language update!! "the" road

Remember my series on varying UK and US uses of prepositions? Well, now I've moved on to articles....

Earlier today a friend wrote that her home is located off of "the Latchmere Road." The use of a definite article to describe a thoroughfare is a particularly English construction. (And it appears to happen only with "road" as opposed to Street.)

I'm thinking that the implication of it is: this is the Road that goes to Latchmere. As in, the Brixton Road is the road that goes to Brixton. There's something quaint about that, from a pre-industrial time when people knew they were headed to the right place because the road was named after their destination.

Nowadays it can get a bit confusing. Since Brixton Road goes to Brixton, that means it's actually located in Kennington and Stockwell, the adjoining neighborhoods.

And let's not get started on the confusion caused by clusters of roads with names like Camberwell Road and New Camberwell Road; Kennington Road and Kennington Park Road. Etc. etc.!

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.

proper documentation

A friend we're staying with suggested yesterday that the English are so good at depictions of dysptopian futures in books and movies like "1984," "Brave New World" and "Brazil" because of their daily experience with British bureaucracy.

After our experience trying to open a bank account, I would tend to agree. For the past two weeks, I've visited 4 different branches of Barclay's Bank and been told many different things about what type of account we're eligible for and exactly what documentation was needed. Some folks said we could get a cheque book, others that we couldn't. Some said we needed to wait until after we'd officially enrolled in school, others that we'd need a utility bill sent to our London address. On Thursday, Sergio was told he had the right information but that it needed to be on letterhead and I was told that I had all the correct documentation but that it needed to be printed on one piece of paper!!

Yesterday, a bank representative finally accepted our applications... requiring only two documents that had been in my possession since my arrival in the UK.

One doesn't want to generalize, but I think it's telling that the customer service representative who finally helped us and laid out the what we needed in a clear manner was a transplanted American. Sure, she had a plastered-on smile and a slightly overbearing manner, but she was informed, competent, and took responsibility for telling us what we needed to know.

Sigh.

Now we just have to wait for the applications to be approved. Keep your fingers crossed!!

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...

going for the gold

We've spent so much time these past two weeks exploring London and musing about British culture, but of course -- much as we'd love to be here just to serve as cultural commentators -- we actually do plan to go to school!!

Since Sergio posted about LSE last week, I thought I'd share some initial impressions about the institution I'll be studying at: Goldsmiths.
As you can tell by the crazy steel sculpture on the building above, Goldsmiths is London's "creative" university. It offers degrees in drama (which I'll be pursuing), visual arts, music, media and communications, as well as the social sciences, and humanities etc. etc.

Some of its best-known graduates are in the fields of art and fashion: including designer Vivienne Westwood, artist Damien Hirst (he of the pickled sharks and the diamond-studded skull) and Steve McQueen (not the 60s movie star, the video artist who represented Britain in the most recent Venice Biennale and whose first commercial feature was the extraordinary "Hunger," a beautiful and brutal depiction of the last days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands).


What have I got in common with those three? Admittedly, not much. Except that I do fancy myself an artist (and, like McQueen, a politically-engaged one).

But the question reveals some aspects of why the prospect of starting a course at Goldsmiths is both exciting and a little bit intimidating for me...
Though there might be ivy on the wall of the school's main building, this is definitely not the Ivy League. From high school onward, I have been a big achiever, going to school only in really, really elite institutions (Yale, Oxford...). The culture of competition among the "best and brightest" is an environment I am thoroughly familiar with.

Goldsmiths will be different. For one thing, it has a different history. Founded in 1891 by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths (as in craftsmen who worked with gold) its original mission was "the promotion of technical skill, knowledge, health and general well-being among men and women of the industrial, working and artisan classes." This was certainly not the mission with which Yale or Oxford were founded!
Goldsmiths history seems to suggest that it's a more "democratic" kind of a place, and a place where practice and craft may be valued as highly (if not moreso) than knowledge. I've always been good at testing and writing essays, all the academic stuff. I've also been very creative, of course, writing, directing and acting for the theater. But at Goldsmiths, the creative part will come to the foreground.
I'm very excited about my course: the MA Writing for Performance. What drew me to it is that it's something more than a "playwriting" program. Performance is defined much more broadly than just traditional plays -- it includes interdisciplinary and multimedia work, performances put on outside of traditional theatrical venues, and performances created through group collaboration, with other artists and with non-professionals.

For the past six years in New York, through my work with the All Stars as well as other groups, I've been engaged in an unofficial postgraduate course in collaborative performance-making and community organizing. It would feel strange to be returning to a traditional academic institution after getting my hands dirty and working in the trenches for so long. I've developed as a very different kind of artist, and have had very different artistic and political experiences, than when I had just graduated from Yale.

But, of course, Goldsmiths is still a school. I will be studying, not doing on-the-ground organizing. I will be writing things and refining them and getting feedback. And I'll be doing this along with a whole new group of instructors and colleagues (whom I'm supposed to be meeting tomorrow!!)

