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excerpts from 365 Days/365 Plays NEWSFLASH #15 2/19/07
Day 99. February 19.
Dance break
An American Desert Soldier comes out and does
a very melancholy tap dance routine. He hums the melody as
he dances, but by the time he’s finished, the people are long gone,
each wandering offstage, bored with his best efforts and
on to more pleasant and less dangerous things.
IT WAS THE ONLY WAY, REALLY.
In February, 2003, BEFORE the US went to war in Iraq, Suzan-Lori created this image. The war, it seemed, was inevitable. And inevitably the war seemed futile. Now here we are, with all these men and women tap dancing and humming a melancholy rag. Who are they? Some are American Desert soldiers. And some are actors in 365, trying to capture onstage the dance of a nation.
IT WAS THE ONLY WAY, REALLY.
I recently attended the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, thanks to my close friend Melanie Joseph from The Foundry Theatre in New York, who has spent the last few years spreading the word to American artists about the importance of artistic voices at the WSF. You will hear more from me in the weeks to come about the World Social Forum, and how to get involved in this remarkable public event. The WSF slogan is “Another World is Possible”. If you are ready to entertain that possibility, then keep your eyes out and your inquisitive mind wide open for upcoming WSF and USSF information.
And, yes, 365 did make an appearance in Kenya – Ralph Pena and Lloyd Suh from Ma-yi Theatre Company along with a Kenyan actor named Sylvester (Sly) Walla performed January 23rd’s THE WAGON. The African premiere! Video to come.
365 LA/ WK 14: NEST ARTS
Nest Arts' 365 Days/365 Plays: Dancing in the Street
For Nest Arts' 365 Project we staged our performances in the storefront Gallery 727, on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles with a floor-to-ceiling glass facade. The block is home to a remarkable millinery factory as well as a wholesale sewing machine/mannequin store complete with a rich and evocative window display. There are some apartment buildings with a range of long-time and newer residents (and all the controversy that follows accordingly), a sort of everything you can imagine store that reminded us of South America, and some parking lots. It is a one-way street and Gallery 727 happened to be in front of a bus stop. So, there were always people. And that great window... We wanted to create a performance experience where the people of downtown LA, the cars, the busses, and the buildings, became a part of the work and were embraced as such.
In addition to the plays we thought it would be fun to have a parade and a dance sequence as sort of book-ends to the plays. The audience stood inside of the gallery for a little while our two artists performing the 3rd Constant offered drinks, cupcakes, and a bevy of pre-show entertainment in the form of tasks they completed. Michael Dunn, in the costume of a house painter, stood outside the gallery looking in and eating a MoonPie. Next, John Zalewski's sound cue of muffled parade sounds came on and the painter took a seat on a bench we had placed alongside the facade of the gallery. The cast of 12 began a sort-of slowed down parade. We used parade archetypes like a conductor, a baton twirler, a plate spinner, a drum Major, a Lady with a Lapdog, a ballerina/flutist, and so on. Then we snuck in the side door, and the painter and the Drum Major performed the 1st Constant yelling to each other through the Gallery glass wall, and eventually joining each other inside the Gallery. The plays continued with audience members moving through the gallery to the different areas where we staged each play. We provided apple boxes as portable seating/standing blocks for audience members to use and the 3rd Constant performers led the way between the pieces. After our last play, the cast came together in front of the window as India.RE's song "There's Hope" filled the sidewalk as well as the gallery. We performed a sort of hip-hop number on the sidewalk, complete with passersby walking through the dance. Then we took a quick bow, and ran thru the gallery high-fiving our audience.
some exciting things happened as we looked through the glass wall from the inside out. Pedestrians and drivers became part of the show, unbenownst to them. Some of the them were straight comedians! During one performance of the 1st Constant, actor Ken Roht (Someone) walked along the sidewalk and peeked in the window of the gallery at the audience inside. A woman walking by wondered what he was looking at. She sidled up beside him and cupped her hands around the glass to get a better look at the audience only to find us staring right back at her. Suddenly the lines between audience and performer were blurred. Was she an accidental performer or was she an audience member? Was the audience now an ensemble of performers? The moment was pure joy - we laughed at her. She laughed at us and waved, enjoying the spotlight for a moment. Then she wandered off to her next performance....
