and will be late in her second trimester
during the <i>Wicoun </i>tour. She doesn’t know anything about the
play, but with her husband and father’s sincere support, she realizes she wants
to do it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The money from the play will also be hugely helpful for the
family, as it will be for several of the community actors. Cornerstone
originally contracted them at South Dakota’s minimum wage—$10.80/hour, or $432
per 40-hour-work-week—but later decided to pay South Dakota’s living wage of
$15.41 hourly, or $616 for a 40-hour week (plus room and meals during
rehearsals and while on tour, housing and per diem). This bump up came as a
welcome surprise and, for many of the actors, represented a significant raise over
their regular income.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Vicki’s mom lives on the Yankton reservation [in Charles Mix
County in southeastern South Dakota], and when she reads <i>Wicoun</i>’s
description and sees that her daughter will play a superhero with super
strength, she feels the part was written for her. Even as a child, Vicki was
her mother’s “pillar of strength.” Vicki’s sense of “just knowing” when
something is right for her also goes deep. At 11, for example, she knew she
didn’t want the life she witnessed on Rosebud and convinced her father to send
her to Catholic boarding school in Huxley, Iowa, where she lived with five
different host families until she finished high school.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With characteristic moxie, Vicki conquers her own fear and,
like her character, “just shows up,” as Larissa recalls it. “We’re like,
‘Yeah!’” She lands the part. She <i>is </i>Wóohitike. And she loves
being onstage. “It makes me feel good to see the way people react, that they
laugh and that I’m causing them joy.” Larissa and Michael are “super-excited to
have a really pregnant superhero portraying the strongest person.” Both of them
believe that with training, Vicki could be a professional. She has an innate
sense of how an actor’s body and comic mask work together. Her performance
never falters. She is confident and strong onstage—brave as hell—and proudly
sports her burgeoning belly.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s also clear that Vicki works round the clock to keep the
family running, even during rehearsals 200 miles from her husband and
daughters. She’s the engine that can’t stop. Online all hours with her family,
she tends to her youngest’s strep throat from afar. This pillar of strength
keeps everything running, even as she toils away on tour—cleaning diligently
when the company packs up its rehearsal quarters, loading and unloading the
truck, folding massive tarps with muscular precision—despite urgings to kick
back. Meantime, she’s returned to college online to earn her bachelor’s degree
in marketing and advertising. In the middle of rehearsals, Vicki finds out
she’s carrying a girl, her third daughter.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If Bravery is her stage name, Vicki considers authenticity
her real-life superpower. “To me that means being my most authentic self so
that I can give people the confidence and ability to be their most authentic
selves.” What makes her feel most powerful? “Being a mother.”</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Generous Perseveres</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In May 2023, a few days before the first performance, puppet
designer Lynn Jeffries shuttles around the porch of her cabin at the
Placerville Camp and Retreat Center [Rapid City, S.D.], where the company is
housed and rehearses in the weeks leading up to the tour. She is trying out a
six-and-a-half foot Hexacomb bear puppet with an actor named <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Generous</b>. Hexacomb—rigid cardboard an
inch thick that is often used as a replacement for foam packaging—will travel
light and be easy to set up and quick to strike in all kinds of touring venues.
The bear attaches by a knotted rope at the nose, sternum, and navel, allowing
it to lumber appropriately. Generous operates it from behind.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Generous is Christopher Alexander Piña’s Lakota name, given
to him by his grandmother, who told him, “It’s because you’re generous,
grandson, that you keep getting blessed,” and who named him Wačante Ognaka
Wičasa, “Generous man.” He had directed a reading of Larissa’s play <i>Average
Family</i> at the Black Hills Community Theatre in Rapid City,
after which Cornerstone held a community reading of a draft of <i>Wicoun</i>.
When Christopher told Larissa his Lakota name, she replied that one of the
superheroes in the play is named Generosity. “You might end up playing
yourself,” she said. “And I was like, how uncanny is that?” As it turned out,
however, that’s the name of the third superhero. Generous/Christopher instead
plays superhero number two: the animal shape-shifting Wówachiŋtȟaŋke, which
means Perseverance.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s easy to understand how, for the Plains Native bands,
perseverance would be a necessary virtue. “When resistance ceased to be an
option,” Joseph Marshall explains, “surviving within the parameters of white
control on the reservations was the only choice. There was no other option but
to reach deep inside and persevere day in and day out, year in and year out,
from one generation to the next.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Wówachiŋtȟaŋke’s origin story is a version of Áya’s life
story, with animal transformation instead of gender change. It provides
backstory for both characters, a description of past events that led them here.
“As a child, I was different,” the superhero explains. “I could not control
what kind of animal I was. It scared people, even my own family.” Like Áya,
Wówachiŋtȟaŋke ran away to live with a sibling, who loved them no matter what
form they took. Also like Áya, they were hounded by evil villains who “did not
understand what I was.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Not knowing how to defend themselves, both Áya and
Wówachiŋtȟaŋke contemplated suicide. The superhero grew small—a flea—and wished
to become even smaller, until they ceased to exist. Both were saved by the love
of their siblings and the little ones they cared for. “I thought of all that I
had overcome already and knew that if I disappeared, I would be missed. I knew
that I had resilience, and that I would not let my trauma define my future.”
Wówachiŋtȟaŋke transformed into a deer and ran home, ever after possessing the
power “to change into different animals at will.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa and the creative team initially imagined that
Wówachiŋtȟaŋke would be a single character played by an actor with puppets of
four different sizes, starting with an “itty-bitty one” and growing to human
size and larger, all based on the actor playing the role and the costume. In a
later draft, though, Larissa reconceived Wówachiŋtȟaŋke with the power to
change into any animal form, transforming before our eyes into six different
animals.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Around the time of that revision, the creative team was also
rethinking group scenes—without actual people. The COVID outbreak at Milks Camp
in August 2022, and the subsequent decision to avoid audience participation and
large locally rehearsed choruses, meant that, according to puppet designer Lynn
Jeffries, “A couple of pieces of the play that were going to be performed by
human beings now needed to be performed some other way.” Remember Áya and
Khoskalaka’s brood of kids? Pre-Milks Camp, they were to be played by local
children rallied by community partners at each tour stop. Now? Puppets.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As the longest-serving original ensemble member (Peter
Howard has also been in the company since day one but took a brief hiatus in
the ’90s), Lynn has designed all production elements for more than 60
Cornerstone shows over the years. Now, after years of working with shadow
puppets and toy theatre, she prefers puppetry. So when set designer Nephelie
Andonyadis suggested the Hexacomb, Lynn was in her (two-dimensional) comfort
zone. Plus, with a script that promised to be in continual flux—especially with
the playwright busy with a play on Broadway until the start of rehearsals—Lynn
reasoned, “Okay, I can just bang the puppets out in a couple of hours. If the
play changes again, I can just bang out something different.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And so Lynn designs as the show evolves, projecting drawings
on Hexacomb and constructing from there. Sometimes, assistant director Sapphire
Tiger, a Mnícoujou/Sičánǧu Lakota and Navajo student from Black Hills State
University [public university in Spearfish, S.D.], helps cut them out. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Generous performs Wówachiŋtȟaŋke’s tale in Lakota, not
English, as the attacks and animal transformations play out as a Hexacomb
puppet show behind a cutout proscenium arch. There are no supertitles, no
program notes. The only translation (quoted above) appears in the script
itself.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa only recently began studying Lakota in an online
class, though she’d been “toying with it on my own” for a while. She wrote
Wówachiŋtȟaŋke’s origin story in English, and it was translated, along with the
many Lakota passages in the play, by Milks Camp elder Jerome Kills Small.
Jerome also recorded the text, so that the actors less conversant with the
language could learn by listening. The play ends in Lakota, too, with a final
speech by Ahí, the superhero Áya becomes. Over the years, Larissa and Michael
entertained the possibility that the whole play might be in Lakota, as some
people had requested as early as 2021. In the final version, the two languages
alternate, with much of the dialogue in English, and these key
moments—including some choral passages—in Lakota.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In one such choral moment the entire cast, speaking Lakota,
recites a long list of responses to a prompt offered at community story circles
over the years of engagement: “My superpower is…” When, in an interview,
Christopher responds to the prompt, his words could describe the character he
plays: “My superpower has probably been fortitude. That’s actually my Auntie’s
Lakota name, and it means to persevere, to push through. Even when it’s hard,
because it hurts to walk, we’ve still got to get up and move forward somehow.
We’re basically the roses that grew from the concrete, like Tupac stated [reference
to <i>The Rose That Grew from Concrete</i>,<i> </i>a collection of poetry
written by rapper Tupac Shakur, published posthumously in 1999], because I come
from a place where it’s not okay to be two-spirit, it’s not okay to be brown,
and it’s not okay to be male and to be those things. So I wake up with three
strikes against me, and I have to be aware of that every time I open my eyes.”
As a two-spirit little brother, “almost raised by my sisters, I completely
connected with this play. And then the bullying—I was bullied even as an
adult.” Fortitude allows him “to see another world out there, where
there’s acceptance, where it’s sacred, where you’re praised instead of
punished.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This project represents the coming together of so many
aspects of Christopher’s life that each coincidence feels like part of a
design. Most remarkable of all is the fact that he’s a self-described
“shapeshifter” playing one. Believe it or not, he auditioned for Cornerstone in
the middle of a snowstorm wearing a reindeer costume. Why? “Because I wear it
during the holidays. I’m everything: I’m the Easter Bunny, I’m Cupid, I’m an
elf.” He costumes up for kids and hands out gifts, determined to show them that
who they are is important. “So I was a reindeer when they took my audition
picture. I was joking, ‘I’m Randy the Reindeer, and I just want to lead the
sleigh.’” Plus, His [<i>sic</i>] connection to <i>Wicoun</i> is also
a connection to the way of life from which the play grew. A Standing Rock
Hunkpapa Sioux, Christopher traces his matrilineage back to
great-great-great-grandma Angela RedFox Uses Arrow, who followed Sitting Bull
after the defeat of Custer at Little Big Horn [25-26 June 1876 in Montana
Territory], first to Canada and then back to Standing Rock Reservation in North
Dakota.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The art part of Cornerstone’s work also comes naturally to
him: He started modeling professionally on a trip to New York and, later, in
Canada. He performed as a dancer in New Orleans. The door to Christopher’s room
at the Placerville Camp is usually open, and he’s covered the walls and windows
with beautiful fabrics and sparkling, colored lights. He is a writer too, an
intern at the <i>Native Sun News </i>in Rapid City, where he has
become aware that “everyone <i>is</i> a story and everyone <i>has</i> a
story.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Of <i>Wicoun</i>, he says, “We are on the star path
here.”</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Gina Gives It All Away</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Áya’s third and final magical assist comes from the
superhero with Christopher’s name, Generosity, played by his real-life
friend, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Gina Project Celebrity
Mallory</b>. At 29, Gina is a few years younger than Christopher, and stumbled
into <i>Wicoun </i>by following him (in his full reindeer drag) when
he went to try out. Together they trudged through the thick of a winter storm
that kept almost everyone else away from auditions.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s her first time onstage, but not the first time she
followed him into Larissa’s world. When Christopher directed the Rapid City
reading of <i>Average Family</i>, he recruited Gina to help with props.
Does she enjoy acting? “It’s hard, but it is so fun—definitely an experience I
feel that everybody should experience at least once in their life,” she says.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The role of Wówačhaŋtognake represents generosity and
compassion, which are, in Joseph Marshall’s telling, separate Lakota virtues,
but have been elided by Larissa into one superhero, who teaches Áya that to be
truly generous, one must “hold nothing back” and “trust in being provided for.”
Joseph Marshall paraphrases “an ancient sentiment” to explain “why generosity
is necessary: ‘The Earth Mother gives us all that she has. We must do the
same.’”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Like Christopher and most of the cast, Gina identifies
closely with her character. This reflects both Larissa and Michael’s canny
casting intuition, as well as their eagerness to suit the characters to the
people playing them. “We’ll come up with some text,” Michael explains, “and
then we’ll cast a bunch of people who really change what the text is.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I’m just like my character,” Gina says. “I’m always so
giving, and I’m always the one that rushes to help right away. I don’t believe
in holding onto very many possessions. What I have with me is what I have in
life because I give everything and anything away.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She and Christopher started a “Regiftmas” one holiday
season, giving presents to 32 families in Rapid City and Pine Ridge. They
helped 172 people with gifts, including animals, adults and children. Online
and in conversation, they heard from a lot of people who don’t celebrate
Christmas because they haven’t received gifts in years. So they solicited
gifts, wrapped them, and sent them back out to others.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These gestures resonate with the example of Sitting Bull [c. 1837-90].
Larissa tells me that the 19th-century Hunkpapa Lakota leader, having grown
quite wealthy, in part by controlling the rights to his own ubiquitous
photographic image, gave some of his money to his own people and donated the
rest to poor white communities. Why would he give his wealth to people who
were, for all intents and purposes, his enemies? He was upset by what he saw,
Larissa explains. He didn’t understand how people who have so much could let
their own people suffer in this way.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Born Sicangu Miniconjou Lakota and Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux,
Gina was adopted by her grandmother, whom she calls “my mom.” Her compassion is
especially attuned to the struggles of teenagers and children these days, their
“tribulations” from “the drugs, the violence, the alcoholism.” Her heart goes
out to the suffering of others.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In Megan’s Prius on the way to the first performance, I’m in
the back seat with Christopher, who has earbuds in and is going over his Lakota
monologue while oiling and braiding his long, just-washed hair. Gina’s in the
front passenger seat. She knows this part of the world intimately, and many of
the places we pass on the way to the Black Hills Playhouse [Rapid City,
S.D.] remind her of jobs she held there, including food service and flagging
traffic for road work. Other locations kindle memories and stories of her life
and community. Though she speaks matter-of-factly, it’s easy to hear both pain
and love in these often tragic stories.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the play, Wówačhaŋtognake’s power is super speed, which
Michael stages by slowing everyone onstage to extreme slo-mo, while Gina moves
with normal, no-hurry ease, covering great distances in a hot second. In
life, she goes at her own pace too. When we drive past the glorious Pactola
Lake in the Black Hills, Gina says she spends her summers there, going almost
daily to be alone, “drinking my drinks and smoking my smokes.” She rides the
length of the water in her own time, on her long board.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Black Hills</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;">At the heart of
this story—of everything—is the land.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The geographic heart of this story is one I almost missed.
It’s the piece that—as a white man who has lived for more than 60 years in
major cities, working at and mostly attending a very different kind of
theatre—I heard wrong. Then, sitting with some of the cast over a delicious
dinner of roasted chicken and a dish of beans, corn, and squash called Three
Sisters Mash, all prepared by company chef Sharea Holcomb, I got it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It was two weeks into rehearsals, my first full day at
the Placerville Camp and Retreat Center, 18 months after my previous South
Dakota visit with Cornerstone. I hadn’t yet read the full <i>Wicoun</i> script
but had watched the company stage scene 12, “Driving in Rapid City”: After
sending the children off to school, Áya and Khoskalaka head to the city with
Wóohitike (Bravery) and Wówachiŋtȟaŋke (Perseverance), the first two virtuous
superheroes. (The car, like so much else, is made of Hexacomb, drawn by
Nephelie and colorfully painted by local Diné graffiti artist Focus Smith. [<i>Diné</i>
is the name the Navajo call themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It means ‘the people,’ just as <i>Oyate</i> means ‘the people’ in the
D/N/Lakota language.]) They will meet with Chris, the older comic book nerd,
played by Brandon J. Sazue Sr. They hope he can unravel the mystery of the
characters in the back seat.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Áya also wants to attend a Native protest at Mount Rushmore
known as the “Blow Up the Faces Rally,” the latest in a series of failed
attempts to rid the Black Hills of the white granite faces of Presidents
Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt (Teddy), and Lincoln. Carved into land that is
sacred to the Lakota—land promised in perpetuity to the Sioux in 1868 and grabbed
back by the U.S. a decade later when gold was discovered there—Mount Rushmore
celebrates the leaders of a settler culture that annihilated so much Indigenous
life. It is a monument to genocide, land theft, and governmental deceit.
Blowing up the faces is, for the Native population, a <i>thing</i>; it is
also, throughout the play, a laugh line.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Still trying to suss out their powerhouse companions, Áya
welcomes them to Rapid City and asks, “Have you two been here?” Wówachiŋtȟaŋke
answers, “We are all from here. It is the heart of everything that is.” My
big-city mind hears irony in the line, and I laugh—the joke being that only
deluded inhabitants of Rapid City, S.D., would think it’s the center of the
universe (when everyone knows that Brooklyn is). At dinner, however, I learn
from Vicki and Brandon that, for the Lakota people, the Black Hills <i>are </i>the
heart of everything, because they’re the site of their origin story, their
emergence from the spirit world or spirit lodge. As part of the Lakota creation
myth, the Oyate originally entered the human world through a portal in the
Black Hills Wind Cave or, in modern Lakota, <i>Maka Oníya</i>, “breathing
earth.” That’s why it’s sacred. That’s why Mount Rushmore is a desecration.
There you have it: Rapid City, specifically the Black Hills, is the heart of
everything. The joke, it seems, was on me.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Note: </span>In many Native American religions,
the origin story designates a “place of emergence,” a sacred spot in their
traditional home territory where The People’s ancestors emerged from beneath
the earth, where the unborn souls dwell, into the living world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among the Hopi of the Southwest, it’s called
the <i>sipapu</i>, a word used by many other Indian peoples.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“So much of Native identity and culture is rooted in land
and this connection to the land,” Kenny Ramos told me in the summer of ’21. He
had arrived in South Dakota ahead of Michael and Larissa, and immediately hiked
the Black Hills with Clementine Bordeaux. When Larissa and Michael landed a few
days later, “The first thing we did was a hike in the Black Hills,” he says.
“We did Black Elk Peak, which is the tallest peak in South Dakota. So for me, I
think first and foremost, it’s just important to be out and connecting to the
land in that way.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When the time comes to tour, Kenny prefers the outside
performances, “even though it’s sweaty and hot as fuck. There’s something
really special about being outside, about the journey of creating the play
starting in He Sapa, the Black Hills. In the birthing and creation of this piece,
the land has been a very big part.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Surrounded by those very same hills, Placerville Camp, a
Christian retreat center 12 miles outside of Rapid, provides the perfect
setting to rehearse and house the company. Placerville is “the most
extraordinary, beautiful campsite one might imagine,” Michael wrote when he,
Kenny, Larissa, and Peter first saw it in August 2021. They were awed by it. It
helped, too, that Sharla and Kerry Ste[e]ver, who run the camp, were
schoolmates of Larissa’s.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Almost two years after this initial sighting, on the
company’s last Saturday after nearly six weeks in Placerville, the camp preens
its glory under cloudless skies, crystal blue after the previous night’s
thunderstorms. Rapid Creek, which borders the property, flows under a wooden
bridge spanning this bank and the verdant woods across the way, the water
mildly glinting in the sun. A turkey vulture floats overhead. Birds call from
everywhere, each with a different song. It might be 70 degrees, hotter in the sun,
but a slight breeze keeps me cool as I sit on a grassy slope running from the
base of the camp’s chapel to the creek. Nearby the Ste[e]verses [<i>sic</i>] and
their colleagues are raising a permanent gazebo supported by Ponderosa Pine
columns, 24 inches in diameter, 8 feet high, and 175 years old, each weighing
about 1,000 pounds. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Behind the chapel, Peter Howard gathers the actors and leads
them through warmups. During his decades at Cornerstone through hundreds, even
thousands of cross-cultural encounters, Peter has held steady as the seasoned,
dedicated professional embodying the performance standards expected from all,
even those who, like Vicki, Gina, and Brandon, have never acted before. Like
the rest of the Cornerstone company, he never patronizes his amateur colleagues
or falsely meliorates. He remains respectful and authentic. From my perch, I
can see the way Peter assumes full commitment at every moment. The cast
vocalizes with movement, releasing their words and voices into the air. “Topeka
Bodega, Bodega Topeka.” I hear the echo of their words from what sounds like
miles away in the hills. “Hello Placerville!” they call. From the surrounding
pines, Placerville calls back: “Hello!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Black Hills, the heart of everything, is where
performances begin. On the day of the first show, which is also the first dress
rehearsal and full run-through, I enter the Placerville dining hall as others
pass in and out, faces serious and sleepy. “Is something happening today?” I
ask, a smartass. Ash Nichols, the company’s tour production manager, responds,
“You mean our first performance and the start of packing and touring?” Lynn
Jeffries pipes in with wry wisdom, uttering what could be Cornerstone’s motto:
“<i>Something</i> will happen.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Elder Superhero Rosetta finishes breakfast. “Ready for the
day?” I ask. “It’s scary,” she answers. “But kinda like a good scary.”</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">May 25, 2023, Custer State Park</span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We enter the campus of the 77-year-old Black Hills
Playhouse, a long-term partner for the project and the one professional theatre
on the itinerary, though the show will perform outside by the covered picnic
area and not in the rustic jewel box theatre. The Playhouse company and interns
arrived only the day before. They will break rehearsal for <i>The Lifespan
of a Fact</i> to attend <i>Wicoun</i>. BHP’s summer stock season also
includes Lauren Gunderson’s <i>Silent Sky</i> and two musicals, <i>The
Drowsy Chaperone </i>and <i>9 to 5</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As the company unloads the rented cargo van, it seems like
the circus has come to Custer. Larissa stands tall in the truck bed, handing
down sandbags made from the 400 pounds of sand that production manager Ash and
managing director Megan bought at the Ace Hardware in Rapid a few days before.
Without them, the set would blow over in the Plains wind at every outdoor
performance. Cast and crew carry costume boxes and racks to indoor dressing
rooms past the Playhouse’s washing machines and low shelves of graying
published plays.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Tape measures mark the lawn playing area with an X,
bookended by pop-up tents sprayed in kaleidoscopic motley by graffiti artist
Focus: Bear Butte on one side, Devil’s Tower on the other. Small colored cones
border the downstage edge. A backdrop of brilliant blues, pink, yellow, and
green—sunrise over the Black Hills—painted by retired Lakota language teacher
Matt Uses Knife (with a duplicate curtain Nephelie painted hanging behind,
creating visual depth) and cut into dangling strips, flutters in the breeze.
Nephelie has engaged these Native artists and prompted them to use parts of the
set as canvas for their painted dreamscapes. Likewise, she set Oglala
Lakota College graphic art student Teslah “Sota” Knight to work on the comic
book-style signage—the SMASH, KABOOM, and OUCH words that accompany the final
melee.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A BHP company management intern leads me to the garden shed,
where I find a shovel suitable for scooping dried bison patties the size of
small satellite dishes from the playing space. In less than half an hour, the
“stage” is set.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Michael rehearses quick changes, including the entrance of
two meth-dealing zombies, played by Brandon and Peter. Focus lies on the hill
among the dandelions (safely away from where I piled the bison poop). He has no
reason to be nervous.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I think about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in <i>Annie
Get Your Gun</i>. In the Irving Berlin musical, the Indians, often played by
white actors, largely serve as comic foils, including Sitting Bull, who did in
fact tour with Buffalo Bill after his return from Canada. (As a young actor
Kenny Ramos performed in that show twice, and he cites it as an example of how,
before meeting Cornerstone, “I had never done anything that was truthful about
American Indians onstage.”) Today, in a historic turnaround, the Indians bring
the show. The tents are theirs, the stories are theirs, and they are the main
act in a production that will travel to predominantly Indigenous communities,
though this first audience, drawn from the Playhouse’s traditional audience,
looks to be mostly white.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa takes the stage with rock star energy and proclaims,
“I’m from South Dakota.” Loud applause. She tells them that, as a kid, she saw
many plays at Playhouse. Now she’s here with a play written about what the
Native people of this land said they wanted to hear. Michael follows
apologetically: “Unfortunately, I’m not from South Dakota.” He cautions the
crowd that the company hasn’t run the whole show before, that Larissa will be
on book and may call out lines. “I may run onstage and yell ‘Stop!’” More
applause resounds from the timber shelter in and around which more than 70
people wait to become <i>Wicoun</i>’s first house.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Laughter resounds too throughout the performance, and the
cast grows confident. Larissa does shout out a few lines when an actor freezes.
Michael stops the show just once—they need more time to arrange the puppets for
Wówachiŋtȟaŋke’s origin story. The wind whips up when Vicki, as Wóohitike,
shows her strength, and it feels like part of the play. The wind isn’t quite as
kind to the cardboard puppets and set. But the audience is more than
kind. <i>Wicoun </i>is off and running.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“In a Cornerstone show, the first performance takes a
quantum leap beyond the dress rehearsal,” Lynn, a veteran of 150 productions,
notes. “It’s not really until you get an audience that you understand what
you’re doing, and then you get it in a deep, electric way. And it’s remarkable.
Watching that happen is one of the great privileges of my life—watching the
community cast light up.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>[In
the next and final installment of “</i></span><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">‘</span></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Superheroes on Native Land</i><i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">’</span></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">” (to be posted on
Saturday, 27 January): More things go wrong—some tragic, some comic, some
elemental—as the company tours without a net.
I hope you all will come back to </i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">ROT</span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> to check it our.]</i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-48177283568187808292024-01-21T10:00:00.119-05:002024-01-24T16:05:08.514-05:00"Superheroes on Native Land," Part I<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;">by</span><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;"> Todd London</b></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In 2018, I reposted a
series of articles about Native American theater from the Theatre
Communications Group’s </i>American
Theatre<i> magazine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I explained at that
time that I’d been introduced to theater by American Indians some years earlier
and had come to feel it was “a remarkable cultural phenomenon.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[A relatively new
development in American theater history, it’s continued to develop and has come
to occupy a significant position in the panoply of American theater.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first play by a Native American woman writer,
</i>The Thanksgiving Play <i>by Larissa
FastHorse, opened on Broadway last spring.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="color: #783f04;">[A little over a year ago, </i><span style="color: #783f04;">American Theatre</span><i style="color: #783f04;"> ran another series of articles on
Native American theater, entitled “Superheroes on Native Land.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Below is the first installment of the
three-part story by Todd London, originally posted on </i><span style="color: #783f04;">AT</span><i><span style="color: #783f04;">’s website on 14
November 2023 (</span><a href="https://www.americantheatre.org/2023/11/14/superheroes-on-native-land-part-i/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">AMERICAN
THEATRE | Superheroes on Native Land, Part I</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">).</span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[The two following articles
will be posted on </i>Rick On Theater <i>on
24 and 27 January.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(For readers
interested in the previous Native American theater posts from </i>AT<i>, I ran “‘Staging
Our Native Nation’” from 24 March to 8 April 2018.)]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">How a Lakota playwright, 7 Indigenous actors, and an
L.A.-based ensemble survived a pandemic, crossed thousands of prairie miles,
and confronted centuries of history to make a play.</span></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Playwright Returns</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">August 2021</b><i style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>At the heart of
this story, an acclaimed artist comes home to fulfill a lifelong ambition:
making a play with and for her own Native community.</i></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: left;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We roll up to the St. Francis Mission [St.
Francis, S.D.] in the rented Jeep. We’ve been traveling the state commonly
known as South Dakota for most of a week, starting in Rapid City. Yesterday we
entered the tribally sovereign lands of the Oglala Lakota Nation. We made our
way, with several stops, through the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the largest
reservations in the U.S. and its poorest county. We’ve reached the south
central part of the state, the Rosebud Reservation, where the playwright’s
Sicangu Lakota family comes from. It’s a place she loves and cherishes, rife as
it is with the emotions of family history, and, of course, <i>history</i> history.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“There’s nowhere I’d rather be on the Earth, nowhere on this
planet,” the playwright says. “That’s always been the case. Unfortunately, my
work doesn’t live here. It’s the first time I’ve been able to bring my work
here. I’ve been working my whole career to get back.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We’ve been traveling together for almost a week: the
playwright; the director, Michael John Garcés, who is also the artistic
director of Cornerstone Theater Company [Los Angeles]; actor and
Cornerstone ensemble member Kenny Ramos; and me. St. Francis is a
spur-of-the-moment pullover, not on the itinerary. The playwright remembers it
somewhat from childhood. She wants to check it out.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The playwright, who trades off driving with Michael, has
been riding shotgun. She emerges first, and I follow her, walking toward the
Jesuit mission’s main building. A man, maybe in his late 50s, steps out of the
main door, watching us. The playwright ambles toward him with the relaxed grace
of someone who has spent over half her life as a professional dancer, which she
has, and the confidence of someone who is at home. Which she is.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Hello,” she says. “My name is Larissa FastHorse.” [See
also “‘Staging Our Native Nation.’” Article 1: “Native Women Rising,” 24 March 2018,
and "‘Staging Our Native Nation,’" Article 5 & 6: “We Start by Acknowledging
the Land,” 5 April 2018.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And the man she has never met, who will introduce himself as
Harold Compton, chief operating officer of the mission, replies simply, “You’re
famous.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As someone who has worked in the American nonprofit theatre
for nearly 40 years and with playwrights for much of that time, it’s hard for
me to imagine any theatre artist who is not a media star being famous in the
Northern Plains. Let alone a playwright. Eighteen months from now, Larissa will
in fact achieve unique status as the first Indigenous woman writer to have
a play on Broadway, but that’s a long, uncertain way off, especially in this
first queasy calm between COVID-19 heaves.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Yet famous she is. She’s <i>from here</i>, and she’s
cut a path through the wider world that few can claim. Starting as a
professional ballet dancer and choreographer until injuries ended her dance
career, she wrote and sold two TV shows and made a film, even before her first
plays were commissioned, written, and produced all over the country, before she
won national awards and prizes and had articles written about her
accomplishments. If folks here see her as a local hero—and many more will by
the time <i>The Thanksgiving Play</i> opens on Broadway in April 2023
[Hayes Theater, 20 April-11 June 2023]—she wears it lightly and connects
easily, despite being a self-proclaimed introvert.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa has lived most of her adult life in Los Angeles and
traveled widely for work, but in some ways she’s never left South Dakota. She’s
returned frequently to lead youth workshops, first in dance and then writing,
on reservations and in towns across the state, almost since she graduated high
school in 1989. I wonder if this geographic split—home always being two
different places—is a product of her origin story.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Born [in 1971] to Lakota parents in the Okreek village on
Rosebud, Larissa FastHorse was brought to white parents, Ed and Rhoda Baer, at
11 months, and open-adopted by them seven months later. She was, for the Baers,
the “miracle baby” they’d tried and wished for in the first 22 years of their
marriage. Larissa spent her early childhood in the tiny city of Winner, S.D.,
before moving to the state capitol, Pierre (pronounced Peer, thank you).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Her parents made sure she stayed connected to her Lakota
community and culture, something that came naturally to Ed, who worked with
Indigenous people throughout the state as an agent of the Board of Pardons and
Paroles and eventually as executive director of the Office of Correctional
Services. He helped found and taught at Native schools and colleges,
including Oglala Lakota College [on the Pine Ridge Reservation] and Sinte
Gleska University [Mission, S.D.], before becoming a founding professor
at Capitol University Center [Pierre, S.D.], teaching sociology for 20
years, including to many Native students. Early in his marriage to Larissa’s
mom, they spent about five years in Nigeria, where he taught, before returning
to the Plains to join the faculty at a Lutheran high school in Valentine, Neb.,
just across the South Dakota border. Larissa, “a daddy’s girl from day one,” in
her own words, inherited her sense of service from him.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Still, as she told <i>New Yorker</i> theatre
critic Vinson Cunningham in a 2023 radio interview, “When I was younger,
it was very painful to be separated from a lot of things I felt like I couldn’t
partake in, because I wasn’t raised on the reservation, or I’d been away from
my Lakota family so long…Now I really recognize it as my superpower, that I can
take Lakota culture and experiences and Indigenous experiences and translate
them for white audiences—which, unfortunately, are still the majority of
audiences in American theatre.” Two worlds at once.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Michael and Kenny walk up behind us to the accompaniment of
summer cicadas, and Harold Compton offers to tour us through the closed St.
Francis Mission buildings. He unlocks the St. Borromeo Parish Church, a
breathtaking fusion of Catholic and Lakota iconography, suggesting a
sympathetic alliance that is contradicted by historical fact. Then, like the
master of keys in a magical children’s story, he parts the sealed doors of
the Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum and ushers us into the most
extensive collection of Sicangu Lakota artifacts outside of the
Smithsonian—more than 2,000 items of art and living culture, including
clothing, handicrafts, tools, regalia, weaponry, tipis—plus a 42,000-item
photographic archive. We are alone in the museum, which has been closed since
the beginning of the pandemic and will stay closed due to staffing shortages,
even as the world begins to open up. [The museum is currently still closed but
is still doing tours by appointment.] Harold, a member of the Rosebud Sioux
Tribe, worked for 35 years at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and still serves as
Deputy Director of Policy and Research for the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Land
Enterprise. He talks us through the history of the mission and its school and
walks us through generations of Lakota life.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He doesn’t mince words: Some people are very positive about
the Catholic education that was available to or forced upon the Native people
starting in the late 19th century. Others “want to burn this place down.” Seven
weeks ago [June 2021], the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania
announced that it would exhume the bodies of Rosebud Sioux children and
return them to their families—9 of at least 189 students thought to be buried
there, victims of physical and sexual abuse in the school’s 30 years of
operation, beginning in 1879.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Carlisle was the first of more than 100 such U.S.
residential facilities to which Native children were sent for Christian
reeducation. There were others in Canada, including Kamloops Indian Residential
School in British Columbia, where, less than three months before we arrived at
this mission, 215 children’s bodies were dug out of unmarked graves. There
they were stripped of their Indigenous culture, language, and names, as a means
to, in the words of Carlisle’s founder, “kill the Indian” and “save the man.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Back inside the offices, we meet one of the mission priests,
and Harold briefly pops into a Zoom meeting projected on his office screen. As
we say goodbye, he pulls a newspaper clipping off a pile on his desk. It’s an
article about Larissa winning the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Award the
previous year [2020]. He cut it out when it first appeared and kept it at hand.
Now the subject of the article has miraculously appeared in his office. He asks
her to autograph it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“That was a quintessential Cornerstone moment,” Michael
tells me, back in the Jeep.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“You just show up, and everything happens,” Larissa
explains.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Everything,” echoes Kenny.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Enter the Ensemble<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">June 1986-present</b><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>At the heart of
this story: A legendary theatre company returns to its rural roots with an
ambitious tour that will take it to 17 venues in 22 days, in 15 towns across
2,000 miles, in a handful of rental cars—one of which will get stuck in the
prairie sand—and a leaky Penske cargo van.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And yet Larissa FastHorse is not the story. “This work isn’t
about me,” she insists. “It’s not about centering my voice and my desires. It’s
about centering community.”</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Centering community isn’t merely a part of Cornerstone’s
mission, it’s the lede. “Cornerstone Theater Company collaborates with
communities.” So reads the first of a three-sentence, 28-word mission
statement that rivals any in the American theatre for succinct clarity:
“Our work reflects complexity, disrupts assumptions, welcomes difference, and
amplifies joy. We aim to advance a more compassionate, equitable, and just
world.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">Co-founded by Alison Carey and Bill Rauch in
June 1986, the original Cornerstone ensemble comprised a troupe of Harvard
grads who shared a beautiful dream of taking theatre into the American
heartland, to make plays with the folks they found there. Cornerstone was the
youngest of a burgeoning field of community-engaged ensembles who were creating
a “professional, activist, community theatre of place,” as I called them in
these pages almost 30 years ago [“Your Place or Ours?” May 1995; </span><a href="https://www.americantheatre.org/1995/05/01/your-place-or-ours/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">AMERICAN
THEATRE | Your Place or Ours?</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">]. CTC’s forerunners included Junebug
Productions (New Orleans); Pregones Theater (the Bronx);
Tennessee’s Road Company and Carpetbag Players; Roadside Theater in Appalachia [Whitesburg,
Ky.]; El Teatro Campesino, El Teatro de la Esperanza, and Traveling
Jewish Theater (Calif.); and Pennsylvania’s Bloomsburg Theatre
Ensemble and Touchstone Theatre, to name a few.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Cornerstone initially traveled the country, adapting
classics with and for the people of places that, even to the early visionaries
of the regional theatre, would have seemed far-flung: Norcatur, Kans.;
Dinwiddie County, Va.; Port Gibson, Miss.; Marfa, Texas. About six years later,
the company settled in Los Angeles, a way of digging into <i>place</i>,
which had always been important to its aesthetic and social values. They could
dig deeper, they believed, if they stayed put. And because L.A. is a city of
many communities, they could collaborate widely without traveling far.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The makeup of the ensemble would also change along with its
methods. The original company was all white; the current L.A.-based ensemble is
approximately two-thirds artists of color. The ensemble defines itself as “an
evolving group of people at the artistic heart of this theatre company creating
through conversation, play, compassion, and consensus.” In the 37 years since
its founding, Cornerstone has created 150 original productions and collaborated
with an astonishing range of U.S. towns and cities, as well as urban
neighborhoods, activist networks, faith-based communities, and—over the
past 10 years of sustained work in L.A., Arizona, and South Dakota—more than 40
Native nations.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These numbers—37, 150, 10, 40—only begin to tell the story.
