culture vultures

Yesterday, was a day devoted to what New Yorkers call "cul-chah." 

The big event of the weekend was the Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park, where the top galleries from all over the world sell high-ticket artwork for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds.  [It's like London's equivalent of the Armory Show.]

We didn't spring for Frieze tickets, but the buzz around the fair does trickle down to lots of the smaller galleries, too.  So we began Saturday with an art exploration walk around the East End.

It began with Pickle and I checking out the Zoo Art Fair, Frieze's hipper, cheaper sibling held in a few abandoned warehouses in Shoreditch.  Like all contemporary art fairs, there was a lot of bullshit, but about 20% of it was really worthwhile.

A fringe benefit was getting to learn about lots of different galleries all in one place.  Signed up for multiple mailing lists and will hopefully be "in the know" about the latest art openings and events in the coming months.

After which, we met up with Sergio (fresh from getting his trendy haircut) and walked around smaller East End spots and saw some more interesting art, including.

• Modern-day Abstract Expressionism in the attic of an old school...

• Paintings of pop cultural divas...

And much more.  And of course, since we were being very hip and chic, we had to dress like French intellectuals (at least I did):

The day concluded with our first trip to the National Theatre, to see a new production of Mother Courage directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw in the title role.  [Based on past history, this production may well be coming to BAM sometime in the future.]

The show's aesthetic was beautifully realized, a spare post-modern Brechtianism and the story-telling was ten million times clearer than the muddled Meryl Streep/George C. Wolfe production in Central Park a couple of summers ago.

Best of all, though, we'd been introduced by Sarah Sloboda to one of the actors who was in the show and he generously invited us backstage for a drink after it was done.  We got to wander through a bit of the backstage passageways at the National and hang out near Fiona during a post-show concert with the cast and crew.  There was an Irish rock band playing and at one point Ms. Shaw got up and recited this lovely John Donne poem:

  BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, 
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ? 
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ? 
        Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide 
        Late school-boys and sour prentices, 
    Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, 
    Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, 
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. 

....

        She's all states, and all princes I ;
        Nothing else is ; 
Princes do but play us ; compared to this, 
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy. 
        Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we, 
        In that the world's contracted thus ; 
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be 
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us. 
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ; 
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

And, on that note, let me report that after five weeks of flopping on an air mattress in a friend's flat we have finally moved into our own place!!  Pictures and further reports on THAT to come soon!

mapping things out

It's been a week of creative breakthroughs on my writing projects. My plans for the first two short plays I'm working on have started to become much clearer (in my head at least).

One especially useful exercise from class was creating an actual map of the audience's experience of your piece. Here's a detail of the journey I hope to take people on:

Think I can achieve this?? I've got about four weeks now to figure out how!

Will keep you posted on the development of both works. Tonight, the plan is to soak up more Elephant & Castle Latin American experience by going to a Colombian restaurant/discoteca that promises to feel like a little bit of Bogota in South London. Maybe I'll have pictures to post...

community outreach

You might remember a previous post describing the four short plays that I need to complete for my course before the end of the Autumn Term. Well, I've begun work on two of them, and the experience of planning them has dove-tailed nicely with my desire to get to know London better.

On Friday, I spent more than an hour walking around Elephant & Castle:

Yes, that's a statue of the eponymous pachyderm. The area got its name, it seems, from a historic pub located on the site. The name "Elephant and Castle" seems to be an English bastardization of the name of a Spanish princess: La Infante de Castile.

Anyway, history aside, Elephant & Castle is now known (or avoided) by most Londoners as an overdeveloped area planned in the 1960's, which is comprised of two traffic roundabouts, a series of grotty pedestrian tunnels that can get you from one side of the street to the other, several housing projects, and a very tacky shopping mall.

To many, Elephant & Castle is a perfect example of bad 60's city planning that didn't take pedestrian life into consideration. There are calls for it to be torn down and many new design proposals for what can be put up in its place. It has struck me as an interesting spot to put on a site-specific outdoor performance (the platform in the picture above even looks a bit like a stage, no?)