During the finale dance number, performer Kathrin Eder in semi-clown regalia, ran up and down the sidewalk, and across the street to the other sidewalk. She would push the walk button so traffic would stop and watch the dance. They would honk and cheer out their windows. Gallery patrons and owners of shops slowly peeked out their front doors and gathered around together to get a better look at the silliness going on at 727. On Friday a homeless man entered mid-performance and I invited him to stay and watch. "I can't right how," he said. "But do you have more tomorrow?" Yes! Please come by tomorrow at 1pm, we have another performance. He showed up the following day at 12:55 on the nose, enjoyed a cupcake and watched the entire thing.
It was so much fun ruminating on the words Suzan-Lori offered on her impetus for starting to write, and for her vision for the national project it has become. Most of all though, it was great to get out there into a real community... not just the community of a theater, or a show and its cast and team etc., but a more incidental organic community. These experiences made us feel so connected to humanity. They were a celebration of downtown life, of the people who live, walk, work and sleep in downtown Los Angeles. People are exciting. They are funny and warm and angry and curious and they love to connect! The week of plays that we were assigned were perfectly captured by the gallery and the people we encountered. We couldn't have been given a more exciting selection of plays or a more perfect place to perform them. We had no idea what
would happen each time we looked through that window. Stepping outside made for sheer joy as a performer, and a thrilling spectacle for our audience, inside AND out.
Adrienne Campbell-Holt & Erica Rice // www.NestArts.org
...
The Big Bend Sentinel – Marfa, Texas – Feb 8, 2007
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:nlltIkh43UJ:www.marfatx.com/bb_index.asp+marfa+suzan-lori+parks&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=safari
Parks’ discipline, devotion, love behind 365 plays
By MEGAN WILDE
MARFA – Suzan-Lori Parks was running up a gravelly hill on Pinto Canyon Road Friday afternoon. The Pulitzer prize-winning playwright was demonstrating how to outrun a bouncer, her name for the critical voice that guards, and sometimes shuts down, a writer’s creative mind.
Parks was in town to see her play cycle, 365 Days 365 Plays, part of a nationwide festival which was performed at Goode Crowley Theater each evening last week. Parks came to Marfa from Venice, California, where she and her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, have lived for the past seven years and are now hoping to leave.
During the drive down FM 2810, Parks said even though she hates driving in Los Angeles, she loves driving in a truck through the West Texas scenery. Odessa was Parks’ home for a few years when she was a child and the Army sent her father to Vietnam. The flat scrubby oil-field town where her grandmother and mother grew up made a deep impression on her in between her father’s military relocations along the east coast and Germany.
Now 42 years old and traveling to lectures and 365 Days 365 Plays performances across the country, Parks was glad to be back in West Texas. She squealed at the sight of windmills, cows, javelinas and blond grass on the way down Pinto Canyon Road.
Her dramatization of outrunning a bouncer along the unpaved section of the road was part of a larger discussion on writing. Some bouncers are lost in thought and slow to move, she explained, so they can be outpaced by writing quickly. Others can be persuaded to keep quiet until it’s time to edit, when a bouncer’s criticisms are useful.
The former California Institute of the Arts professor believes that 98 percent of writing depends on learning to control one’s bouncer and manage one’s personality. Parks became an expert at this while writing 365 Days 365 Plays. On November 13, 2002, Parks decided to write a play a day for a year. To do so, she couldn’t let her bouncer’s criticisms get in the way.
“To write a play a day,” she said, “you have to let him go. Dismiss him. Send him on a long vacation.” Without that flow of internal criticism, Parks adopted a principal in her writing that she calls “radical inclusion.”
“Every idea is welcome, which is a huge change because ordinarily you’re much more selective,” she said. “Normally it’s ‘I’m writing and only quality thoughts are allowed in the door. Only quality thoughts!’ Well, if you’re writing a play a day, you have to take whoever is there. ‘Hey you, next. Hey you, you look kind of flimsy. So what! Sit down. You’re the next person in the play. You’re the next subject for the play.’”
Some days though, Parks said no ideas showed up when she sat down to write. Then the project took on a meditative quality.
“It happened a couple of times,” she said. “There was a play called Going Through the Motions and I sat there and… nothing. And I thought, Well, I’m going to go through the motions. So I wrote at the top of the page ‘Going Through the Motions,’ and I thought, Oh, that’s a good title for a play.”
“See what happens when just you let in anything?” she continued. “You accept the fact you have no ideas. You accept the fact that all I’m going to do today is go through the motions.”
This caught the attention of actor David Patrick Kelly when he read Going Through the Motions during an early workshop of Parks’ plays in New York. “He said, ‘It’s such a beautiful play because I think of you sitting there and all you had was the commitment to write a play a day. All you had was your practice,’” Parks said.