Cornerstone’s collaboration with Larissa and these nations has led to three
plays: <i>Urban Rez</i> in L.A., performed in 2016; <i>Native
Nation,</i> a collaboration with Gammage, the arts center at Arizona State
University (2019); and now, after more than four years of engagement in South
Dakota, <i>Wicoun </i>(pronounced Wich’oon). <i>Urban Rez </i>involved
13 Indigenous actors representing 15 tribal communities, though only Kenny
Ramos (Barona Band of Mission Indians/Kumeyaay Nation) was a representative of
the 111 federally recognized tribes in California. (Another 80 California
tribes are unrecognized by the U.S. government, thus federally declared
extinct.) Arizona’s Indigenous population, numerically close to California’s,
represents a greater, more visible percentage, since the state is so much
smaller. (In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey’s
one-year estimate, Arizona ranked first, just ahead of California, with over
332,000 Indigenous people from 22 tribes, a few of which spill across borders
with adjoining states). At Gammage, Cornerstone hired 38 Indigenous actors (in
a cast of 40) and showcased the work of 400 Indigenous artists.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This quantity of engagement has been matched by its depth,
as the lead-up to <i>Wicoun </i>also proves. Cornerstone artists make
10 “engagement” trips to South Dakota between July 2019 and the start of
rehearsals in April 2023, each lasting a week or two and requiring as much as
2,000 miles of driving. Each trip—each stop—is different. They meet with
potential partner organizations, ranging from other theatres to schools, social
service and community centers, powwow committees, a skate park, city
administrators and mayors, tribal health boards, and youth development
programs. They confer with regular advisors and new contacts across the
Northern Plains. They attend art exhibits and festivals, powwows, rodeos,
student poetry slams, theatre performances, and fairs. They hold talking/story
circles, at which any number of people might show up, 40 or a handful.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“The work is predicated on depth of listening and service,”
Larissa says. “The work happens at a restaurant in Chamberlain or a picnic
table in Lower Brule or a bar out in the middle of nowhere—it’s always
uncertain, it’s always intense, it’s always surprising. You can have 10 story
circles of 20, 30, or 40 people, and it’s one conversation with one person that
changes everything. That gives me the key to how to tell the story for the
community.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These plays aren’t Cornerstone’s first collaborations with
Indigenous communities, as Peter Howard, one of two founding members still in
the ensemble (the other is designer Lynn Jeffries), reminds me. Still, those
early collaborations with American Indian communities—<i>The House on Walker
River </i>(1988), an adaptation of <i>The Oresteia </i>performed
in a tribal welding shop on the Walker River Paiute Indian Reservation in
Schurz, Nev., and the Ibsen adaptation <i>Pier Gynt</i> in Eastport,
Maine, performed in 1990 with some residents of the local Passamaquoddy
reservation—were quite different than the last three. For one thing, they were
adaptations, “very much initiated by that all-white company collaborating with
a Native community, but not with Native leadership or Native inspiration,”
Peter concedes.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">While Cornerstone’s journey is the stuff of theatre legend,
it isn’t necessarily the stuff of national currency. At a small picnic with
colleagues in Brooklyn in the summer of 2023, I talk about my travels with
Cornerstone. The picnickers are excited by what I tell them, but I am startled
to learn that no one at this cross-generational party of theatre artists has
even heard of the company. I’ve grown used to professional myopia both around
companies outside of New York (other than large institutional theatres), and
especially around ensembles creating work with and for specific communities. I
am still shocked. Until I remember who Cornerstone is <i>for.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Cornerstone’s ensemble, the seat of all major decisions,
chooses the communities it collaborates with. Except for occasional past
projects in larger institutional settings like Yale Repertory Theater [New
Haven, Ct.] and Arena Stage [Washington, D.C.], its audiences are mostly made
up of people in places underserved by theatre. From early days in Norcatur and
Port Gibson to more recent projects in L.A.’s Skid Row or the Jordan Downs,
a public housing development in the Watts neighborhood [of L.A.],
Cornerstone has performed, not for a national audience, but for the partner
communities themselves, including the families of the locals they cast and
their neighbors. It’s the opposite of mainstream production intended for anyone
who can afford a ticket. Most of Cornerstone’s performances are free anyway
(with a box for donations).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Because every encounter and every performance in every tour
venue is different and unpredictable—small audiences, street noise, dogs
barking, people coming and going, late starts, last-minute confirmations and
cancellations—the attention and payoffs of more traditional productions don’t
apply. In 2014-15, an 11-month, 10-stop California tour of founder Alison
Carey’s adapted <i>The Tempest</i> did perform in L.A. and San
Francisco, but also in rural towns with populations in the hundreds and names
like Weedpatch, where ensemble member Bahni Turpin reportedly exclaimed, “I’m
about to go onstage and play Prospera in Weedpatch!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In his influential book, <i>The Lakota Way: Stories and
Lessons for Living </i>[2001], the historian and educator Joseph M. Marshall
III, also Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, collected stories exemplifying the
virtues that form “the foundation and moral sustenance of Lakota culture.” Four
of these virtues play a prominent part in <i>Wicoun</i>, the play will
Larissa eventually write. A fifth virtue—which for Marshall is the principal
one—seems to me to apply to the work of Cornerstone generally. <i>Unsiiciyapi</i> translates
from the Lakota as “humility….to be humble, modest, unpretentious,” to take
“the quiet path.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I don’t want to romanticize this. People work hard in the
theatre. The Cornerstone folks—artists, administrators, and technicians—work as
hard as any I’ve seen, often doing several jobs at once. They rarely enjoy the
luxury of professional specialization. The “famous” playwright, for example,
makes shopping and car rental runs with the artistic director, cues actors in
rehearsal, and, as a matter of course, hauls sandbags and set pieces during
load-in and strike at each stop on the tour. Designers Nephelie Andonyadis
(sets and props) and Lynn Jeffries (puppets) build much of what they design
alone. They also supervise (which means fix and rebuild) their creations during
the tour. Costume designer Jeanette Tizapapalotl Godoy tends to wardrobe and
serves as dresser throughout. Michael Garcia, Cornerstone’s associate producer,
acts as rehearsal stage manager until performance stage manager Maria V.
Oliveira is free to join the company and take over for tech, at which point
Garcia returns to L.A. for other Cornerstone projects and misses the tour
altogether.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the weeks before the tour launches, members of CTC’s
administrative and production staff, including managing director Megan Wanlass,
can be found in the dining hall of the rehearsal and living quarters at almost
all hours, working heads down. On one trip I accompany this same executive
leader to buy glue sticks for the puppets and to make copies of a prop driver’s
license. Office Depot employees aren’t allowed to Xerox “fake” licenses, so
Megan color-copies it herself, handing it over for lamination.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“We’re a small company on a really small scale,” founding
ensemble member Peter Howard emphasizes. While theatres across the country have
experienced post-pandemic hiring challenges, both Peter and Nephelie will later
reflect on the particular stresses of this demanding project—which, while
taking good care of community participants, never quite achieves Cornerstone’s
“best” practices of caring for its own people.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Was the project more ambitious than anyone predicted?”
Peter will wonder later. “More expensive? Were there ways in which a different
kind of planning might have eased some of the shortages we experienced?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Though <i>Wicoun</i> stretches the company thin,
it never veers off-purpose. As Peter puts it, “I see these projects as
experiences in the reality of welcome and invitation, building relationship and
mutual understanding—the kind of mutual understanding that in my life has only
come through making things together, working on that third thing that is not
about you and not about me, but about this thing between us that we’re creating
together.” As the ensemble’s longest-serving actor and, over the decade of
collaboration with Larissa, often the lone white man in mostly Indigenous
casts, Peter is both master artist and cultural novice, again and again.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“For me,” he continues, “a gift and a necessity in my life
is to be, via our Native leadership, welcomed into places and into community
and conversations that I would never have access to otherwise. And to feel that
we are moving forward in Indigenous/settler relationship and trying to figure
out how, and even whether, we can work together to heal and to create
opportunity. I have a stake in that as much as anyone.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Joseph Marshall again: “A person [who] walks with face
toward the Earth…can see the path ahead. On the other hand, the arrogant man
who walks with his head high to bask in the glory of the moment will stumble
often because he is more concerned with the moment than what lays ahead.” I ask
artistic director Michael John Garcés (I’ll refer to him as Michael to
distinguish him from producer Garcia) about my idea that humility is the
company’s cardinal virtue. He concurs, adding, “At its best.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Its best isn’t easy. Every community has different history
and different expectations, and, as Michael points out, “Native communities are
as diverse and also similar as any communities.” If humility is a guiding
virtue, Peter suggests, it is “that forced humility of realizing that the kinds
of changes this play talks about needing in the world are not going to come as
a result of one play.”</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The D/N/Lakota Project</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">2019-2023</b><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>At the heart of
this story: the people themselves, the Oyate.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Although it will be seen by white audiences (in Rapid City
and at the Black Hills Playhouse, for example), <i>Wicoun</i>, like
the two earlier “trilogy” plays, is intended for Native audiences. It is by
them, for them, about them, and, thanks to the rental cars and the stamina of
this troupe, it will be performed <i>near</i> them. A Lakota
playwright will create a Lakota play with and for Lakota people on Lakota land.
A first.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then, in late 2019, someone in Vermillion, S.D., asks if
Dakota will be welcome to participate. Yes! And so, what begins as “The Lakota
Project” becomes the “D/N/Lakota Project.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota—which, as Michael puts it,
are “different bands of the same people”—originally called themselves “Oyate”
or “the People.” But the name given them by the Ojibwe, Nadouessioux, later
shortened by French settlers in the 1600s to Sioux, stuck. The seven different
tribes or “Council Fires” that make up these neighboring nations continue to
stress their kinship as well as their differences. Over a delicious home-cooked
lunch at her kitchen table—chicken and wild rice soup with pieces of boiled
squash and bread—Dusty Nelson, a community member on Pine Ridge, reels off
friendly Lakota jokes at the expense of other tribes. Dusty recently started a
daycare center in her home and serves on the board of Rock the Rez, an
organization that focuses on female/trans/two-spirit empowerment. She clearly
enjoys her intertribal needling: “There are two types of people,” she tells us.
“Lakota and people who want to be Lakota.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">“The D/N/Lakota Project” title will give way to the final
one, </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Wicoun</i><span style="color: #783f04;">. The word doesn’t translate directly into English, but,
as Larissa explains it, it means “way of life”—spiritual, cultural, and
physical all at once. </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Wicoun </i><span style="color: #783f04;">comes with a subtitle too: “A
Play With and About the </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Oceti Sakowin</i><span style="color: #783f04;">.” When I ask Larissa and
Michael whether they will translate or define the Lakota term </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Oceti
Sakowin</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> for a non-Native audience, they are both firm: No. First of
all, people who live in South Dakota know what it means, they tell me. Second,
if they (i.e. white people, or, in Lakota, </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Wašíču</i><span style="color: #783f04;">) don’t know, they
can do the work and look it up. Learn. As I suggest my readers </span><a href="https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/plains-belonging-homelands/oceti-sakowin"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">do
now</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>Wicoun</i> is the most geographically rangy of the
three Native nation trilogy plays. With the exception of some rural outreach in
Arizona, the first two were urban projects. Between summer of 2019 and 2023 the
company will cover tens of thousands of miles, crossing the state many times
over, almost all their stops in small towns and rural parts of eight of the
state’s nine reservations. (On the final tour, in less than three weeks,
Michael will log 3,672 miles driven on his rental car. “I’m an accountant’s son,
so…”) “Cornerstone has done a lot of work in rural communities,” Michael
explains, “but never this particular inquiry into contemporary Indigeneity.”
Additionally, though Larissa wrote all three plays (for what wasn’t originally
intended as a trilogy), this is the first time she is working in the “community
where she’s from,” as Michael puts it, “versus her being, albeit Indigenous, a
guest in the land where we’re making the work.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Everywhere Cornerstone travels, the folks they talk with
want the play to “be about the <i>nation</i>, not one specific place,”
Michael explains. At each stop they’re urged to include other tribal
communities. As a result, the scope of the play-to-be keeps growing, beyond
anything they’ve done or may be able to accomplish, geographically or
financially. Participation raises other questions. “The challenge is always
about inclusiveness versus depth of experience,” Larissa explains. “The wider
you get in terms of how many people can participate, there’s just less of you
to go around. If you have a smaller group of people, the more individual
attention people get. The quality of experience can be, in a certain sense,
better—certainly deeper.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa and Michael hope that the play will end up with the
scale of the first two: between 15 and 40 actors, with choral parts to be
filled in after a brief rehearsal with elders and youth from each tour site.
Beyond that, everything remains an open question. If the play is to be written
by these communities and not by their guests, Larissa can’t just dream it up in
the privacy of her own mind and laptop, the way playwrights usually do. This
project isn’t about her imagination, personal interests, or concerns.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It’s not just me,” Larissa explains. “The people here are
trusting this whole team of people they’ve never met, who’ve never been in the
state on Lakota lands. And Dakota. And Nakota.” She includes herself. “I don’t
live here. I’ve lived in California for a long time. I still come in as a
guest. I love this place, and I love these people, and it’s my home. And you
don’t want people to mess up your home. The other artists get to leave. I need
to be able to come back.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the summer of 2021 Larissa won’t even speculate on what
she will write. Because of the COVID pandemic, this is her first extended visit
since December 2019. She feels she hasn’t heard enough. It is “too soon to lock
that in, to make those sort of assumptions for the community. It’d be fixing it
in some part of my brain.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">More radically, given the artistic and legal energy
playwrights exert to retain control of their scripts, Larissa will, through
public readings of subsequent drafts, give community members veto power over
every word and action in the play, an editorial process that will occur in late
2022 and early ’23 across the state. (Given the sensitive nature of being an
urban, white observer on this process, I have—full disclosure—emulated this
practice and run a draft of these articles by the <i>Wicoun </i>company
and some community partners, selected and circulated by Cornerstone staff to
make sure I have represented things accurately.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When I join them in August 2021, we COVID test every day
before meeting with locals. Protecting host communities from disease is
particularly fraught in this context. For one thing, infection rates are high
on the reservations. (Despite high Native COVID rates across the country,
vaccination statistics in South Dakota Native communities remain unclear.) One
cause of a recent surge: the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a gathering of half a
million bikers from across the country in a state with under a million citizens.
In 2020, Sturgis quadruples the population of Rapid City, and turns the rally
into a super-spreader event.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There are COVID checkpoints at some rez borders. “They are
under siege again,” Larissa says. Her comment comes loaded with the history of
centuries—especially the 17th and 18th—when Native populations were wiped out
by previously unknown diseases brought by white European settlers, some
unintentional and some murderously on purpose. Suicide rates in Native nations
also rise during lockdown to twice those of the general population. It’s not
unusual for cars to pull over on the reservation highways to let funeral
processions go by.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Against this backdrop, the Cornerstone guests in these lands
proceed with care. The next scheduled engagement trip, October 2021, is
canceled when the Delta variant spikes.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Stuck</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></b><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Summer 2022</b><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>At the heart of
this story: things that make no sense.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A different kind of engagement: Michael is about to be
married. After three intensive visits to South Dakota—March, June, and
August—he’ll head to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., in September for the big event.
Before that he’s in Norristown, Pa., rehearsing a play he’s written for Theatre
Horizon called <i>Town </i>[15-18 September 2022], the culmination of
a two-year, “Cornerstone-esque” project directed by Nell Bang-Jensen and
featuring 50 actors.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Meanwhile, Larissa, in L.A., is trying to make sense of
something they have heard in every story circle since 2019. She doesn’t want to
bug her director, especially while he’s being the playwright on something else.
But he understands something she can’t, and she needs to keep writing.
Guiltily—she even feels guilty recounting it a year later—she starts “whisper
texting” him.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Community engagement can be tricky for a playwright; the
play you’re asked to write might not be one you know how to write. As various
members of the Cornerstone ensemble, board, and staff have traversed much of
the state, holding workshops and story circles with youth, adults, and elders
in the D/N/Lakota nations, they’ve asked what people want to see, what kind of
play they want. They hear one request over and over, from people of all
ages: <i>They want to see superheroes. </i>Superheroes superheroes
superheroes. The problem is, Larissa doesn’t do superheroes. She doesn’t get
them. Doesn’t even <i>like</i> them. “I’m not a superhero person,”
she admits. “At every single story circle someone brought up superheroes. It
got the point where Michael and I would just give each other <i>the look</i>.
‘Okay…?’”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa had been wrestling with superheroes all along. She
and Michael discussed it on an earlier trip, driving up from Lower Brule
through the Fort Pierre National Grassland along the Missouri River.
The grasslands, a federal attempt to recreate the prairie as it was when wild,
provide habitat for prairie chickens, grouse, pheasant, and an array of
wildlife, including black-tail prairie dogs, badgers, coyotes, and antelope.
Larissa and Michael didn’t dwell on the natural landscape as they drove, but on
the nature of superheroes. What kind of superpowers could they treat
theatrically? Michael remembers them brainstorming “a very rough-magic
theatricality that could be overt and seen by the audience. It would be
playful, but we didn’t have to limit ourselves.” They might use puppets, which
allow for characters to fly through the air, or stage a scene where one
character’s normal movements—in contrast to the others’ lugubrious slow-motion—creates
a sense of hyper speed. They would find ways that different powers could be,
according to Michael, “fun, intelligible, and have their own kind of magic.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa first tried her hand at short superhero plays during
a number of youth development workshops and camps they’d led as part of the
engagement process leading up to the moment she needed to write the final
piece. Just two months before she begins guiltily bugging her director by text,
she wrote one with and for about 10 kids at Cheyenne River Youth Project in
Eagle Butte. This brief <i>Superhero Story</i> featured two magical
beings, Osiceca (Storm) and Wanahca (Flower Girl), whose superpower is to make
flowers bigger, along with the original Native trickster Iktomi or, as Iktomi
Wičháša, the original Spiderman. Together this trio attends a demolition derby
and fights and conquers Godzilla, sending him, defeated, stomping off into the
prairie.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That project also marked an early collaboration with Talon
Bazille Ducheneaux, a Dakota/Lakota rapper/DJ/sound designer and member of the
Cheyenne River and Crow Creek Sioux tribes. (Talon will score <i>Wicoun</i>.)
For <i>Superhero Story</i>,<i> </i>he had the children create sounds
with their bodies and voices that he sampled—along with Godzilla’s roar and the
sounds of racing cars—for a soundtrack.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The ensemble followed the progress of engagement through
daily reports Cornerstone members took turns posting to keep the company
informed about the work on the road. What you couldn’t read about in these
reports, however, was the writer’s state of mind as she attempted to make
artistic sense of it all. Larissa wrote these brief plays with magical heroes
for Lakota youth; she riffed with Michael about superpowers and heard from
hundreds of people in dozens of communities; she printed and read every note
from every meeting—“all the talks, all the years”— and put them together in
“one massive document.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But now that it’s time to write the real play, she can’t do
it. She still doesn’t understand superheroes. She can’t “find any way into it
personally.” And so the panicked, guilty texting begins. “I was like, ‘Explain
it to me. What is it? Why does everyone keep saying this?!?’”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">While Michael gets married, Larissa finds one answer in the
movie <i>Everything Everywhere All At Once </i>[2022; winner of 7 top Oscars].
“That broke it open for me,” she says. “Okay, now I get it. I can do this.
That’s where I saw it doesn’t have to be about good and evil.” In an
Oscar-winning performance by Michelle Yeoh, the movie’s heroine, Evelyn Quan
Wang, under IRS audit, gets drawn into battle with a powerful being bent on
destroying the multiverse. As Larissa understood it, however, events play out
within Evelyn’s family itself. She’s “very much tied to her family and her real
relationships,” Larissa explains. Her husband and daughter get sucked out of
the real world and into the superhero realm with her. The world shifts, but
these relationships stay central.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Another lightbulb flips on when she remembers the only other
superhero movie she’d liked: <i>Wonder Woman</i>, Patty Jenkins’s 2017
film, starring Gal Gadot. “Because it’s like, her power is <i>compassion</i>!
That’s incredible! They’re also both female-centered.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A lifetime comic book aficionado, first as a boy, then as
the father of one, Michael adds context: “<i>Everything Everywhere All at
Once </i>isn’t a revenge fantasy. I loved those kind of comic books, and
then at a certain point in my early adulthood, I was done with them. I didn’t
buy this whole revenge fantasy thing—this projection of power that’s very
important for a lot of adolescent male psyches. But finding a comic that is
halfway between the superhero coming into one’s power and using it to overcome
at the same time, not being just a revenge or good vs. evil savior fantasy—I
think that was really helpful for Larissa.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Another thing Larissa and Michael keep hearing in story
circles over the months that become years: concern about LGBTQ youth,
particularly trans youth. Young people speak about this urgently, but adults
bring it up too. “Sometimes surprising adults,” Michael adds. They want to
address these concerns, but aren’t sure how to represent youth voices given, as
Michael explains, they doubt they’ll be able to take young people on tour with
the show. They hope to find another way to involve youth—including many they’ve
met through camps and workshops—in the final production. They originally plan
to do this through local audience interaction. Young folks in the audience
might play a specific role, for instance, or be coached into action as part of
the show. The team hopes the pandemic will continue to recede enough for
large-scale, maybe even choral participation, rehearsed or led at each site
just before the performance, possibly involving elders as well.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This is consistent with both of their previous Native plays.
In <i>Urban Rez</i>, the first play of the trilogy, audiences moved from
place to place, thrown into whatever was happening, often choosing their own
adventure amid a lot of simultaneous action. According to Michael, the L.A.
Native communities had asked Cornerstone “to create a thing where the audience,
in particular the non-Indigenous people, felt what it was to <i>not</i> be
part of the narrative and to feel unsure where to go, the way Native people
there have often been made to feel displaced.” It was, as Cornerstone dubbed it
in promotional materials, “a hotbed of chaos.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In contrast to that disorienting immersion, <i>Native
Nation</i> stressed the participatory power of the more cohesive and
politically active Indigenous population of Arizona, where the Native tribes
are, in Larissa’s words, “many and so strong.” There the audience was divided
in four groups that circulated among different stages where they could learn
about and engage with issues affecting Native communities: the Indian Child
Welfare Act of 1978, water rights, blood quantum [a strategy used by the
government and tribes to authenticate the amount of “Native blood” a person has
by tracing individual and group ancestry], missing and murdered Indigenous
women (MMIW), and “a host of community concerns that manifested from our
conversations for the two or three years leading up to the April 2019
performance,” according to Rosetta Badhand-Walker, a community actor who
brought her activism on behalf of MMIW to the play. A strong advocate for
Native electoral participation, Rosetta also had a side table to register
voters. <i>Native Nation</i>—arguably the largest Indigenous theatrical
experience in the history of American professional nonprofit theatre, with, in
Rosetta’s words, “a cast of 40 and a full-blown production crew that brought
semi trucks full of equipment from L.A.”—meant business.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">August 2021 & 2022</b><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the heart of
this story: things that go disastrously wrong.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Milks Camp, a community at the very edge of Rosebud, is the
site of Lakota Youth Development (LYD), the realized vision of a
real-life superhero named Marla Bull Bear more than 30 years ago. LYD addresses
such problems as teen suicide, substance abuse, and violence by teaching youth
Wolakota (Lakota way of life), focusing on the 12 Lakota virtues: compassion,
perseverance, sacrifice, fortitude, generosity, wisdom, love, respect, bravery,
honor, humility, and truth. Marla, the executive director, works alongside a
small staff that includes, as facilities manager, her husband Charles Bull
Bear, a former police officer and ranger for Rosebud, and a board, whose
president is Joseph Marshall III, author of <i>The Lakota Way</i> and
many other books.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Larissa has been involved with LYD for many years, and she
and Michael have returned several times for workshops with the youth there.
Cornerstone previously led a summer camp there, in the summer of ’21, which I
had the privilege of participating in.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Cornerstone approaches all of its
relations thoughtfully, aware that what holds for one community won’t apply in
another. Work with Native children requires extraordinary care to build trust,
especially when it’s led by white or white-presenting folks and strangers to
their community. Cornerstone members are practiced at this care and have been
trained in working with traumatized populations. They talk through all workshop
ideas with Marla.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Among the important context they
gather along the way: More than four in five American Indian women and men have
experienced violence in their lifetime, more than 90 percent of that
interracial, i.e. perpetrated by non-Native people. More than half of all
Native American women (56 percent) have experienced sexual violence, 96 percent
at the hands of non-Native perpetrators, according to CDC reports. Against this
background of violence and the centuries-old history of aggression, genocide,
and displacement, Native children experience post-traumatic stress at the same
rates as veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan—i.e., triple the rate of
the general population.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Given all this, LYD’s teachers and
camp elders insist on very specific care. Marla makes sure that all lesson
plans are tied to Lakota culture. In preparation for the campers’ arrival in
August 2021, the Cornerstone crew—by then we’re joined by Peter Howard and
another longtime ensemble member, lighting designer Geoff Korf—discuss every
detail with her, from cultural customs around eye contact and shaking hands to
the way play-devising prompts should be phrased: Talk about “words” and
“pictures,” rather than “writing” and “drawing.” “Tell the story of your names”
is a formulation that takes time and trust; it should be replaced with “one fun
fact about your name.” Cut “I like to watch movies,” as some kids don’t have
access to them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the summer of 2021, I find it
profoundly moving to see six young campers, 10 to 15 years of age, begin the
week hidden deep inside their hoodies and then, over only a few days, blossom.
They light up playing theatre games like Indigenous Zip Zap Zop and Sweeping
the Tipi, led by Kenny and Peter. They respond creatively to bonfire stories
told by camp elder Joseph Kills Small and art projects with Lakota artist Mike
Marshall.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A year later, in early August 2022,
before Michael’s Pennsylvania play and Vineyard wedding, before Larissa’s
writing panic and breakthrough, a group of 15 campers, having completed another
full week of camp, join to celebrate a successful staged reading of another new
play, <i>Our History Is Our Future</i>, which weaves together ideas and
contributions from<i> </i>every kid at camp. Spirits are high. Peter wakes
up early and joins Marla and two sleepy campers for the sunrise morning song,
with which they greet the day. They walk up the hill to “marvel at the light,”
as Peter later writes, from the new sun, clouds, and a rainbow. They plan to
hold a follow-up presentation of the play in the morning, and the campers show
up at breakfast in COVID masks and Lakota Youth Development T-shirts, which
double as costumes. As the rain grows heavy, they “roll gamely with the news”
that the encore performance will be canceled. They pack their things and
prepare to de-camp.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Peter gathers up Lynn and Nephelie’s
tools and consolidates craft materials they will leave for future work at LYD,
including “a large cotton tarp, cut and grommeted to fit the backdrop of the
outdoor stage.” They leave paint and brushes to paint it with, and a new light
source in the popcorn concession shed, which they hope will be a puppet booth
next summer. (The campers all want to make and work with puppets.) Meanwhile,
Larissa holds a closing session with the youth, and they list things they’re
taking away from camp, including:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Speak clearly with
voice so people can hear you.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">You should come to
theatre camp because it’s inspiring. And helps you learn about theatre.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Writing scripts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Inspires you to
speak louder in front of crowds of people.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Food.
Well-nourished and healthy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Theatre camp helps
social skill.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Creativity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the process of recounting the
learnings from camp, Larissa and Marla realize they haven’t clearly
communicated that working in the theatre is an actual job—that people get paid
for it. As Larissa reports, “It was mind-blowing to them. Lots of actual dropped
jaws.” Marla polls the kids about which jobs they would want, and designers
come out No. 1, with a couple votes for acting, writing, stage management—none
for directing. Larissa concludes that being in charge might be “intimidating
for them.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the next hours, though, the week’s
affirmations give way to a different kind of positive. For all their care, some
things are out of everyone’s control. COVID hits the fan. The company’s daily
reports, usually precise and full of local color, break down. Peter Howard
files his Aug. 4 report five days after the fact, referring to a brief Aug. 5
report by community advisor Clementine (Minnie) Bordeaux. Clementine, a
collaborator on <i>Wicoun</i> and CTC board member, is an enrolled
member of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, raised on Pine Ridge, who, along with her
family, has been instrumental in providing support and connection throughout
the state, even while completing a PhD in Culture and Performance at UCLA.
(Clementine will receive the doctorate during <i>Wicoun</i>’s<i> </i>tour.)
Larissa weighs in a week later with a pre-dated report, followed by another on
Aug. 12, after a Paxlovid-induced night of insomnia. She refers to Clementine
as “the last of us COVID virgins to test positive,” in what veteran ensemble
member Lynn Jeffries will later call “the Milks Camp fiasco.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Lynn, Nephelie, Larissa, and
Clementine all have COVID. Reports follow from LYD of folks, young and old,
including visionary Marla, testing positive. Michael remembers: “Our group
brought it with us, and it was really hard.” The COVID spread spared no group.
“Elders, babies, the whole community. It was devastating. It had a huge
emotional, psychological, and practical impact on the work and on us.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A similar camp scheduled for the
following week at the Yankton reservation is canceled; with school about to
start, the risk of exposure is too high. The company divides. Lynn isolates in
a hotel, Nephelie in an Airbnb, while COVID-free Kenny goes to Rapid City with
Clementine, where they quarantine, separated by two floors.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Michael and Peter, who stay
virus-free and act as gofers for their nearby colleagues, rent an Airbnb in
Sioux Falls with Larissa. “COVID House,” as she calls it, has big windows to
open and ceiling fans for the warm summer nights. With asthma and another
autoimmune disease, Larissa starts taking Paxlovid 48 hours later. When she
wakes at 9 p.m. with a fever and high heart rate, struggling to breathe, she’s
glad to have taken it. She considers herself a “poor patient,” and is
especially grateful for Peter and Michael’s care. Clementine dubs them the
GOATS of the trip, as they traverse the Covid bubbles, pharmacies, and shops.
They deliver food and books, drive their colleagues to doctors and hospitals,
and take distanced walks with their patients.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Every day I was getting a call about
a new person who tested positive,” Michael recalls. “We just sat in Sioux
Falls, couldn’t leave. It was really emotionally rough. We had tested like
crazy before. We became the problem nonetheless, and the price is high most
importantly in how it impacts the community.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Eight days later the threesome from
COVID House test negative and head to Pipestone, Minn., a national monument of
breathtaking “beauty and variety and history and power and peace,” as Larissa
describes it. It’s her last Paxlovid day, and she’s exhausted, having done
nothing all week, so she naps on some large rocks, while Michael and Peter hike
around. “If this is how I end,” she tells the guys, “let people know I ended in
a good way at a good place.” Later that day they have dinner and ice cream
outdoors with Lynn, who is feeling better but still testing positive.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The impact of that week remains hard
for each of them to express: “Scary, sad, exhausting, boring, beautiful,
restful, monotonous, bonding, etc.,” Larissa writes to the full company. The
outbreak overturns their plans for the production to come. Everything must
change: the shape of the production, scale of the tour, the play itself, and of
course, the design. Any ideas of immersion get scrapped. They will, instead,
create the most intimate show of the trilogy: eight actors, presentational
style, no community chorus, no audience participation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“After the Milks Camp COVID fiasco,
we completely rethought everything,” puppet designer Lynn Jeffries explains.
“Michael and Larissa felt that now, even though COVID is definitely improving,
we did not want to be having much contact with people. So they reconceived how
the set was going to be so that there was more distance between audience and
performers. We totally eliminated having local cast members at each venue, and
would just have a small group of people who would travel together.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[In
the next installment: The cast assembles and the tour begins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope that everyone will return to </i>ROT<i> on Wednesday, 24 January, for Part 2 of “</i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">‘</span></i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>Superheroes
on Native Land.</i></span><i><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">’</span></i><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">”</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Todd London is a former managing editor of </i>American Theatre<i> and
the author of numerous books on the theater, including </i>This Is Not My
Memoir <i>[2020] with Andre Gregory, </i>An Ideal Theater <i>[2013], </i>Outrageous
Fortune <i>[2009], </i>The Importance of Staying Earnest <i>[2013],
and </i>The Artistic Home <i>[1988], as well as two novels, </i>If
You See Him, Let Me Know<i> [2020] and </i>The World’s Room <i>[2001]
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A long-term artistic director of New
York’s New Dramatists, he won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic
Criticism and was the first recipient of Theatre Communications Group’s
Visionary Leadership Award.]<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></p><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-13094238726146966992024-01-16T10:00:00.049-05:002024-01-16T14:40:14.827-05:00The People's Theatre Project<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[When I first heard CBS2
News reporter Dave Carlin, who covers breaking news stories and major events in
the Tri-State Area, broadcast a story about the People’s Theatre Project on
WCBS-Channel 2’s six-o’clock program on Wednesday evening, last 25 October, I
was really intrigued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d never heard of
the project, even though it was launched 14 years earlier, and had one very
illustrious name attached to it: Lin-Manuel Miranda.</span></i><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Furthermore, it was a
totally fascinating project: a new theater focused on and promoting the work of
immigrant artists, to be located in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood of
Manhattan, where playwright and composer-lyricist Miranda grew up.]</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The People’s Theatre Project was founded in 2009 to build “a
culture of peace through theatre,” according to its mission statement, in the
northern Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The founders of PTP had a vision to combine
social justice with the arts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">PTP works in partnership with various community stakeholders
to advocate for the artistic and cultural resurgence of Upper Manhattan and to
become a significant forum for the ideas and expressions of immigrants and
people of color.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That same year, the People’s Theatre Project launched a theater
program for children ages 5 through 12 that became what is now the PTP Academy
for Leadership, Theatre, & Activism, a multi-year, full-scholarship program
dedicated to “the holistic development of immigrant youth and youth of color.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Over PTP’s early years, it held classes, rehearsals, and
performances all through the Inwood and Washington Heights neighborhoods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From 2010 to 2016, PTP produced a dozen Forum
Theatre productions that toured the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The goals of Forum Theatre, a kind of
role-play, are to “rehearse tactics against real-life oppression, critically
analyze how each tactic plays out, and creatively share ideas as a community.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As described on a blog, a Forum Theatre scenario might begin
like this:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Who thinks they can arrange these
three chairs as though one has more power than the other two?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">. . . .</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">From sculptures using the three
chairs, we start to generate stories and eventually bring them to life in short
improvised scenes about encounters with the police—a conversation, a detention,
and an interrogation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In one scene last week . . ., a
young person playing a police officer pulled out a bottle of Axe body spray in
order to “pepper spray” his peer playing the suspect (slightly avoiding his
face for the purposes of the scene).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Because that’s what they do!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They did it to me!” he explained once the scene was over and he could
break character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The now-scented room of
young people concurred—sometimes cops do that.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Once we’ve established the reality
and have seen what kinds of oppression are enacted during police encounters, we
turn each scene into Forum Theatre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Who
has another idea? What else might this “suspect” character try?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the purposes of this workshop, we’re also
asking “What are this character’s legal rights?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The People’s Theatre Project’s aim is to create what it considers
a more just and even-handed society by making theater by and for immigrant
communities. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of its productions
include <i>Mariposas </i>(Butterflies), focusing on the journey of immigrants
mothers and their children, as well as <i>Somos Más</i> (We are more), a story
about immigrants who spark a revolution in a world where assimilation is
required.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2015, the People’s Theatre Project became a resident
company of the Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center on W. 166th Street at
Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights with access to two rehearsal studios and
an event space. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>PTP began offering its
public programs on a regular basis.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After four years at the Alianza, PTP leased a rehearsal
studio and administrative office in the Workspace Offices complex at 5030
Broadway, between 213th and 214th Streets in Inwood, which allowed the
organization to expand its offerings into the after-school hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">From Summer 2015 to 2017, the People’s Theatre Project teamed
with the Office of English Language Learners<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(OELL) of New York City’s Department of Education to bring its
arts-integrated programming to immigrant students in 32 schools in four
boroughs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When PTP determined that its
staff was too small and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it was spread
over too large a geographic area, it began a reorganization in Spring 2017.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This resulted in a fresh commitment to its community and its
mission and vision, and renewed strategic priorities for the next three to five
years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2019, the Pierre and Tana
Matisse Foundation made a $750,000 Arts Education Impact Grant to the People’s
Theatre Project for the PTP Academy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2021,
PTP marked the start of its second decade of making theater with and for
immigrant communities, and entered into collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda
and his family. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city and the
country. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The People’s Theatre Project's
staff (all retained at their full wages), board, partners, and families worked
to adapt its programming to the virtual space and PTP served its community by
providing resources (such as cash relief, food pantries, vaccine drives) to
local residents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It co-organized a Black
Lives Matter march and a collaborative arts camp.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Programming is now back in-person and on 19 May 2022, New
York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that the People’s Theatre Project “will
own and operate a first-of-its-kind Immigrant Research and Performing Arts
Center coming to Inwood.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
announcement read further: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Filled with a range of visual and
performing arts, the center will amplify the voices of New York City’s diverse
immigrant communities and cultivate work by local artists and arts
organizations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The city will invest $15
million to help PTP acquire a newly constructed cultural center . . . .</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">According to the official statement, the People’s Theatre
Project was selected through an open request for expressions of interest
conducted by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the New
York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to the $15 million in capital
support from the city for the new facility, DCLA provided $75,000 to help PTP
prepare to operate the new space.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Lin-Manuel Miranda; his father, Luis A. Miranda, Jr.; and
their charity, the Miranda Family Fund, have been influential in the creation
of the new performing arts center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The three-time
Tony-winner, three-time Emmy-winner, and five-time Grammy-winner personally
gave a million dollars to help build the center.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“The Miranda family is excited that People’s Theatre Project
has been named the owner and operator of Inwood’s first performing arts and
cultural center,” wrote Luis Miranda in a release. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“For too long, our artists of Northern
Manhattan of all disciplines have needed local space to create, display and
perform their work. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are proud to
support as they build this home for our immigrant artist community.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Luis Miranda is a political strategist, philanthropist, and
advocacy consultant who lives in Washington Heights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was born in Puerto Rico and served as an
advisor for Hispanic Affairs to Mayor Ed Koch.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The new Immigrant Research and Performing Arts Center, to be
known as The People’s Theatre: Centro Cultural Inmigrante (immigrant cultural
center), will rise at 407 W. 206th Street at Tenth Avenue in Inwood, and is
expected to open in 2026.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The center will be in a new, mixed-income, mixed-use
building, developed by a joint venture of LMXD, an urbanist development company
focused primarily on mixed-income and mixed-use residential projects; MSquared,
a women-owned real estate impact platform focused on creating mixed-income,
mixed-use projects that promote affordability, sustainability, and diversity;
and Taconic Partners, a New York City real estate developer. The design is by the woman- and
immigrant-owned architecture firm WORKac and theater and acoustics consultant
Charcoalblue.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On the floors above the cultural center there will be
affordable residential rental units, part of a separate project with a more
than $400 million price tag.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Construction on the Centro Cultural is actually already
underway, but a ceremonial ground-breaking took place on 25 October 2023, with
Lin-Manuel Miranda in attendance, along with New York Governor Kathy Hochul.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Other guests at the ceremony included elected officials,
including U.S. Congressman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), who represents Inwood and
Washington Heights; New York State Senator José M. Serrano (D-South Bronx); New
York Assemblyman Manny de los Santos (D-Fort George), whose district includes
Washington Heights; Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo (D-South Bronx); Manhattan
Borough President Mark Levine (D); New York City Councilwoman Carmen de la Rosa
(D-Inwood); and Deputy Speaker of the New York City Council Diana Ayala (D-East
Harlem).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Also appearing were appointed city officials and
representatives of corporate benefactors of the project.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Hochul and Miranda got a tour from former director and
theater teacher Mino Lora, PTP’s Dominican-born co-founder and its executive
artistic director.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It's a 19,000
square-foot cultural center,” Lora said. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There are rehearsal rooms, sound booths,
dressing rooms, green rooms and art gallery space, and a state of the art
theater. So <span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">‘</span>Centro Cultural Inmigrante’ will be coming in 2026 to serve our
community and citywide artists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">” </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The center will also have a flexible midsize theater, a
smaller performance space, rehearsal studios, a soundproof practice room, and
gallery space. It will be PTP’s first
permanent home in its history.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">"This is a joyous day,” proclaimed Miranda, “this a
real dream come true for the many artists who grew up in Washington Heights and
Inwood and now will get to make theater in the actual neighborhood where they
live.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It is for immigrants,” Lora affirmed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“So we have social workers across the city who
refer unaccompanied minors to us and we work with them to build their skills
through theater. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the young
people who performed today came as unaccompanied minors a few years ago. Separated from families, crossing the border
by themselves, and here they are sharing those stories.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“As someone who grew up a few blocks from here, to have a
theater in our neighborhood is incredible. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A Latina-owned, Latina-run theater in Inwood,
woah,” exclaimed Miranda.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Aside from growing up in Inwood,
Miranda set his first Broadway success, <i>In the Heights </i>(Off-Broadway: 8
February-15 July 2007; Broadway: 9 March 2008-9 January 2011; film released: 9
June 2021, Tribeca Film Festival), in Washington Heights, the neighborhood to
the south which is part of the community PTP serves.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Among the participants of the ground-breaking ceremony were
three young performers, members of the People’s Theatre Project who will soon
find an artistic home at the cultural center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One, actress Vida Tayabati, said with hope: “I am Iranian. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have people from China, Korea, Africa, all
over, different places. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are gathered
here at PTP having the same goal, showing that we can collaborate together, we
are the same.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Tayabati, who came here from Tehran about 11 years ago,
added. “You get to work with people from different backgrounds, different
cultures, different points of view, it’s beautiful. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's just going to be for us, as a home, we
need a home. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As artists, here, so we can
come together, work together. It's just
going to be amazing for us. For all of us.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The performances that will take place in the cultural center
will focus on immigrant experiences in New York City. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Live music, dance performances, film
screenings, and civic and community events will take place on its stages and
its performance spaces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For children and families, the center will offer classes,
festivals, student matinees, and field trips. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>PTP will also partner with the New York Public
Library to provide space for literary programming and research exploring the
historical intersection of immigrants and the performing arts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The center is expected to draw at least
28,000 people annually.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The People’s Theatre Project’s mission will be accomplished
through a combination of efforts:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>production, which includes the development of devised and
playwright-driven original theater, all by immigrants and artists of color;
education, which provides free access to high-quality arts education through
the multi-year PTP Academy for immigrant youth, and partnerships with schools
and libraries across the city for immigrant New Yorkers of all ages; and
advocacy, in which PTP staff and artists collaborate with elected officials,
community leaders, and other organizations to champion immigrant rights, racial
equity, LGBTQIA+ rights, and equitable arts and culture funding in New York
City and beyond.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“As the largest Latine theater in New York City and the
city’s first Dominican-managed cultural institution, the People’s Theatre
Project’s new home will be more than a performing arts center—it will be a
tribute to the diverse artists, cultures, and communities that define our great
state,” Governor Hochul said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I look forward to cutting the ribbon on this beautiful
space in a few short years,” concluded the governor.<o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-37031950772071037462024-01-11T10:00:00.063-05:002024-01-11T14:09:12.137-05:00Actors On Their Craft<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 38.7pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[For
</i>Rick On Theater<i>, I collect published
pieces from various news outlets that present something I find interesting or
pertinent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I take extra note of articles
or essays on aspects of theater and the performing arts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes I hold onto the articles until they’re
appropriate or when I have space for them.</i></span><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 38.7pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Below
are two such pieces, both about acting and focusing on two actors talking about
their art in terms of roles for which they were particularly noted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is from 2019 by an actress, Adrienne C.