It's all very exciting, but the sense of the unkown is also very large...

I think I'll close this entry off with a few more images. Below is a Victorian bathhouse on the Goldsmiths campus that has been converted into artists' studio space.


Make me want to take up painting again!

And here are some shots of the neighborhood, New Cross, in Southeast London where the school is located.



Unlike Sergio, I won't be in the pulsating center of London, but then some of the most interesting art has always come from the margins, right?

Wish me luck!!

straight or gay? it's okay! (as long as you're not polish)

And of course there had to be a post about something gay. I saw this sticker on a lamp post in our neighborhood and it caught my attention. But the sticker is not what this post is about.

I went to the gym today for the first time in well over a month. I haven't decided what gym I will be joining yet (since my class schedule is still TBD), but I managed to get a free pass at Soho Gym, a chain located mainly around central London. I desperately need to start burning all those Krispy Kream donuts I've allowed myself to gobble down.

The clientele, unsurprisingly, was largely gay. After my workout I sat in the sauna for a bit where I overheard a rather ridiculous conversation. Two extremely muscular (in a bad way), old men were chatting about which of the branches of Soho Gym has more of a gay following. This led to one of the men saying how appalled he had been when at another branch he had heard a couple of muscular men use the word 'queer' in a private conversation. The guy seemed to suggest that the term had been used in a derogatory manner, but had not been directed at anyone in particular or used to insult any particular individual.

The second man in the sauna, asked him whether he reported it to the police. The first man shook his head. The second man reminded him that using the word 'queer' is a form of speech that incites hate and thus can be reported to the police as a crime-- which I found surprising and somewhat troubling (but I won't comment further since I haven't read what exactly the law entails). The conversation went back and forth for a bit longer. Before leaving the sauna the first man identified the men who had made the 'queer' comment as Polish, to which he added: "Fucking Polish people. They should go back to their own fucking country."

I had a hard time trying not too chuckle.

EastEnders

No, not the long-running BBC soap opera (though I did get introduced to that on Friday night)...

Instead, we spent most of our Sunday north of the river, exploring the section of London once known as the East End. Famous as the home (at various points in its history) to London's Cockneys, criminals, working-class Jewish community, and avant-garde artists, it's now (surprise, surprise) a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that made us fee like we'd never left Brooklyn! Hooray!

We began just west of the East End in "the City." The Barbican Centre is a housing/cultural development erected in the sixties in an area that had been heavily bombed during the Blitz. Home to an apartment complex as well as a cultural centre with film, theatre and visual arts (like Lincoln Center or BAM) it looks like a weird concrete jungle of bridges and walkways very cut off from the pedestrian life of the city.

For some reason, there was an outdoor art installation of a small wooden hut in the courtyard which you could enter and have tea in...

Look's like Bilbo Baggins's house in Lord of the Rings, no?

After this, we headed east and popped briefly into a Victorian Turkish Bath that had been renovated into a cool restaurant space.

From there, we crossed into Whitechapel, the true gateway to the East End, and visited its flagship artistic institution, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which has been in the area since well before it was trendy (1901, to be exact) and now shows contemporary exhibitions in the line of the New Museum (we saw an Elizabeth Peyton show that had actually been on in New York earlier this year). It was interesting to learn that Picasso's "Guernica" had been brought into the gallery in 1939 as the backdrop for an anti-fascist rally during the Spanish Civil War.

We continued on to Brick Lane, the street associated with the South Asian immigrant community and one of the most popular areas to stop in for a curry.

Round the corner from Brick Lane is the Old Spitalfields Market, once a Victorian fruit and vegetable exchange, now re-developed into a glitzy conglomeration of stalls and boutiques, like Chelsea Market but much bigger.

The facades of the buildings retain their old English character, as evidenced by this coffeehouse where we stopped for afternoon tea.

Yes, folks, after more than ten days in London, we finally sat down for a true English "cream tea," replete with scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam. Mmmmmm....

The northern end of Brick Lane appears to be home to East London's hipster community and on Sunday, the place is taken over by hip, artsy markets, filled with young people from all over Europe eating gourmet street food and buying silk-screened t-shirts and other cool curios. I felt at home. I don't know why. I had been feeling a bit disoriented in London over the past few days but discovering this part of the neighborhood made me feel like a fish thrown back in the pond. God bless bourgeois bohemia!

There was an American guitarist serenading the throngs.

This red London bus hat been fitted out as a beer and food stand.

Jazzing up your fashion (or your interior decoration) with peacock feathers appeared to be all the rage...

After sampling a chorizo sandwich and a chicken satay wrap, we strolled up to Shoreditch and saw how urban decay had yet again been transformed by the arrival of hip commercialism.

This was our first trip to the East End, but it's not likely to be our last!