Maintaining that commitment to write a play every day came naturally to Parks, who said her parents were always impressed by her discipline. “I realize I am a very obsessive-compulsive kind of person. Very focused,” she said. “I used to do things like cross-country running and I always wanted to be an ultra marathoner. I don’t think my knees or my Achilles tendons would have cooperated. But in my mind I’m an ultra marathoner. I love to run across the desert in my mind. I have that basic nature.”
Producing a play every day took more discipline than simply sitting down to write. Parks refers the experience of writing the 365 project as a “walk around a sacred mountain.” That meditative devotion to her daily task shows a spiritual discipline, which comes across in the way people respond to the plays.
Parks said many viewers have commented that the plays seem like they were written for their community. Here in Marfa, audience members commented that plays like Horse and Rider worked perfectly set in Far West Texas.
“It’s a very spiritual act, writing these plays. When you’re thinking of God you’re thinking of everybody,” she said. “You’re thinking of everybody because you’re thinking of the thing that thinks of everybody all the time. So, sure, when a piece of writing hits the spot it feels like it was written for you, because that’s what good writing is.”
Parks’ love of writing was a driving force behind the 365 project, and the plays convey that love as well.
“I just love writing,” she said. “I knew I was saying thank you to writing by writing these.”
When she watched the plays and enjoyed the community potluck afterward in Marfa Thursday night, she had an insight into what the plays are about.
“Seeing the whole community come together to celebrate, it’s like Thanksgiving every day. That’s what it felt like last night, ‘Oh, this is a Thanksgiving feast in Marfa,’” she said.
She imagined similar Thanksgiving celebrations happening all over the country at the dozens of theaters producing her plays this year.
“For me, watching it, it is about spreading love,” she said. “I sat there last night and I’m like, Yep, it is about spreading love.” “For me, watching it, it is about spreading love,” she said. “I sat there last night and I’m like, Yep, it is about spreading love.”
ONLINE PRESS/ LAist – Feb 17: A Portrait of LA Stage Alliance’s Terence McFarland
http://www.laist.com/archives/2007/02/17/a_few_of_the_365_plays_with_terence_mcfarland.php#more
A FEW OF THE 365 PLAYS WITH TERENCE MCFARLAND (See photo attached)
By day, Terence McFarland is known throughout the LA theatre community as the Executive Director of the LA Stage Alliance, a reputable non-profit service organization dedicated to building awareness, appreciation, and support for the performing arts in Greater LA. After leaving the fashion industry in New York City to attend CalArts for a master's degree, he quickly found his role as a leader helping solve problems within the experimental art school's bureacracy of BS. It was that keen sense of "fuck this shit, let's fix it" that led him to be one of the most powerful movers and shakers in LA's theatre and cultural scene.
So what happens by night with McFarland? His art does. And tomorrow night at 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. at Shakespeare Festival/LA in Downtown, his vision of the 365 Days/365 Plays festival will come and go as fast as Andy Goldworthy's art survives on a windy day (for info on seeing it tomorrow, go here). And here's what McFarland has to say...
Why should Angelenos check out 365?
As directors and companies threw their hats in the ring during the application process to participate in the 365 festival we weren't given the plays for the weeks we picked. We went in blind and cold.
Knowing a thing or two about Suzan-Lori (um, hello, TopDog Underdog, The America Play - Lincoln as the ground zero of Race and America), I figured Lincoln's birthday week would be a kick-ass week. Not to mention that my birthday is Feb 11th. Little did I know that she fucking killed it with president's book-ending the week and a sweet gooey valentine's day play in the middle. The performers, dancers collaborators and I are having a delicious time...a deep tongue kiss to the audience for valentine's day week.
Last night, the performers and I were discussing the generosity of these plays, not only in our week, but throughout the 365 cycle and Suzan-Lori's and [producer] Bonnie [Metzgar's] generosity in allowing this work to be shared with communities of different stripes, shapes and sizes with the inherent understanding that if a reading is all one company pulls off it is celebrated just like that of a fully realized production. There are over 16 regions producing 52 weeks of programming - that's at least 832 theatre companies collaborating on one work throughout the country. Even if you're a community activist and don't give a rat's ass about theater - consider the Herculean grass roots work it took to build the coalition that made this happen.