Moore, best known for her television work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The second is an interview with comedian Christopher John O’Neill, who in
2013 appeared on the first National Tour of </i>The Book of Mormon<i>.]</i></span></p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>ADRIENNE C. MOORE’S
BRIEF BUT SPECTACULAR TAKE </u></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><u>ON THE CHARACTERS IN HER LIFE</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Adrienne C. Moore</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: left;"> </span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[Adrienne C. Moore’s (b. 1980)
oral essay on “all the characters of my life” appeared in “Brief But
Spectacular,” a feature of </i>PBS NewsHour<i>,</i> <i>on</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">27 November
2019.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Brief But Spectacular” is an
interview series created in 2015 by Steve Goldbloom. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each episode features the interviewee's
personal take on a topic he or she feels is personally important.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The interviewer is off camera and the
questions are not heard.] </i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Adrienne C. Moore is
an actress best known for her role in the Netflix TV series “Orange is the New
Black.” [The series streamed on Netflix from 2013 to 2019.] During her first
theater performance, she immediately noticed the way the show affected the
audience emotionally. Moore opens up about drawing inspiration from her
upbringing in Atlanta, the impact her father had on her and her Brief But
Spectacular take on the characters of her life.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b>Judy Woodruff:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>Tonight’s
Brief But Spectacular features performer Adrienne C. Moore, an actress best
known for her role in “Orange Is the New Black.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She opens up here about pulling characters from her
upbringing in Atlanta and the impact her father had on her.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This is part of Canvas, our continuing covering of arts and
culture.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b>Adrienne C. Moore:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></b>What I love about acting and being in front of people is, honestly,
seeing their expressions.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">My first production that I can remember was “The Best
Christmas Pageant Ever” in Nashville, Tennessee. [Moore is referring to a stage
adaption by the author of Barbara Robinson’s 1971 novel of the same
title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moore was 6 when she appeared in
the production.]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had no lines, just
the little chorus parts. But that gave me a chance to look at every single
person in the audience during the show and seeing them smile, and laugh, and
have feelings and emotions.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And from that moment on, I said, I want to do this for the
rest of my life.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Orange Is the New Black” came about just like any other
audition. They called me in for Black Cindy. Immediately, when I read it, I
said, oh, my gosh, I know this girl. To me, she represented a lot of girls that
I had run across when I’d moved to Atlanta, just very fiery and speak their
minds, and pop their fingers, and roll their eyes, and roll their heads, and
just tell their truth.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And so, when I read her, I said, I think I could embody her
pretty well.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Of course she ain’t smiling. She got screwed by me, by — by
everybody. Suzanne, everything is broken and life is unfair. When are you going
to learn that?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The play that I did in Shakespeare in the Park was called “Taming
of the Shrew.” [The Public Theater production, in which Moore played Tranio,
was in June-July 2016.] I got to work with Phyllida Lloyd, who is a phenomenal
director. And I was always afraid of Shakespeare, iambic pentameter, and just
going up on a line and all that kind of stuff.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But she really taught me how to own the language and, in
that ownership, how to own the character. And once I got past that fear, I had
the most amazing time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">What was so revolutionary about that experience was that I
lost my dad literally in the same time that I was doing that show. And so I was
experiencing incredible highs and incredible lows at the same time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">But one of the things that my dad taught me and told me
before he passed was happiness. And so that’s the thing that I always try to
embody in my work and in my life and in who I am.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I feel like, when I’m in the pocket with something, I will
sometimes hear this little chime or this a little ding somewhere off in the
distance, and I feel like it’s my dad being like, you got it. You’re on the
point, girl.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">My dad was very proud of me, of his children, because one of
the things he always said was, do what makes you happy. And a lot of times,
when I get in very confusing places in my life, and I don’t know what choice to
make, I always think about what he said, which is, do what makes you happy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And so that’s how I make my decisions. I don’t question. I
just go inside of myself. And I say, well, what will make me happy in this
moment? Because that’s what my dad taught me.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">My name is Adrienne C. Moore, and this is my Brief But
Spectacular take on all the characters of my life.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><b style="color: #783f04;">Judy Woodruff:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="color: #783f04;">And
you can watch additional Brief But Spectacular episodes on our Web site, </span><a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.</span></span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“‘<u>THE BOOK OF
MORMON’S’ LATTER-DAY STAR</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">by Jessica Goldstein</span></span></span><b><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></b></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[Christopher
John O'Neill (b. 1982) is a sketch-comedy performer (</i>The Chris and Paul Show <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">with</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paul Valenti, from 2000).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While performing his comedy act at the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe he was invited to audition for the role of Elder
Cunningham in </i>The Book of Mormon<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
joined the first National Tour in December 2012, his professional acting debut,
and in January 2015 he joined the Broadway cast until 2017. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">[The
tour made its second stop at Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jessica Goldstein’s interview
with O’Neill ran in the </i>Washington Post <i>on</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">4 August 2013 (sec. E [“Arts”]: 5).]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s just before the end of Act 1 of “The Book of Mormon,”
and Christopher John O’Neill is singing about Jesus.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill knows the words. He <i>knows</i> he knows the words.
The song is “Man Up.” His character, the bumbling self-proclaimed sidekick
Elder Cunningham, is getting his Mormon game face on. O’Neill is sweating. He’s
sweating a lot, actually; has he ever sweated so much in his entire life? It’s
just that it’s really hot onstage at the Kennedy Center. The bright lights. The
heavy costumes. There’s a lot of dancing, okay? You’d sweat too, probably.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Man Up” is what O’Neill sang at his first audition. He was
in some studio in Midtown [Manhattan], when the whole idea of being in this
show — the first national tour of “The Book of Mormon,” with nine Tony Awards
and a gazillion bucks in ticket sales to its name — was a joke, a fantasy. But
when somebody asks if you want to try out for a lead part in the most popular
show in America, you don’t say, “Actually, I’m a sketch comedian with
absolutely no professional musical theater experience.” You ask your girlfriend
to take a photo of you on the roof of your place in Queens, you get the image
copied, and you and your homemade headshot hightail it to Manhattan.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill, 31, wasn’t new to performing in public; he and his
comedy partner, Paul Valenti, had been writing and starring in their comedy
act, “The Chris and Paul Show,” since 2000. They’d toured the United States and
made it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where they were spotted by a “Book of
Mormon” casting director. Both men fit the physical Cunningham profile: stocky,
on the short side (O’Neill is 5-foot-6), with a youthful, kinetic energy.
Really the only potential snag was that the last time O’Neill had been in a
real singing-and-dancing musical was in high school back in Stamford, Conn., a
dozen years ago.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Which maybe explains why, as a couple of casting directors
looked on, O’Neill butchered the line “Just like Jesus, I’m growing a pair!” by
singing, “Just like Jesus, I’m combing my hair!” not once, not twice, but <i>three
</i>times before he finally stuck the lyric landing. While he was walking back
to his apartment, O’Neill got a call from his mom. She asked him how it went.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” he said. When she asked if he thought he’d get a
callback, he laughed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill nails the line in the show tonight at the Kennedy
Center, no problem. His days of rookie flubs are behind him. “Once you get up
there, you’re with people you trust onstage and you trust the material,” he
said. “And you just kick its a--.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill has been on this tour since December but he’s still
about as stunned to have landed in this cast as Elder Cunningham was to arrive
in Uganda. This is the last place on the planet O’Neill ever expected to be.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b>The accidental actor</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Elder Cunningham begins “The Book of Mormon” as the
unlikeliest of success stories. Instead of saying the approved dialogue
missionaries are trained to recite, he blurts out, “Hello, would you like to
change religions? I have a free book written by Jesus!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill didn’t have the most auspicious start, either.
Though he had a proclivity for performance in his DNA — his dad is a
Juilliard-trained pianist — O’Neill only took to theater in high school because
his lousy grades got him kicked off the soccer team. His mom, an eighth-grade
teacher with zero tolerance for her son’s poor academic performance, “went to a
parent-teacher meeting and came home and said she’d put me in concert choir,”
O’Neill said a[s] he sat in his hotel room in downtown Washington.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The choir teacher needed boys to be in the chorus of “Bye
Bye Birdie,” and O’Neill figured, why not? “And that was the moment. . . . My
whole high-school life was changed around.” He thanks his choir teacher by name
in the “Book of Mormon” Playbill.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill didn’t score a speaking part until senior year, when
he played Nicely Nicely Johnson in “Guys and Dolls.” He auditioned for a few
college theater programs but, with no real acting training to his name, got
rejected from all of them. After graduation, he stuck around Stamford,
connected with Valenti, who was a few years older and shared O’Neill’s love of
“The Kids in the Hall” and “Saturday Night Live,” and “got super-addicted” to
improv.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“That was my goal,” O’Neill said. “I need to do comedy.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill was desperate to get out of his parents’ house in
Stamford and into New York City, so he and Valenti scraped together the money
to go. “I look back now and it’s like, what were we thinking?” said Valenti.
“But the chemistry we had kept us going.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In October 2003, they moved into a 16-by-8 studio apartment
behind Lincoln Center. They slept in bunk beds. O’Neill worked a series of
“really crappy jobs” in the city: at an ice cream shop, a toy store, a couple
of restaurants, as a comedy barker in Times Square. Meanwhile, Valenti would
call comedy clubs and pretend to be a manager or an agent, pitching a two-man
act. Most nights the duo performed “at the 1:30 a.m. time slot when nobody was
there,” O’Neill said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Valenti remembers “a lot of fights about what kind of
direction we wanted to go in… what [is] our niche, and what’s going to make us,
brand us?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“We spent six years trying to figure that out,” Valenti
said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“The Chris and Paul Show” is their sensibility distilled to
its simplest form: a joke heads in one direction but veers to the left at the
last minute, and the sketch snaps shut before the shock fully registers.
O’Neill’s self-deprecating way of describing their aesthetic is “stupid and
abrupt.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill and Valenti toured at some festivals and started
taking home awards. The two made their inaugural trip to the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe, one of the oldest, largest theater festivals in the world, in August
2011. Despite the unglamorous setting (“The Chris and Paul Show” was “literally
performed inside of a cave,” said O’Neill), they won best newcomers at the
festival and were invited back the next year: the year a “Book of Mormon”
casting director happened upon their act.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After the initial “Book of Mormon” auditions in New York,
O’Neill and Valenti both made it to L.A. to try out for Parker and Stone.
Valenti stood outside the door at the Pantages Theater while O’Neill auditioned.
“My stomach is full of butterflies,” Valenti said. “I hear Chris belt out ‘Man
Up.’ And I got chills.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Valenti didn’t get past the L.A. stage, but O’Neill went
back to New York for a month-long workshop. Every day, he and at least a dozen
other Cunningham contenders worked with a director, a voice teacher and a music
director. And every day was an audition.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It was “mentally grueling,” O’Neill said; two weeks in, <i>more
</i>Cunninghams showed up. “Book of Mormon” was casting for multiple companies
— Ben Platt, who is Cunningham in the Chicago production, and Cody Strand,
Cunningham on Broadway [2013-14; 2018-23; 2024-?], were at the audition, too —
but as far as O’Neill remembers, “none of us knew” that more than one person
would wind up with a job.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When he finally got the call offering him a spot on tour,
O’Neill signed the contract, with one condition: that he be able to take off
April 19, his wedding day. His wife, Jennifer (who took the photo that became
O’Neill’s official headshot) stayed in New York where she works at a restaurant
software company. O’Neill flew to San Francisco in December 2012. “And it’s
been nonstop since.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It was a long process,” O’Neill said. “And I wouldn’t
change it for anything. If there are people who have overnight success, I’d
much rather suffer . . . because you really learn about yourself and
discipline, and you pay your dues. That’s why, where I am now, I’m 31 and it
happened at the perfect time for me. If it had happened at 21, I’d be like,
‘Oh, that was easy! That’s great!’ Now, I know how hard it is to get somewhere
like this.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b>A natural-born Elder Cunningham</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Mark Evans, the Elder Price to O’Neill’s Cunningham,
described a typical night before a show begins: “I’m sat in my dressing room
doing my warm-ups or whatever, and all of a sudden I hear a basketball out in
the corridor. Or [O’Neill] comes into my room with a mouth organ, or a
harmonica.” The man, Evans insisted, “actually is Elder Cunningham in real
life.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In other words, Evans said, “He’s like a child on acid.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Other soon-to-be missionaries tell Elder Price he’s “like
the smartest, best most deserving Elder the Center’s ever seen!” Cunningham,
not so much. In real life, “We’re the odd couple,” said O’Neill of his
relationship with Evans. “He’s this tall, handsome English guy. . . . And I see
how much I can annoy him in every show.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Evans and O’Neill joined the tour six months in, and O’Neill
“was very wide-eyed and green and eager,” said Colin Bradbury, the tour’s dance
captain.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“I think he was quite overwhelmed by the whole thing,” said
Evans, and has coped with the craziness by “just taking it a show at a time, a
city at a time.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O’Neill agrees: “I’m constantly fighting to make every song
work and not screw everything up.” The workload is immense. “There’s no cruise
control with this show. . . . It’s 2½ hours of screaming and aerobics.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Early reviews didn’t pour on the praise for O’Neill’s pipes
(a reviewer in St. Louis referred to his “halfway decent vocals”), but there’s
a sweetness about him that’s cited almost everywhere. He has a kind of “Put me
in, Coach!” charm that gets the audience in his corner. O’Neill has weekly
Skype sessions with a vocal instructor and, according to Evans, “His singing
has improved immensely. He would be the first to admit that he hadn’t trained
professionally as a singer, but now, he’s up there with everybody else.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">What makes O’Neill’s Cunningham click, said Evans, is the
humor that got him hired in the first place. “He’s a comedy genius. . . . He’s
always pushing boundaries and trying to do new things. And the great thing is,
he’s not afraid for something to not work and not land. He’s a brave comedian.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">O'Neill said he’ll definitely audition for more musicals in
the future, though “I don’t feel for a second like I made it just because I’m
in this show.” He and Valenti still touch base every day, working on sketch
ideas and plotting big things for “The Chris and Paul Show.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Valenti finally caught O’Neill as Cunningham when the tour
was in, of all places, the holy land of Rochester, New York, home town of
Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“It made me so emotional,” said Valenti. “I had nosebleed
seats. I was watching him through binoculars. . . . It was just so surreal. I’m
looking at everyone around me, and people are laughing at his jokes and just
enjoying the show. I just couldn’t get over it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Surreal” is the same word O’Neill uses to describe the past
year of his life. For someone who spends 20 hours a week playing a man who
always believes, O’Neill still has a hard time believing any of this could
really be happening to him.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Every time I see an advertisement,” he said. “It’s like, ‘<i>I’m
in that</i>!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[</i>The Book of Mormon<i>, which opened on Broadway in 2011
and, with a hiatus during the COVID shutdown, has continued to run until the
present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It ran</i> from <i>9 July through
18 August 2013 at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first National Tour played Chicago before
coming to Washington; it went on to Dallas and Houston.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[O’Neill won the 2015 Helen
Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actor, Washington’s local Tony counterpart,
for his Elder Cunningham portrayal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>The Book of Mormon<i> returned to Washington in 2015 and
2017 at the Kennedy Center, and will play at the National Theatre in 2024.]<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-9952717027167177972024-01-06T10:00:00.164-05:002024-01-06T13:43:24.837-05:00Dreidel<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The eight-day Jewish
holiday of Hanukkah (or, less commonly, Chanukah), often called the Festival of
Lights, just passed in the middle of last month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In 2023, the celebration went from sunset on
Thursday, 7 December, to sunset on Friday. 15 December; this year’s dates will
be sunset on Wednesday, 25 December, to sunset on Thursday, 2 January
2025.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All Jewish religious holidays,
including the Sabbath, or Shabbat – Friday evening to Saturday evening, run
from sunset to sunset.)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The date discrepancy is
due to the reliance on the Hebrew calendar, a basically lunar calendar coordinated
to the phases of the moon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dates for
Hanukkah on the Hebrew calendar are regular: 25 Kislev (the Hebrew calendar’s
third month) to 2 or 3 Tevet (the fourth month; the date depends on whether
Kislev has 29 or 30 days that year).</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[For those who are
unfamiliar with the Hanukkah story, I’ll only briefly say that it celebrates the
Maccabees’ victory over the Seleucid, or Syrian-Greek, army in 164 BCE,
evicting the foreign rulers from Jerusalem and Judea (until, that is, the
Romans reconquered the province in 63 BCE)).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Greeks had defiled the Temple by celebrating pagan rites within it, so the victorious
Jews had to rededicate it, including relighting the eternal flame.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[This required pure olive
oil and the victors could only find one cruse of unprofaned oil, enough to last
only a single day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, the
eternal light miraculously burned for eight days while the Jews pressed a fresh
supply of oil.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I’m not going to go into
either the scheduling of the holiday, however, nor its religious meaning or
secular significance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m going to look
exclusively at one aspect of the celebration, a non-ecclesiastic plaything of
Jewish children during this holiday: the dreidel.]</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Hanukkah (the initial sound represented by <i>H</i>, or<i> Ch</i>
in alternative English spellings, is similar to the Scottish <i>ch </i>in <i>loch</i>
or the German in <i>Buch</i>) is a joyous holiday, celebrating a miracle and the
historical recovery of Jerusalem and the rededication of the Second Temple in
the 2nd century BCE.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement),
Jewry’s High Holy Days, are solemn holidays, but Hanukkah is a <i>festival</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Singing, exchanging gifts, passing out
Hanukkah <i>gelt</i> (literally, Hanukkah money – chocolate coins),<i> </i>and
playing games, especially among the children, are an important part of the
celebration.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Those last two are connected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most common game the little ones play at
Hannukah is dreidel—the name for both a toy and the game that’s played with it—and
the chocolate coins are a traditional part of the game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But before I discuss the game itself—it’s
actually very simple, by the way—let me go back and sketch out the history of
the dreidel itself.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A dreidel, sometimes also dreidle or dreidl (pronounced <i><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">dray</span>-d’l</i>) is a four-sided spinning
top.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The name ‘dreidel’ is the
romanization of the Yiddish name <i>dreydl</i>, which comes from the word <i>dreyen</i>
(‘to turn’ or ‘to rotate,’ derived from the homonymous German verb <i>drehen</i>,
meaning ‘to turn’ or ‘to spin’).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The four faces of the top are each labeled with a Hebrew
letter, representing a Yiddish word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Yiddish,
as most readers will know, is a Germanic dialect written in the Hebrew
alphabet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the <i>lingua franca </i>of the Ashkenazim, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and the nations to which
they eventually spread. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s a brief
history of the evolution of Yiddish in “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,
Part 1: Yiddish Language & Literature,” 23 August 2012.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are abbreviations for the instructions for
the rules of the game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I’ll get to the
details in a bit.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The letters and what
they mean are:</span></p>
<div style="margin-left: 27pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><a name="_Hlk154766183"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> •<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>Nun</i> (</a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154766183;"><b style="mso-ansi-font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span dir="RTL" lang="HE">נ</span></b><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span>), standing for <i>nisht</i>
or ‘nothing.’<br /></span></span><a name="_Hlk154766183" style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">•</a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154766183;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>Gimel
</i>(ג), standing for <i>gantz</i> or ‘everything.’<br /></span></span><a name="_Hlk154766183" style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">•</a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154766183;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>Hey
</i>(ה), standing for <i>halb</i> or ‘half.’<br /></span></span><a name="_Hlk154766183" style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">•</a><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154766183;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><i>Shin</i>
(ש), </span>standing for <span class="script-hebrew"><b style="mso-ansi-font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span dir="RTL" lang="HE" style="background: white;">ה</span></b></span><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="background: white;"><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span></span><i> shtel</i> <i>arayn</i>
or ‘put in.’</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></div><div style="margin-left: 27pt; text-align: left; text-indent: -9pt;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dreidels can be fashioned in clay, ceramic, wood, silver,
brass. iron, lead, aluminum, ivory, and, of course, good ol’ plastic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Home-made dreidels can be constructed from
cardboard, such as discarded cereal boxes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The lettering and other decorations can be painted or drawn on, stained,
carved, or inlaid—whatever a clever dreidel-maker, artisan or DIY-er, can
imagine.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/files/2022/11/Dreidels-by-Michelle-Stefano-Blog-1536x899.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="468" data-original-width="800" height="187" src="https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/files/2022/11/Dreidels-by-Michelle-Stefano-Blog-1536x899.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Assorted dreidels<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In these days of computer ubiquity, 3-D printers are
increasingly being used to design and produce dreidels of previously unimagined
conception.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Guinness World Record-holder for the most expensive
dreidel was created by a jeweler in 2019.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s yellow gold with the letters on the four sides in white gold encrusted
with diamonds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was valued at $70,000—over
$81,000 today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Playing dreidel with this
specimen would be a delicate endeavor: its tip is a 4.2-carat diamond!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Old dreidels, found all over the world, have become
collectors items and some are housed in such collections as the Spertus
Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago, Yeshiva University
Museum at the Center for Jewish History in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York
City, and the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica at Temple Emanu-El
in New York</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There are also dreidels in the collections at the Spinning
Top & Yo-Yo Museum in Burlington, Wisconsin, and Don’s Lair, a private
collection of toys, now open to the public, in what was Don Olney’s Toycrafter
factory in Rochester, New York.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The game’s exact origins are unknown, but there’s evidence
that Babylonian (ca. 19th-6th centuries BCE) players used blocks adorned with
images of Ishtar—goddess of love, war, and fertility, and associated with
beauty, sex, divine law, and political power (known to the Romans as Venus and
the Greeks as Aphrodite)—and Ninurta—god of farming, healing, hunting, law,
scribes, and war (Saturn or Chronos)—that signified winning and losing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One legend, which may well be apocryphal (though I confess
it’s what I heard as a boy), recounts that when Torah study was banned in
ancient Greece (during the reigns of Seleucid Kings Antiochus IV [175-163 BCE]
and Antiochus V [163-161 BCE]), the Jews would evade the law by playing with a
spinning top – a popular gambling device at the time – while learning Torah
orally. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the soldiers raided the illicit
Torah scholars, they’d just find a group of dissolute “gamblers.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Some say the game was introduced in India and made its way
to Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other sources find that the
game was initiated in ancient Rome or Greece and brought to Britain by soldiers
or settlers during the Roman occupation of Britain (43-410 CE.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may explain why the letters on some
ancient English tops refer to Latin words: <i>N</i> for <i>nihil</i>
(‘nothing’), <i>T</i> for <i>totum</i> (‘take all’), <i>A</i> for <i>aufer</i>
(‘take from the pot’), and <i>D</i> for <i>depone</i> (‘put into the pot’).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">By the 16th century, the game of teetotum (sometimes
“T-totum”), the predecessor of dreidel, had become popular in England and
Ireland, and by 1801, the letters adorning the sides of the top referring to
Latin words were swapped out for English references to serve as a mnemonic for the
rules of the game: <i>N</i> stood for ‘nothing,’ <i>T</i> for ‘take all,’ <i>H</i>
for ‘half,’ and <i>P</i> for ‘put down.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The game was particularly popular around Christmastime, and eventually
sailed across the Channel to other parts of Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the painting <i>Children’s Games</i> (<i>De
Kinderspelen</i>), painted in 1560 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Flemish; b. ca. 1525-30,
d. 1569), depicting many children’s pastimes from the Netherlands, one girl in
the lower left-hand corner is playing with a teetotum top. (The work is currently
in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum [literally, “Museum of Art History,” often
called the “Museum of Fine Arts”].)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When teetotum got to Germany in the 16th century, the
letters on the faces of the top were changed to reflect the local language: <i>N</i>
stood for <i>nicht</i> (‘nothing’), <i>G</i> for <i>ganz</i> (‘all’), <i>H</i>
for <i>halb</i> (‘half’), and <i>S</i> for <i>stell ein</i> (‘put in’)—almost
certainly in Frakturschrift, the Gothic-like typeface used in Germany at the
time: 𝕹
𝕲
𝕳
𝕾.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It seems that Germany, home to Europe’s largest and most
influential Ashkenazi community and the center of Yiddish culture, was where
Jewish children were introduced to the game. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was probably there, too, that, like the
Christmas-inspired gift-giving that’s been incorporated into Hanukkah
festivities, it was transformed into a Jewish holiday pastime.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim changed the name of the top
and the game to <i>dreydl</i> and once again replaced the letters on the top—this
time with the Hebrew counterparts of Yiddish words. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The Yiddish name for the top and the game, as
romanized into English, as I explained earlier, is rooted in the word ‘to
turn,’ but the one-letter suffix <i>-l</i> is a common attachment in southern
German dialects as a diminutive suffix—a truncation of the standard German
diminutive suffix <i>-lein</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dreidels
are <i>small</i> toys.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">An irony of the dreidel’s history concerns Hanukkah as a
holiday dedicated to celebrating the rejection of cultural assimilation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Maccabean rebels resisted the Seleucid
rulers who wanted the Jews to adopt Greek lifestyles, including accepting their
gods and religious beliefs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Part of the story Jews tell about the dreidel is that it was
a means to resist Hellenization. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was,
in the legend, a cover for maintaining Jewish identity by studying Torah in
secret. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the dreidel was actually a secular
pastime adopted from non-Jewish Greeks and others and, thus, is a manifestation
of the cultural assimilation it was supposed to have been used to resist.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Teetotum is a gambling game and actual money is used, though
it was probably always a penny-ante stake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(In addition to dreidel, teetotum is an ancestor to dice games.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When it transformed into dreidel, it was
still a game on which cash—coins, rather than large sums—was risked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even as a children’s game, some played for
real pocket money—to be spent on candy and little playthings.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Later, however, as it became more of an innocent pastime for
Hanukkah celebrations, many substitutes for the coins were used, such as raisins,
beans, nuts, toothpicks, matchsticks, or poker chips.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most common token today, I’d say, is
Hanukkah <i>gelt</i>, generally chocolate coins given to the children as treats
and party favors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(<i>Gelt</i> is the Yiddish word for ‘money’ or ‘cash’; it’s
derived from the German word <i>Geld</i> that means the same thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the past, Hanukkah <i>gelt</i> was real
coins, generally the equivalent of pennies or nickels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the children receive actual cash, they’re
encouraged to donate it to charity to teach them about the importance of giving
to those in need.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As I said, the game itself is very simple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s played with two or more participants (even
numbers are best) . . . and you need a dreidel, obviously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every player starts with the same number of
tokens, enough so that no one runs out too quickly and players start to drop
out before the game gets going.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The
number of tokens needs to be evenly divisible by the number of players.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more tokens, the longer the game will
last.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then follow these steps:</span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 31.5pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -13.5pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span>As soon as the game starts, each player antes
one token for the “the pot.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whenever the
pot is down to one or zero tokens, every player should put one in the pot.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 31.5pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -13.5pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span>Each player spins the dreidel in turn. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each turn is one spin of the dreidel. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The letter which comes up once the top stops
determines what action the spinner should perform: for <i>nun</i> (<b style="mso-ansi-font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span dir="RTL" lang="HE">נ</span></b><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span><span dir="LTR"></span>), the spinner does
nothing; for <i>gimel </i>(ג), the spinner takes all the tokens in the pot; for
<i>hey </i>(ה), the player takes half the pot (in the case of an odd number of
tokens in the pot, round up); for <i>shin</i> (ש), the spinner puts one token
into the pot.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 31.5pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -13.5pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span>Pass the dreidel on to the next player.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 31.5pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -13.5pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span>When a player runs out of tokens, she or he may
ask another player for a loan; if no one comes across, the player without
tokens is “out.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 31.5pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -13.5pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span>The game is over when one player has collected all
the tokens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That player is the winner.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There are a few anomalies in the story of dreidel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aside from the myth of Torah study cover (no
one’s found a reliable historical reference to confirm this folktale), there
are all sorts of significance ascribed to the dreidel couched in numerology (study
of numbers, such as the figures in a birth date, and of their supposed
influence on events, phenomena, and human character) or gematria (assigning
numerical values to words based on the fixed numerical values of their letters).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is given force in Hebrew culture because
each letter in the Hebrew alphabet also represents a number and is largely
practiced by followers of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalism.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Another “meaning” of the dreidel comes from an interpretation of the four letters on the top’s faces. Many people see נ (<i>nun</i>), ג (<i>gimel</i>), ה (<i>hey</i>), ש (<i>shin</i>) as a mnemonic for the Hebrew affirmation נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה שָׁם (<i>nes gadol hayah sham</i>), which means “a great miracle happened there,” referring to the miracle of the oil for the Temple lamps, the “Miracle of Hanukkah.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In Israel, the </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">shin</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> on the dreidel has been replaced
by </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">pe </i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(or </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">pey</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> – פ), which for dreidel stands for the Yiddish
word </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">peyde</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> or ‘place’ (i.e., . . . a token in the pot).</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The prophetic statement that the letters
are said to abbreviate now reads “a great miracle happened </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">here</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">”
(</span><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; mso-ansi-font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span dir="RTL" lang="HE" style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: HE;">נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה פֹּה</span></b><span dir="LTR" style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"></span><span dir="LTR" style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"></span><span dir="LTR" style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"></span><span dir="LTR" style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> – </span><i style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">nes gadol
hayah poh</i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">).</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Just to add to the mix, many Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews insist
that <i>shin</i> continue to be used in Israel because the reference to “there”
means “in the Temple in Jerusalem” and not “in Israel.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, a five-sided dreidel was invented in 2022
to represent the Hebrew proclamation <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה שָׁם פֹּה</span> (<i>nes gadol
hayah sham poh</i> – “a great miracle happened <i>here and there</i>”).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On a more prosaic level, there are even competitive dreidel tournaments
(played on a portable dreidel stadium called the Spinagogue!).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2007, a dreidel game called No Limit Texas
Dreidel was released; it’s a cross between traditional dreidel and Texas Hold’em
poker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jettisoning the gambling aspect
of dreidel, a version of Major League Dreidel requires spinners to compete for the
longest spin.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1993, astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman, while a member of the
crew of the Space Shuttle <i>Endeavour</i>, spun a dreidel for Hanukkah before
a live audience watching via satellite during his fourth space flight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At some 250 miles above the Earth, in zero
gravity and with friction only from the drag of the air in the shuttle, but none
from whatever surface the top spun on, the dreidel turned for an hour.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On Earth, the longest a standard dreidel would
spin would be about 18 seconds.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(If Hoffman had taken the dreidel outside the shuttle during
his space walk on that trip, theoretically it could have spun in the vacuum of space
forever!)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jewish ritual doesn’t include hymns; during a Jewish
service, even among Reform or Liberal Jews, there really are no sacred
songs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That may be—and I’ve never looked
into this, so it’s just my conclusion—because much of a Jewish service is
traditionally sung or chanted, specifically most of the prayers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We do, however, have songs associated with various holidays,
such as “Had Gadya” (or “Chad Gadya” – "One Little Goat”), which is sung
at the end of the Passover Seder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Chag
Purim” (“Purim Festival”) is a folk song for, as you can guess from the title,
Purim. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These songs are secular, but they’re
often sung both at home and in synagogues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In synagogues, they’re sung after the religious service is over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A song popular with children at Hanukkah is “I Have a Little
Dreidel” (also known as the “Dreidel Song”), written in English (with a Yiddish
translation).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Written by Chayim B.