Walking around the other day and mapping the area, I came across a number of interesting features: there's an old movie theater, a bingo parlor/bowling alley, a colorful area (below street level) of market stalls populated by a lively ethnic mix of vendors, and even a restaurant called La Bodeguita that seems to be frequented by most of London's Colombian community (which, to be honest, I hadn't even known existed). The network of pedestrian tunnels make for interesting staging opportunities and the mix of ethnic food stands can provide flavors and smells.

You can see from this shot that there's a conglomeration of bus stops (right near where that white tent is). My initial idea is to stage a night-time performance there for the assembled crowds of tired, drunk partiers who are waiting for London's night buses (the Tube shuts down around 12:30 AM). Perhaps involving distribution of empanadas from the Latin food stand next door? The fun thing about the project is that we have no budgetary or feasibility constraints since this is merely a proposal -- we don't actually have to stage it. I think my next step will be to hang around E & C a few more times and eavesdrop on people passing through in order to get some ideas for characters and stories...

Meanwhile, for my other assignment, I need to do research into a subject or a community that I have not had personal experience with. I immediately thought of the African community on Rye Lane in Peckham (near where we've been staying while we wait for the lease to start on our flat). You may remember my previous post about the African market along this road, which we pass through every time we go to the train. There are also a number of churches on the second stories of the buildings, from which one can hear incredible music emanating at different times.

I'm very interested in finding out more about the culture of these churches, most of which seem to be attended by African immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana. Below are some representative pictures (not my own) off of a website called Peckham Vision:

The research for the project can take on many forms. I've already been to the library to look into statistics about immigration from Nigeria to the UK, as well as the mixing of Christianity and traditional Yoruba religion. But the centerpiece of the work is supposed to be conducting interviews, so I'm hoping that I can meet some pastors and congregants of some of these churches and talk to them.

In a couple of hours, in fact, I'm planning to go down the street and see if I can sit in on a service...

All of this planning and research seems like a lot of work to do just for a 15-20 minute performance, but I'm truly curious to learn more. Being an outsider to London, I think I bring fewer pre-conceived notions to my investigations and everything that I discover has the appeal of being brand-new. I'll keep you posted on how these pieces are developing!

the same but different

You might not know think you've ever heard of the playwright Wallace Shawn (one of my favorite writers), but you've definitely seen him in one of his innumerable cameo roles in movies and TV:

In an essay entitled "Myself and How I Got into the Theatre," he addresses the differences in theater-going culture on either side of the Atlantic:

And who were the theatre-goers? In my country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the European continent, for example. Those enormous respectable crowds had never gathered in the United States, the way they had in so many European cities, to watch the plays of Ibsen or Racine. The habit simply had never been formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre just didn't arise. And for those who, somehow, had gone so far as to see a play or two--well, the experience had left most of them rather nonplussed. Having been exposed extensively to the rival storytelling mediums of television and film, most of my fellow-countrymen found it frankly rather peculiar to pay extra money to attend an event in which the faces of the actors could barely be seen, and where you had to strain to hear what on earth they were saying (despite the fact that they never stopped shouting, even when standing right next to each other).

As a newly minted graduate student in a playwriting program, I've had occasion to think quite a bit recently about those differences in theatrical culture. What are they all about? What's the difference between theater in the US and the UK?

Well, first of all, I would argue that the kinds of things you can see in the UK, you can also see in the US and vice versa. All of the problems afflicting Broadway these days (jukebox musicals, half-baked movie adaptations) can also be found in the West End. Sometimes they are literally the same productions (i.e. Wicked, Jersey Boys) or other times they're English versions of the same formulas that American producers have been using (there are stage adaptations of Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Shawshank Redemption as well as the forgettable English film comedy Calendar Girls on now in London).

Similarly, if you know where to look, you can pretty much find in New York the same kind of gems that you can in England: great Sheakespeare, interesting new plays, devised work created by experimental collectives, etc.

The difference, I would argue, is related to the situation that Shawn describes above. It has to do with the audiences. In New York (and the US in general) we have a much more stratified theatrical environment. You have your Broadway audiences, your non-profit subscriber bases, the cultural elite who go to the Lincoln Center Festival, the hipsters who go to see things downtown and in Brooklyn warehouses. But these strata of theater don't seem to be part of the same community and few members of the general public (i.e. people who are not theater-makers themselves) would be found in all of these places.