Also, Suzan Lori lives in Venice, won the Pulitzer Prize and the festival is FREE. Free, that's right, free. 52 weeks of FREE shows produced by some of the best companies Los Angeles has to offer and a tremendous number of up and coming directors, performers, collectives etc. There are so many approaches and entry points for the work that everyone can find a way in to the worlds of these plays.
In the weeks I've attended I've seen some of my favorite performers, discovered a few new ones, reconnected with friends and had one of my top theatre experiences all year. My mister, Dennis said that the play for Jan 10, Things are tough all over, was his favorite play of the last year.
What is the philosophy, brand, credo or whatever you want to call it, behind your vision of theatre?
I like stuff you can't fake on stage. I want their to be residue on the stage after a performance. Physical, emotional, tangible residue. My work tends to be ensemble generated and a movement based spectacle so I couldn't ask for a better sandbox to play in with SLP's recurring themes of Americana, race, Love, history and disaster.
The openness of SLP's work gives us a framework to build on top of metaphor and analogy and, ultimately, have a fucking good time with these darkly comic pieces. Singing, dancing, the birth of Abraham Lincoln, a valentine's day as only Suzan Lori Parks could imagine, and two plays that address what exactly we mean by "President's Day Sale."
And did I mention FREE?
What has it been like to put together 7 or so plays with 22 performers in one week?
Let's say you were trying to coordinate the schedules of 22 creative, talented, popular friends of yours who live in all different parts of LA. Or better yet, let's say you needed 22 people to put on a show, but were working in one week, with no money. How many calls or emails might it take to find 22 peeps? I went in nervous that I was asking too much to pull this off. With the 3 constants and the 8 plays in the week I'm producing/directing, there was the chance to work on 11 plays. Oh, and did I mention the original song in the play for Feb 16? Did I say that one of my collaborators is getting married on Saturday night before the performance and the entire dance company will be at the wedding? Or that almost everyone has full time jobs? Or mention the beautiful, small infant joining us at rehearsals?
The process thus far? Exhilarating, exhausting, electric, x-fucking-tastic. Wouldn't want it any other way. Although I probably should have called in a stage manager cause I build big, epic work.
As an independent producer/director I don't have the resources of a company to pull together to "put on the show." It's coming out of my blood (check, remember to get more band-aids on the way to rehearsal tonight), sweat (check), tears (hmm, someone better cry tonight, I don't want to have lied to the ist-ers) and personal bank account (check, cash and ATM)
That said, I know some phenomenal folks and they know some more incredible people and we're putting together quite the spectacle.
I'm collaborating with Hysterica Dance Company's Kitty McNamee and Ryan Heffington, a first for me which has been thrilling, a composer, Nedra Wheeler, who I've known for many years personally, but with whom I've never had the pleasure of working artistically and the designer Dan Weingarten who I've worked with professionally but never on a personal project like this.
POSTCARD OF THE WEEK – Outsiders Inn, 365Seattle wk #12
(See attached postcard)
365 FESTIVAL & 365 UNIVERSITY MAILING ADDRESSES
365 University
c/o Rebecca Rugg
Yale School of Drama
222 York Street
New Haven, CT 06511
365 Festival
c/o David Myers
PO BOX 250-465
Brooklyn, NY 11225
365 PARTICIPANT AGREEMENT
Participant agreements need to be submitted by all participants. You should be able to insert text into the document (with information requested, like the name of your theater company, location/town where you are located). If you have trouble, or have any questions, please let me know by email at 365newsflash@gmail.com. We need the Participants agreements BEFORE you perform your week.
MEDIA RIDERS
Every theater company who is interested in documenting their 365 performances IN ANY MEDIA (including podcasts, audio and video) needs to fill out a video rider BEFORE they shoot/record the performance. The media rider has 3 forms. Form 1 needs to be filled out by anyone making an archival video or audio recording. Form 2 is a VIDEO or ELECTRONIC MEDIA FOR PRODUCTION RIDER – this is an application that needs to be filled out if you are proposing to use video, audio or other media recordings as part of your presentation. Form 3 is a release to be signed by all participating actors/artists and must be executed for both archival recordings and media created for production. You can get media riders from your hub leaders or email me at 365newsflash@gmail.com .
365 CONTACT INFO
If you would like to add your name to the 365 newsflash mailing list, please send an email to 365newsflash@gmail.com with your address and your region or network affiliation. Please put “newsflash mailing list” in the subject field. You can also email me with ideas for the newsletter. For other questions regarding the 365 Festival, please email me directly or contact David Myers at 365plays@gmail.com and always cc: me at bonnie365@gmail.com .