Alevsky (b. 1967), a New York rabbi, it’s so popular in the United States that
even non-Jews know it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Appropriately for
this article, it’s all about making a dreidel and then playing with it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Drey dreydl” (“Turn, dreidel”) is a Yiddish-language Hanukkah
song by Moyshe Oysher (1906-58), which includes the lyric “Turn, dreidel, from
nothing to all, / Turn, dreidel, and turn out well.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another traditional folk song, with origins
in Israel, is “Chanukah, Chanukah,” with Hebrew words by Levin Kipnis (1894-1990).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It contains the line translated as “Chanukah,
Chanukah, The dreidel spins and spins. Spin your top until it stops, Have a
good time, see who wins!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">An interesting thing about the English rendition of that
line is that the Hebrew for <i>dreidel</i> in the original lyrics is <i>sevivon</i>
(סביבון).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s the word for the top in
Israel, from the Hebrew word for ‘to spin’ or ‘to rotate.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s even a Hebrew Hanukkah song called “Sevivon,”
also by Kipnis, that’s very popular in Israel.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Now, you’ve learned that Hanukkah can start anywhere from
late November to late December according to the Gregorian calendar and end
between early December and early January.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So, every year somewhere during that span, stores all over the country
will have displays of gold- and silver-foil-wrapped chocolate coins, known to
Jews, especially the children, as Hanukkah <i>gelt</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-260w,f_auto,q_auto:best/newscms/2023_17/3521979/screen_shot_2021-11-29_at_3-38-30_pm.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="303" data-original-width="260" height="320" src="https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-260w,f_auto,q_auto:best/newscms/2023_17/3521979/screen_shot_2021-11-29_at_3-38-30_pm.png" width="275" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hanukkah <i>gelt </i>in a mesh pouch</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Some of the chocolates’ wrapping may also be light blue,
especially those imported from Israel, because it’s the color of the flag of
the modern state of Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The discs
are usually also molded with decorations including the Star of David and the
menorah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The menorah is sometimes the
seven-branched candelabrum, which is the most ancient symbol of Judaism—and the
symbol of modern Jerusalem—predating the Star of David by many centuries, but
more often it’s the eight-branched candelabrum, called a “hanukkiah” or a
“Hanukkah menorah,” which is the central device of the observance of the
holiday.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As I noted, Hanukkah <i>gelt</i> isn’t a necessary part of
dreidel, but it is the most common token used for playing the game today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s have a look at its history and
development, too.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As I explained above, <i>gelt</i> is Yiddish for ‘money.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are many explanations for the origins
of this tradition, some of which are certainly apocryphal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One tradition has it that the gift of money refers to the
distribution among Jerusalem’s soldiers, widows, and orphans of the spoils collected
by the victorious Maccabean rebels when they retook the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In later justifications, when the practice
was still for adults, not children, the money was basically an end-of-year
gratuity for people who did a regular service: the butcher, your child’s
teacher, the postman, the milkman, your hairdresser. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hanukkah was a time to pay these men and women
a little extra.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The inclusion of teachers in this version of the custom is
significant because another exegesis is related to the etymology of the word <i>hanukkah</i>,
which means ‘dedication’ in Hebrew but is related to <i>hinuch</i>, the word
for ‘education.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Most readers will be aware that one characteristic of the Jewish
people is that they revere education.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
common explanation for this is that Jews had become so accustomed from early in
their history, starting from the beginning of the diaspora following the Roman
destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, to the deprivations suffered in the
less-than-welcoming host countries into which they migrated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The societies of the dominant cultures where the wandering
Jews settled quickly relieved them of most of their possessions, including
money, homes, and goods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jews quickly
saw that the one thing that could not be taken from them was learning—and, of
course, religious learning, the study of Torah, was an obligation set out in
the Bible (Deuteronomy 6:7).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So,
education, particularly Jewish education, became a cultural touchstone.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Teachers were admired and valued in Jewish communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s no coincidence that <i>rabbi</i> means
‘teacher’ or ‘master.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In ancient Judea,
a priest, or spiritual leader, was a <i>kohen</i>, not a rabbi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the Renaissance era (15th and 16th
centuries), rabbis traveled from village to village to give instruction on
Jewish law and history, usually without payment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At Hanukkah, however, the rabbis accepted
coins and food as expressions of the villagers’ gratitude, giving rise to the
practice of Hanukkah <i>gelt</i> as a sign of appreciation for valued services.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It wasn’t until the 19th century that giving money shifted
from a practice of tipping helpful adult workers to giving gifts to
children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This coincided with the time
that Hanukkah, historically a minor holiday in Judaism, grew in importance,
particularly in the U.S., because of its proximity to Christmas, as the focus
shifted from adults and historical commemoration to children and gift-giving.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The shift from real coins to chocolate was a long process,
starting in the 16th century when the Spanish explorers and settlers in the New
World had their first encounters with the cocoa bean and its byproducts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chocolate was introduced into Europe in the
early part of the century as a drink, and that remained its form for 200
years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Solid chocolate was produced in Europe starting in the 18th
century and immediately became very popular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some historians record that chocolate coins were fashioned in Europe by
Jewish chocolatiers as early as then and continued into the next century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the most common history of the
development of chocolate Hanukkah <i>gelt</i> credits a U.S. candy manufacturer
in the 1920s who marketed the first foil-covered chocolate coins in a small,
mesh bag with a draw-string closure that resembled a coin purse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s still sold that way today (though the
candy inside is reputedly of much higher quality and better flavor than the
earlier versions, according to those who remember).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">By the way, if this account makes you yearn to treat
yourself to some Hanukkah <i>gelt</i>, forget it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wait till next year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like the panettones, Stollen, and
Pfeffernüsse of Christmas, which disappear by 2 January on the dot, and the <i>haroseth</i>
some shops offer at Passover, gone by a few days after the holiday ends, the <i>gelt</i>
is off the store shelves no later than a day or two after the last day of
Hanukkah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Sic transeunt </i>the
gustatory pleasures of the world.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i style="text-indent: 121.5pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I have a little dreidel. I
made it out of clay.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="text-align: center; text-indent: 121.5pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> And when it’s dry and ready,
then dreidel I shall play.</span></i></p><br /><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-31775805955880222942024-01-01T10:00:00.050-05:002024-01-01T10:00:00.142-05:00Keeping Up with Mr. Dylan<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="text-align: center;">by</span><b style="text-align: center;">
Kirk Woodward</b></span><b style="text-align: center;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[<a name="_Hlk153282892">My friend, and prolific guest-blogger on </a></i><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk153282892;">Rick On Theater<i>, Kirk Woodward is about as big a fan of
singer-songwriter—and Nobel Laureate—Bob Dylan as he is of the Beatles (see his
last post, “‘Now and Then,’” posted on 8 December 2023).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since Kirk’s also my go-to guy for almost
anything musical, it’s just right that he should appear on this blog again—and launch
2024 for me—with a Dylan retrospective, “Keeping Up with Mr. Dylan.”</i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk153282892;"><i>[“Keeping Up” is founded
on Kirk’s analysis of Dylan’s November concert at New York City’s Beacon
Theater.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’ll tell you about that
below.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to remind </i></span><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk153282892;">ROT<i>ters that Kirk has several previous posts on this
blog about or featuring Bob Dylan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Some
of them are referenced in “Keeping Up.”)</i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk153282892;"><i>[Here’s a list of Kirk’s
past posts concerning Dylan: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist,” </i></span><i>8 January 2011; “Bob
Dylan at Woodstock – And a New Album,” 14 November 2012; “Bob and Ringo,” 1
December 2017; “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion,” 23 April 2018; “Bob Dylan Dance Party,”
17 December 2019.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The singer-songwriter also
gets attention in a number of other posts (“The Jukebox Musical,” 7 October
2011; “Leonard Cohen,” 2 February 2013; “Writing </i>As You Like It<i>,” 5
September 2017), plus passing mentions in still others, most notably in “‘Now
and Then.’”]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I
didn’t go to Bob Dylan’s concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on November
16, 2023. I’ve seen Dylan a number of times beginning in 1965, and I’ve written
about him several times for this blog [see list of Dylan posts above], but I
didn’t feel like making the trip into New York, and to be honest, it can be a
lot of work listening to a Dylan concert – more about that in a moment. So I
stayed home.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">However,
a video of the concert is available, well produced by the podcast <i>dylan.FM</i>.
The audio (there’s no video) is a pretty good reproduction of what Dylan
concerts at the Beacon that I’ve attended [see Kirk’s “Bob and Ringo” and “Bob
Dylan Dance Party”] sound like, and judging from the recording I missed an
excellent concert.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dylan
(b. 1941) needs no justification at this stage in his life. He is unarguably
the preeminent living songwriter in Western music, and he has a Nobel Prize in
Literature (2016) to prove it. He has recorded forty studio albums to date,
every one of them worth a listen and many of them magnificent.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He
has a place in history by virtue of his association with the civil rights
movement of the 1960s and his “anti-war” songs of the same period. There is no
way to measure how many times he has been written about and quoted in college
classrooms, books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and even judicial opinions.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">His
recent years – as of this writing he is 82 – have been particularly productive.
During the Covid epidemic, in 2020, he released the album <i>Rough and Rowdy
Ways</i>, a striking collection of deeply poetic, often almost-spoken songs
with hushed instrumental backgrounds, stylistically different from what he had
recorded before. Half a year later he sold his entire songwriting catalog for an
unannounced figure unquestionably amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Half
a year after that, he made a streaming video called <i>Shadow Kingdom: The
Early Songs of Bob Dylan</i> featuring thirteen of his songs, subsequently
released as his 40<sup>th</sup> studio album <i>Shadow Kingdom</i> (2023),
about which I will have more to say.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">He
released a book called </span><i style="color: #783f04;">The Philosophy of Modern Song</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> in 2022 that
contains 66 idiosyncratic essays on a wide range of compositions and was well
received. Columbia, his recording company, has continued to issue important “bootleg”
collections of his unreleased material, now up to seventeen volumes including
two released in the period discussed here [see “Mr. Dylan Gets Religion” (</span><a href="https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/04/mr-dylan-gets-religion.html"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Rick
On Theater: Mr. Dylan Gets Religion</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">) for an explanation of these albums].</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Notably,
Dylan continues to perform with a sterling band at a rate of something like a
hundred concerts a year, a heavy schedule for any entertainer and particularly
for one who’s been eligible for Social Security for the last 17 years. He is by
no means a back number; his concerts frequently sell out, they are avidly
attended by fans, and – perhaps most notably – no one who attends one of his
concerts knows exactly what they are going to hear.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There’s
little chance that any entertainer’s performance would be <i>exactly</i> the
same twice. Minor differences would creep in. The concerts of Paul McCartney (b.
1942), for example, appear to be standardized from one show to the next, yet I
recently read that one of the members of his touring band says the group has to
be continually alert, since McCartney may throw in a change of some sort at any
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[In addition to this discussion of
Dylan’s drive constantly to change his song delivery, see also “Bob and
Ringo.”]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
same is true of Dylan, only more so. With Dylan, the likelihood that changes
will occur from show to show is one of the main interests in his performances.
“Change,” in fact, seems to be his watchword. In his valedictory song “It’s All
Over Now, Baby Blue” (1965). Dylan sings</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Strike another match, go start anew</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">and
that could practically be his motto as far as his public life is concerned. (Another
song from around the same period, written in 1964, is titled “Restless
Farewell.”) Dylan seems always to have wanted to keep moving, keep advancing,
keep growing, keep exploring.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">What
such impulses might mean for concerts is problematic. For every person who’s
said to me, “I like the way Dylan sounds now,” I could name a half dozen who
have said, “I wish he’d sing the songs the way he wrote them.” This he
resolutely refuses to do. He changes tempos, harmonies, melodies; sometimes he
seems to do away with melodies altogether. He already sang the song “the old
way;” now he’d like to do something new with it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It
seems likely that in a general sense our interest in what we hear is
conservative: we like to listen to the same music over and over. Symphony
orchestras, for example, regularly program standard pieces, and may face empty
seats if they schedule too many contemporary compositions. I have no problem
listening to my Beatles recordings endlessly, and I have little interest in
other people’s versions of the same songs – unless I’ve heard them enough that
I add them to my rotation, so to speak.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Some
musicians are content to sing and play the same songs in the same ways – or
relatively so – through their entire careers. I saw Bing Crosby (1903-1977) in
concert in New York City in the 1970s and he sang “White Christmas” by Irving
Berlin (1888-1989) the same way he had sung it in the film <i>Holiday Inn</i>
in 1942.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Other
musicians chafe against such restrictions. The singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer (b.
1928), for example, has said that he recorded his songs so he wouldn’t have to
sing the same songs in the same way all the time; knowing that people could
play his records, he couldn’t imagine why they would want him to sing the same
songs to them in person.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then
there’s Dylan, who absolutely refuses to sing his songs the way he used to,
going so far as to change his entire vocal style over the years. The <i>quality</i>
of his voice is still somewhat the same as it was in earlier days, but huskier,
with less care (sometimes) about diction, and, as I said, with radically
different musical approaches to his earlier recorded material.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If
the whole point were that Dylan wanted to sing his songs differently, there
wouldn’t be much reason to care; the whole thing would be an academic exercise.
Dylan, though, is one of the great interpreters of songs. He wants to bring out
as much meaning in them as he can, and he keeps working on it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At
least, that is the impression he gives today. ’Twas not always so. There were
periods, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, where he seemed not to care about
his material at all, singing it more or less by rote. His concerts were a
matter of desperation for many of his fans.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dylan
doesn’t miss much, as is clear in his valuable autobiography <i>Chronicles:
Volume One</i> (2004), a vivid account of several moments of importance to him
in his life. About the year 1987 he writes:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The public had been fed a steady diet of my
complete recordings on disc for years, but my live performances never seemed to
capture the inner spirit of the songs – had failed to put the spin on them. The
intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners, it must
have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass. . . . I’d been
following established customs and they weren’t working. The windows had been
boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it’s not like I didn’t know
it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dylan
was not the only one who noticed that his concerts were problematic. I never
saw him in those desert years, but I talked with people who did, and they were
living on hope more than expectation that he might offer something worthwhile
in a concert. “You know Bob,” they’d say, “sometimes he’s on and sometimes he’s
not.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In
<i>Chronicles</i> (pages 156-162 of the first edition) Dylan describes how he
found and latched on to a new approach to singing, one, he says, “based on an odd-
instead of an even-numbered system.” I would like to explain here what he
means, but I can’t, because I don’t understand it – my fault, undoubtedly, but
there it is.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s a highly controlled system of playing and
relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they <i>form
melodies out of triplets</i> and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord
changes. . . . The method works on higher or lower degrees depending on
different patterns and the syncopation of a piece. Very few would be converted
to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their
whole lives to be technically superior players. . . . With any type of imagination
you can hit notes at intervals and between backbeats, creating counterpoint
lines and then you sing off of it. [Italics mine.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I
see the words but not what they mean. He adds, optimistically, “There’s no
mystery to it and it’s not a technical trick.” I believe him, I just have no
idea what he’s talking about, possibly because my own ideas of music are too
conventional, possibly because he’s the only one who understands what he’s
saying. At any rate I have found no one who explicates the musical system Dylan
describes in <i>Chronicles</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I
exaggerate a bit. I do often hear “triplets” in his singing – three note
clusters that disrupt the expected rhythmic pattern of a song, most of which
are written in four, not three, beats per measure. The effect is to derail the
melody (which he may not be singing anyway). One may find this disruption
stimulating; one may find it irritating. In any case, it does seem to give
Dylan a great deal of freedom as he sings.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">To
make things even more interesting – or challenging – Dylan is, as I have said
before, a performance artist [see Kirk’s post “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist”],
and he plays a long game. He will give a particular kind of performance over a
range of hundreds of concerts, but occasionally he will change the focus and
challenge everyone else to catch up.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For
example, in his earliest days he accompanied himself on guitar, first acoustic,
then electric; famously, he first worked solo, then with a rock band. More
recently he dropped the guitar entirely and performed behind an upright piano.
Now he sits at an electric baby grand piano facing the audience, downstage left
center – but at a Farm Aid concert, playing a smashing three song set with the
Heartbreakers, also this year, he played electric guitar exclusively.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For
several years he played a radically different setlist every show, and fans
delighted in discovering what treasures he would pull out of his vast songbook
on a given night. Currently he is playing the same setlist every night – except
that he has recently begun most concerts with a song related to the city where
he is performing. At the Beacon it was Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.”
Another town, another song.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A
feature of this year’s Beacon concert, which a number of fans commented on, was
that Dylan was clearly rearranging approaches to songs within the concert,
conferring with the instrumentalists several times during the show. The result,
as heard on the recording of the concert, is energetic and loose.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dylan
is singing, literally singing, more these days, apparently an after-effect from
his immersion a few years ago in songs sung by Frank Sinatra (1915-1998), in
recent concerts represented by the song “That Old Black Magic” (1942, music by
Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">His
voice has cleared up too, when he wants it to, and the effects of both can be
heard in the Beacon concert on the song “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To
You” from the <i>Rough and Rowdy Ways</i> album. “We’re beginning to get it
together now,” Dylan says after that song, and he deserves the satisfaction he shows.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In
other words, it’s a good time to be a Dylan fan, a feeling strengthened for me
when my friend Nick mentioned there was a Dylan album I hadn’t heard – the
soundtrack of <i>Shadow Kingdom</i>. In it Dylan takes a huge risk, because many
of the thirteen songs are widely familiar, like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,”
and “Forever Young” (1973).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One
gets on board with Dylan’s current way of singing or one doesn’t. For me, on a
first listen I was cautious; on a second, convinced; on a third, enthusiastic.
It seems to me – I’m by no means the only person to feel this way – that Dylan
is one of the most expressive singers ever recorded. He is a master of nuance. He
can be this because he’s not tied to anything – he can try any approach he
wants, and he does.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As
I listened to <i>Shadow Kingdom</i> I realized more clearly than I had before
that “approach” is the word – that he takes an angle, an attitude, toward each
song and follows it where it leads. My favorite example on the album is “I’ll
Be Your Baby Tonight” (1967) from the spare and brilliant <i>John Wesley
Harding</i> album of the same year.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Taking
off from the line “Bring that bottle over here,” Dylan sings the song as though
pleasantly high. At the Beacon, singing the same song with a slow introduction
that leads to a fast finish, he sings the first part as though he really were
smashed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In
general, Dylan is a portraitist, as well as a master of imagery and
observation, but in order to really take in what he’s doing, one has to listen,
and, of course, what one hears has to be worth listening to. I have been
convinced for a long time that Dylan is worth the trouble. “Old men should be
explorers,” T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote. Hats off to an artist who won’t stand
still.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Above,
Kirk states, "'Change,' in fact, seems to be [Dylan’s] watchword." <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I read that, I immediately thought,
"The Times They Are a-Changin’,” after all! The song, released in
March 1965, is all about change, and Kirk confirmed, “He meant it even
more than we knew then.” That made me think of the circumstances of
my first hearing a Dylan song.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I
recounted that incident in my afterword to Kirk’s “Bob Dylan Dance Party” (17
December 2019):</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>My introduction to "Dylan" goes back
a pretty long way. (Both Kirk and I are older than Rock ’n’ Roll.)
I put the singer-songwriter’s name in quotation marks like that because
it wasn’t actually the man himself, but someone who sang one of his songs,
which I’d never heard before.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>I don’t remember a lot of the details (like I
said, I’m older than R ’n’ R), but it must have been sometime in 1965, probably
the summer. My folks had moved to Bad Godesberg, the home of our embassy
to Germany, by that time (my dad had been transferred to the embassy from
another post in the spring) and the event took place in someone’s
embassy-compound apartment. </i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>I don’t remember whose apartment it was or why
we gathered there. I assume whoever the embassy staffer was, she or he
had a teenaged son or daughter (I don’t know why, but for some reason I
remember a girl) who’d invited a bunch of other embassy brats like me to
the home for an evening—there was a small crowd of us, all teens and maybe some
college-aged kids as well. </i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>I remember sitting around in the living room,
listening to a guy sing as he accompanied himself on guitar. What I
recall as the last song was “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” the Dylan song
that wasn’t released until the previous year and hadn’t gotten to Europe
yet—or, at least, not to my ears. As I remember the impromptu rock
concert, none of us had heard the song—or, I imagine, anything like it.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>I don’t remember who the singer was—for all I
know, he became a famous folk-rocker (or maybe he already was and I just didn’t
know him). I assume he wasn’t an official State Department sponsee
because, if he had been, my dad would have been his host because Dad was the
Cultural Attaché; it would have been his gig! </i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>I may have known Dylan’s name by then, or I may
not yet. I just don’t remember. After my brother and I moved to
Germany in 1963, I only went back to the States once, in the spring of ’64 to
visit colleges (and the New York World’s Fair with my grandmother!), and
American culture didn’t get to Europe in those days until after a gap of maybe
six months or longer. (My American schoolmates in Switzerland mobbed my
brother and me when we got there because we’d been “home” more recently than
most of them and we knew the songs and dances that had been current when we
left that summer! We were the cultural heralds, so to speak.) </i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .25in;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">So this was my first impression of “Dylan”—by
proxy, but nonetheless striking. Not as avid as Kirk’s, perhaps, but
I went on to become a fan, too.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[What
I didn’t say in this recollection is that I was very taken with “The Times They
Are a-Changin’”; I think all the kids in the gathering were.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t remember if the singer sang other
Dylan songs or any other songs in that vein—folk rock or protest songs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was new to us, living 3,000 miles off
America’s shores, often for years by this time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(I was 18 in the summer of 1965; I came to Germany to live when I was 16
and until the previous spring, my family lived in a provincial German city, not
an embassy residence compound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See “An
American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013.)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I
suppose none of us had heard music like this yet. At our ages, it was exciting and new. Clearly, just the fact I remember as much of
this experience as I have after almost 60 years suggests that I was affected.]</span></i></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-4030132533076226932023-12-27T10:00:00.071-05:002023-12-27T10:00:00.258-05:00Sphere, Part 2<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Welcome
to the second and concluding installment of my report on Sphere Las Vegas, the new
high-tech performance venue conceived and built on the Strip by Madison Square
Garden.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took years in the planning
and construction, including delays from the COVID shut-down, the supply disruptions,
and the inflation surge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It ended up
costing $2.3 billion and opened with the début of a U2 residency on 29 September
2023.</span></i><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Part
1 of “Sphere,” posted on 24 December, covered such topics as the business
arrangements for the shifting partnerships that brought the venue to fruition,
the architecture and construction of the world’s largest spherical edifice, the
reception by Las Vegans and visitors to the city of the concept and the rising structure,
and some details regarding visiting Sphere as an entertainment site.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Part
2 below will cover the tech of Sphere, both exterior and interior, and some of
the responses to the structure as a place to see concerts and other
events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I’m not tech savvy—I can barely
get my laptop to work the way I want it, and I still haven’t really mastered my
cell phone—I found looking into that first topic particularly interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope readers, including the many of you who
are more advanced than I in this area, will find my efforts informative.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[One
word of caution/recommendation: I haven’t repeated in Part 2 identifications,
explanations, or definitions that I gave in Part 1. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you haven’t read the first installment, it
would be a good idea to go back and catch it before proceeding to avoid having
to toggle back and forth to look up that information.]</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Now I think
it’s time to tackle the technology of Sphere—the aspect of the venue that,
alongside its shape, distinguishes it from all other entertainment venues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether that’s good, bad, or indifferent
. . . well, I guess we’ll have to see.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">Let’s start
with the exterior of the globe, since that’s what people see first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, the 580,000 square feet/</span>54,000
square meters<span style="background: white;"> of LED light panels covering the Exosphere make Sphere
visible from several miles away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According
to the website <a name="_Hlk149483602"><i>Virtual Events Group</i></a>, it can
be seen from outer space—though the <i>Washington Post </i>reports only that it
“seems like it could be seen from space.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The exterior
screens are fully programmable to create a dynamic exterior display with almost
limitless creative possibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The
possibilities for artists, partners, and brands to create compelling and
impactful stories to connect with audiences in new ways,” are compelling to
Sphere’s senior VP of brand strategy and creative development. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among other spectacles, Sphere can “look like
a black hole has opened up or a Christmas snow globe has landed in Vegas.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListBullet" style="margin-left: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: none; tab-stops: .5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">At the first illumination of the exterior LED panels, the Independence
Day spectacle last July, along with “LED fireworks, American flag effects,
nature scenes, and some sci-fi visuals, perhaps the most stunning use of the
world's largest artificial spherical structure was projecting some other famous
spheroids from around the solar system on its display, including the moon,
Mars, and even Earth itself.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“Sometimes it’s
a gargantuan basketball,” reported New York’s <i>Observer</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can also do an emoji face, a gigantic jack-o’lantern, and a tennis
ball. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“And recently,” added the <i>Observer</i>,
“it loomed in the skyline in the guise of an anatomically correct eyeball
keeping watch over the strip. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These and
other vividly realistic illuminations are stopping traffic across the city as
locals and tourists pause to take in Sphere . . . .”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Using cameras
placed at strategic locations around Las Vegas which can live-stream images of
the cityscape surrounding Sphere, the orb can even perform a neat trick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the pictures are displayed on the LED
panels of the Exosphere, it seems to disappear as viewers “see through” it to
the terrain in which Sphere stands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
called “see-through” or “cloak” mode.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Not all Las
Vegans have been pleased or amused.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <i>Washington
Post</i> asserts, “Some see a technological marvel, while some see a gigantic
spherical billboard that’s a prime distraction for drivers.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Speaking of
that billboard: the website <i>Boardroom</i> reports that “a one-week
advertising campaign [on the Exosphere] could set brands back $650,000. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one day (four hours, really), expect to
pay $450,000.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One Las Vegan
nevertheless told a local news outlet “that he thinks the glowing ball is ‘the
most incredible thing ever built in the world. . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll look at it every night.’”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another wrote on X (formerly known as
Twitter), “This is the future right here. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vegas is doing it right.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Others have had
different reactions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I would not want
to see some of that from my hotel window after a late night out Vegasing,”
wrote a visitor, and another resident posted, “Who wants to do some mushrooms
and watch this thing all night?”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Now, let’s move
inside Sphere, arguably the region of greatest interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It measures out at 875,000 square feet (81,290
square meters) of floor space. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I
mentioned earlier, the globe has nine levels, counting the basement, with luxury
suites—13 at Level 3 and 10 at Level 5—which are expected to be acquired by corporate
sponsors. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sphere’s interior,
largely column-free to preclude obstructions to sight or imagination, was designed
by MSG Entertainment (before the spin-off) and hospitality specialists Icrave, a
New York City-based firm that specializes in nightlife venues such as lounges
and clubs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Icrave’s
founder and CEO, Lionel Ohayon, proclaims, “The experience doesn’t begin at the
theater. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As soon as you pass the
threshold of the Sphere, you are in the show.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s because every space at Sphere is designed to generate a similarly
surreal frisson as the entertainment event.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sam Lubell of <i>Fast
Company</i>, a monthly print and online business magazine published in
Washington, D.C., that spotlights technology and design, describes the
visitor’s first encounter with the inside of the orb this way:</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Sphere is
dominated by an eight-level atrium, ringed with rounded mezzanines and bisected
by crisscrossed escalators and flying bridges. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s as immersive and otherworldly as the
theater itself. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To increase
reflectivity—and a sense of otherworldly limitlessness—the floor is made of
shiny, highly polished black terrazzo. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
are virtually no straight lines anywhere. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lighting system, says Ohayon, “has a
personality that can speak to you,” with virtually every surface lit by
indirect LED illumination that can be customized for intensity, temperature, or
color to match the mood or theme of any show. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Entry and exit thresholds consist of low
archways that compress you and then dramatically release you into taller
spaces.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The whole
experience—of the setting, if not the performances—seems to be intended to
evoke space travel, as if you’re making a stop-over at a space station in the
late 24th century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London’s <i>Daily
Mail</i> declares that Sphere “looks like it landed from outer space” and Journey,
a business consulting and services company, whose website bills itself as the “Next-Gen
Customer Experiences,” posts that “Sphere . . . catapults the stadium
experience into the future.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">But what about
the auditorium, the performance space itself?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">Well, to start
off, it’s </span>called the Bowl, with a volume of nearly 6 million cubic feet
(169,901 cubic meters), seating 17,385 spectators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The Bowl can hold a 20,000-strong,
all-standing audience.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The interior is
big enough, the owners say, to hold the Statue of Liberty, from torch to base (151
feet without the pedestal; 305 feet total [46 meters/93 meters]).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The stage is portable and
adjustable to any size; it can even be removed for films. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seating covers approximately two-thirds of the
interior, with the stage occupying the remainder of the space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The general admission (GA) floor is right in
front of the stage, and there are four different distinct seating levels: 100,
200, 300, and 400.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The primary floor setup features
a GA pit/floor area right in front of the stage, offering an up-close
experience. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this area, seats are not
assigned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The seats in the 100 section
are closest to the stage, which are great for viewing the stage and the live
performers; they’re not so good, however, for watching the screen, which is so
big that it’s impossible to see any detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By most spectators’ experience, the over-hang of the 200 tier blocks the
view from many 100-level seats.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Most advisors say that the 200
level is the best area, especially for concerts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(It’s also the most expensive.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For movies like <i>Postcard from Earth</i>
and other video presentations, the common advice is that seats in the 300 and
400 level are best because they afford the best view of the screen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The 400 level offers the least expensive
seats available.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The common wisdom, especially as
promoted by Sphere Entertainment and the Venetian Resort, is that there are no
bad seats at Sphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many attendees
who’ve posted comments online disagree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
over-hang I already mentioned was a frequent complaint from unhappy visitors,
and several commented on the steep incline of the stairs accessing the upper
tiers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least one commenter said that
“it felt like being in a cramped airplane seat.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The screen at the Bowl is about 3<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">⅓</span> football fields (American—without
the end zones)—160 square feet (14,864.5 square meters).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the world’s largest and best-resolution
and t<span style="background: white;">he giant LED screen wraps over and behind the audience,
delivering a totally immersive visual environment.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><span style="background: white;">Variety</span></i><span style="background: white;">’s Willman describes a couple of effects created in the Bowl during
U2:UV:</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There’s one segment
where the video screen turns this cornerless room into a rectangularly shaped
space, and you can only guess at how the designers had to bend the laws of
physics to create that illusion on a circular screen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most jaw-dropping moment of the night,
arguably, comes when you look straight up and see what appears to be an
elevator made up of data descending down toward you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can only be described as a very
slow-motion, more abstract version of the chandelier dropping in “Phantom of
the Opera.”</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">All seats in the
auditorium have high speed internet access.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sphere’s engineers devised an ultra-fast
wireless environment so that 10,000 people can interact with the venue’s LED screen
simultaneously from any seat in the house.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Some seats are also equipped
with an infrasound haptic system to vibrate to match whatever is being depicted
on screen, such as a helicopter ride or an earthquake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>4D machines that create wind, temperature,
and scent effects are also a part of the Sphere experience. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The system’s embedded in the flooring system,
which utilizes technology to convey bass through the floor for guests to “feel”
the experience.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“When you’re riding
a Harley, you’ll feel the pistons pumping,” says James Dolan, MSG’s CEO. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“When lightning strikes, you’ll feel that,
too.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sphere Entertainment asserts that
it can program and control the infrasound seating and audio systems to simulate
a range of amazing sensory effects from the swell of the tide to a total shift
in gravity.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(4D, or 4-D, refers
to an ordinary three-dimensional experience supplemented by synchronized
physical effects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Infrasound, or low-frequency
sound, is sound under the lower limit of human audibility; however, at higher
intensities it’s possible to feel infrasound vibrations in various parts of the
body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Haptic [of or relating to the
sense of touch] technology targets users’ tactile sense.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sphere’s effects
units can technically achieve wind blasts of a slight breeze up to 140 mph, enough
to blow the roof off a building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
temperature regulators can create everything from the ideal setting of Sphere’s
AC system to the degree drop it takes to make spectators feel as if they’re immersed
in a 4D blizzard.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“The sound is a new technology,”
said Nick Tomasino, MSG Entertainment’s construction VP, “never implemented
before, using beam-forming technology, which allows you to have the same
experience whether sitting in the back or the front.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Beamforming is a type of radio frequency
management in which a wireless signal is directed toward a specific receiving
device, rather than sending it from a broadcast antenna to be spread in all
directions.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At Sphere, the acousticians have ensured
that every seat in the house gets optimal audio reception.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore, according to Sphere
Entertainment, the venue has the ability to direct sound like laser beams. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sphere’s sound system can deliver unique audio
experiences to different listening locations all across the orb. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">According to Chris Willman of <i>Variety</i>,
a demonstration for the press “showed how it is even possible to make it so
that patrons sitting three seats apart could hear a lecture in different
languages, with no bleed-over.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sound isn’t the
only tech element Sphere’s techies can manipulate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Visitors to the Vegas globe may be
transported to an array of places, from far out in space to the bottom of the
ocean. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lighting system can simulate how
light filters through different environments so Sphere can capture the effect
as close to nature as possible.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">As Caryn Rose</span><span style="letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> of National Public
Radio noted of the Bowl in its entirety, something’s </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“conspicuously absent”:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There are no speaker
stacks, no carefully positioned hanging PA columns, no lighting rig. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As [U2’s] Bono and Edge gleefully told [New
Zealand radio DJ] Zane Lowe and everyone else: "The entire building is a
speaker." <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What that means from a
practical standpoint is not just immersive clarity, but also an incredible
balance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the Sphere, Bono can speak
in a normal, conversational tone into the microphone and everyone can hear
it. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Now, I want to have a look at what people
who’ve experienced Sphere as an entertainment venue think of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sphere “is living architecture,” says Guy
Barnett, Sphere’s Senior VP of brand strategy and creative development, “and
unlike anything that exists anywhere in the world.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">How does the first-person experience measure
up?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Bono, U2’s lead vocalist and primary
lyricist, said it himself: “This whole place feels like a distortion pedal for
the mind.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Actor and producer Aaron Paul, best known
for <i>Breaking Bad</i>, was at the U2 première and averred that “U2 is
arguably one of the biggest rock bands ever to exist, and this is arguably one
of the greatest—if not the greatest—music venue on the planet. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We did a tour [inside Sphere] a couple of
months ago. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Minds were blown.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I’ve already quoted </span>Chris Willman’s <i>Variety</i>
review of U2’s opening performance at Sphere, so to narrow in on his opinion of
how it fit into Sphere, let me return to his notice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of the rock band’s première, Willman wrote:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Not to take any credit away from U2,
but the most impressive moment of the Sphere show may be when you first walk in
the room. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that happens on two
levels, literally. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Above you, that
massive domed ceiling has been made to look like you are in some industrial
grain silo that has been constructed sky-high. (One seatmate described the feeling of looking
up at this while waiting for the show to begin as “terrifying . . . but not in
a bad way.”) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s an immediate
indication of some of the offbeat photorealism you will be in for. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But at the same time, if you’re on one of the
lower levels of the multi-tiered auditorium, looking out over the
general-admission SRO floor, and block out what’s hovering over you (which is
surprisingly easy to do), you suddenly feel like you’re in the world’s coolest
nightclub. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or at least mega-club; at or
slightly above floor level, it kinda just feels like the Hollywood Palladium,
albeit with more of the audience wrapped around the sides of the stage.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: .25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The reviewer from arguably the
entertainment industry’s premier journal also asserted that</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">it’s the audacious hugeness, not the Let’s
Get Small interludes, that “U2:UV” will most be remembered for. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is, at its giddy and delirious best, a
slide down the surface of things, to recall a prophetic phrase that might have
foretold the very existence of Sphere, a venue that invites you to spend a
half-hour at a time thinking or talking just about its interior and exterior
surfaces, including a ceiling that reaches to 366 feet tall. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These surfaces feels [<i>sic</i>] like they
should be measured in square miles, not square feet, but U2 does not feel
dwarfed in their glow.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">He added that the show is accompanied by “a series of settings . . .
