Theater For The Future

I’m listening right now to one of the best Chicago Theater podcasts that I’ve come across so far - the Serendipity Theater Collective’s 2nd Story podcast.

It’s a great example of how to take the work you’re already doing and translating it with a minimum of effort to a new, distributable medium. Second Story is a regular cabaret-style storytelling event, and because it’s essentially a sound-designed staged reading, it’s a perfect format to just plop right down as a podcast. They’ve also been very wise to keep a sustainable episode schedule - they’ve been monthly since the beginning of the year. In contrast, our poor “weekly” New Leaf podcast has been on hiatus for about a month despite having material for two more episodes ready to go. That’ll teach me to take up blogging.

The Second Story podcast also works as a carrot here - the reading sounds like a fun evening, and you know clearly what to expect from that evening from the podcast - including the fact that you can expect some eye-opening honesty. You can hear the small audience laughing along, you can hear the clink of glasses at the bar in the background, in “The Girls,” you’re even given a taste of the wine selections for the evening that you WOULD be sipping if you had come to the actual event.

Podcasts and YouTube clips are a great tool to convince your non-theater going friends to take a chance on seeing a show. With a wide variety of podcasts out there - from Second Story, to New Leaf, to the Neo-Futurists, to the House, there’s a style of performance that will appeal to a wide variety of entertainment-seeker. It’s worth putting some thought into how best to “capture” your performance - which is easier than recreating it - into some kind of distributable form. And it’s not always a technological solution - I’m excited to see devilvet’s upcoming photoshopped graphic novel version of Clay Continent - it’s the perfect medium to distribute a version of that show to folks who will find it appealing, and I’d wager that it’d make them more likely to see the live version next time it comes around.

Don’t know if there are theater purists out there, but I often also have doubts about dipping our feet in other media waters - it’s a plain fact of life when there are fewer and fewer delineations between artistic media these days. The breaking down of these delineations means increased blood flow of creativity to all the organs - and yes, there’s this nagging doubt that there may be some cancer cells somewhere in there that also get fed, in the same way that fundamentalist cells have greatly benefited from having the affordable distribution system for their ideas. (I stumbled the other day, in my search for information on a Mediawiki timeline plugin, onto a white supremacist society that had created an alternative to Wikipedia that reflected their values without all that accountability to the community that kept getting in their way. I’m not linking there because - well, blood flow feeds a cancer - but yikes.)

Irrational doubt and fear of change aside, it’s happening, and it’s more important than we might think to remind people that live performance - being there in the audience - actually does matter. Remember that children raised on the internet will not have the same exciting relationship with live performance that we did growing up, unless we expose them to it. The idea that live performance is valuable is going to be increasingly underrepresented in the newer forms of media - most artistic expression other than concerts, installations and theater, really. I think it’s important, given all the larger issues with new media, for those of us who are starting to fish in other media to remember the mystery and immediacy of live performance and infuse our new media projects with that energy.

I’m also jazzed about Second Story for another reason this week - I’ll be running sound for their event in the Goodman Lobby all Looptopia night this Friday. Drop by the sound cart, stick around for the event and say hi! For those of you who don’t know what Looptopia is, look here, and for god’s sake get your plane tickets soon. There are moments where Chicago lives up to its artistic mecca reputation, and Friday’s gonna be one of them.

“Community Culture, Online Collaboration, Web 2.0, oh my!”

I think a lot of theater artists hear enough of this crap in our day jobs, and by the time they get to places at 8:00 pm and when they take the spotlight or hit that go button, they embody that force in the world that wants to smash corporate culture and servers back into the stone age. We scream, “feel something HUMAN, dammit!”

And alas, in that moment we miss the boat.

I just read an interesting summary of the current corporate-sector debate about Web 2.0 technologies and how exactly to implement them from Regina Miller at Future Tense. (Are they the dawning of the age of the aquarius? Are they another stock market crash in the making?) I think of this standoff between IT professionals and the corporate culture marketers (yeah, I know you’ve got it at work too) as similar to the self-supporting tension between theater technicians and artistic management.

We need each other, and we need to work together, but boy is there some unnecessary disrespect that gets flung around between us.

Here’s what’s going on, as far as I can see: Technical folk live with this technology, they eat and breathe and sleep it, and get REALLY flustered when they come in contact with folk who see it as external - even unessential - to a collaborative environment. (”For crying out loud we could work from HOME in our UNDERWEAR while we play XBOX!”) So flustered that they often become seriously unhelpful and uncollaborative, thus negating the value of whatever easy snazzy collaboration tool they were developing.

Want an example of such an impenetrable world-changing tool? Sure, I can dig one up.

This one comes from the workdesk of one of my Chicago Sound Design forefathers, Mr. Ben Sussman, long time engineer and arranger to composer Andre Pluess (and who I think got snatched up by Google recently). In between Jeff-award winning designs, He quite literally wrote the book on a new programming collaboration tool called subversion. Go ahead, try and read it. Even with pretty graphical explanations featuring little fluffy white clouds labeled “Ye Olde Internet,” you maybe understand 35% of what the hell is going on.

This is the language and collaborative world that the technical folk live and breathe in. They take for granted - in this case - that you know that CVS is a ubiquitous if flawed online collaboration framework for programmers, not that place where you can get your prescriptions filled. Like any speakers of a language, they take for granted that you’re fairly fluent. In my own work, I throw more acronyms around than a can of alphabet soup.

For technicians, this new language and vocabulary we build is useful and efficient. If we don’t share knowledge of how technologies can be used, we can’t say things like “Hey, can you register the globals on that php class and update the version control so that I can freaking FTP my localization preferences already?” and getting things done takes a LOT more time.

Marketers and Management in the corporate sector have a similar acronymble language developed for the feel-good world of institutional culture and branding. The language is sky-high with hope and inclusiveness and leveragable words that can mean anything and everything to anyone and everyone. (”Let’s get Actualized!”) It has to be in that inspirational world for so many hours out of the day that the technical folk on the ground can look at it be tempted to call it all BS. They look at the dreams and audacious goals and immediately start thinking about all the long hours they’re going to have to pull to get that pile of crap DONE.

These two groups need to train each other a bit, which gets painful, because they are both masters of a different art. When a technician’s dreams take into account the dreams of his colleagues, wonderful things happen. When a manager’s gameplan for success includes practical input on implementation, the path to success gets cleared faster.

I think Regina’s recipe for a “Change Management” team has many applications for theater. I’ve always thought that creating a unified online dynamic document - accessible and editable by all - is the fastest route to coordinating the huge challenges of scheduling and volunteer labor that is involved in mounting a storefront show. Nearest and dearest to my heart is a well-rehearsed and accessible production timeline. If a company can create - and regularly update - a cohesive and centralized to do list (say on a wiki or online forum, or even on a dry erase board at the space), tasks can be shared and people who are getting burnt out can get relief. Knowledge becomes shared - and remembered.

This only works, however, when the entire company can come together and learn to work as a collective. For some reason, arts management becomes a top-down structure again with a couple really overworked individuals serving as Managing Director or Artistic Director, or holy crap, both. We relearn to collaborate on every show that we do, it shouldn’t be that much of a leap for theater artists to learn to collaborate in our project management styles, and implement a single collaboration strategy within a company that works for everyone.