What's amazing to experience in London is that there is indeed a "general public" for theater. If you look at the programming at the National, an institution whose mission is to represent the nation, you see classics, you see plays by the heavy-hitters (Stoppard, Hare), you see inventive shows aimed at young audiences, you see multi-media and devised work. And lots of these same productions go on to tour the nation (which is, admittedly, easier to do in a comparatively small nation).

Theater education and "community-based" theater is also much more widespread here, which may also explain how a broader audience is developed and maintained. Many major UK playwrights (people like David Edgar and Mark Ravenhill) work with various different community and youth groups to create plays that somehow interact with the community. There is a thriving culture of small theaters outside of London that develop new work and draw in local audiences.

What I'm getting at is a structural difference: there's a more diverse eco-system here in the UK. If the West End were to shut down due to a stagehands' strike the way Broadway did a couple of years ago, no media source would send its chief theatre critics (as the New York Times did during the Broadway shut-down) to review museums and concerts, as if to say that there was no theater worth paying attention to than the commerical mega-shows. Everyone in England knows that there's much more to their theatrical culture than the West End.

My Times gripe is revealing: with more newspapers over here writing about theater, and none of them dominating the market, you have a broader marketplace of critical ideas, more room for different kind of work to be championed and recognized.

And this whole circumstance results in another quite significant difference, one that was mentioned to me last night by an actor who had worked in both countries: "In London," he said, "an actor assumes he's getting paid for his work, unless he hears otherwise. In New York, he assumes that he's not."

There are different funding structures here, which help support less obviously commercial work. The Arts Council has certain requirements for subsidized theater, which is part of the reason why so many institutions and artists do community-based work. (And every citizen, including unemployed actors, gets nationalized health care.)

To get back to Shawn's remark, with which I opened this post, theater in the UK is just a bigger deal than it is in the US.

I don't mean to paint an overly rosy picture here. As my course continues and I have more contact with theater administrators and literary managers, I will learn more from the inside about how things operate here. Having worked in community-based theater in New York, I'm eager to see how the English do it.

At the moment, though, with so much theater to see and to think about, it feels a bit like a bounty of riches.

beginnings

Yesterday, we had our first meeting of Drama postgraduate students at Goldsmiths. It was an exhilarating and somewhat overwhelming introduction to what I'll be doing over the course of the next year. It's going to be a whirlwind, but an exciting -- and hopefully growthful -- one!

Between now and December 10, we will be writing four short performance pieces:

• a site-specific event, intended for performance outside of a traditional theater
• a text created from research and interviews on some topic of interest
• a play created for a "special audience" (in our case, teenagers -- a group I know well!)
• a collaborative text created along with students studying directing and musical composition (which we must perform in, as well as write)

We'll be working on the first two simultaneously and the second two simultaneously. Each of the projects are an interesting challenge. I'm so pleased that we're beginning our studies with this diverse, all-over-the-map approach rather than just sitting down and discussing plot and character.

While writing those four pieces, we'll also be doing an intensive look at the new work that's going on right at the moment in the UK (the first text is Caryl Churchill's play about Gaza, Seven Jewish Children), which will feature sessions led by the artistic and literary directors of some of the leading theatres that produce new writing. We'll be assigned to go see a lot of productions, as well, such as David Hare's new play about the credit meltdown that's going on at the National Theatre.

We'll also be reading some exemplary and canonical works in order to understand different approaches to dramaturgy. I am pleased to say, though, that the selected texts are very much in line with my own set of aesthetic and political interests: in addition to Churchill, we'll be reading two by Brecht, as well as Chekhov, Garcia Lorca, Suzan-Lori Parks, Bernard-Marie Koltes, and Pinter.

During all this initital stimulation period, ideas should be percolating for my own full-length piece, which I am supposed to have a first draft of by February.

It seems like a lot, but it's also set up in a way that will make it exciting to do. There's very little that I love more than reading about and writing plays, so the big workload should be pleasurable. My colleagues (there are about 10 of us doing the writing track) come mostly from the UK, but one from Australia. I am not, as I thought I might be, the oldest one. We've got a few who've recently completed their undergrad years but also a few in their 30's or older who've been out working in the world.

The only downside is how difficult it may now be to find the time to blog! But I will try; want to keep everyone posted on how this whole thing is developing...