that blow your mind, then give it a helpful rest, and then return for further
sensory overload at the end.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Of the sound, which Willman dubs “phenomenal,” the <i>Variety</i>
reviewer wrote that “it was more wonderful than anything we’ve ever heard in an
18,000-capacity venue.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reminding his
readers of Sphere’s “system that micro-targets concertgoers wherever they’re
sitting,” Willman reported that “the most basic goal, of offering
studio-quality sound on a massive scale, seemed to have been met.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Overall, Wilman concludes of Sphere as a performance venue:</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“U2:UV” does come off managing to feel like
actual rock ‘n’ roll. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also feels like
Circus Circus marrying some kind of foreign-film aesthetic. With all the heart and soul and silliness and
grandiosity appropriate to the host city, this might be the best shotgun
wedding Las Vegas ever presided over.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Circus Circus Las Vegas is a hotel and casino located on the northern
Las Vegas Strip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It features circus and
trapeze acts, as well as carnival games, at its Carnival Midway, and an indoor
amusement park, Adventuredome.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(I stripped out Willmer’s assessment of U2’s rock performance itself—and
I’ll be doing the same for other evaluations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As I suggested in Part 1, check out the review online for that.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Another reviewer, Jackson Arn of the <i>New Yorker</i>, connected Sphere
to “immersive” art experiences (like “van Gogh warehouses,” on one of which I
reported on <i>ROT</i> on 10 and 13 January 2022):</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Immersion bombards and overpowers; it
commands the viewer to <i>surrender</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At heart, it’s a prayer that we can spend a
few moments in a state of pure attention, the sort once rumored to exist in
monasteries.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">All art makes some initial pitch for
attention. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In immersive art, sustaining
attention isn’t the means; it’s the point, the work’s way of justifying itself.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As such, the pitch is almost always the
hard sell—intense, elemental sensation, immediately delivered. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes the method of immersion is scale;
often, it’s eye-wrecking color, or some all-out assault on the visual field. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This sounds vaguely tyrannical, but immersion,
as an ethos, is sweetly democratic. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
treats all of us the same and requires the same thing from each of us—usually,
nothing.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(I feel the need to mention that, as an antidote to Sphere, Arn gives a
marvelous review and description of an artwork near Las Vegas called <i>City</i>
(1972) by Michael Heizer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a kind of
gigantic earthen installation that took 50 years to complete, measuring 1¼
miles long and more than a quarter of a mile wide – 2 kilometers by 0.4 kilometers;
200 acres or 80 hectares.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">(Arn’s review of Heizer’s installation is too long, and too much about <i>City</i>
and not enough about Sphere, to reproduce here—but I heartily recommend reading
it at </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/the-sphere-and-our-immersion-complex"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The Sphere and
Michael Heizer’s “City,” Reviewed: Two Paths for Immersion | The New Yorker</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;"> or in the issue
of 20 November 2023.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In <a name="_Hlk154155081"><i>Billboard</i>, Katie Atkinson </a>declared,
“Nothing can prepare you for the magnitude of experiencing a concert in this
venue.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Earlier, Atkinson expressed the
opinion that “U2 was exactly the right band to welcome the mind-blowing space.”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Rolling Stone</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">’s Andy Greene determined:</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">By any measurement, it was a stunning
success. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Sphere somehow managed to
live up to years of hype with its dazzling 16K resolution screen that
transported 18,600 fans from the stars in the night sky to a surreal collage of
Vegas images, the arid deserts of Nevada, and the information overload of Zoo
TV [a worldwide concert tour by U2 in support of their album <i>Achtung Baby </i>in
1992-93]. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the sound wasn’t the
sludgy, sonic assault you typically get at an arena or stadium concert. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is clear, crisp, and pristine, making
earplugs completely unnecessary. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
advertised, this was a quantum leap forward for concerts.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Before the show starts, upon first entering Sphere, Greene observed, “With
the screens off, it felt like you were walking into the world’s largest IMAX
theater.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when things get going
following a sort of warm-up, “the ludicrous scope of the place became apparent.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s impossible to even take in
everything at once since the screen stretches far beyond anyone’s scope of
vision. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All you can do is take the ride
and absorb as much as possible.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As for Sphere’s impact on the pop music scene in the future, Greene
predicted: “Whatever happens going forward, it’s hard to imagine a better proof
of concept for Sphere than this U2 show. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s almost painful to imagine going back to a
dumpy sports arena for a show after experiencing something like this.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In contrast, however, Steven Hyden on <i>UPROXX </i>objected that “I’m
having trouble imagining a band that isn’t U2 in that space.” He expanded his
thought: “Is this extremely expensive bowling ball at all practical for
non-Irish stadium acts who don’t have 18 months to prepare a two-hour
spectacle? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plenty of artists <i>could </i>play
at this venue. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But who <i>should</i>?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he explained:</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Sphere is overpowering and ridiculous,
technologically advanced and rooted in an old-time “more is more” show-business
sensibility, and supported by some of the industry’s most powerful players even
though it’s possibly unsustainable.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I read many professional reviews of both U2:UV and Sphere Experience/<i>Postcard</i>
and a lot of the online remarks from ordinary entertainment-seekers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My impression is that the overall response
leans toward the positive, with a good number of really enthusiastic reactions
to the experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a
substantial representation from visitors who ranged from disappointed to angry,
however, usually for one or another specific complaint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The ticket price was a big issue, and the
seating, as I noted above.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The majority seem to have been impressed with the various tech
accomplishments—videos, sound; very few mentioned the haptic embellishments—and
the response to the events themselves was pretty evenly split.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Except for the U2 concert—that got universal
raves from both concertgoers and journalists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A fair number of commenters had complaints about something at Sphere but
wrote them off as glitches one should expect from a new and innovative venue on
its shake-down outing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More than a few
seemed concerned, as Steven Hyden of <i>UPROXX</i> posted, that Sphere would
have trouble finding appropriate talent to fill its schedule and make
successful use of its special features.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">Bono was the only artist I found who said anything about Sphere as a
place to perform—but, then, his band are so far the only performers to occupy
the place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Darren Aronofsky spoke to the
<i>Hollywood Reporter</i> about making <i>Postcard from Earth</i>, and he
described a lot of the tech that went into shooting the film, but he didn’t say
anything about displaying the movie at Sphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(For those interested in the cinematography largely newly invented for
creating <i>Postcard</i>, read “Darren Aronofsky Describes His Journey to
Creating the First Movie for the Las Vegas Sphere” by Carolyn Giardina at </span><a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/sphere-las-vegas-darren-aronofsky-postcard-from-earth-1235610029/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Sphere Las Vegas:
Darren Aronofsky on ‘Postcard from Earth’ Film – The Hollywood Reporter</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As for Sphere’s impact on concertizing in the future, I guess we’ll just
have to wait for a few more performances and let the artists and managers
determine where this new platform will take them and their audiences.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As for those who insist that only U2 is capable of fully making use of
Sphere as a performance space . . . well, maybe if the London Sphere
and any others still in the conception stage actually get built, more
artists—even in other forms besides music—will reimagine what they do and
create new work for a Sphere’s attributes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That’s what happened with film and television, isn’t it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the legendary stage musical team of composer
Richard Rodgers and lyricist-dramatist Oscar Hammerstein II, often labeled the
greatest of the 20th century, pivoted to film for <i>State Fair</i> (1945, 1962)
and then TV for <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Cinderella </span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">(1957, 1965, 1997).</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the end, at least for Sphere’s inaugural outing, the general response
seems to be what a friend of mine quoted a neighbor who went there as saying: “It
was fantastic. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We loved it. Everywhere you looked, there was something to
see.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></b></p><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-70526939836972803702023-12-24T10:00:00.075-05:002023-12-25T04:16:27.930-05:00Sphere, Part 1<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[When
the new Las Vegas entertainment venue Sphere opened on 29 September, I’d never
even heard of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I obviously missed the
memo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had a look on the ’Net and saw
that there’d been major coverage in the press, both online and in print, for
several years, since before ground was broken almost exactly five years
earlier.</span></i><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[There
was talk about the plans for the structure, its design and construction, the
technology that would be incorporated, and every other aspect of the future
spherical building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I decided to do a
post like the ones I did for Arena Stage’s and MoMA’s remodeling (26 November
2011 and 1 January 2020, respectively) and the Signature Center’s and
Blackfriars’ construction (18 February 2012 and 18 November 2009)—a description
of the architecture/construction and the tech as well as its function as a
performance venue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I’m
not a techie—in fact, I’m half a luddite—so this assignment necessitated a lot
of online research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I started writing
the report, the first part (of two) of which is below, on 12 October, and I
hope </i>ROT<i>ters
find it interesting and informative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Maybe it’ll even answer some questions you may have.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Let
me make one thing clear at the outset: this won’t be a review of U2:UV, the
rock concert that initiated Sphere, or any other performance or event that’s
taken place at the venue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s strictly
about the performance and event space itself.]</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><br /></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: .25in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i>This is pretty much the antithesis
of any accepted, traditional rock ‘n’ roll orthodoxy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is also the natural human reaction to just
about any or all of “U2:UV Live at Sphere Las Vegas,” the
greatest-show-on-earth that opened Friday night in an enormous dome just off
the Strip. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The just-over-two-hour show
marks the apotheosis of a bigger-is-better ethos that has regularly occurred
throughout the band’s career, and which they are not about to give up now that
they’re in their 60s for any back-to-basics false modesty. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The group that has spent so much of its
recording output urging you to think about God, and other only slightly less
weighty matters, is in Sin City mostly to make you say: “Oh my God.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we can vouch that we were hearing that
utterance, from people above, below and around us, in a kind of reactive,
quadrophonic effect that nearly matched Sphere’s vaunted 22nd-century sound
system.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That’s what <a name="_Hlk154145934">Chris Willman of <i>Variety</i> </a>said in the opening of
his review of U2’s concert at Sphere in Las Vegas on Friday, last 29 September.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a name="_Hlk148884659">U2:UV <i>Achtung Baby</i>
Live at Sphere </a>was the inaugural show at the new performance venue at the
Venetian resort, just off the Las Vegas Strip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The opening performance was witnessed by the likes of LeBron James,
Oprah Winfrey, Andre Agassi, Jeff Bezos, Bryan Cranston, Snoop Dogg, and Paul
McCartney.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Now, I’m not going to report on
the Irish rock band’s performance—I’m not qualified to do that, even if I’d
been there—but I’ll try to document what Sphere is: its architecture and
construction, its technology, its impact on Vegas, its effectiveness as a
performance space, and its influence on the entertainment scene at large.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: #783f04;">(For readers interested in the
reviews of U2:UV </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Achtung Baby</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> Live at Sphere, which focuses on the band’s
album </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Achtung Baby</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> [Island Records, 1991], there are plenty published by
qualified music writers available online.</span><span style="color: #783f04;">
</span><span style="color: #783f04;">You can start with Willman’s </span><i style="color: #783f04;">Variety</i><span style="color: #783f04;"> review, “U2 Takes to Playing
in the Round (the Very, Very Round) at Las Vegas’ Sphere With Spectacular
Results,” at </span><a href="https://variety.com/2023/music/concert-reviews/u2-sphere-las-vegas-residency-opening-concert-review-1235741243/"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">U2's
Sphere Opening Night Lives Up to the Hyperbole: Concert Review (variety.com)</span></a><span style="color: #783f04;">.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">So, then: what precisely <i>is </i>Sphere?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why’s it noteworthy?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sphere’s a project of the live
entertainment and media company Sphere Entertainment Co., formerly Madison
Square Garden Entertainment Corp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
addition to the entertainment venue, Sphere Entertainment operates MSG
Networks, regional (chiefly the Mid-Atlantic states) cable TV sports and
entertainment channels, as well as a companion streaming service; MSG GO, producer
of live sports content and other programming; and Tao Group Hospitality, a
global entertainment, dining, and nightlife company.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">First, let’s tackle the
name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(If Sphere Entertainment is successful
in Vegas, this could be significant as they’re planning more of these
structures around the world, starting with London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may, thus, become a <i>brand</i>
name.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it “The Sphere” or just
“Sphere”?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Well, it looks to me like it’s
the latter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While <i>Wikipedia</i> and
several press outlets (see the <i>Washington Post</i>,<i> </i>9 July 2023) call
the structure “The Sphere” or “the Sphere,” the venue’s own website and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">New
York Times </span></i>consistently call it “Sphere”—without an article (except
in phrases like “the Sphere experience” or “the Sphere show”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That seems definitive to me, supported by <i>Variety</i>,
which more often than not calls the structure “Sphere.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll go with that.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One contrarian online writer, <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Steven Hyden of <i>UPROXX</i>,
an entertainment and popular culture news website, proclaims, “</span>I
understand that the ‘correct’ way to refer to the Sphere is simply ‘Sphere.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I am going to continue with ‘the Sphere,’
because 1) it just feels better and 2) it seems way less Orwellian. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or should I say Bradbury-ian?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Hyden is, I presume, referring,
first, to George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, <i>1984</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His second reference is to Ray Bradbury’s
short story originally published as “The World the Children Made” in the 23
September 1950 issue of the<i> Saturday Evening Post</i> and then
republished under its current name, “The Veldt,” in the 1951 anthology <i>The
Illustrated Man</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hyden reports that James
Dolan, the CEO of Madison Square Garden Entertainment and executive chairman of
MSG Networks who conceived Sphere, has said he was inspired by the story.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Because the structure’s name
isn’t securely established yet in people’s or journalists’ minds, many media
outlets are calling it “the Sphere.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So,
readers, in quotations in this article, you’ll see both “Sphere and “the
Sphere” interchangeably.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t avoid
that, but don’t get confused.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(For instance, in addition to
Hyden, the <i>New Yorker</i>’s Jackson Arn, the magazine’s art critic,
introduces the structure as “The Sphere, a.k.a. Sphere, a.k.a. the Sphere at
the Venetian,” and then proceeds to call it “the Sphere” throughout his
critique.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Keep in mind, too, that
‘sphere,’ with a small <i>s</i>, is still the common name for a round,
three-dimensional, generic object such as a ball or globe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The word will show up frequently in this
report because, as the entertainment structure’s name implies, its shape is a
sphere.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sphere is, in fact, currently the
largest sphere-shaped building in the world at 516 feet or 157 meters in
diameter.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(For the curious, the Avicii
Arena in Stockholm, at 362.2 feet/110.4 meters is the second largest spherical
structure, but if the London Sphere meets its planned specifications when
completed, at 393.7 feet/120 meters, would surpass it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For U.S. chauvinists, Spaceship Earth at
Epcot in Walt Disney World in Florida, with a diameter of 165 feet/50 meters,
is currently the sixth largest and the Perisphere, of the Trylon and Perisphere
at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair, dismantled in 1941, is fifth at 180 feet/55 meters
in diameter.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(If you’re wondering about the
Unisphere, with a diameter of 120 feet/37 meters, the symbol of the 1964 New
York World’s Fair and a permanent feature of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in
Queens, New York, it isn’t a building, but a giant sculpture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See my post on <i>Rick On Theater</i>, “A
Helluva Town, Part 2,” 18 August 2011)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sphere’s also, as one website
declares, “one of the world’s unique structures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s also a perfect fit—and an up-the-ante—for
the restless, nonstop, glittering shit show that is Vegas.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in; tab-stops: .5in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">To be precise, the
Vegas “pleasure dome,” as the <i>New Yorker</i>’s Arn dubs it, “is not,
technically speaking, a sphere but a spherical cap, a ball with the bottom
sliced off.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the sake of convenience
and verbal simplicity, I’ll just call it a sphere or a globe.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">To be more accurate, Sphere isn’t just a spherical building, it’s a <i>geodesic</i>,
constructed on the same principals as geodesic domes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Most of the large sphere-shaped structures extant
around the world are geodesics, I believe.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The spherical shape is formed by tessellating triangles (obscured now by
the overlay of the LED screens, but clearly visible as Sphere was going up).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If you look at the many early photos of the construction in progress—they’re
all over the ’Net—you’ll see that the exoskeleton is made up of hundreds of
interlocking triangles to create the 360° shape and structure of Sphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">The </span><span style="background: white;">triangular</span><span style="background: white;"> elements of a geodesic are architecturally rigid and
distribute the </span><span style="background: white;">stress</span><span style="background: white;"> throughout the structure, making geodesics capable of
supporting very heavy loads for their size.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In essence, a geodesic structure is extremely strong and stable compared
to other kinds of curved edifices.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">(<i>Geodesic</i> is
both a noun and an adjective—there’s also a synonymous adjective, <i>geodetic</i>—which
is derived from <i>geodesy</i>, the science concerned with determining the
shape and size of the earth and the exact position of points on its surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The term has since been generalized </span><span style="background: white;">to the geometry of any curved surface.</span><span style="background: white;">)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As long as we’ve started with metrics,
lets go ahead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As I noted, Sphere measures 516
feet (157 meters) across at its widest point and 366 feet (112 meters) high,
and the exterior, called the Exosphere, is 580,000 square feet (54,000 square
meters), covered in LED displays.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(According to the creators, that can be seen from space—but I don’t know
if anyone’s actually checked that out.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sphere
stands on an 18-acre (784,080-square foot or 72,843-square meter) site
contributed by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Sphere project was announced on
or about 14 February 2018.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At that time,
the structure was known as the MSG Sphere because Madison Square Garden was originally
the partner of Las Vegas Sands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The site
is east of the Venetian Las Vegas resort, an 8-minute, mile-and-a-half drive by
a tortuous route.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s a pedestrian
walkway directly from the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, associated with
the resort, though reports are that it’s very slow and crowded after an event.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There’s limited parking at Sphere itself, about 300
vehicles, so visitors are expected to park at the garages of the Venetian, the
Pallazzo (part of the Venetian complex), or the Venetian Expo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The construction of a new Las Vegas Monorail
station for Sphere and the Venetian was approved in 2018, but the Coronavirus
shutdown halted the plans and no schedule for restarting the project has been
announced.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">From the announcement on, the
control of the project got complicated to follow, as businesses and properties
kept changing hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2022, Apollo
Global Management purchased the Venetian, opened by the Las Vegas Sands
Corporation (to replace the demolished Sands Hotel and Casino) in 1999, and
became MSG's new partner on the Sphere project, replacing Las Vegas Sands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As part of the sale, the land beneath the
Venetian and the Sphere was purchased by yet another company.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then on 20 April 2023, Sphere
Entertainment Co. spun off from Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. and
took its new name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(MSG Entertainment
continues to operate, though Sphere Entertainment owns approximately 33% of its
outstanding shares.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sphere was designed by Populous
Holdings, Inc., a global architectural and design practice specializing in
sports facilities, arenas, entertainment venues, and convention centers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>MSG initially estimated the project cost at
$1.2 billion. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Two years later, the company said
the price tag had gone up to $1.66 billion because of design changes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The expense continued to increase, eventually
passing $2 billion due to the COVID-generated worldwide supply-chain disruptions
and the accompanying inflation surge. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With a final price tag of $2.3
billion, it’s the most expensive entertainment venue in Las Vegas history,
beating out the $1.9 billion Allegiant Stadium, a domed football arena in
Paradise, Nevada, which opened in 2020.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Paradise is an unincorporated
township of Clark County, Nevada.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s adjacent
to, but not part of, the city of Las Vegas, also in Clark County.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most people who visit the Las Vegas Strip—where
Sphere is located, along with the Venetian—don't realize that they are
technically not within the Las Vegas city limits at all.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ground was broken for Sphere on 27
September 2018.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Excavation began in
March 2019 and the 21-foot-deep (6.4 meters) basement, where a VIP club, as
well as back-stage facilities, are located, was started around May.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are eight above-ground floors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Perhaps the most spectacular
construction feat of the project was creating the framework for the dome of
Sphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In order to achieve full
coverage of the LED panels on the Exosphere, the engineers had to create
precise contact between the panels and Sphere’s exoskeleton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That necessitated a steel compression ring
that forms the spherical shape of the building.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The compression ring sits at the
top of the sphere and holds the structure in place so that all the component
parts remain in the exact relation to one another without deviation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I understand it, this is necessary both so
that the LED panels fit precisely onto the framework so that the Exosphere
gives the impression of a seamless skin, and that the many parts of Sphere’s
frame form the spherical shape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This maneuver was an amazingly
complex operation taking many months of planning, preparation, and
execution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The compression ring itself
was a monumental assemblage: a 170-ton steel ring—more than two Boeing 757’s
(that’s what Air Force One is)—with a diameter of 136 feet (41½ meters).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Because of its size and weight, the compression ring had to
be assembled on the construction site. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
took crews three weeks to assemble it and weld and bolt the prefabricated pieces
together on the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then it had to
be hoisted into place atop a temporary 285-foot-tall tower at the center of the
structure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Once construction of
Sphere’s roof started, crews disassembled the tower.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The prodigious lift was
accomplished with the use of the world’s fourth-largest crawler crane, a huge
crane mounted on caterpillar tracks, like a bulldozer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This piece of equipment had its own saga.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In February 2020, the crane
arrived on the construction site, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean from
Belgium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It weighs 869 tons and the boom
can extend 580 feet high and has a load capacity of up to 1,760 tons.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When the crane was delivered by
ship to southern California in January, it was broken apart and loaded onto 120
semis for the 340-mile journey to Las Vegas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A separate crane was needed to reassemble it, a job that took 18 days.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The crane lifted the compression
ring onto its temporary perch in February 2021.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Construction workers used a hydraulic lift on top of the tower to
calibrate the steel ring’s exact position before emplacing the roof trusses, dividing
the dome undercarriage into 32 pie slices, which serve as the skeletal support
for Sphere’s steel dome—which weighs 13,000 tons.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This record illustrates vice
president of construction for MSG Entertainment (now Sphere Entertainment) Nick
Tomasino’s assertion that the building of Sphere “has every engineering and
construction challenge that one venue could have . . . .”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The dome was “topped off” on 18 June 2021
and on 21 August, the company announced that work on the globe’s interior had begun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Construction of the concrete-and-steel dome
was finished in late October and <span style="background: white;">work on the interior framework continued into 2022.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On 24 May 2022, “the last piece
of the gigantic three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle” that is Sphere was fitted into
its Exosphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Crews raised an evergreen
tree and an American flag, the traditional symbols of the “topping off”
celebration at a construction project when the last and highest section is
completed, on the summit of the globe while more than 1,000 Madison Square
Garden Entertainment Corp. employees and construction workers cheered the
milestone event.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Sphere was slated to open in 2021,
but construction was suspended between March and August 2020 due to supply
disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The venue opened on 29 September 2023 with the
U2 show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<span style="background: white;">The band’s residency
is scheduled to consist of 47 appearances between the première show and 18
February 2024.</span>)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The project began with 400
construction workers and eventually grew to employ an estimated 3,500 local
workers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sphere Entertainment projected
that the facility will provide 4,400 permanent jobs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The estimated annual infusion by Sphere into the
local economy is $730 million, generating in the range of $48 million a year in
tax revenue for the State of Nevada and the Las Vegas metropolitan area.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Now, let’s talk
about amenities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems that Sphere
isn’t brimming with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There are 23 luxury
suites, but Sphere Entertainment hasn’t released the prices for the suites, so
I haven’t been able to pin down their cost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I don’t even know if Sphere will be leasing the suites on a yearly
basis, selling them like condominiums, or renting them per event—or some
combination of all three.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(Why Sphere
Entertainment is keeping prices and costs so <i>sub rosa</i>—even the drink
price list is only known because it was leaked on <i>Reddit</i>—I don’t
know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe they haven’t settled on what
the market will bear, or maybe they’re just trying to generate mystery and
buzz.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">If the suites
are leased or sold, the costs will certainly be in the mid- and high six
figures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Las Vegas is generally an
expensive city to play in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If they’re
rented by the event, the prices would probably be in the five-figure range,
however.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Suites, for example, at Madison
Square Garden, the New York City arena of the original parent company of
Sphere, rent for $8,000-60,000, depending on the game.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In addition to
the various prices of the luxury accommodations, I wasn’t able to track down
any concrete information on what they offer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Neither the luxury suites nor the so-called VIP club are described by
either Sphere Entertainment or any press outlets I could find.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(There are photos of MSG’s club seating
areas, but none of Sphere’s.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">I assume that
they offer waiter service for food and drinks, possibly complimentary
non-alcoholic beverages, private bathrooms, and comfortable surroundings, based
on what other venues’ provide for the extra cost—but I don’t know that for sure
and I don’t know what Sphere’s luxury accommodations may have that varies from
the standard offerings.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Aside from the
luxury suites, a minimum of food and drink is about all the venue offers
outside of the entertainment for which it was built.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I don’t see the tech that supports the
entertainment function of Sphere as “amenities,” but I’ll be getting to that
soon enough.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ticket prices
for Sphere vary widely depending on how close you sit (or stand) to the stage,
when you go, what the event is, and where you buy them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>U2 tix start in the low three figures and can
go up to the mid-four figures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other
events start as low as about $50 and can range up to a little under $500.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to reports, Sphere’s admission
prices aren’t out of line with other premier venues across the country.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(There are
other events at Sphere at the same time as the series of U2 concerts are being
performed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is The Sphere Experience,
an interactive encounter with holographic art installations, a chat with
interactive robots, and “22nd century technology.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(This is a
two-part program that begins when you enter the venue. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first hour begins in the Atrium, where,
through immersive technology created specifically for Sphere, visitors are
intended to gain a better understanding of how technology amplifies our human
potential.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(The Sphere
Experience then continues in the main performance venue, known as the Bowl, for
a multi-sensory cinematic experience, Darren Aronofsky’s <i>Postcard from
Earth</i> [débuted 6 October 2023].<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
a 2023 film directed by Aronofsky, a filmmaker whose work is noted for being
surreal and often disturbing, created expressly for Sphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aronofsky says of his film: “<i>Postcard from
Earth</i> is a sci-fi journey deep into our future as our descendants reflect
on our shared home.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(The film is an
immersive exploration of planet Earth through the eyes of two human beings played
by Brandon Santana and Zaya [Ribeiro]. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was designed and shot specifically for
Sphere. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 4D film features
270 degrees of viewing experience, climate control, shaking seats, and
scents to create an immersive environment that tells the story of life on
Earth.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white; color: #783f04;">Once you’re
inside the building—and by the way, once in you can’t leave and come back:
reentry isn’t permitted—there are some rules of behavior; check the “Code of
Conduct” list on Sphere’s FAQ page: </span><a href="https://www.thespherevegas.com/faqs"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">FAQs | Policies &
Ticketing | Sphere (thespherevegas.com)</span></span></a><span style="background: white; color: #783f04;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here are some other factoids regarding the
“Sphere experience”:</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There’s food
and drink (including alcohol and sodas) available for sale on the Concourse,
but it’s “food court” service.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are
counters for ordering and paying and there are self-service concessions for
those who don’t want to stand on line, but there are no seats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prices are high, but not more than other
sites similar to Sphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quality is
debatable: some visitors have shrugged it off, others have registered
complaints online.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There are many
eateries of various types in the immediate area of Sphere, but you can’t bring
outside food or beverages into the venue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If you want a real meal when you go to an event at Sphere, you should
probably plan to eat either before or after the show and rely on the in-house
food selections for snacks to hold off the munchies (if you’re ready to pay $7
for a Coke).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The only
food-related items you may bring into Sphere is an empty soft plastic
bottle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Glass and metal containers are
not allowed.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can fill it with cold
water from the drinking fountains around the facility and bring it into the auditorium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No other food or beverage is permitted in the
auditorium.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As far as I can
tell, Sphere doesn’t, at least as yet, have merchandise for sale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some performers, such as U2, will have merch
on display, but that’s on them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sphere
just provides the space on the Concourse for the display and sales.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I lie: Sphere does offer a “Souvenir
Soda”—whatever that turns out to be—but it’ll cost you $14.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A “fountain” soda is half that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So’s Path Water.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Those
seven-buck drinks are the cheapest things on the Sphere drink menu.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was posted on the social media website <i>Reddit</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A single drink of “Premium” liquor will cost
you $15, “Deluxe” is advertised for $16, and “Ultra” is $19.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(You can get a “double,” but it’ll cost you .
. . well, double.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Domestic beer goes for
$18, and premium lists for $19.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wine,
margaritas, and palomas (tequila, lime juice, and a grapefruit-flavored soda)
are priced at $20, while the “Specialty Cocktail” costs $30.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As reported in <i>Parade</i>,
the nationwide Sunday newspaper magazine, many visitors agreed that "this
is price gouging at its finest . . . but it’s exactly in line with how every
other venue gouges you," while others pointed out that Sphere’s prices are
similar to venues in other cities, noting that the beers offered at entertainment
facilities like Sphere are usually larger than normal (12 ounces), like 20 or
24 ounces.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One <i>Reddit</i>
comment responded to the revelations that Sphere’s in an exceptional position
as a new and advanced site and “is unique and can do whatever they want.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Here’s an
important tip: Sphere is entirely cashless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You can’t pay for anything with money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The venue takes credit cards (I assume all of them, but I don’t know
that for sure), debit cards, or “mobile” (by which I presume they mean, your
phone).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are cell-phone chargers
around the building and “reverse ATM’s” that will convert cash to debit
cards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know what happens to
excess cash left on these cards when the show’s over.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="background: white;">(There are
“trained” staff personnel in the facility who can assist visitors, and I assume
they can answer questions about all this stuff—but don’t be surprised if the
answer is “I don’t know”!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Upon entering
Sphere’s grand atrium, visitors will encounter five lifelike, AI-equipped
humanoid robots—all named Aura—that are programmed to interact with guests</span>
<span style="background: white;">and reveal the marvels of Sphere to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know how extensive the programming is—human
techies are standing by—but it might be fun to find out.)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[This concludes Part 1
of my report on Sphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part 2 will be
posted on Wednesday, 27 December.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope
you will all come back then for my coverage of the technology of Sphere and
some of the assessments, both from professional reviewers and from ordinary entertainment-seekers,
of how well the Las Vegas event space stood up to its hype.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: 0.25in;"><br /></p><br /><p></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-81494442214710531862023-12-19T10:00:00.054-05:002023-12-19T14:37:16.026-05:00A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Update (2008-2023)<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series</b></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: left;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I
was able to put together a facsimile of an update to the history of the National
Endowment for the Arts from 2008, when Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham ended
their chronicle, “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008” (NEA,
2009), and 2023.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result of my effort
is below.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Though
there is more detail available if one digs deep enough, I decided to keep the
record simple and brief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My intention
was to provide a sort of précis of the agency’s past 15 years as an indication
of where it was headed since Bauerlein and Grantham finished their
comprehensive report.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Obviously,
there isn’t a problem with reading this summary on its own, except for an
occasional reference to earlier chapters, but if you haven’t been following the
tale of the Arts Endowment, you might want to go back and catch up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Introduction and Chapter 1 was posted on 5
November; Chapters 2 through 10 and the Epilogue followed on 8, 11, 14, 17, 20,
and 30 November, and 3 and 13 December, respectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The theater section of Part II of the report,
“The Impact of the NEA,” ran on 16 December.]</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Dana Gioia (b. 1950), a poet, literary critic, literary
translator, and essayist, was appointed the ninth Chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts by President George W. Bush (b. 1946; 43rd President of
the United States: 2001-09) on 29 January 2003.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After serving one term, he was reappointed on 9 December 2006, but
resigned on 22 January 2009 to return to writing poetry <span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">full time (see Chap. 10 [13 December 2023]).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia’s position was filled by former Deputy Chairman for
States, Regions, and Local Arts Agencies Patrice Walker Powell (b. 1952),
appointed by Barack Obama (b. 1961; 44th President of the United States: 2009-17)
to serve as Acting Chairman until August 2009.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It fell to Powell to navigate the rough waters that rose
during the economic downturn of 2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5), the economic-stimulus
bill enacted 17 February 2009, was amended by Congress to exclude a $50 million
infusion for the Arts Endowment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Even several of the NEA’s most stalwart supporters such as Democratic
Senators Charles Shumer (b. 1950) of New York and Dianne Feinstein (1933-2023) of
California voted for the amendment; it took efforts from House Democrats and lobbying
by arts groups and a phone call from actor Robert Redford (b. 1936) to the
speaker of the House, Democrat Nancy Pelosi (b. 1940) of California, to
preserve money for the arts in the bill.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On 7 August 2009, President Obama appointed Rocco Landesman
(b. 1947), Broadway theater producer, to be the 10th NEA chairman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For Fiscal Year 2010, the Arts Endowment’s budget reached $167.5
million [$227.1 million in 2023], the level it had been during the mid-1990s,
but fell again in FY 2011 to $154.7 million [$203.8 million today].</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During his tenure, Landesman oversaw the transformation of
the Operation Homecoming initiative (see Chap, 10 & Epilogue [13 December
2023]) into Creative Forces (2013), which brought creative arts therapies to
U.S. service members and veterans recovering from post-traumatic stress,
traumatic brain injury, and other psychological health conditions; the creation
of Blue Star Museums (2010), which provided free admission to more than 2,000
museums throughout the country for active-duty military members and their
families every summer; and a new grant program, Our Town (2011), which funded
arts-based community development founded on the belief that the arts have a
unique ability to create a distinct sense of place, jumpstart local economies,
and increase creative activity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Landesman, who was president of Jyjamcyn Theatres,
Broadway’s third-largest theater-owner, from 1987—he bought the company in
2005—until his appointment, served until 31 December 2012, when he retired
after fulfilling his pledge to serve only one term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was succeeded by Acting Chairman Joan
Shigekawa (b. 1936), the former Senior Deputy Chairman and a film and
television producer and arts administrator.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">More than 18 months passed after Landesman stepped down from
the Endowment’s chairmanship before his successor took office. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The cause was apparently President Obama’s
deliberate talent search, though the White House didn’t make any comments on
the delay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nonetheless, current and
former NEA officials and other arts administrators echoed the feelings of the president
of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, who said that “the agency
tends to drift until you have a chairman coming in.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The only time a leadership search had taken longer was in
2002, after the death of Michael Hammond after six days in office (see Chaps. 8
& 9 [3 December 2023]).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obama
announced his choice, R. Jane Chu, which had to be confirmed by the Senate, on
12 February 2014.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On 12 June 2014, the Senate confirmed Chu (b. 1947) as the
Arts Endowment’s 11th chairman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An
artist, pianist. and educator, Chairman Chu was, from 2006 until her NEA
appointment, president and CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in
Kansas City, Missouri.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the beginning of Chu’s chairmanship, the agency rebounded
a bit with a 2015 budget of $146.2 million [$182.4 million]—the same amount as
had been appropriated for 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The
figure was a slight raise over the 2013 allotment of $138.4 million [$177.9
million].)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The NEA produced the publication <i>The Art of Empathy:
Celebrating Literature in Translation</i> in 2014, in which 19 translators and
advocates of translation illuminate the challenges of bringing new voices to
American audiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2015, the NEA
launched an initiative, Creativity Connects, to examine and uncover the ways
the agency could support a sustainable future for the arts and creativity in
our nation by exploring how the arts connect with other industries.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2016, the NEA was awarded a Special Tony Award for “paving
the way from Broadway to cities across the U.S.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That same year and again in 2017, the Arts
Endowment received Emmy nominations from the Television Academy in the
Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series category for its digital
story series <i>United States of Arts</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On 16 March 2017, President Donald J. Trump<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> (b. 1946; 45th
President of the United States: 2017-21)</span> submitted a budget outline to
Congress that would have eliminated all funding for the Arts Endowment;
Congress, however, approved a budget that retained the agency’s funding at $149.8
million [$181.3 million]. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2017, in the midst of this funding crisis, following a
series of devastating hurricanes, the National Endowment for the Arts carried
out a multipronged relief effort, awarding emergency funding for re-granting to
the affected state arts agencies.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For 2018, the Trump White House once more proposed a budget that
called for the elimination of NEA funding, but Congress again retained the
funding for another year, increased to $152.8 million [$180.9 million].<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the end of Trump’s term the NEA’s annual
budget for 2020 had risen to $162.25 million [$187 million].</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That year, for its innovative outreach strategy to Historically
Black Colleges and Universities, the National Endowment for the Arts received a
Public Partnership Award in 2019, presented by the White House Initiative on
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (WHI-HBCU) at its annual
conference in Washington, D.C.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During Chu’s term, she traveled to 200 communities in all 50
states, meeting with artists and arts organizations all over the country. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The initiative Musical Theater Songwriting
Challenge was created during her tenure. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is an opportunity, which started in 2016
as a pilot program, for high school students to develop and showcase musical
compositions that could be a part of a musical theater production.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Chu oversaw the 50th anniversary of the agency in 2015,
including a symposium with former chairpersons Landesman, Ivey, Alexander, and Hodsoll,
moderated by Judy Woodruff (b. 1946), the respected broadcast journalist who was
the anchor and managing editor of the <i>PBS NewsHour</i> from 2013 to 2022.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In addition, a report was commissioned to update the
findings of the Urban Institute’s 2003 study <i>Investing in Creativity</i>,
which identified support systems necessary for artists. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new report, <i>Creativity Connects</i>,
investigated the major changes and trends affecting artists over the following
decade.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A new grant program also called Creativity Connects was
created to partner arts organizations with non-arts organizations on projects
that advance common goals to benefit communities. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The anniversary year culminated in a
symposium, In Pursuit of the Creative Life: The Future of Arts and Creativity
in America, in which a diverse group from arts and non-arts sectors gathered to
explore how creativity permeates nearly all professions, from transportation to
engineering.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Chu resigned on 4 June 2018, succeeded by her Senior Deputy
Chairwoman, Mary Anne Carter, as Acting Chairman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though her agency was targeted for
elimination twice by the Trump administration, the departing chairman didn’t make
any mention of the efforts in her resignation announcement.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Mary Anne Carter (b. 1966), <span style="background: white;">a public
affairs consultant</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">, was nominated on 14 December 2018 by Donald Trump and confirmed by the
Senate on 1 August 2019 as the 12th Chairman of the National Endowment for the
Arts.</span> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She resigned on 20 January
2021, the day Joseph R. Biden (b. 1942; 46th President of the United States:
2021- ) was inaugurated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In her final
statement, Carter said, “A new team should have a new leader.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Carter pushed to make the NEA more accessible to the American people,
directing an expansion of Creative Forces (an arts therapy program for U.S.
service members and veterans recovering from post-traumatic stress, traumatic
brain injury, and other psychological health conditions) and bolstering many of
its national initiatives, including Shakespeare in American Communities, NEA
Big Read, and Poetry Out Loud (all addressed in Chap. 10 [13 December 2023];
Poetry Out Loud is discussed in a sidebar on p. 161 of the published report).</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">To further expand the reach of the Arts Endowment, Carter held several
public meetings of the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s advisory
committee, at locations outside the agency’s offices. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These include a June 2018 meeting in
Charleston, West Virginia—the first such meeting outside of Washington, D.C., in
27 years—and in June 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On 14 February 2020, Native Arts & Culture: Resilience,
Reclamation, and Relevance, a first-of-its-kind national convening that was
hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the
Humanities, and Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, brought members from
more than 40 tribal nations as well as the heads of several federal agencies together
in Washington, D.C.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At the beginning of 2020, the world experienced its worst
pandemic in more than 100 years. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
United States, businesses effectively closed down for much of the year. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was especially devastating for arts
organizations and artists.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That year, the NEA received $75 million [$86.5 million]
through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to
preserve jobs and help support organizations forced to close operations due to
the spread of COVID-19. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2021, the NEA
received an additional $135 million [$150.5 million] through the American
Rescue Plan (ARP).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On 18 December 2021, Maria Rosario Jackson (b. 1965),
appointed by President Biden, was confirmed as the NEA’s 13th chairman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An urban planner with expertise in
integrating arts and culture into community development, Jackson is the first
African American and Mexican American to lead the Arts Endowment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Before becoming chairman of the NEA, Jackson had a seat on
the National Council on the Arts, appointed by President Obama in 2012. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her term is scheduled to end in 2025 (though a
Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election, especially if Trump is
the GOP nominee, may cause that to change).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">President Biden’s new NEA leader has two guiding principles.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One’s the premise of “artful lives.” Jackson
defines this as “an inclusive concept containing a wide range of arts
experiences, including the everyday, deeply meaningful practices and
expressions within our daily lives as well as the making, presentation, and
distribution of professional art from all disciplines and traditions.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s more than merely being an “audience” or consumer of
art, which Jackson feels has been the focus of the NEA<span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-ligatures: standardcontextual;">’</span>s endeavors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She considers arts participation as
encompassing “many other ways of engaging [art], you know, thinking about
making, doing, teaching, learning, in addition to participating as audience or
to consuming art.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jackson’s other principle is “arts in all.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She sees this as “the intention of full
integration of the arts in how we live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not only does the concept push up against the relegation of arts as
something separate or just extra, but we’re also leaning into arts integration
that will create new opportunities and unlock resources for artists and arts
organizations.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The purpose of this notion, as Jackson sees its application
to the Arts Endowment, is to integrate the arts throughout the federal
government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jackson sees this as a mandate
for the agency to continue and expand its outreach and collaborations with
other, non-arts agencies.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In June 2022, Chairman Jackson appeared before the House
Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her appearance was anything but routine, as it
was the first time in recent history that the chairperson of the Arts Endowment
had been invited to testify before Congress to discuss the agency’s budget.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During her first year in office, Jackson traveled to urban,
suburban, rural communities in all regions of the country, and talked with
artists and arts administrators from all artistic disciplines as well as people
from other fields like the health, transportation, </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">and</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">community development who
are also working with artists and arts organizations.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">She met with elected officials and saw the work
of many NEA grantees.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For example, she saw evidence of Our Town investments from
many years ago that are just now bearing fruit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This Jackson sees as a practical development of her notion of promoting “artful
lives” among members of the community.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jackson expanded the NEA<span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-ligatures: standardcontextual;">’</span>s work at the intersection of art
and health, a function of “arts in all.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Arts Endowment’s worked for a number of years with the Departments
of Defense and Veterans Affairs on the Creative Forces Initiative, but now it also
partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the CDC
Foundation to launch an initiative to engage artists and arts organizations to
promote COVID vaccine readiness in their communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2022. the agency contributed to a long-term recovery and
resilience plan, a program led by the Department of Health and Human Services,
that uses a whole-of-government approach that emphasizes that arts and culture are
critical to achieving success in a number of domains including social cohesion
and paying attention to community wellbeing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On 30 September 2022, Biden issued “Executive Order on
Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services” (Executive
Order 14084). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The president declared the
Biden-Harris Administration’s policy to advance equity, accessibility, and
opportunities for all Americans, and to strengthen the creative and cultural
economy of the United States by promoting the arts, the humanities, and museum
and library services.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jackson proclaimed that she was hopeful that this executive
order bolstered the Arts Endowment’s work at the intersection of arts and other
sectors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She appointed a senior staff
member to move this work forward, and urged the NEA staff to recognize this as
a priority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the executive order, Biden also re-established the President’s
Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, after a five-year hiatus. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The PCAH is intended to advise the president
and the heads of cultural agencies on policy, philanthropic and private sector
engagement, and other efforts to enhance federal support for the arts,
humanities, and museum and library services.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ex officio members of the revived PCAH include NEA Chairman Jackson
and the heads of key cultural agencies and institutions such as the National Endowment
for the Humanities Chairman and the Institute of Museum and Library Services Director,
as well as the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery
of Art Director, Librarian of Congress, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees
of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The honorary chairman of PCAH is Dr. Jill Biden (b. 1951), the
First Lady of the United States, which is traditional.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other members include the Co-Chairs Bruce
Cohen (b. 1961), an Oscar- and Tony-winning, Emmy-nominated producer of film,
theater, and television; and Lady Gaga (b. 1986), the award-winning singer,
songwriter, actress, and philanthropist.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Among the other almost two dozen committee members are Jon
Batiste (b. 1986), a prolific and accomplished musician who was the popular first
bandleader on <i>Late Show with Steven Colbert</i>; Oscar-winning movie actor
and filmmaker George Clooney (b. 1961); and writer and actress Anna Deavere
Smith (b. 1950).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Biden’s 2023 budget included an appropriation of $207
million for the NEA, up from $180 million [$187.2 million in 2023] for the
previous budget.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In October 2023, the annual National Arts and Humanities
Month, NEA Chairman Jackson stated:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We cannot tell the complex story
of our nation without the arts and humanities, nor envision or achieve a more
just, equitable, and hopeful future without them. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We celebrate not just the arts and humanities
this month, but the imaginative and creative spirit that animates our democracy
and makes better American—and global—citizens of us all.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[This chronology was compiled
from various sources from the Internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Most of the information is from various NEA documents and reports.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I tried to find a summary
of the period of the current Arts Endowment chairman, Maria Rosario Jackson,
but her administration is apparently still too new to have been chronicled,
even for its first three years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Therefore, I focused on what Jackson said were her goals and objectives,
rather than her accomplishments.</span></i><i><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">[This installment concludes
my history of the NEA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope </span></i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">ROT</span><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">ters found it informative and interesting.]</span><o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></i></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-48398374879322435582023-12-16T10:00:00.077-05:002023-12-16T15:54:06.188-05:00A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Impact on Theater<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series</b><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[This
installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts,” the last
section of Bauerlein and Grantham’s “National Endowment for the Arts: A History,
1965-2008” I’ll be posting, is from Part II of the NEA report, “The Impact of
the NEA.” It’s divided into six
topics—"Dance,” “Literature,” “Media Arts,” “Museums and Visual Arts,”
“Music and Opera,” and “Theater”—but I’ll only be posting the theater
segment. </span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[This
section serves as a summary of the work of the Arts Endowment in theater and
its effect on the field. If you’ve just
joined this thread, I suggest that after reading “Impact on Theater,” you go
back and read the rest of the serialized report, starting with the Introduction
and Chapter 1, posted on 5 November. Then continue with Chapters 2 through 10/Epilogue,
posted on 8, 11, 14, 17. 20, and 30 November, and 3 and 13 December.]</span></i></p>
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><a name="_Hlk152939469"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk153588046;">“<u>NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008</u>”<br /></span></a></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk153588046;">edited by Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham<br /></span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(National Endowment
for the Arts, 2009)</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large;">p a r t<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>II</span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-large; text-align: center;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">The
IMPACT of the NEA</span></i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-weight: normal;">Theater</span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large; font-variant-caps: small-caps;">bill
o’brien<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Theater
Director</span></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large; font-variant-caps: small-caps;">Introduction</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In a speech to regional theater directors, whom she had
assembled in 1935, Hallie Flanagan, theater producer, director, and playwright,
insisted that theater in America “. . . must experiment with ideas, with the
psychological relationship of men and women, with speech and rhythm forms, with
dance and movement, with color and light or it must and should become a museum
product.” The group was assembled to help launch Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal
Theatre Project (FTP)—a division of the Works Progress Administration [WPA].
Flanagan recognized that the commercial concerns that had governed the field
since the nation was established did not always support this type of
exploration. To ensure artistic advances, and widespread access to them by the
general public, federal support would be necessary.</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945;
32nd President of the United States: 1933-45) took office in the midst of the
Great Depression (1929-39). The WPA (1935-43) and its constituent programs like
the FTP, among others, was intended to put Americans unemployed by the economic
crisis, including artists of all disciplines, back to work. They were paid to
do jobs in their professional fields for the public good.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There had been no single national theater in the United
States, such as those in Russia, England, France, and many other developed
nations of the world. Apart from the brief, but influential tenure of the FTP
(from 1935-39), the evolution of American theater progressed without the
benefit of coordinated federal planning or consistent investment. Despite this
lack of centralized support, talented artists and leaders began to emerge in
the early and mid-twentieth century who were intent on creating a proud
American theatrical tradition that would appropriately reflect the nation’s new
position in the world. By the time they were through, a fledgling decentralized
national theater movement had emerged, one that rivaled the ongoing dramatic
achievements of any nation in the world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Nonetheless, American theater still struggles with rising
costs, audience loyalty, and rival entertainments. [See “A Crisis In America’s
Theaters,” posted on <i>Rick On Theater</i> on 13 September 2023, and “The
Regional Theater: Change or Die,” 3 October 2023.] Theater in America has been
marked by a long struggle between art and commerce, and its evolution from
popular entertainment forms such as vaudeville and melodrama have, at times,
hampered its ability to be perceived as a serious art form. Still, in the
twentieth century playwrights have marked one of our country’s most
distinguished artistic traditions. Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee
Williams, among others, have created classics destined to endure as part of our
national legacy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These playwrights’ success lies partly in the fact that by
the midpoint of the century amateur and educational theater was flourishing in
many locations in the United States. Professional theater centered in New York
and Broadway, the undisputed capital of the industry. But elsewhere, an active
and talented set of artists and leaders explored new ways to produce theater.
Their results were inspirational and helped to set a course for a more
expansive national theater movement than had ever been seen before. One of them
was Margo Jones from Dallas, Texas, who established the first nonprofit
professional theater company in America in 1947, entitled Theatre ’47 (the name
changed each year). Jones based her institution on a vision of a “golden age of
American theatre.” In her influential 1951 book, <i>Theatre-in-the-Round</i>,
she described her dream of a future in which theater plays a part in
everybody’s life, and in which “civilization is constantly being enriched.” [Theatre
’47 lasted until Jones’s death in 1955.] Other leaders emerged in communities
spread out across the country to join in the effort:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Nina Vance and the Alley Theatre
in Houston [founded in 1947]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Zelda Fichandler and the Arena
Stage in Washington, DC [founded in 1950]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Gordon Davidson and the Mark
Taper Forum in Los Angeles [opened in 1967]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Jon Jory and
Harlan Kleiman and the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut [founded in
1965]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Richard Block and the Actors
Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky [founded in 1964]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• William Ball and the American
Conservatory Theater in San Francisco [founded 1965]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Joseph Papp
and the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York [conceived in 1954; now the
Public Theater]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These and other pioneering thespians sought to plant the
theater in the midst of American life, to make it as essential to ordinary
citizens as any other entertainment they might enjoy. And they tried to base it
in communities and to define it as much by artistic innovation as by market
constraints. [See “Regional Theater: History,” 8 October 2023.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation’s W. McNeil Lowry [director
of arts and humanities programs (1957-64); vice president (1964-74)] conceived
a new strategy to support the nascent nonprofit theater. The foundation began
to award arts grants, national in distribution, as leveraged investments in the
development of resident theaters across the country. Support was provided to,
among others, an ambitious new theater in Minneapolis. The Guthrie Theater [founded
in 1963], established by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Peter Zeisler, and a group of
energetic artists, opened its doors in a sparkling facility as a repertory
ensemble company. Elsewhere, notably in Stratford, Connecticut, and Ashland,
Oregon, new theater festivals were created [American Shakespeare Theatre
(1955-89) and Oregon Shakespeare Festival (founded 1935), respectively].
Concurrently, in New York City, brilliant young playwrights gathered at La MaMa
Experimental Theatre Club [founded 1961] and other little-known spaces to
produce exciting pieces “off-off-Broadway.” [See “Greenwich Village Theater in
the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011; also “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September
2018.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the 1960s, the landscape of theater began to change as a
confluence of societal forces—including improved public education, relative
prosperity, increased leisure time, and advances by women and minorities in
public life—sparked more consumer interest in the arts. These same influences
helped bring the National Endowment for the Arts into being.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The NEA</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Enters The Scene</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">By 1965, the year the Arts Endowment was established,
theater in America had become a vibrant and vital cultural tradition, though
mainly in New York City and the handful of other communities fortunate enough
to have a professional regional theater company. The movement was primed for
growth and the potential of the Endowment’s influence was felt almost
immediately in the theater world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The first National Council on the Arts contained several
noteworthy figures from the field, such as Helen Hayes, Charlton Heston,
Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Rodgers. In May of 1966, the council
declared that one of its primary goals was to support “the development of a
larger and more appreciative audience for the theatre.” Among its first actions
was a decision to undertake studies of several pilot projects in the field of
repertory theater. The council understood that many of the best theater
companies already benefited from grants from a number of foundations, including
the Ford Foundation, which continued to back regional theaters in the 1960s.
While the council felt that their ability to win support elsewhere should not
exclude these organizations from receiving federal awards, it also reasoned
that it would be imperative to broaden Arts Endowment support in a way that
would appropriately reflect the national reach and responsibility of the new
agency. Hence, the council also set about encouraging “grants to professional
groups to be formed with strong local and regional support,” and “grants,
research, and liaison work with the idea of sending the best repertory
companies on tour to play in university theaters.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Another early action by the National Council on the Arts
generated an experimental program entitled the Laboratory Theatre Project.
Formed in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education and state and local
school boards, the program aimed to provide American cities with professional
theater companies that would present outstanding performances at no charge to
secondary school children during weekday afternoons and to adult audiences
during weekend performances.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1966, the first two Laboratory Theatre Project grants
were awarded to Trinity Square Repertory Company in [Providence,] Rhode Island
and Repertory Theatre of New Orleans. Under the direction of Adrian Hall and
John McQuiggan, Trinity Square used the award to produce Anton Chekhov’s <i>Three
Sisters</i>, Shakespeare’s <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i>, George Bernard
Shaw’s <i>Saint Joan</i>, and Eugene O’Neill’s <i>Ah, Wilderness!</i> The
Repertory Theatre of New Orleans, under the direction of Stuart Vaughn,
received funds to present Brandon Thomas’s <i>Charley’s Aunt</i>, Shakespeare’s
<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, Thornton Wilder’s <i>Our Town</i>, and Richard
Sheridan’s <i>The Rivals</i>. Theater critics responded quickly to the
productions. William Glover of Associated Press wrote, “The biggest theatrical
angel this season isn’t on Broadway—but in Washington. He is Uncle Sam, backing
a multipurpose test of drama in education. . . . Taking part, in a rare display
of agency togetherness, are the National Endowment for the Arts, the United
States Office of Education [1867-1972; succeeded by the United States
Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services] and state
and local boards of Education. . . . It is the first time that two Federal
units have meshed efforts and cash in the cause of culture.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Other grants awarded that year went to the New York
Shakespeare Festival for its mobile theater units, to San Francisco’s American
Conservatory Theater for its training and educational programs, to the
Experimental Playwrights’ Theater to produce outstanding new American plays,
and to the National Repertory Theatre to support touring classical productions
throughout the country.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[I haven’t been able to
identify the Experimental Playwrights’ Theater, which was also mentioned in
Chap. 2 (8 November 2023), but the National Repertory Theatre was founded in
1961 as a touring company by Michael Dewell (1931-94) and Frances Ann Hersey
(1919-2001). It seems to have been based in New York City until 1967, when it
moved to Washington, D.C., becoming the resident company at Ford’s Theatre. In
1970, NRT moved to Los Angeles as the National Repertory Theatre Foundation. From
that point on, NRTF focused on developing, sponsoring, and consulting on
projects like the Los Angeles Free Shakespeare Festival, The Company Theatre
workshop, The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, and the National Play Award.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Almost from its inception the Arts Endowment relied on the
peer-panel review system to identify the strongest applications and ensure
informed decision-making in the agency. The significance of the panels in the
early years is vividly illustrated by the roster of theater professionals who
served on them. In 1972, for instance, the members included Harold Prince,
Joseph Papp, Lloyd Richards, Zelda Fichandler, Peter Zeisler, Robert Brustein,
Gordon Davidson, John Lahr, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Donald Seawell, and Earle
Gister.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">A Separate Program</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1967, the Arts Endowment established theater as an
independent program. Under the leadership of Ruth Mayleas, the agency’s first
Theater director, the recommendations of the panels and decisions by the
National Council on the Arts had a significant impact on the future of theater
in America. [Musical theater came under the Opera/Music Theater Program, which
was formed in 1979.] Through both the Theater Program and the Expansion Arts
Program, support extended to a rapidly growing national network of theaters.
The program’s commitment to new work was reflected in its support for new play
festivals such as Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New
American Plays, and for playwriting workshops including the Eugene O’Neill
Memorial Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. A Playwriting Fellowship
category was offered in the Literature Program through the 1970s, until it was
transferred to the Theater Program in 1980. Support for playwrights through
institutions and fellowships was integral to the explosion of new theaters and
new work throughout the decade.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The agency also worked on behind-the-scenes issues such as
the payment of reasonable fees and salaries to artists. The Arts Endowment
offered Challenge or Advancement Grants to help companies acquire new
facilities, hire new management, and build institutional capacity. A professional
theater training program was established as well as a program to help young
directors through the transition from training to professional career.
Earmarked support was also directed to presenting companies, touring projects, theater
for youth, mimes, translators, and designers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During its first year, the NEA Theater Program invited
resident theaters to apply for matching grants of between $10,000 and $25,000 [$87,300
to $218,300 in 2023] to “be used for general artistic and organizational
development, and to include any special programs or projects in line with this
development.” The category targeted geographically diverse groups of performing
arts organizations, and was intended to assist the growth and development of a
decentralized American professional theater by helping to strengthen existing
companies. By 1971, grants totaling $559,000 [$4.2 million today] were awarded
to 26 theaters across the country. Recipients included:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Front Street
Theater, Memphis, Tennessee <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Cleveland
Play House <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Dallas
Theatre Center <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Cincinnati
Playhouse in the Park <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Milwaukee
Repertory Theater <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Seattle
Repertory Theatre <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Olney
Theatre, Maryland</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Arts Endowment continued to focus on strengthening the
burgeoning, decentralized nonprofit professional theater movement. Support for
services to the field, such as publications, management programs, artists
services, and meetings administered by the Theatre Communications Group—a
national service organization dedicated to strengthening, nurturing, and
promoting nonprofit theater— ensured field-wide support to shore up
administrative and organizational capacity for nonprofit theaters throughout
the nation. The NEA awarded funding to new play producing groups in order to
ensure a reinvigorated corpus of new works that could be made available to
producing organizations and their audiences across the nation. Support also
continued for the Theatre Development Fund and its visionary ticket subsidy
programs. This program was dedicated to creating affordable admission for
audience members from underserved and disadvantaged populations and helped to
ensure broader public participation in the art form.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
Theatre Communications Group is a nonprofit service organization established in
1961 and headquartered in New York City that promotes professional nonprofit
theater in the U.S.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>TCG also publishes <i>American
Theatre</i>, a monthly magazine, and <i>ARTSEARCH</i>, a theatrical employment
bulletin, as well as paperback editions of play texts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
Theatre Development Fund is a nonprofit performing arts service organization in
New York City created in 1968.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
addition to the ticket subsidy program, TDF operates the popular TKTS Discount
Booths in Times Square, Lincoln Center, and Downtown Brooklyn which offer
tickets to Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals and plays, and dance and music
productions at discounts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(There was a
TKTS Booth in the World Trade Center that was lost on 9/11.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A dance and music booth operated in Bryant
Park until 2019, but it wasn’t a TDF facility.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Other services include the TDF Accessibility Program, known as TAP, for
disabled, hearing-impaired, and autistic theatergoers, and educational programs
for schools and student artists and audiences.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1973, the Theater Program initiated a pilot project for
Regional Theater Touring. While agency support of the regional theater movement
had already expanded the geographic reach of live theater in numerous
metropolitan areas across the nation, this program would work to create
opportunities for participation in areas that were more geographically
isolated. The touring program awarded five grants totaling $209,243 [$1.4
million] to recipients including Center Stage of Baltimore for its production
of Robert Sherwood’s <i>The Petrified Forest</i> and The Guthrie Theater for
its production of John Steinbeck’s <i>Of Mice and Men</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">New Growth—New Challenges</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 1976, 45 nonprofit professional theater companies
received grants from the Arts Endowment. One-third of the main stage
productions mounted that season were new plays (124 out of 378). The proportion
is an indication of how the Arts Endowment influenced the field in its first
decade. In 1966, nearly all new plays that reached a wide audience originated
on the commercial stage and then filtered down to other, non-commercial levels
of the theater. Ten years later, the situation had nearly reversed, with most
new work being generated by nonprofit theater institutions. Perhaps the most
compelling transformation was how the movement had succeeded in becoming
effectively decentralized. That year, Peter Donnelly, managing director of the
Seattle Repertory Theatre, wrote, “What has been accomplished in the last
decade with the assistance of the Endowment has been quite phenomenal. A
theatre which for all practical purposes did not exist except in New York has
been created nationally.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Many institutions from many regions received agency support
under the Professional Theater Companies category, including Actors Theatre of
Louisville, the Alley Theatre in Houston, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park,
the Circle in the Square in New York, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven,
Milwaukee Repertory Theater, The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, South Coast
Repertory in Costa Mesa [California], and the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo.
Additional funding was also made available in other categories, such as
Professional Theater Companies with Short Seasons; Theater for Youth; and
Developmental Theater, New Plays, New Playwrights, New Forms.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">After roughly one decade of agency support, it appeared as
though Margo Jones’s dream of an American civilization being enriched by
theater—in every region of the nation—was beginning to come true.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The institutional growth was encouraging, but it also
introduced new perils for the art form that it supported. Growing dependence on
larger box office receipts, subscriptions, and other sources of income—coupled
with the demands and expenses incurred from larger venues and their necessary
support staff—threatened to eat away at the adventurous spirit that had
launched the movement in the first place. The pressure to install cautious
programming that would not put an institution at risk was always present. Arthur
Ballet, Theater Program director [1978-81], recognized this concern and how the
agency could respond to it when he wrote in the Arts Endowment’s 1979 <i>Annual
Report</i>:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“The Endowment’s Theater Program stands at a crossroads. On
one hand, the Program can choose safety, staying just behind the field, behind
inflation, behind the sure warhorses of production and plays. Or the Program
can begin to shift priorities, to try new ideas, new directions. We are taking
the latter path.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">This latter path resulted in establishing new funding
programs designed to encourage and support young artists with fresh concepts
and new ideas:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Director
Fellowships to assist the career development of directors who have demonstrated
an ability and commitment to work in professional theater</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-indent: -9pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Artistic
Advancement/Ongoing Ensembles to help existing theater companies create or
strengthen relationships with their resident artists</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Professional
Theater Presenters to reach underserved audiences by supporting performances by
nonprofit professional touring companies in places where such work is not
usually available to audiences</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 27pt; text-indent: -9pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">• Designer
Fellowships to provide individual stage designers of exceptional talent, who
work in the American nonprofit professional theaters, with financial support
and creative opportunities</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Arthur
Ballet (1924-2012) was an academic, dramaturg, and director.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis
from 1959 to 1985 and, as a Fulbright professor, taught in Denmark. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ballet served as dramaturg at the Guthrie
Theater, the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and the National
Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut.
He was a founding member of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and
an occasional theater and film reviewer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ballet was the editor of 13 volumes of the new-plays anthology <i>Playwrights
for Tomorrow</i>.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The structure of the Theater Program continued to evolve. By
1984, the Arts Endowment was providing funding via ten separate theater
categories, including those focused on touring, training, direction,
playwriting, translation, and other special projects, but by 1986 these had
been consolidated into four major core categories: Support to Individuals,
National Resources, Professional Theater Companies, and Artistic Advancement.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During this time, various economic and cultural shifts and
pressures in the country fed a burgeoning solo performance scene whose artists
reflected a wide variety of tastes and influences. These artists had minimal
production costs and demands, and were able to create unconventional, highly
individualistic pieces that could be performed practically anywhere. The
flexible nature of this new arena provided a platform for a wide variety of
artists to present—or confront—an audience with all manner of ideas, performance
styles, and individual perspectives. The influence that these artists carried
with them was as broad as any that had been exhibited from the American stage
and included not only classical and modern theater, but popular dance and
downtown art scenes as well.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[O’Brien’s
description above is clearly a reference to performance artists like those
named below, but it also applies to monologists like Spalding Gray (1941-2004)
and Garrison Keillor (b. 1942), and new vaudevillians like Bill Irwin (b. 1950)
and David Shiner (b. 1953).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[It
also describes the solo character work of Whoopi Goldberg (b. 1955) in her
early career, Danitra Vance (1954-94) before <i>Saturday Night Live</i>, and Lily
Tomlin (b. 1939) after <i>Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are performance reports on Vance (“Short
Takes: Some Unique Performances”) on 28 July 2018 and Irwin and Shiner together
(<i>Old Hats</i>) on 22 March 2013.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In May of 1990, Chairman John Frohnmayer, acting on
recommendation of the National Council on the Arts, rejected grants to
performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes (who
collectively became known as The NEA Four [see Chap. 6 (20 November 2023) and
elsewhere in the report; also my <i>ROT </i>post on “Performance Art,” 7 and 10
November 2013]. The four artists sued the agency for the amounts of the grants
resulting in a public controversy that led to pressure from Congress to
eventually discontinue NEA support for individual artists and to make drastic
cuts in its budget and staffing. As the NEA’s grant process shifted away from
discipline-based applications toward four new agency-wide categories—Creation
and Presentation, Education and Access, Heritage and Preservation, Planning and
Stabilization—the agency was pressed to demonstrate more directly the public
benefits of its grants. The Theater Program turned directly toward its service
organizations to sustain the infrastructure of the field, with the Theatre
Communications Group (TCG) being the most prominent. Since then, the NEA has
collaborated with TCG in a number of ways. For instance, the NEA/TCG Theater
Residency Program for Playwrights was created in 1996 at the initiation of
Chairman Jane Alexander [Chap. 7 (30 November 2023)] and Theater Director Gigi
Bolt [1995-2006], and support for early-career directors and designers was
reshaped into the NEA/TCG Career Development Programs for Directors and
Designers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Shakespeare On Military Bases</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2004, in an effort to make good on its commitment to
bring the arts to all Americans, the Arts Endowment created the first program
in its history dedicated to reaching military personnel and their families. As
part of the agency’s Shakespeare in American Communities program [see Chap. 10
(13 December 2023)], professional Shakespeare productions were presented at
bases in 14 states. Supported by $1 million [$1.5 million] from the Department
of Defense (DOD), the military tour was an unprecedented partnership at the
time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Through this initiative, Alabama Shakespeare Festival
brought its production of <i>Macbeth</i> to 13 military installations, with
additional bases visited by the Aquila Theatre Company, The Acting Company, and
Artists Repertory Theatre. Performances were accompanied by educational
workshops for base youth whenever possible. Most bases did not have a
conventional theater, therefore performances were presented in movie theaters,
auditoriums, and in one case, an airplane hangar shared with fighter jets.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Conclusion</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">From its inception, the Arts Endowment’s Theater Program
focused on solidifying the artistic gains that had taken root in the field. The
NEA was uniquely suited to enter into this struggling but potentially fertile
environment, and to enable the best theater artists to pursue their best art
and to broaden their exposure and impact.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Arts Endowment is the largest funder of nonprofit
theater in the United States, and can lay claim to playing a primary role in
the expansion of nonprofit professional theater over the last 40 years. In 1965
there were a limited number of professional theater companies operating outside
of New York. Since the Arts Endowment’s creation, American theater has grown
exponentially. According to IRS records, by 1990, there were 991 nonprofit
theaters throughout the country that reported annual budgets of $75,000 [$151,000]
or more. Today [2008] there are more than 2,000.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[On 7
February 2023, TCG published its <i>Theatre Facts</i> for 2021.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It estimated that there were 1,852 professional
nonprofit theaters operating in the U.S.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That was an increase of more than 30% from an estimated 1,422 nonprofits
in 2020.]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The quality of theater that has been produced through the
Arts Endowment’s support is remarkable. Of the 35 Pulitzer Prizes awarded in
drama since 1965, 30 have gone to works that originated in an NEA-supported
nonprofit theater, including <i>August: Osage County</i> by Tracy Letts [Pulitzer
in 2008], developed at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago; <i>Anna in the Tropics</i>
by Nilo Cruz [2003], developed by Florida’s New Theater and New Jersey’s
McCarter Theatre; Suzan-Lori Parks’s <i>Top Dog/Underdog </i>[2002], developed
at the Public Theater in New York; and Doug Wright’s <i>I Am My Own Wife </i>[2004],
developed through workshops at Chicago’s About Face Theatre and California’s La
Jolla Playhouse.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The economic and cultural impact that American theater now
has on the nation is substantial. According to TCG’s “Theatre Facts 2005,” the
1,490 documented professional theaters in America during that year alone
contributed $1.53 billion [$2.26 billion] to the U.S. economy in the form of
payments for goods, services, and salaries (not including related induced
spending for eating out, parking, babysitters, artists’ living expenses, and
other goods and services). The positive impact that these activities have had
on the cultural health of the nation is no less compelling, if harder to
quantify.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">These numbers indicate a strong level of interest and
participation among the American public in live theater. The field continues to
face new challenges, however, in ensuring its ongoing health and vitality.
Production costs and ticket prices continue to rise. As we move into the
twenty-first century, entertainment and cultural programming available to the
public via cable and satellite programming as well as through the on-demand
convenience of TiVo, Netflix, and pay-per-view, provide the public with a wealth
of cheap and convenient choices for their limited time and dollars.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[This
report was written before the rise of streaming services and computer
conferencing sites such as Zoom (founded in 2012).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During the COVID shut-down, these increased
in popularity as means of presenting and viewing both live and recorded performances
and may remain part of the theater universe as theaters have returned to in-person
performances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See posts on <i>ROT </i>“Theater
Online – A Preliminary Report” by Kirk Woodward and Rick (19 May 2020) and “<i>The
Diary of Anne Frank</i> Online” (29 May 2020).]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The challenges facing the field of American theater today
are substantial, but history has shown us that our greatest theatrical
achievements of our past transpired in response to its greatest challenges. As
Hallie Flanagan asserted in 1935 and Margo Jones and her many influential
colleagues understood in the decades that followed, in order to thrive, the
future of our American theater must be guided by deeply committed and authentic
artistic ambitions. It must continue to engage our public in meaningful and
transformative experiences that inform our understanding of ourselves and each
other. Throughout its existence, the National Endowment for the Arts has sought
out, celebrated, and supported the best of those efforts and has helped spur an
enormous growth in the number of nonprofit theaters across the nation. Their
combined civic impact, via the production of excellent plays, along with the
delivery of arts education, outreach, and other civic-minded programs, has been
one of the most encouraging cultural evolutions of our time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Bill
O'Brien (b. 1967?) was the NEA Deputy Chairman for Grants and Awards, appointed
by President Barack Obama</i> <i>(b. 1961; 44th President of the United States:
2009-17). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until his appointment, O’Brien
had served as the Arts Endowment’s Theater/Musical Theater Director since 2006.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prior to joining the NEA, he was
Managing and Producing Director of Los Angeles’s Deaf West Theater for seven
years. He’s enjoyed a career as a theatrical director and a performer for
stage, television, and film.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[This
concludes my serialization of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008”
by Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham. If
I’m successful at piecing together an outline of the NEA’s history from 2008, when
Bauerlein and Grantham left off, to 2023. I’ll try to post it on 19 December,
finishing out “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts.”]</span><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-35274291914631190772023-12-13T10:00:00.083-05:002024-01-03T16:36:27.752-05:00A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 10 & Epilogue<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Welcome
back to the concluding installments of “A History of the National Endowment for
the Arts” after a pause on 8 December for Kirk Woodward’s discussion of the Beatles’
release of “Now and Then.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a name="_Hlk153201168">This installment is the final chapter and the epilogue of
Part 1, “The History of the NEA,” of “National Endowment for the Arts: A
History, 1965-2008” </a>by Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Chapter
10, “Building a New Consensus,” covers the Arts Endowment chairmanship (2003-2009)
of Dana Gioia (b. 1950), a poet, literary critic, literary translator, and
essayist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Epilogue, “A Great Nation
Deserves Great Art,” is a short summation of the results, benefits, efforts, and
successes of the first three-quarters of the Arts Endowment’s existence.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[As
I’ve recommended since the start of this series, visitors to </i>ROT <i>who are just
encountering the NEA history should go back to the beginning and read Chapters
1 through 8/9, published on 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, and 30 November, and 3 December,
respectively.</i><span style="font-style: italic; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>The NEA’s report is report
organized chronologically, so it won’t make much sense if you jump in at the
end.]</i></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: center;"> </span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><a name="_Hlk152939469">“<u>NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008</u>”<br /></a></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">edited by Mark
Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(National Endowment
for the Arts, 2009)</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large;">p a r t<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I</span></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-large; text-align: center;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a name="_Hlk152939430"><i>The</i></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk152939430;"> HISTORY <i>of the </i>NEA</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">chapter</span> 10</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Building a New Consensus</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts,
poet Dana Gioia, was nominated by President George W. Bush to succeed Michael
Hammond on October 23, 2002. The U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed the
nomination on January 29, 2003.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Chairman Gioia, 52 at the time of his confirmation, was an
intellectual figure of national importance. He had published three collections
of poetry, including <i>Interrogations at Noon </i>[2001], which won the 2002
American Book Award. His 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” [<i>Atlantic Monthly</i>,<i>
</i>April 1991] stimulated a major debate in the literary world, and a
subsequent book, <i>Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture </i>[1992],
was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He
co-edited several best-selling literary textbooks with the poet X. J. Kennedy,
and he had attained further distinction as a translator from Latin, Italian,
and German. Also trained in music, Gioia had worked as a music critic and
composed two opera libretti, <i>Nosferatu</i> [2001; jointly premiered by
Rimrock Opera (Billings, Montana) and Opera Idaho (Boise), 2004] and <i>Tony
Caruso’s Final Broadcast </i>[2005; premiered in Los Angeles, 2008; co-production
by the Los Angeles Opera, OperaWorks, CSU-Northridge, and the Southern
California Opera Guild].</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Born to a working-class family of Italian and Mexican
descent in Los Angeles and the first member of his family to attend college,
Gioia graduated from Stanford University and received a master’s degree in
comparative literature from Harvard, where he studied under the poets Robert
Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. He returned to Stanford to attend business
school and earned an MBA. Beginning in the late 1970s, he spent 15 years in New
York working for General Foods while writing in the evenings. He eventually
became a vice-president before leaving business in 1992 to write full-time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Gioia’s Vision</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia inherited an Arts Endowment that showed some progress
in increasing its budget and devising promising new programs. Still, the impact
of the 1990s culture wars hung heavily over the NEA, and the severe cuts in
funding and staffing remained a burdensome legacy. In spite of more than
100,000 grants given in every state and U.S. territory, the Arts Endowment
remained best known for a few controversial grants given nearly a decade prior.
Many members of Congress continued to criticize the agency, and anti-NEA
legislation was regularly introduced. The media remained alert for potentially
contentious grants, artists and arts organizations were bitter over the
cutbacks, and public perception was mixed at best.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia approached his new position with the aim of first
changing the national conversation about the rationale for federal funding for
the arts. In a speech delivered to the National Press Club in Washington, DC,
on June 30, 2003, he asked, “Can the National Endowment for the Arts matter?”
The speech was a sober statement of philosophy, and a sharp overview of the
public standing of the agency. He began by observing that, “If the Chairman of
the National Endowment for the Arts had spoken to this forum ten years ago, the
topic might well have been ‘Should the NEA Exist?’ At that time a serious
cultural and political debate existed in Washington about whether the agency
served a legitimate public function.” Gioia observed that this question had
become moot, at least as a policy matter. Congress had saved the agency. The
Arts Endowment had undergone severe budget cuts and a reduction in staff, but
its continuing existence was assured. The question, to Gioia, was not should
the NEA exist, but how could the NEA best serve the nation?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia outlined his goal for the agency succinctly as
“bringing the best in the arts and arts education to the broadest audience
possible.” His vision stressed, first, that the agency needed to serve all
Americans, including tens of millions in rural areas, inner cities, and
military bases who had historically been ignored by the NEA. Second, the agency
must enhance culture and enrich community life, especially by connecting
“America with the best of its creative spirit.” To meet those goals, and do so
in a way that would win over critics and change public perception, Gioia
realized, would require more than funding strong applicants. It demanded a
radical change in the still largely negative public perception of the agency,
and these changes needed to be embodied in visible, national programs.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">A New Approach Is Needed</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The controversies of the previous decade showed that, in the
media and political spheres, a single questionable grant could outweigh a
thousand meritorious ones. Historically, the Arts Endowment’s successes tended
to be seen merely at a local level. Only when a grant became controversial did
it and the NEA receive national attention. Likewise, most arts organizations
mounted programs that had only local impact, even though the larger issues they
faced such as sustainability, funding, media coverage, and audience development
transcended their local reach. Gioia concluded that the American arts might
benefit from a different model than the NEA’s traditional piecemeal approach of
awarding single grants to individual organizations for specific projects.
Stronger national leadership was needed. Properly designed and executed, an
expanded funding model could link local arts organizations to broader networks
and partnerships in fruitful ways.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And so the Arts Endowment developed an ambitious new method
of supporting the arts that would have unprecedented impact. In addition to
continuing its numerous direct grants, the Arts Endowment created large
initiatives designed to incorporate local organizations into broader national
partnerships. These national initiatives improved both the efficiency and
effectiveness of arts programs. By creating large national partnerships, these
programs could achieve enormous economies of scale while also gaining publicity
no individual organization could generate independently. Arts organizations
were invited to apply for the opportunity to deliver a program to communities
around the country, especially those in which opportunities to experience the
arts were limited. These national initiatives served both artists’ need for
employment and arts organizations’ need for funding, educational outreach, and
affordable programming. In addition to reaching an unprecedentedly large and
diverse public, the new initiatives provided the public—including the media and
government officials—with tangible examples of the Arts Endowment’s
achievements.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">National Initiatives</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Shakespeare in American Communities</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In April 2003, Chairman Gioia announced the launch of the
first national initiative, Shakespeare in American Communities, a project
designed to bring Shakespeare to audiences and schools all across the U.S. and
unite players in the arts and arts education systems. It also focused on
reviving theatrical touring of serious drama, a once thriving practice that had
become unaffordable for most companies. In its initial phase, the program
organized regional tours of Shakespeare plays by six distinguished theater
companies. First Lady Laura Bush and Motion Picture Association of America
President Jack Valenti served as honorary chairs and Arts Midwest as partner.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[In a June 2008 NEA document
entitled “National Initiatives: Shakespeare in American Communities: About
Shakespeare in American Communities,” the agency named seven theater companies
which participated in the touring program in 2003-04: The Acting Company (New
York, NY) – <i>Richard III</i>; Alabama Shakespeare Festival (Montgomery,
AL) – <i>Macbeth</i>; The Aquila Theatre Company (New York, NY) – <i>Othello</i>; Arkansas Repertory Theatre (Little Rock, AR) – <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>; Artists
Repertory Theatre (Portland, OR) – <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i>; Chicago
Shakespeare Theater (Chicago, IL) – <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>; The Guthrie
Theater (Minneapolis, MN) – <i>Othello</i>.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The first phase of the program began in autumn 2003 and ran
to November 2004. In that year, six companies visited 172 communities—mostly
small and midsized towns—and 500 schools across all 50 states. As the initial
phase gained momentum, an unexpected new dimension of the program began as the
Department of Defense supported the NEA to expand the Shakespeare program to
visit military bases and neighboring schools. It was the first time the
National Endowment for the Arts had received funding from the Defense
Department, and the first significant program that the Arts Endowment had ever
offered to the millions of Americans in the military or their families. This
surprising partnership signaled to the arts world, the press, and the general
public that something new was happening at the agency.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Over the next four school years, Shakespeare in American
Communities grew into the largest Shakespeare tour in history. Focusing
increasingly on providing students with the opportunity to see a professional
production of Shakespeare, the program eventually sponsored performances and
tours by 77 theater companies, reaching more than 2,300 municipalities in all
50 states. The program also provided free education materials for teachers,
including an audio CD and two award-winning films that featured Tom Hanks,
William Shatner, Martin Sheen, Harold Bloom, Julie Taymor, Mel Gibson, and
James Earl Jones, among other talented artists. By late 2008, the Shakespeare
kits had been distributed to teachers and librarians across the country and
reached more than 24 million students. In addition to its vast educational
impact, the program gave 2,000 actors paying work performing classic theater—a
great boon to professionals so often underemployed.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
two videos noted above are <i>Shakespeare In Our Time: Shakespeare in American
Communities</i> and <i>Why Shakespeare?</i> (both 2005).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The CD featuring literary scholar Bloom (1930-2019),
among others, is <i>An Introduction to Shakespeare </i>(2003).]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Through its vast reach and broad appeal the Shakespeare
program soon became the Arts Endowment’s signature initiative. Widely covered
by the press, it signaled a resolve at the NEA to bring the best of art and
arts education to communities that had previously been overlooked. It also
demonstrated a new concern for improving arts education in U.S. high schools.
As more theater companies, actors, presenters, teachers, and students
participated, the program developed a large constituency of supporters, including
many members of Congress, who appreciated major theater companies visiting
their districts. The Shakespeare program also represented a substantial new
investment in American theater since the Arts Endowment was able to create this
historical tour without cutting existing grant support for the theater field,
continuing to support a huge variety of other projects including approximately
135 new works each year.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As the events of 9/11 plunged the United States into a new
era of geopolitics, the Arts Endowment leadership envisioned another, entirely
new national initiative. In 2003, Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson and
Chairman Gioia discussed a class on poetry Nelson had recently taught at the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “The cadets had really eaten up the
experience of writing and reading poetry,” Nelson said. “Now some of them are
e-mailing me from the war. I wish we could do something more—something
tangible—for them.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The conversation became the seed of Operation Homecoming:
Writing the Wartime Experience, which began in 2004. Under the direction of NEA
Counselor to the Chairman Jon Parrish Peede, the Arts Endowment sponsored a
series of writing workshops at military installations led by a group of
distinguished and diverse writers, including Mark Bowden (<i>Black Hawk Down</i>),
Tobias Wolff (<i>In Pharaoh’s Army</i>), Jeff Shaara (<i>Gods and Generals</i>),
Tom Clancy (<i>The Hunt for Red October</i>), Bobbie Ann Mason (<i>In Country</i>),
Stephen Lang (<i>Beyond Glory</i>), and Joe Haldeman (<i>Forever War</i>). As
with the Shakespeare program, the Department of Defense and the military
services became valuable partners, and The Boeing Company [the aerospace company]
agreed to support it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The response to the program was massive. Phone calls,
letters, faxes, and e-mails poured into the NEA as military personnel and their
families asked to participate, some calling from Baghdad and Kabul. Vietnam War
veterans also sent emotional letters of support, stating that they wished they
had been offered a similar opportunity decades earlier. During the next two
years, teams of writers led workshops at 25 military bases in the U.S. and
overseas for 6,000 service members and their spouses. Participation was so
enthusiastic that the Arts Endowment decided to compile their best work in an
anthology edited by Andrew Carroll. By the end, more than 12,000 pages of
poems, memoirs, short stories, and letters were submitted by military personnel
and their families and evaluated by an independent editorial panel of writers.
As Gioia assured in the preface to the volume, “The Arts Endowment gave the
visiting writers total freedom in conducting their workshops. They were not
told what to teach, and they in turn gave the participants complete freedom on
how and what to write.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Essays written by service members and their families were
published in <i>The New Yorker</i> in June 2006. In September 2006, the release
of the anthology, <i>Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home
Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families</i>, published by Random
House, was celebrated at the Library of Congress. The project also inspired two
documentary films: <i>Muse of Fire</i>, directed by Lawrence Bridges, and <i>Operation
Homecoming</i>, directed by Richard Robbins. <i>Muse of Fire</i> premiered at
the National Archives in Washington, DC in March 2007. <i>Operation Homecoming </i>was
broadcast on PBS in April 2007, eventually winning two Emmys in 2008, as well
as becoming a finalist for a 2008 Academy Award.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">NEA Jazz Masters Initiative</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2004, Chairman Gioia took a small but venerable NEA
program of fellowships to jazz musicians and expanded it to become the largest
jazz program in the agency’s history. Renamed the NEA Jazz Masters Initiative,
it stood at the center of an ambitious effort to recognize the distinctive
American musical form and expand the audience for jazz in the United States.
Gioia increased the number of fellowship winners and the dollar amount for the
award. A category for “jazz advocate”—eventually named after A. B. Spellman—was
added.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">All components—including the NEA Jazz Masters on Tour, a
series of presentations featuring performances, educational activities, and
speaking engagements by NEA Jazz Masters in all 50 states—were united into the
new initiative in partnership with Arts Midwest. With the expansion came NEA
Jazz in the Schools, an educational program for high school teachers that
combined a Web-based curriculum produced in partnership with Jazz at Lincoln
Center. The Verizon Foundation provided early support for the school initiative,
and the Verizon Corporation along with The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
donated funds to support NEA Jazz Masters on Tour. Meanwhile, the Arts
Endowment worked with XM Satellite Radio to feature the NEA Jazz Masters on a
daily radio segment across 13 news, talk, and music stations. Donating their
radio time, XM broadcasted these popular jazz features as often as 120 times a
day.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">American Masterpieces</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In January 2004, First Lady Laura Bush made an historic
appearance at the Old Post Office Pavilion. At a news conference there, she
announced the Arts Endowment’s new national initiative, American Masterpieces:
Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, along with a Presidential request to
Congress for an $18 million [$26.6 million in 2023] budget increase for FY
2005.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">American Masterpieces brought exhibitions, concerts, dance
performances, and broadcasts of great American art to large and small
communities in all 50 states. Each grant was accompanied by an educational
component that involved seminars, learning projects, and curricular materials,
a feature that led Mrs. Bush to say, “I’m especially pleased at the program’s
focus on arts education, as it is crucial that the knowledge and appreciation
of our cultural legacy begins in our schools. The Endowment would support
touring, local presentations, and arts education in order to acquaint
Americans, especially students with the best of the nation’s artistic
achievements.” By the end of 2005, Congress appropriated $10 million [$14.8
million today] for American Masterpieces, and support was firmly in place for
the Visual Arts Touring, Musical Theater, Dance, Choral Music, and Literature
components of the program. The art forms were remixed slightly each year. In
2006 Choral Music was added to the program, and in 2008 the chamber music and
presenting fields received funding.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">American Masterpieces has sustained an enormous number of
tours, exhibitions, and festivals. Over 50 dance grants were awarded in the
first three years of the program enabling companies like Alvin Ailey, Martha
Graham, Luna Negra, Pilobolus, Trisha Brown, and José Limón to tour the nation.
Meanwhile, over the past four years, 47 visual arts exhibitions from
institutions such as the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Phillips Collection, George
Eastman House, American Folk Art Museum, and Olana Partnership toured 200 venues
across 39 states.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Research about Reading</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia placed great importance on careful research as a means
to determine the public agenda for arts and arts education. In the early months
of his chairmanship, the Arts Endowment’s Office of Research and Analysis began
to analyze the results of the latest <i>Survey of Public Participation in the
Arts</i>. As with previous surveys administered in 1982 and 1992, the Arts
Endowment designed the 2002 questionnaire in consultation with survey experts
and arts professionals, then commissioned the U.S. Bureau of the Census to
collect a sample and conduct the survey.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The 1992 Arts Participation survey had offered reasons for
optimism, with access to the arts and audiences on the rise in most art forms.
In 2002, however, the trends reversed, with audience participation in the arts
going down. Broken down by age groups, the findings proved even more troubling.
The youngest group (18 to 24-year-olds) showed the steepest declines of all in
numerous art forms. The percentage of young adults who listen to jazz on radio
dropped by 11 points, while young listeners of classical music dropped by nine
points. A major problem had clearly emerged in the American arts that would
deeply influence NEA planning and programming—the decline of audiences in
almost every art form, a decline steepest among the young.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">One art form, however, underwent an especially daunting
decline—literature. The rate of adults who read any fiction, poetry, or drama
in the preceding 12 months—any imaginative writing of any length or quality in
any medium—slid from 54 percent in 1992 to 46.7 percent in 2002. In addition,
during this period, access to books and the arts expanded, with more libraries,
museums, historic sites, performing arts spaces, and after-school programs in
the United States every year. For literature, the portion of young adults who
engaged in literary reading was 9.5 percentage points lower than ten years
before—an astonishing drop in such a fundamental activity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The reading declines called for further study, and Gioia
commissioned an expanded analysis of the literary reading segment of the
survey. The result was <i>Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in
America</i>, which turned out to be one of the most discussed and debated
cultural stories of 2004. Created under then-Research Director Mark Bauerlein
[the editor of this report], <i>Reading at Risk</i> showed literary reading
rates falling precipitously in every demographic group—all ages, incomes,
education levels, races, regions, and genders. Librarians, publishers, editors,
writers, and educators weighed in on what Gioia termed “a national crisis,” and
more than 600 stories and commentaries appeared in the first few weeks after
its release. A serious national debate about the causes and extent of the
reading decline had begun and would continue for years with the Arts Endowment
taking the lead.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2007, the Arts Endowment’s research division, headed by
Sunil Iyengar, issued an influential follow-up study, <i>To Read or Not to
Read: A Question of National Consequence</i>. The report compiled reading data
from other government agencies, private foundations, and university research
centers, all of which reached a consistent finding. This comprehensive report
reinforced and expanded the earlier conclusions. All Americans, especially
young people, read less and read less well, and these declines had serious educational,
economic, and civic consequences. These reports have remained the definitive
reference point for treatments of the field of literary culture and publishing
in America.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Re-Investing in Reading: The Big Read</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia acknowledged that no single program or government
agency by itself could reverse the decline in reading. As the leading arts
agency in the United States, however, the Arts Endowment assumed the task of
developing a national initiative to encourage literary reading.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On May 9, 2006, the agency unveiled a new program, The Big
Read. Building on ideas from existing “City Reads” programs, the National
Endowment for the Arts created a partnership of public, private, nonprofit, and
corporate entities—Arts Midwest, the Institute for Museum and Library Services,
The Boeing Company, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation—to support and administer
an ambitious national reading program. The Big Read offers citizens the
opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities, as well
as provides comprehensive resources for discussing the work, including readers
guides, teachers guides, CDs, and publicity material as well as a national
public service campaign and an extensive Web site with comprehensive
information on authors and their works.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For a pilot program, the Arts Endowment selected ten
municipalities from across the country to receive grants to conduct and promote
four- to six-week community-based programs aimed at both teens and adults. From
January through June 2006, these diverse communities—ranging from rural
Enterprise, Oregon (population 1,895) to metropolitan Miami-Dade, Florida
(population 3,900,000)—took part in the pilot phase. Each community created
unique events, activities, and literary programs around one of four classic
novels: <i>The Great Gatsby</i> by F. Scott Fitzgerald, <i>Their Eyes Were
Watching God</i> by Zora Neale Hurston, <i>Fahrenheit 451</i> by Ray Bradbury,
and <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> by Harper Lee.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">To introduce public officials to the program, the NEA held a
celebration of The Big Read on July 20, 2006, at the Library of Congress. Ray
Bradbury participated vivaciously, greeting the capacity audience via a video
recording. Members of Congress, including Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN),
Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY), and Representative Charles Taylor
(R-NC) read passages from their favorite books. Mrs. Laura Bush, who
enthusiastically joined The Big Read as its Honorary Chair, remarked, “In ten
cities and towns across the United States, thousands of Americans are being
introduced—or reintroduced—to the joys of reading literature. They’re learning
how characters in our favorite stories become close friends that we can visit,
just by reopening dog-eared volumes. They’re discovering how we can escape to
another world by losing ourselves in a good book—only to find truths about
humanity that lead us right back to our own lives.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In its third year, The Big Read reached all 50 states as
well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. By 2009, more than 400 towns
and cities will have hosted a Big Read program, with over 21,000 local and
national organizations supporting the initiative. Indeed, The Big Read has
become the largest federal literature program since the World War II Armed
Services Editions project. Organizers choose from 27 books, ranging from
classic novels such as Willa Cather’s <i>My Ántonia</i> and Mark Twain’s <i>The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer</i> to contemporary works such as Tobias Wolff’s <i>Old
School</i> and Tim O’Brien’s <i>The Things They Carried</i>. The Arts Endowment
also helped produce a weekday show on XM Satellite Radio focusing on The Big
Read books. Broadcast three times daily, each book was read in half-hour
segments. (All of the broadcast time was donated by XM Radio.) Among the many
celebrated figures who volunteered their time and talents were Robert Duvall,
Ed Harris, Robert Redford, Ray Bradbury, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Albee, Alice
Walker, and Sandra Day O’Connor. The Arts Endowment, with Lawrence Bridges
[director of the 2007 documentary film <i>Muse of Fire</i>; see above], also
developed special introductory films presenting interviews and commentary by
the living authors of The Big Read.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In late 2007, the Arts Endowment added an international
component to The Big Read that included exchange programs with Egypt, Russia,
and Mexico. In Egypt, partnerships were created in Cairo and Alexandria to
bring American novels to readers (including the first Arabic translation of <i>Fahrenheit
451</i>). Meanwhile, American audiences read <i>The Thief and the Dogs</i> by
Egyptian Nobel Laureate [1988] Naguib Mahfouz. Russia featured <i>To Kill a
Mockingbird</i> in the Ivanovo and Saratov regions while selected American
cities read Leo Tolstoy’s <i>The Death of Ivan Ilyich</i>. For the U.S./Mexico
Big Read the NEA and the Fondo de Cultura Económica jointly produced an
anthology of classic Mexican short stories, <i>Sun, Stone, and Shadows</i>,
published in both Spanish and English editions to be read in both U.S. and
Mexican cities. Each of these international titles became permanent selections
for the U.S. Big Read.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Cleaning up the Old Post Office</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Not all of Dana Gioia’s initiatives were national. Some of
them were downright homey and domestic. When Gioia visited the Old Post Office
in November of 2002, he was surprised and dismayed by the Arts Endowment’s
cluttered corridors. The stately marble hallways had long served as storage for
excess files, old books, office furniture, and an assortment of supplies and
materials, for the agency was short on space. Although Gioia’s own desk sets no
high standard for neatness—always piled high with books, documents, journals,
and CDs—he felt a need for the NEA public spaces to portray the agency’s
accomplishments. Laurence Baden, deputy chairman for Management and Budget,
gradually secured more office and storage space in the Old Post Office. This
expansion not only improved working conditions; it also allowed staff that had
been dispersed around the building to enjoy a common working space with their
colleagues.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
Old Post Office building is discussed in Chapter 3 (11 November 2023) of this
series; see also “Saving the Old Post Office,” a sidebar on p. 43 of the published
NEA report.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Today the corridors of the Old Post Office are clear of
clutter. Those who visit the NEA enjoy viewing framed portraits of NEA Jazz
Masters and stylish caricatures of American authors featured in The Big Read
program. The staff also rescued its 1984 Oscar from storage to display as one
more symbol of the agency’s achievements. Portraits of former chairmen now
greet visitors to the chairman’s office, and striking paintings loaned by
living American artists decorate the office walls.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The Arts Endowment won an Honorary
Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the 57th Academy
Awards in 1984 “in recognition of its 20th anniversary and its dedicated
commitment to fostering artistic and creative activity and excellence in every
area of the arts.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See Chapter 5 (17 November
2023).]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The Conversation Changes</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">By January 2004, the public conversation about the Arts
Endowment had changed markedly. Discussing the proposed budget increase, Roger
Kimball, conservative intellectual and previous critic of the NEA, now found
the Arts Endowment “a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of
artistic culture.” Indeed, he added, “the NEA has become a clear-sighted,
robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people.”
Kimball’s summary appeared in <i>National Review Online</i>, which had taken a different
attitude toward the agency only a few years earlier. Meanwhile, veteran
columnist William Safire of <i>The New York Times</i> likewise commended on the
new programs, citing their bipartisan spirit. “The NEA has raised a banner of
education and accessibility to which liberal and conservative can repair,” he
said. <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> joined in the praise, too. In response to
the new NEA Jazz Masters initiative, Nat Hentoff wrote, “No one with government
funds to dispense has done more to bring jazz to American audiences than Dana
Gioia.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In a long piece in <i>The New York Times</i>, Bruce Weber [national
arts correspondent and theater reviewer] wrote that the NEA under Chairman
Gioia “has won the Congressional approbation that eluded his predecessors. And
[Gioia] has done so without alienating artists, who tend to resist all
restraints on their independence.” Michael Slenske’s [freelance writer] 2,700-word
profile of <i>Operation Homecoming</i>, published in 2005 in <i>The Boston
Globe</i>, referred to the program as an “innovative” model that not only
serves an important historical purpose, but “promises to be helpful” in the
recovery of war veterans.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Growing public support for Arts Endowment programs extended
to Capitol Hill. In September 2004, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who had
previously been highly critical of the NEA, wrote to the <i>Montgomery
Advertiser</i> to praise the Shakespeare initiative. “In my view,” he said,
“these are the kinds of programs the National Endowment for the Arts should be
sponsoring—taking the best of American art and culture and making it available,
in this case, to our service men and women and their families. . . . I’m proud that
the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was chosen to participate in the program.” In
floor debates in the House of Representatives on May 18, 2006, Rush Holt (D-NJ)
argued that an increase in NEA funding “will build programs that use the
strength of the arts and our nation’s cultural life to enhance communities in
every state and every county around America.” One month later, Representative
Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told his colleagues, “Funding for the arts is one of the
best investments our government makes. In purely economic terms, it generates a
return that would make any Wall Street investor jealous.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Fortieth Anniversary</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On March 10, 2005, when Chairman Gioia appeared before the
House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related
Agencies, he summarized the situation of the Arts Endowment: “As the National
Endowment for the Arts approaches the fortieth anniversary of its founding
legislation, the agency enjoys a renewed sense of confidence in its public
mission, reputation, and record of service.” Chairman Gioia also noted that the
“Arts Endowment now reaches both large and small communities as well as rural
areas, inner cities, and military bases—successfully combining artistic
excellence with public outreach.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">At public events throughout 2005 and 2006, the 40-year history of the Arts Endowment was noted and celebrated. [On 28-29 October 2005], the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum at the University of Texas at Austin convened [The NEA at 40: Cultural Policy and American Democracy,] a three-day conference to commemorate the signing of the legislation establishing the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities [the NEH conference occurred on 27 October]. At panel discussions and receptions, the founding and evolution of the Arts Endowment were remembered. Among the many notable speakers was former Congressman John Brademas [D-IN], who discussed the original legislation creating the Arts Endowment [National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, 29 September 1965 (Public Law 89-209); see Chapter 2 (8 November 2023)]. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In November 2005, President and Mrs. Bush hosted a black-tie
dinner at the White House to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the NEA and NEH.
Artists, scholars, and patrons attended, as did Lynda Bird Johnson Robb,
daughter of President Johnson. President Bush paid tribute to NEA Chairman
Gioia and the agency’s “support for music and dance, theater and the arts
across our great country.” The NEA, he said, “has helped improve public access
to education in the arts, offered workshops in writing, and brought artistic
masterpieces to underserved communities.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The capstone anniversary event was a symposium on arts and
culture held at American University’s striking, new Katzen Arts Center [Washington,
D.C.] in May 2006 [Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement, 17-19 May 2006]. It
was an educational symposium for graduate students and young professionals to
learn about the Arts Endowment and the dramatic growth of the arts during the
last 40 years.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Highlights of the two-day [<i>Washington Post </i>reported
three days] conference were the individual sessions convened by every
discipline director to discuss the impact of the Arts Endowment on his or her
field. Other events included a plenary session on international cultural
exchange and a panel discussing public funding and private giving. Finally,
graduate students from colleges and universities throughout the country
presented papers on diverse topics relative to the arts in the public sector.
The NEA’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, including this symposium on arts
and culture, provided ample opportunities for gleaning lessons from the past to
shape the next 40 years.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Gioia’s Second Term</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On December 9, 2006, Dana Gioia was unanimously confirmed by
the U.S. Senate for his second term as NEA chairman. During his second term,
Chairman Gioia expanded the international activities of the NEA. Under the
leadership of Pennie Ojeda, the agency created literary exchanges with Russia,
Pakistan, Egypt, Northern Ireland, and Mexico. The Arts Endowment also
streamlined its grants process and simplified its application categories. In
its fortieth year, the NEA staff handled more applications (a 30 percent
increase from Fiscal Year 2000 to 2004) and more grants (a 12 percent increase
in the same period) without an increase in staff. While operating on a reduced
administrative budget, the Arts Endowment also managed the substantial workload
of Challenge America grants in order to reach every congressional district
consistently each year.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia continued to spend considerable time refining and
expanding national initiatives. Believing that consistency of support and
excellence of execution were essential to their success, he urged the NEA staff
to look for ways to improve the programs with each new grants cycle.
Application procedures were adjusted, teaching materials updated, Web sites
revised and redesigned, and partnerships expanded.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Gioia also observed that arts organizations benefitted from
being able to repeat programs. A theater company whose first tour was
challenging gained the necessary experience to make subsequent tours go more
smoothly. A school district modestly involved in one year’s jazz, poetry, or
Shakespeare programs would greatly expand its participation the next time
around. In a second Big Read program, a municipality coordinated its many
partners more easily than in its first effort. Consistent NEA investment not
only sustained the specific initiatives; it also helped build the expertise,
confidence, and credibility of all the organizations involved. As the number of
partners involved in these initiatives reached into the thousands, the
widespread impact of this long-term planning and support became visible.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Historic Budget Increase</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Congress noted the NEA’s progress with growing enthusiasm.
In December of 2007, the NEA received a $20.1 million [$28.5 million] budget
increase—the Arts Endowment’s largest increase in 29 years. The NEA’s $144.7
million [$200.2 million] budget for 2008 marked a 16 percent increase over
2007. This dramatic budget increase was not only a testament to Congress’s
confidence in Gioia’s leadership, but a concrete example of the impact of the
work of the NEA staff, including Senior Deputy Chairman Eileen Mason,
Government Affairs Director Ann Guthrie Hingston, Communications Director
Felicia Knight, and Congressional Liaison Shana Chase, in rebuilding the
agency’s relationship with Capitol Hill and the media.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The NEA also helped secure historical legislative changes in
the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program of the Federal Council on the Arts and
the Humanities. The new legislation authorized a substantial increase, with the
international indemnity ceiling reaching $10 billion [$13.8 billion, based on
the valye of the dollar in 2008, the year of the changes in the indemnity program]
along with an additional $5 billion [$6.9 billion] to support the creation of a
domestic component to the program. In a period of skyrocketing art values and
high insurance rates, it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this
legislation, which made major museum shows financially possible across the
nation. As John E. Buchanan, Jr., director of museums with Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco noted, “It is one of the greatest things that the government can
do for American art museums.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The same legislation also created the NEA Opera Honors, the
first new class of federal arts awards in 26 years. Like the Arts Endowment’s
Jazz Masters awards, the NEA Opera Honors are lifetime achievement awards
celebrating artists and advocates who have earned the highest distinction and
made irreplaceable contributions to their field. The new program reflected
Gioia’s conviction that the U.S. government needed to do more to recognize and
celebrate the contributions of its artists. The first NEA Opera Honors
recipients were soprano Leontyne Price, conductor James Levine, composer
Carlisle Floyd, and director Richard Gaddes. Administered by OPERA America, the
awards were greeted with enormous enthusiasm by the American classical music
world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Serving All Americans</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In September 2008, Gioia announced his intention to resign
the following January—two years before the end of his term—to return to
writing. “I have given up six years of my creative life,” he remarked. “I want
to return to poetry while I have the stamina and spirit to pursue the art
seriously.” This announcement caused regret on both sides of the aisle.
Congressman Patrick Tiberi (R-OH) wrote that Gioia “had successfully worked
across party lines to bring broad support and enthusiasm to the arts and arts
education.” Meanwhile Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) praised Gioia’s
democratization of the Arts Endowment, which “brought the arts to many new communities
and demonstrated to Congress how the NEA’s work touches every corner of the
country.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As he prepared to leave office in late 2008, Gioia received
what he termed “the best farewell gift imaginable.” American literary reading
had risen for the first time in 26 years. After the universal declines charted
in earlier NEA surveys, reading trends reversed among virtually every group
measured. Best of all, young adults (age 18-24), who had shown the most drastic
declines over the previous decades, now registered the largest increase of any
group (+21 percent). Although the survey did not establish cause and effect, it
seemed no coincidence that these young adults had been in high school when the
NEA launched the national literary initiatives (Shakespeare in American
Communities, Poetry Out Loud, and The Big Read) that had reached millions of
teenagers during the previous six years. Likewise the NEA’s influential reading
surveys had helped ignite national concern about the decline of reading and its
effects. While these new positive trends reflected the work of countless
teachers, librarians, writers, and parents, the NEA had played a catalytic
role—demonstrating that well-focused federal investment could make a difference
in American society.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;">epilogue</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a name="_Hlk152942635"><i>A
Great Nation Deserves Great Art</i></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Over the past four decades, the National Endowment for the
Arts has established itself as a unique institution in American culture. As the
official arts agency of the U.S. government, supported by yearly appropriations
from Congress, the NEA has not only become the nation’s largest supporter of
arts and arts education, but also, by its special position as the nexus between
the public and private sectors, an irreplaceable institution. In addition to
distributing thousands of grants each year, including critical funding to the
state arts agencies, the Endowment also convenes panels that set standards of
artistic quality, publishes research reports that guide informed discussions of
cultural trends and policies, and creates institutional partnerships that now
reach every community in the nation. The NEA’s direct financial influence has
been enormous. To date, it has awarded more than 126,000 grants totaling over four
billion dollars [$5.5 billion in 2023, based on the value of a dollar on 2008],
a sum that has generated matching funds many times larger than the initial
investment. As a result, American culture has been enlivened, enlarged, and
democratized.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Such impressive results were surely in the minds of the
legislators who first called the agency into existence in 1965 at a moment of
cultural optimism in which the government’s vision of a great nation included a
commensurably great artistic culture. Although these legislators might have
been surprised by some of the subsequent debates involving the agency, they
understood that the NEA represented a bold innovation in federal policy. How
could such great innovation occur without incident? In retrospect, it seems
inevitable that the growth of federal arts policy would involve debate,
challenge, and change as the nation defined the new agency’s proper role.
Guided by nine chairmen with diverse outlooks and leadership styles, the Arts
Endowment has lived through an often turbulent period of cultural
transformation. The agency has not merely survived these challenges; its work
has been strengthened and clarified by them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Today, the National Endowment for the Arts enjoys high
regard for its commitment to bring the best of arts and arts education to all
Americans. Supporting excellence in the arts—both new and traditional—across
all of the disciplines, it fosters the nation’s creativity and brings the
transformative power of the imagination into millions of lives, reaching many
who would have no easy access to the arts without government funding. Having
created a new national consensus for federal support of the arts, with strong
bipartisan support from Congress and wide public approval, the agency has moved
decisively into a positive new era. As a new Administration arrives in
Washington, led by President-elect Barack Obama, who has voiced his belief in
the federal cultural agencies, the Arts Endowment seems poised for continued
growth. Under future chairmen, the agency will surely pursue new ideas and
opportunities, but one thing will remain constant, the Endowment’s commitment
to serve all Americans by bringing the arts into their lives, schools, and
communities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Chapter
10 and the Epilogue concludes Part I, “The History of the NEA,” of “National
Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After the final section of the serialization of Mark Bauerlein and Ellen
Grantham’s Arts Endowment report, I will try to post the update of the NEA
history from 2008 and 2023 (if I can find enough information to compile one).</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
next installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” will be
from Part II of the NEA report, “The Impact of the NEA.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That section is divided into six topics—"Dance,”
“Literature,” “Media Arts,” “Museums and Visual Arts,” “Music and Opera,” and “Theater”—but
I’m only going to post the theater segment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It will run on 16 December and I hope you will all return for that.]</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-17552330921617293142023-12-08T10:00:00.078-05:002023-12-08T19:40:26.537-05:00"Now and Then"<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;">by
</span><b style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: center;">Kirk Woodward</b><i style="text-align: center;"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[As
veteran </i>ROT<i>ters
know by now, Kirk Woodward’s been a generous contributor to this blog since it
began over 14½ years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s
probably largely because I started </i>Rick On Theater<i> at Kirk’s suggestion,
so spiritually at least, he’s a part-owner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Even
if you’ve only read an occasional post on </i>ROT<i>, you probably know that one of
Kirk’s most frequent topics is the Beatles—because he’s been an avid fan of
that British rock foursome since they first appeared on the U.S. rock ’n’ roll scene
almost 60 years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[(To
be fair, I was, too, but I was in high school in Europe [see my post “Going to
a Swiss International School,” 29 April-14 May 2021], so I started listening in
mid-1963 on such radio stations as Radio Luxembourg and pirate stations aboard
ships in the Atlantic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kirk, however, has
a strong music background that I lacked, so I may have heard them earlier, but
he understood what they were doing.)</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[In
any case, when I heard a report on WCBS-TV news on the evening of Thursday, 26 October,
about the “new” Beatles song about to be released, I immediately e-mailed Kirk
with the news (even though I was pretty sure he’d have picked up on it before I
did) and urged him to try to hear the record ASAP and write about it for the blog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ultimately, that’s what he did—and the outcome
is below.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[(He
actually sent his copy to me on 14 November, but after editing (minimal), I
held it to space out Kirk’s contributions a bit—he’d sent me “</i>Great Directors at Work<i>”
just before and I was posting it on 25 November—so they wouldn’t all come at once.)</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Kirk’s
past Beatles posts on </i>Rick
On Theater<i> include: “The Beatles and Me,” 7 October 2010; “The Beatles Box,”
30 September 2012; “The Beatles Diary” by Kirk Woodward & Pat Woodward, 8
January 2013; “The Beatles’ Influence,” 13 July 2015; “Now, Live, the
Non-Beatles,” 27 September 2016; “Bob and Ringo,” 1 December 2017; “</i>Help!<i>,”
17 September 2020; and “Reviewing the Beatles,” 19 December 2021.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
Beatles have been so central to my life that I don’t even think about how important
they are to me anymore until something happens to remind me, like the recent
release of “the last Beatles song,” a John Lennon song called “Now and Then.” [See
Kirk’s earlier <i>Rick On Theater</i> posts “The Beatles and Me” (7 October
2010) and “The Beatles’ Influence” (13 July 2015), among his other Fab Four
contributions to this blog.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Lennon
(1940-1980) recorded a “demo tape” on a cassette tape recorder in the late 1970’s.
When the three remaining Beatles were working on the <i>Anthology</i> project
in the 1990’s, Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Lennon’s widow, offered some of Lennon’s
demo tapes to the remaining Beatles for the project.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Sometimes
referred to as the <i>Anthology</i> project,<b><i> </i></b><i>The
Beatles Anthology</i> is a multimedia retrospective consisting
of a TV documentary, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book on the
history of the group. Beatles members Paul McCartney, George
Harrison, and Ringo Starr participated in the making of the
works, while Lennon appears in archival interviews.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
television documentary was first broadcast in November 1995. The <i>Anthology</i> book
was released in 2000; <i>Anthology 1</i> of the album set was released the same
week of the documentary’s broadcast and <i>Anthology 2</i> and <i>Anthology
3</i> were released in 1996.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Two
of the songs she provided, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” were completed and
released (in 1995 and 1996 respectively) by the remaining Beatles, and they
began work on a third, “Now and Then,” but abandoned it, with George Harrison (1943-2001)
in particular losing interest, partly because of technical issues – Lennon’s
voice was combined with his piano playing in a way that couldn’t be separated,
and apparently there was an unfortunate hum on the tape as well.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Paul
McCartney (b. 1942) occasionally mentioned in interviews that he’d like to
finish working on the song, and he became more vocal on the subject in 2021.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">While
the film director Peter Jackson (b. 1961) was doing superlative work on the Beatles
documentary <i>Get Back</i> (2021), he and his team developed software for separating
and remixing monophonic sound (for example, on a cassette recording) that far exceeded
the capability of previously existing software.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Apparently
in 2022, McCartney and Ringo Starr (b. 1940) finished work on the song, adding
additional instrumental and vocal parts, including an orchestral score. Producing
the recording were Jeff Lynne (b. 1947); McCartney; and the brilliant Giles
Martin (b. 1969), the son of the Beatles’ famous original producer George
Martin (1926-2016). Giles Martin also co-wrote the orchestral scoring for the release
with McCartney and composer Ben Foster (b. 1977). The result was publicly
released on 2 November 2023.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For
a band that made its last recordings in early 1970, the Beatles have been hot
in recent years. Paul McCartney recently played on a track on the new album by
the Rolling Stones, <i>Hackney Diamonds</i> (released on 20 October 2023). And “Now
and Then” has done well on the US music sales charts and was #1 on its release
in England.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[According
to <i>Wikipedia</i>, “Now and Then” débuted at #42 in the U.K. on 3 November and
reached #1 the following week. In the U.S., the song was #1 on the <i>Billboard</i>
Digital Song Sales chart for the week ending 11 November and hit between #5 and
#7 on other <i>Billboard </i>charts, making “Now and Then” the Beatles’ 35th
top ten single on the magazine’s tallies. <i>Wikipedia</i> records, however,
that two weeks later, it “fell off the chart.”]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then
there’s the <i>Get Back</i> documentary, in three parts and about eight hours
long, an astonishing look at the creative process in action – we literally see
the first moments of the composition of the song “Get Back” (originally released
as a single on 11 April 1969) as McCartney improvises.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
<i>Get Back</i> documentary (footage originally shot in January 1969) also
shattered a long-held belief about the Beatles, that their experiences making
the <i>Let It Be</i> album (1970) that features “Get Back” were, not to mince
words, a living hell. The documentary shows that there certainly are difficult
moments, plenty of them, among the Beatles, but even more there are moments of
cooperation, fun, and productivity, as well as a great deal of just messing
around.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
Beatles did go on to break up over financial and management issues, but the <i>Get
Back</i> film removed a huge cloud of gloom from over their last years, and I
suspect that the film had much to do with the anticipation that greeted the
announcement of the release of “Now and Then.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">We
may ask, what is it about the Beatles, anyway? Why are they important to many
of us (certainly to me) more than fifty years after they finished being a band?
I have chewed over this question many times, and my answers never completely satisfy
me.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Part
of it is simply that they did their work so well. Song after song, recording
after recording, the work is well thought out, clearly presented, full of
energy, humor, and imagination. The Beatles are among the few rock bands
capable of being funny; they are astonishingly poised; they almost never repeat
themselves, even though many of their songs would make a career for most
artists.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">There’s
got to be more to the story, though, and I think one can follow a thread that
begins with the earliest songs they wrote and recorded. Typically those were “love
songs,” and popular music is mostly made up of them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
singer and songwriter Barry Manilow (b. 1943), who should know, said recently
that in popular music, “You can either write, ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you.’ You
go any further than that, you’re writing a Broadway song.” (Barry Manilow’s
first Broadway musical, <i>Harmony</i>, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre
on 13 November 2023.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Actually
Lennon and McCartney stated, in their earlier days, that they hoped one day to
write a musical. Their songs have been presented on Broadway, notably in the
musical <i>Beatlemania </i>in 1979. An early feature of their song list was “Till
There Was You” from the 1957 musical <i>The Music Man </i>(released by the
Beatles in 1963).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Kirk
has written about the distinctions between “popular songs” and “theater songs”
in “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” posted on <i>ROT </i>on 2 October 2011.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
Beatles did not write for Broadway, but they wrote popular songs of an
extraordinarily broad range.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In general
the earlier songs the Beatles – almost always Lennon and McCartney – wrote were
about romantic relations, but from the start the angles from which they
observed romance were unusual – but frequently presented so smoothly that one
might not notice.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
famous “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (1963), for example, is about the simplest possible
“romantic” idea, expressed completely in its title, but even so, <a name="_Hlk152175144">“holding hands” isn’t exactly a staple of rock music</a>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">About
the same time, though, “She Loves You” (also 1963), another enormous success, takes
a different approach – the singer isn’t the person in love but is talking to
another person about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i> relationship
to still another, and offering advice on behavior:</span></p>
<h3 style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">So it’s up to you – I think it’s only fair;<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Pride can hurt you too – apologize to her!</span></span></span></h3>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
song sounds so effortless that it’s easy to overlook how unusual the story
within the song really is as an example of (extremely successful) popular music.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then,
still in the early period of their success, the Beatles met Bob Dylan (b. 1941)
and listened to his songs, and learned that the focus of songs could range
almost anywhere – toward society, toward people, toward one’s inmost thoughts
and feelings.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With
a little practice the Beatles mastered this insight and for the last several
years of their career they wrote songs that didn’t convey meanings so much as
they suggested the <i>possibility</i> of meanings, pointing to the existence of
worlds of experience beyond the words of the songs themselves.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
master of this approach was John Lennon. A prime example is his song “I Am the
Walrus” (1967), in which the lyrics don’t make literal sense. It’s a waste of
time trying to parse them. But they point furiously at a swirl of meanings that
the song only indicates. What does the song mean? It “means” that there is
meaning <i>somewhere.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Practically
this meant that in their later years together the Beatles seldom wrote “love
songs”; when they did, the songs were often complex and were full of
implications beyond themselves. Frequently, their songs made one feel they were
openings to a much wider world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">For
a while it looked like the Beatles were leading the way in the march of popular
songwriting. Today it’s clear that the Beatles basically were an end rather
than a beginning. The following statement is a generalization by a fogey (which
I am), but basically big selling recordings today are once again personal
relationship songs, when they’re not simply music to exercise by.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On,
then, to the song “Now and Then.” When I first heard it, I wasn’t thrilled. It’s
a moody, sadly dreamy number. John’s voice definitely is clearer than in the
first two posthumous Beatle songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” but I
still felt it sounded a little unnatural. I was not impressed by Paul McCartney’s
solo on electric guitar.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In
general I was a bit let down. By contrast I had found “Free as a Bird”
worthwhile, and I loved “Real Love.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">However,
times have changed, and a feature of popular music for the last several decades
has been the “music video.” Visual presentations of musicians playing songs go
back to 1894, according to <i>Wikipedia</i>, and once “talking films” became
prominent, they were often made.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
Beatles, however – who else? – pioneered the music video for our time, deciding
in 1965-66, around the time they quit touring, that they could introduce their
songs without having to do so in person. They used first-rate directors who
brought imagination to their videos.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Following
that hint, the music network MTV filled its programming with videos for years. Music
videos turned into a competition of creative approaches. Today every song with
a major release has one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The
video for “Now and Then” was directed by Peter Jackson. He had access to the “Get
Back” footage, since he had spent years preparing that documentary. He was also
able to use video of Beatles performances and recording sessions, including the
ones for “Now and Then.” Pete Best (b. 1941), the drummer who famously was
fired by the Beatles as they began to become famous, provided a very early film
clip (although he is not seen in the video itself).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jackson,
whose <i>Lord of the Rings</i> films certainly tell a story, took his
storytelling skills and fashioned a narrative for the video of “Now and Then.” It
begins with quick cuts of guitars being tuned, a cassette tape being inserted
in a console and then played, and two musicians playing guitar. We quickly see
that they are George and Paul, and that they are working on “Now and Then.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">As
they get going, the view shifts – John, identifiable by his “granny glasses,”
is looking over the ocean, an appropriate choice since he wrote the song. The
Beatles themselves, in old-fashioned bathing outfits, appear and disappear.
Paul and Ringo, in the studio, continue to record the song, then Paul, Ringo,
and George together, cross-cut with images of John and George, the two departed
Beatles.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Then
Ringo and Paul are standing next to each other, recording vocals for the song –
except they’re not actually next to each other, it’s a trick of photography
discernable because they’re using two different kinds of microphones. Still, in
the image there they are . . . and at the line “I want you to be there with me,”
there are the <i>four</i> Beatles, from left to right George, today’s Ringo and
Paul, and John, mugging for the camera.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s
a stunning moment, all four apparently together today over a span of half a
century. It comes on unexpectedly, and for the rest of the video Jackson plays
variations on the tune, so to speak, with different combinations of Beatles in
different places – young and old, “now and then.” At the very end we see all
four bow as they always did after a song (a moment taken from the wonderful 1964
film <i>A Hard Day’s Night</i>), and then their images dissolve, leaving only
the word BEATLES.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Jackson
does something else of great interest – the images he selects of John Lennon
show not the John of the melancholy song, but John at his most relaxed,
funniest, most giddy. John mugs, briefly imitates Elvis, does the Twist. He
appears to stand in front of the orchestra that’s recording the score for the
song, joyfully imitating the violins and mock-conducting them. The other
Beatles, both younger and older versions, appear to be responding to his antics,
bemused.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Art
thrives on opposites. Jackson could have chosen melancholy images of John to
match the melancholy tone of the song. Instead he does the opposite – he shows John
at his most charming and amusing. The result, for me at least, is deeply
satisfying. It gives me the John I want to think about – the best John – and
the Beatles together, timelessly, working in harmony.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">And
now I love the song! That’s what music videos are supposed to achieve, but I
can’t recall any that had that result for me before. I’m not surprised, however
– the Beatles are nearly always a cut above everything else.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A
question: did Lennon write “Now and Then” about Paul McCartney? It’s certainly
a song about a difficult, perhaps ruptured relationship, filled with an
unspecific hope that the break might in some way be repaired “if we start
again.” Was it Paul that John was writing about?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Or
Yoko Ono? Or someone else? Many writers will say that questions of inspiration
are beside the point, that the finished work is an object of its own, not bound
by its antecedents.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">It’s
hard not to speculate, though. McCartney has said that one of the last things
Lennon said to him was to think of him “now and then, old friend.” Even more to
the point, John’s song – to my ears at least – sounds like a “Paul song.” It
could easily have been written by McCartney in his post-Beatle years. It wasn’t,
but if it had been, it wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Paul’s work.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Most
of all, both the song, the work of the surviving Beatles and their team, and
the video, are filled with gratitude for the very existence of the Beatles. So,
I probably don’t have to add, am I.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I
find it coincidental that both “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”
come up together in Kirk’s article.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
happen to have a 45 of those two songs . . . in the German versions the Four
recorded in ‘64 (“Sie liebt dich” and “Komm, gib mir deine Hand”; released in
March 1964).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I bought </i>Die Beatles<i> in
Koblenz, the town where my dad was stationed as a Foreign Service Officer (see “An
American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013), as a curiosity/souvenir, and I
still have it.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I
observed in my introduction to this report that, though I never got to see the
Beatles in person when they were appearing on the Continent before their
American stardom exploded, I heard their recordings in mid-1963 or so, and I
started buying their recordings pretty soon afterwards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My copy of </i>With the Beatles<i>—their second album
in the U.K. but their first in Germany, where I lived then—is the German pressing
which I bought in Koblenz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Released in
Germany on 12 November 1963, it has 14 songs, seven on each side, rather than
the usual 12 for U.S. releases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The
U.S. version was entitled </i>Meet the Beatles<i>, released on 20 January 1964,
the Beatles’ début album in this country.)</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[(It’s
not really relevant, but my </i>Rubber Soul<i> is the British release [3 December 1965], purchased
in France by my friend Marc Humilien as a gift when I was in Villefranche-de-Lauragais,
the Humiliens’ tiny hometown in southwestern France, for a visit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like my German </i>With the Beatles<i>, it also
has two songs that aren’t on the American release.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Two
other curiosities are in my record collection, too: a pair of 45 rpm
extended-play disks from Odeon, something that was rare in the U.S. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>The Beatles’ Hits<i> has “From Me To You” and
“Thank You Girl” on the A side with “Please Please Me” and “Love Me Do” on the
B; </i>The Beatles<i> contains “She Loves You” and “Do You Want To Know a
Secret” on one side and “Twist and Shout” and “A Taste of Honey” on the other. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[All
sung in English, of course, three of the songs on </i>The Beatles<i> were
listed on the disk’s jacket with their French titles in parentheses: “J’ai un
secret à te dire,” “Twiste et chante,” and “Un homme est venue” (literally, “I
have a secret to tell you,” “Twist and sing,” and “A man has come”). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oddly, that last is “A Taste of Honey,” but
don’t ask me how come.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I
must have bought at least that last record in Geneva, where I was in school—I
don’t know why else it’d have French titles and not German. </i>Die Beatles<i> was a
souvenir, a keepsake; the other four I bought because I wanted the songs to
play in the dorm. (Neither of these records is dated, but I’d guess I got all
of the EP’s in 1964 and 1965, during my senior year in high school.)</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[One
last comment on these songs: Kirk asserts that “‘holding hands’ isn’t exactly a
staple of rock music,” and I thought about that a bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only other pop song of which I can think
in which holding hands as used as a romantic gesture—I’m sure there are others,
but I can’t think of any off hand (no pun intended!)—is Elvis’s “Can’t Help
Falling in Love” (1961, from </i>Blue Hawaii<i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sings “Take my hand / Take my whole life
too / For I can’t help falling in love with you.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hand-holding’s not the main idea of the song,
and it’s only one passing mention, of course.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Now, for ROTters who are reading the serialization of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008,” which I’ve interrupted a second time to post Kirk’s discussion of “Now and Then”: I’ll be publishing the next installment, Chapter 10 & Epilogue, “Building a New Consensus” and “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art,” on Wednesday, 13 December. I hope that you’ll all come back to ROT when I return to that serial post.]</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5641398182926491003.post-81651798966749694282023-12-03T10:00:00.065-05:002023-12-08T16:01:23.198-05:00A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapters 8 & 9<p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series</b></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; text-align: left;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[Thank
you for coming back to </i>Rick On Theater<i>’s “A History of the National Endowment for the
Arts” for Chapters 8 and 9 of the NEA report, “National Endowment for the Arts:
A History, 1965-2008.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This installment covers
the chairmanships (1998-2001 and 2002) of folklorist and author Bill Ivey (b. 1944)
and musician and educator Michael Hammond (1932-2002).</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[As
I have all along, I recommended that visitors to </i>ROT <i>who are just
encountering this series go back first to the beginning and read Chapters 1
through 7, published on 4, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, and 30 November,
respectively. The NEA’s history is presented chronologically, so
it’ll make more sense if you read it in order.]</i></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: small; text-align: center;"> </span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“<u>NATIONAL
ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008</u>”<br /></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">edited by <a name="_Hlk152451388">Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham<br /></a></span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">(National Endowment
for the Arts, 2009)</span><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></span></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large;">p a r t<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The</i> HISTORY <i>of the </i>NEA</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal;">chapter</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: large;"> 8</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Broadening the Agency’s
Reach</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In his search for a successor to Jane Alexander in December
1997, President Clinton turned to the director of the Country Music Foundation
in Nashville, Bill Ivey, as the seventh chairman of the Arts Endowment. Ivey
was born in Detroit in 1944 and grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He
received his education at the University of Michigan and Indiana University,
earning history, folklore, and ethnomusicology degrees. In 1994, Ivey had been
named to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. He also
served two terms as president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences, as a senior research fellow at the Institute for Studies in American
Music at Brooklyn College, and as a faculty member of the Blair School of Music
at Vanderbilt University.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ivey was known primarily as an advocate for the preservation
of country, folk, and popular music. The Country Music Foundation operated with
an annual budget of $4 million [around $6.9 million in 2023, figuring from 1998
dollars, the last year of Ivey’s CMF directorship], and through it, Ivey
administered the Country Music Hall of Fame from 1971 to 1998, while publishing
a journal and directing a record label. After being unanimously confirmed by
the Senate, Ivey was sworn in as chairman in 1998. A populist, Ivey represented
a new sort of federal arts leader. While public and political support for the
agency remained low, and the agency’s budget had been cut by 40 percent, his
profile was helpful in reassuring Congressional critics who believed that the
Arts Endowment’s programs catered to cultural elites.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The <i>Washington Post</i> quoted Ivey on the announcement
of his pending appointment, affirming that the Arts Endowment was “a very
important agency, particularly in its role of nurturing excellence in all the
arts . . . it would be an ultimate job for me.” The same newspaper cited praise
of Ivey as “an amazing generalist” by Michael Greene, president of the National
Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Greene endorsed Ivey as one who knew “a
tremendous amount about the visual arts and folklore,” and who “in terms of
arts advocacy . . . had always gone down the center. He hasn’t jumped into any
camp.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Ivey’s first annual message as chairman was short. He noted
that since its creation in 1965, the Arts Endowment had awarded 110,000 grants,
supported museum shows and theater companies of varying size, established arts
classes for youth, televised concerts and folk festivals, and developed
innovative public-private partnerships. With the budget at $98 million [$169.5
million today], grants in 1998 emphasized diversity, including support to a
theater group for a play about African-American performer Paul Robeson, a
Hispanic performing arts series, a country music program in Nashville, folk art
instruction in Nevada, and Alaskan native authors and storytellers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
1998 Paul Robeson (1898-1976) play production supported by an NEA grant was <i>Paul
Robeson, All-American</i> developed and presented by<i> </i>TheatreWorks/USA, a
company which produces original plays geared towards younger audiences. Created
for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Robeson’s birth, the musical
play was written by actor and playwright Ossi Davis (1917-2005) with music
composed by Jason Robert Brown (b. 1970).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The
play’s début was staged by John Henry Davis with choreography by Thomas
DeFrantz (b. 1931) at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center at the Borough of
Manhattan Community College (Lower Manhattan) from 13 to 25 July 1998. The part
of Robeson was played by operatic bass baritone Stacey Robinson.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Less than a month after Ivey’s confirmation, the Arts
Endowment claimed a major victory when the Supreme Court affirmed on June 25,
1998, by a vote of eight to one, the constitutionality of the statutory
provision requiring the agency to consider “standards of decency and respect
for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public” in its application
review process. The sole dissenting Justice was David H. Souter. Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, held that the Congress had the right to
be vague in setting criteria for spending money, and the decency clause did
not, on its face, discriminate on the basis of viewpoint. In a separate
opinion, but one that joined the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia declared, “It
is the very business of government to favor and disfavor points of view on
innumerable subjects, which is the main reason we have decided to elect those
who run the government, rather than save money on making their posts
hereditary.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Broadening Local Appeal</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Chairman Ivey demonstrated a deep understanding of the
infrastructure and public policy needs of American cultural enterprises.
Furthermore, Ivey built on Alexander’s reorganization with further reforms—for
example, engaging program directors more in the grant-making process,
specifically, in determining grant amounts. Ivey, having previously served on
NEA panels, believed that some panelists had too narrow a focus, and welcomed
the discipline directors’ expertise and broad perspective.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With the NEA budget remaining essentially flat for two more
years, Ivey nevertheless introduced strategies for enhancing American cultural
life, including the development of a broad initiative called Continental
Harmony. Administered by the St. Paul, Minnesota-based American Composers
Forum, the program placed composers-in-residence with local chamber music
ensembles to develop new musical works reflecting the sensibilities and
traditions of local communities. Many of the compositions premiered on July 4,
2000. Continental Harmony exemplified a new approach in Arts Endowment
programming that also included ArtsREACH, a program launched in 1998 that
funded arts projects in states identified as “underrepresented” in the agency’s
grant count. ArtsREACH answered Congressional demands that NEA funding reach
underserved areas. States that received special attention and grants workshops
under ArtsREACH included Alabama, Indiana, Iowa, South Carolina, and South
Dakota. In 1999, ArtsREACH increased the agency’s grantmaking in 20 targeted
states by more than 350 percent. It served as a prototype for another program,
Challenge America, which also emphasized outreach and arts education for
previously underserved areas.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">That year, in his <i>Annual Report</i> message, Chairman
Ivey outlined his vision. Conforming to the requirements of Congress, Ivey
developed a strategic plan for the years 1999–2004, and named it “An Investment
in America’s Living Cultural Heritage.” The plan included a revised mission
statement: “The National Endowment for the Arts, an investment in America’s
living cultural heritage, serves the public good by <i>nurturing</i> the
expression of human creativity, <i>supporting</i> the cultivation of community
spirit, and fostering the recognition and appreciation of the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">excellence</b> and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">diversity</b> of our nation’s artistic accomplishments” (emphasis
original). The goals of the five-year strategic plan reinforced the sense that
the NEA under Ivey would broaden participation and local appeal in Arts
Endowment activities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In his chairman’s statement accompanying the plan, Ivey
highlighted his populist bent: “Today, art is no longer confined to paintings
in museums—or dances, plays and symphonies in concert halls and theaters. . . .
It’s in large cities and in the smallest, most remote towns. Besides anchoring
communities, growing the economy, and increasing jobs, the arts give
communities a sense of identity, shared pride, sound design that affects how we
live, and a way to communicate across cultural boundaries.” Echoing the
agency’s enabling legislation, the introduction stated, “It is vital to
democracy to honor and preserve its multi-cultural artistic heritage as well as
support new ideas; and therefore it is essential to provide financial
assistance to its artists and the organizations that support their work.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The expansion of Arts Endowment grants to more communities
remained a touchstone of the Ivey chairmanship. In the area of design, he
instituted four Leadership Initiatives to improve design standards across the
country. The initiatives focused on government facilities, obsolete suburban
malls, schools, and the stewardship of rural areas. Another NEA program during
this period, the YouthARTS project, brought the Arts Endowment together with
the Department of Justice to address crime by minors. This partnership helped
establish arts programs inside juvenile justice facilities and in “at-risk”
neighborhoods.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Thirty-Fifth Anniversary</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Arts Endowment celebrated its thirty-fifth year in 2000
by organizing “America’s Creative Legacy: An NEA Forum at Harvard,” cosponsored
by the Kennedy School of Government. The conference was held with the
participation of Chairman Ivey and all his living predecessors—Jane Alexander,
John Frohnmayer, Frank Hodsoll, and Livingston Biddle [Chaps. 7, 6, 5, and 4,
respectively]. The forum reflected the arrival of the millennium and the
roll-out of millennium projects developed by the Arts Endowment over several
years. The White House Millennium Council’s Final Report on these efforts,
which was issued in January 2001, included a section titled “Imagining America:
Artists and Scholars in Public Life,” which declared, “The arts and the
disciplines of the humanities have a real effect on individuals, institutions,
and communities. But too often, artists and scholars are separated from public
involvement, precluding valuable collaboration.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Chairman Ivey laid out the accomplishments of the Endowment
over 35 years by restating his belief that “the agency strengthens American
democracy at its core.” The Arts Endowment’s support assisted in the growth of
local arts agencies from 400 to 4,000, nonprofit theaters from 56 to 340,
symphony orchestras from 980 to 1,800, opera companies from 27 to 113, and
dance companies multiplied by 18 times since 1965.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the 2000 <i>Annual Report</i> chairman’s statement, Ivey
pointed out that the Arts Endowment had bipartisan support in Congress, and he
proposed a “Cultural Bill of Rights” for Americans, comprising:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">1. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Heritage:</b> The
right to fully explore America’s artistic traditions that define us as
families, communities, ethnicities, and regions.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">2. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">A Creative Life:</b>
The right to learn the processes and traditions of art, and the right to create
art.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">3. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Artists and Their
Work:</b> The right to engage the work and knowledge of a healthy community of
creative artists.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">4. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Performances,
Exhibitions, and Programs:</b> The right to be able to choose among a broad
range of experiences and services provided by a well-supported community of
cultural organizations.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">5. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Art and Diplomacy:</b>
The right to have the rich diversity of our nation’s creative life made
available to people outside of the United States.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">6. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Understanding
Quality:</b> The right to engage and share in art that embodies overarching
values and ideas that have lasted through the centuries.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Finally, Ivey stated, “As we move into a new millennium, the
NEA is committed to citizen service.” Although never adopted in any broader
public sense, this “Cultural Bill of Rights” provided a vivid snapshot of
Chairman Ivey’s vision for the Arts Endowment.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Challenge America</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The agency’s 2000 budget stood at its lowest in a
quarter-century, totaling only $97.6 million [$161.6 million]. Chairman Ivey
gained a $7.4 million [$12.2 million] increase for the Arts Endowment budget
for fiscal year 2001, raising the agency’s annual appropriation to $105 million
[$169.5 million]. After an attempt by the bipartisan House Arts Caucus to
increase the NEA’s budget failed, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) led a successful
effort through the Senate to increase the NEA’s budget. The increase was
ultimately maintained in the final version of the bill agreed upon by both the
House and Senate in conference.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The new funding was earmarked exclusively for the Challenge
America Arts Fund to provide grants for outreach and arts education projects in
remote and previously neglected communities. This important program represents
Ivey’s major legislative triumph. After almost a decade of cuts, it marked the
first increase in the Arts Endowment’s budget since 1992. The following year,
Congress raised the Endowment’s budget to $115.2 million [$182 million], again
with the increases going to the Challenge America program.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Under Ivey, Challenge America began as a short-term
mechanism for enhancing the arts, arts education, and community activities in
underrepresented areas. The program was expanded and under future Chairman Dana
Gioia, the NEA achieved national reach through Challenge America by awarding a
direct grant to every U.S. Congressional district. The program’s popularity
with Congress also continued to grow. In July 2003, Representative Lynn Woolsey
(D-CA) stated, “NEA programs such as Challenge America are using art as a means
to bring communities together. Along with the United States Department of
Housing and Urban Development and the National Guild of Community Schools,
Challenge America has started a program that offers arts instruction to
children living in public housing. When we deprive the NEA and NEH of the funds
it needs, we deprive this entire nation of an active cultural community.”
Support for the program continued throughout the Administration of President
George W. Bush, who requested $17 million [$25.6 million] for Challenge America
for fiscal year 2004.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Arts and Accessibility</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The NEA’s Office of AccessAbility, originally named Special
Constituencies Office [until 1994], was created under Chairman Nancy Hanks
[Chap. 3] in 1976 in response to an appeal by National Council on the Arts
member Jamie Wyeth. Wyeth and his wife, who uses a wheelchair, were often
unable to attend cultural events as the venues were not accessible. The
National Council resolved that “No Citizen, regardless of physical and mental
condition and abilities, age or living environment, should be deprived of the
beauty and insights into the human experience that only the arts can impart.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The NEA became a leader in the field of accessibility, and
was the third federal agency to publish its Section 504 Regulations in the
federal register. The AccessAbility Office, in addition to serving as an
advocate for those who are older, disabled, or living in institutions,
established a series of initiatives to advance the Arts Endowment’s access
goals: Universal Design, Careers in the Arts for People with Disabilities, Arts
in Healthcare, and Creativity and Aging.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In a 1998 speech to the National Forum on Careers in the
Arts for People with Disabilities, Chairman Ivey reiterated the importance of
the work of the Arts Endowment in the field of accessibility. “Most Americans
will experience disability at some time during their lifespan, either
themselves, or, like me, within their families. As with aging, it is an
experience that touches everyone. Thus working towards a fully accessible and
inclusive culture is important to all Americans.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Ivey Moves On</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The end of 2000 brought a presidential election and the
victory of Republican George W. Bush. The new First Lady, Laura Bush, made her
vigorous support for culture and the arts clear from the beginning of her
residence in the White House.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Bill Ivey remained in charge of the Arts Endowment, and—like
Nancy Hanks two decades earlier—wondered whether the NEA chairmanship could
become a nonpartisan appointment. Bill Ivey served nine months under the new
Republican Administration. In April 2001 he announced that he would resign in
September of that year, six months before the expiration of his term. Before
his departure, he championed the NEA’s FY 2002 budget request before Congress
and expressed his hope that “the new Administration will be able to move
efficiently to choose new leadership for the Arts Endowment.” But the
controversies that had plagued the agency remained vivid, and the public image
of the Arts Endowment continued to be dictated largely by its critics.</span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Chapter
9, “In Dark Hours,” the next installment of “A History of the National
Endowment for the Arts,” chronicles the brief 2002 chairmanship of musician and
educator <a name="_Hlk152428687">Michael Hammond (1932-2002)</a>, who died of a
heart attack one week after being sworn in.]</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: small-caps; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal;">chapter</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;"> 9</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In Dark Hours</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Before a successor
to Chairman Bill Ivey could be appointed, America underwent the frightful
experience of September 11, 2001, stunned by the horror of the attacks on New
York and Washington, DC. Federal employees close to the Capitol, and in tall
buildings such as the Old Post Office, were especially alarmed. On the day of
the attacks, panelists reviewing fellowship applications for literature
projects gazed out the windows as smoke rose from the Pentagon across the
river. Evacuated from the building, they decided to assemble in a nearby hotel
and continue to work.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Because New York
City, the main target of the terrorists, is the nation’s arts center, the
impact of September 11 on artists and cultural institutions was felt
nationwide. Immediate action was taken by the Heritage Emergency National Task
Force to assess structures and collections in the areas of the 9/11 attacks.
Within hours, the American Association of Museums reported that all New York
museum staff were accounted for and museum collections safe.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">However, on the
105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald
investment firm had suffered the horrific loss of hundreds of employees. The
world’s largest corporate collection of works by sculptor Auguste Rodin and
numerous works by Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, and Louise Nevelson were
destroyed. Next door in the South Tower, the National Development and Research
Institutes Library was completely wrecked, as were the offices of the Lower
Manhattan Cultural Council. The Broadway Theater Archive, with 35,000
photographs, that stood a block from the World Trade Center was also lost, and
13 other historically or architecturally significant structures, including the
Federal Hall National Memorial, were damaged.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The Federal Hall National
Memorial, established in 1955, is in the historic building at 26 Wall Street in
the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. The current Greek
Revival–style building, completed in 1842 as the Custom House, is owned by the
United States federal government and operated by the National Park Service as a
national memorial. The memorial is named after a Federal style building on the
same site, completed in 1703 as City Hall, which the government of the newly
independent United States used during the 1780s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was demolished in 1812.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The current national memorial
commemorates the historic events that occurred at the original structure. With
the establishment of the United States federal government in 1789, the Federal
style building was renamed Federal Hall. It was the home of the Congress of the
Confederation. the first U.S. Capitol building, and the site of George
Washington’s inauguration.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the days and
weeks immediately following September 11, Americans turned to the arts,
especially to music and poetry, to express their grief. Media focused on the
dark stages of Broadway and paid little attention to the blight of the
nonprofit arts community. Congress debated how to expedite relief to New York
City while arts groups navigated eligibility requirements to secure loans from
the Small Business Administration and aid from the Federal Emergency
Preparedness Agency.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The economic impact
of the terrorist attacks on each of the arts fields was assessed by the NEA.
There was a dramatic downturn in year-end giving to nonprofit arts
organizations as donors directed giving to 9/11 charities. Revenues were lost
from cancelled performances and low attendance at arts events. The general
economic slump, decline in tourism and travel, and reduction in state tax
revenues brought about cuts in state and local arts budgets. New York City
announced a 15 percent across-the-board cut in funding for cultural
organizations. Insurance costs rose, in part because of increased security
needs at public performances.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">The Arts Endowment
issued a Chairman’s extraordinary action grant through the New York State
Council on the Arts to help artists in Lower Manhattan begin the process of
cleaning and repairing offices and purchasing equipment. Over the years, the
Endowment had provided similar emergency disaster grants to arts organizations
devastated by floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes, and help after the bombing
of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[The Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City was the target of a bombing by domestic terrorists
Timothy McVeigh (1968-2001) and Terry Nichols (b. 1955) on 19 April 1995. The
truck bomb that was detonated in front of the building killed 168 people,
including 19 children at a day-care center housed in the building, and injured
680 others.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[One third of the building
collapsed and the remains were demolished a month after the attack. The
Oklahoma City National Memorial, formally dedicated on the fifth anniversary of
the bombing, 19 April 2000, was built on the site.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[McVeigh was tried and found
guilty of the attack, and sentenced to death. He was executed in 2001. Co-conspirator
Nichols is serving multiple sentences of life without parole in a federal
prison.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">More substantial
help for New York’s cultural organizations came from private foundations. The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation created a special $50 million fund [$80.7 million
in 2023] to benefit those museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations
most directly affected. Several years later President Bush presented the Mellon
Foundation with the nation’s highest award to artists and arts patrons, the
2004 National Medal of Arts for “civic leadership in the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Hammond
Appointed</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Eight days after
September 11, President George W. Bush announced his intention to nominate
Michael Hammond, dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in
Houston, as chairman of the Arts Endowment.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Hammond was a
conductor and composer, but he also brought vast educational and arts
administration experience to the agency. A Wisconsin native, he attended Lawrence
University and Delhi University, India, and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to
Oxford University where he received degrees in philosophy, psychology, and
physiology. Before joining the Shepherd School in 1986, Hammond directed the
Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee, and then moved to New York State
to become the founding Dean of Music at the State University of New York at
Purchase [in Westchester County, a suburban country north of New York City].
Subsequently, he served as president of the college. While in New York, he
founded the celebrated international arts festival at Purchase, known as
Pepsico Summerfare [1980-1989; named for its principal sponsor, the former Pepsi-Cola
Company, headquartered in Purchase]. The new chairman, at 69, had long been
active in orchestral and vocal music, but his biography was so diverse that it
also included lecturing in neuroanatomy to medical students in Wisconsin.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In a statement
reflecting the somber mood of the country in those days and weeks, Hammond
declared, “I am deeply honored by President Bush’s confidence in me. . . . The
arts can help heal our country and be a source of pride and comfort.” As
Hammond prepared for his Senate confirmation, he further articulated his vision
for the Arts Endowment, “Our heritage embodies all the efforts that have gone
before us, what we imbibe, and what we wish we could say but cannot put into
words.” He cited the <i>Guide to Kulchur</i> [1938] by Ezra Pound as “a primer
for American poets” that “begins with words and gestures, and finds new
metaphors.” Western civilization is “a conversation,” he said, influenced by
new voices and cultures. For Americans to join that conversation wisely, they must
be trained in it, and so he saw his primary mission to be arts education. “We
have never made a serious effort in the United States to engage our youth with
the arts,” he lamented. “We can make the greatest impact on preschool children,
and then move onward with technique-based, prolonged involvement with the arts.
This will help formulate good taste and deepen understanding.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Hammond compared the
task before him to the moon-landing mission brought forth by President Kennedy,
which took nearly a decade to accomplish. “What use is creating awareness of the
arts,” Hammond asked, “if it is not a long-term, crucial task?” Hammond
anticipated the agency’s Shakespeare in American Communities program, proposing
that ten Shakespeare touring groups be selected for funding, “with two or three
of them on the road most of the time.” He also called for a renewal of interest
in representational painting and for attention to classical music on radio.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">With Chairman Ivey
gone and Michael Hammond not yet in place, Robert S. Martin was designated
acting chairman of the Arts Endowment on October 1, 2001. While serving as
acting chairman of the NEA, Martin was also director of the Institute of Museum
and Library Services, a sister agency of the Arts and Humanities Endowments.
Formerly, Martin had been a professor and interim director of the School of
Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas,
and Texas State Librarian. He served until January 23, 2002, when Hammond was
sworn in.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">On his third day in
office, Chairman Hammond called an all-agency staff meeting and spoke
eloquently about art and the creative process. Those in attendance were moved
by the promise of his remarks and looked forward to his inspirational tenure,
but Hammond served as chairman for only seven days—from January 23 to January
29. On Tuesday, January 29, he did not report for work. Hammond had felt ill
over the weekend and had gone to the hospital for a series of tests on January
28. That night he attended a gala at the Shakespeare Theatre Company with
Michael Kahn, the theater’s artistic director, and Queen Noor of Jordan,
followed by a performance of <i>The Duchess of Malfi</i> by John Webster.
Hammond left the performance early and returned home in a taxicab. The next
morning, when he did not show up for work, police were called to his home.
There they found Michael Hammond, dead of natural causes at age 69.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[It was later confirmed that
Hammond died of a hear attack. While he was at Rice University, he’d been
treated for cancer.]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">“There was great
sadness among the staff,” Senior Deputy Chairman Eileen Mason recalled. “They
had waited four months for a new chairman and were excited about the breadth of
Hammond’s intellect, his passion for the arts, and his lifelong work in music
education. On January 23, they had welcomed him with food and song at an
all-agency reception, and had heard about his love of the arts and his vision
for the agency.” Now the agency needed a new leader, and Mason assumed the post
of acting chairman.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-variant: small-caps;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The
Mason Interim</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Eileen Mason came to
the agency with a background in education, publishing, and governmental
service. A native New Yorker, she began studying the violin in grade school,
and continued her lifelong commitment to symphonic and chamber music under the
tutelage of composer and conductor Karel Husa at Cornell University. With a
Bachelor of Arts from Cornell, where she studied English and music, she worked
as a book editor at Little, Brown in Boston, editing college textbooks in
literature and the social sciences. In Washington, DC, she served as a manager
at two federal energy agencies, and earned a master’s degree in public
administration from American University. She became vice president for grants
on the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Maryland, before
joining the Arts Endowment in 2001.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">Mason served for 13
months as acting chairman, focusing on honoring Hammond’s memory, strengthening
relations with Congress, supporting arts education, and extending access to
quality arts programs in underserved communities. In April 2002 she joined members
of the Congressional Arts Caucus led by Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY)
and Representative Steven Horn (R-CA) to visit 16 New York City arts
organizations significantly affected by the destruction of buildings, closing
of performance venues, and decrease in tourism after the attacks of 9/11. As
the group, hosted by the New York State Council on the Arts, traveled from
Times Square theaters to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Brooklyn Academy of
Music to El Museo del Barrio in Harlem, it was clear that the arts industry in New
York was determined to rebound, but financial aid was direly needed.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">During their visit
to the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Artistic Director, National Medal of Arts
recipient, and former National Council on the Arts member Arthur Mitchell
greeted the group. Mitchell recounted how he had started with a small company
years before [DTH was incorporated in 1969 and débuted in 1971], believing that
every child in Harlem deserved the opportunity to learn how to dance. “If it
weren’t for the National Endowment for the Arts,” he declared, “Dance Theatre
of Harlem would not be here today.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">A few days later,
Mason represented the NEA at a meeting of the President’s Committee on the Arts
and the Humanities, with First Lady Laura Bush in attendance. Carrying forth
the vision of Michael Hammond, Mason stated that the Arts Endowment’s mission “is
to acquaint Americans with their rich and diverse artistic heritage.” Two
initiatives she put forward anticipated things to come. First, she called for
an examination of the state of classical music on nonprofit radio, which would
evolve into a full-scale project of the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis,
and, second, she announced a plan to bring professional performances of
Shakespeare’s plays into every corner of the country. This idea would later
grow under Chairman Dana Gioia [see Chap. 10] into the major Shakespeare in
American Communities initiative.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">When President and
Mrs. Bush presented the 2001 National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities
Medals to a distinguished group of artists and scholars, emotions ran high.
Only six months after the attack on the World Trade Center, a packed audience sang
“The Star Spangled Banner” with reverence and new meaning. Among the Medal of
Arts recipients were painter Helen Frankenthaler, film director Mike Nichols,
singer Johnny Cash, novelist Rudolfo Anaya, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The highlight
of the ceremony was Yo-Yo Ma’s cello performance, accompanied on the piano by [then-current]
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In 2002, the
National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the Appalachian Regional
Commission, sponsored a regional conference to demonstrate the positive
economic impact that the arts can have on local communities [Building Creative Economies:
The Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainable Development in Appalachia, Asheville,
North Carolina; 29-30 April 2002]. More than 300 artists and arts
administrators shared information about model programs and best practices. Two
Republican North Carolina legislators, Congressman Charles Taylor, a member of
the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, which
has jurisdiction over the Arts Endowment’s budget, and Congressman Cass
Ballenger, a nonvoting member of the National Council on the Arts, attended and
endorsed the concept.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In July 2002, the
House of Representatives voted for an amendment sponsored by Representative
Louise Slaughter (D-NY) for a $10 million [$15.8 million today] budget increase
for the Arts Endowment. Representative Slaughter’s amendment was supported by
191 Democrats, 42 Republicans, and one Independent. The tally indicated that
momentum was slowly building in the House, as Republicans were showing signs of
support for the agency. The Senate, however, voted for only a modest increase.
When a final omnibus bill was passed in February 2003, with rescissions across
the board for all agencies, the agency received $115.7 million [$177.8 million]
for 2003—a disappointing increase of only $500,000 [$768,300].</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial;">In the aftermath of
the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the
Pentagon, arts organizations were facing serious shortages in the availability
of private and public funding. The eighth chairman of the National Endowment
for the Arts, Michael Hammond, had begun his long-awaited tenure on January 23,
2002, laid out his vision for the agency, and passed away a week later. Despite
the upheaval of Chairman Hammond’s death, the NEA began to receive growing
support from a bipartisan coalition in Congress and established a renewed
commitment to extending access to quality arts programs throughout the country.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[These two chapters have
brought us close to the end of the NEA history as recorded in </i><i>“National Endowment for the
Arts: A History, 1965-2008.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s
still more to present, but Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham’s chronicle only
went up to 2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><i>[I
promised, however, that I’d try to provide an outline at least of the years
from the end of the NEA report and the present day if I can compile one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile, Bauerlein and Grantham have more
to say and I’ll post that shortly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chapter
10, “Building a New Consensus,” covers the administration of Dana Gioia (b.
1950), a poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist, and NEA
Chairman from 2003 to 2009.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” will be
published on </i>ROT<i>
on Wednesday, 13 December.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[Before
that, though, I’m going to interrupt the NEA history series for another piece
from my friend Kirk Woodward on 8 December.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">[When
I heard a report back in October about the “new” Beatles song about to be
released, I immediately urged Kirk, who’s a huge Beatles fan and an experienced
musician and singer, to try to hear the record ASAP and write about it for the
blog. And that’s what he did . . . and
the result is “‘Now and Then,’” which I’ll be posting next Friday. The rest of the NEA series will be back after
that.]</span><span style="font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></p>Rickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08164037407475532693noreply@blogger.com0