Another reno project checked off the list.

I made this!

Well... I made it with my Dad.  Which is still pretty awesome because it's not like he's a carpenter either.  He just happens to have a bit more experience with do-it-yourselfing.  And he had the sawhorses.

Specifically, I'm talking about that shoe shelf nooked ever so casually into our front entryway.  To understand how epic this project was, you need to understand that the two flanking walls are not straight.  Each shelf is a custom shaped rhombus that fits the space between the two walls at one specific height.

Since this was my Dad and I this involved two trips to the hardware store, the death of one measuring tape, and approximately 35% more wood than a professional might need (anybody want a black, oddly shaped rhombus or two?) but it instantly transformed the cleanliness of our entry way and is still satisfying to look at more than a week later.  Fully satisfying - and a goal on my 101 list.

Why there (probably) shouldn't be a Stormcrow Productions theatre company

Okay - lets go blog hopping for a sec.

This discussion starts here. Adam (I think rightly) takes a hard look at what the point of an artist driven theatre company is headed towards.

A highlight:

"Together you will form a company. You'll put together a mission statement. It will include words like "enlighten, challenge and inspire." The mission statement is a lie. The real mission statement of the company is:
To showcase us.
This is your fatal flaw. It will be the thing that causes much pain later if you don't realize this."

Then there is a rebuttal from Flux Theatre here.

To quote the rebuttal:

"But what really rubbed me the wrong way is the scorn he has for the idea that the 'real' mission statement of an artist-run organization is to showcase the artists involved (his word, definitely not mine). He describes this as the fatal flaw of a failed artist run organization."

"That's where the most insidious ideas of the post live. Court Theatre produces plays and so does Flux. The work of artists is 'showcased' in both examples. So why is it all right for an institution to produce the work of artists, but not artists to produce the work themselves?"

and finally...

"The mission of any real work of art is nothing more or less than the experience of it. If that experience could be put into a statement, you could just read the statement, and skip the play."

I think that Augusts rebuttal misses the key point of the initial criticism.

The artist driven theatre company is formed, Adam points out, because a group of like-minded artists get together to create a show. Things work out well enough that they do it again and soon enough there is a "company".

It is not that this "company" doesn't have intentions for how their art will engage and affect their audience/community but they exist rather nebulously, held together by their shared intentions, styles, ways of doing theatre, etc.

What is important, however, is that unlike an art-making institution style company, these artist-driven companies are steered by individual artists. These artists are frequently involved in the company in a as-long-as-it-suits-my-interests sort of way (not in the financial or even "learning experience" sense of interest, necessarily, but at least in the until-I'm-not-interested-in-making-this-kind-of-theatre sort of way). That is, the artists expect this "company" to continue to do what they want until they are done with it. An art-making institution by contrast retains artists until it is done with them.

So, when an artist driven company is forced to choose between, say producing a risky-but-important work and a more popularly known one (which will likely sell more tickets) the purpose of its existance (to make "our" kind of work) can trump financial considerations. This is a good thing, in its way, but Adam's point is that once an artist-driven "company" recruits a board and becomes an entity in its own right, it has to, at some point, be responsible for its own health, even when that stands at odds with what the artists who started it in the first place want to do.

At this point we might well say, so what? If artists want to drive the bus, and put their company in a more risky position then so be it. But the catch 22 quickly appears - these very artist-driven companies want to do more than eek out shoestring budget pieces in their spare time. And since they don't attract enough audience bucks to pay for more (better sets, salaries for actors, etc.) they look to government for money to supplement their budget. And the government peskily insists that money be handed out to an agency with a board that will control the finances to ensure the ongoing viability of the company. And this artist-driven agency is forced to quantify its mission and purpose in an ongoing way, and that's when all those mushy feely words about community engagement and educational opportunities and what not get written down. Because nobody could get government money for "We want to make our theatre, our way, please pay us and hope we don't have a falling out."

And I think at core the issue is that these artist-driven companies are most often birthed with no intention to create an independent institution that will last long past all of its founding members. This can happen naturally over time, but more often than not they either die out as people move on (c.f. the last theatre company I was a part of) or at some point get a board and then bemoan when that board hijacks or hamstrings the company in the interest of sustainability.

"But its not fair," complains an artist in an artist-driven company. "We are important in lots of ways and deserve funding without having to worry about doing popular shows."

I think these artist-driven organizations do deserve funding. I think they provide lots of run-off benefits to society that cannot be captured in ticket revenue. But I think they should stop pretending to be something they are not. They should be able to say, "me and my buddies want to do this particular show, in this way, and it's going to cost X (including real salaries for actors, directors, technicians, etc.), and our tickets will get us back Y. Please give us X-Y dollars, government body."

"But what if this specific play offends some people? The government won't want to fund it."

Okay. So there should be some kind of arms-length agency in charge of doling out funds to non-institutional artist clusters, that could provide the funding decisions well enough in advance to allow theatres to get booked etc., that would be on a totally different government ledger from the usual support for the arts institutions in town.

As a playwright, I'm reading the trends of institutional theatres and seeing that the opportunities for me to flourish there are limited - very limited if I'm not first a brand they can latch on to. So should I start my own tiny semi-professional theatre company (as a couple of my peers have recently, and very bravely, done)? If so, I'll have to pretend that I'm creating an agency that could well survive without me as Artistic/Executive Director. Otherwise I can't imagine getting enough money together to produce a few shows, develop a name, and get to the point where someone else would want to pay for my words.

I'll admit I'm in a surly place right now, but I think the thrust of Adam's argument is very telling - that the motivation for creating a theatre company is frequently at odds with the current mechanisms to finance it.

Doomsday has come for American Theatre!!!

Or so the discussion is going.

It's a discussion that started with some interesting discussion of the Walmartization of American theatre thanks to the dominance of the Broadway system.  Basically, if you are an actor anywhere in america and you want to make it, you have to leave the place you grew up in and go to New York and try to be in small shows so that producers will notice you and put you in Broadway shows, after which point you can get acting gigs all over the country because regional theatre companies across the states tend to bring most of their actors in from New York, because there aren't many well developed local actors because anyone local who wants to make it has to leave to go to...  well you get it.

I've been thinking about the Calgary theatre scene.  From the actor's point of view things are a lot better than that.  If I go to a proffessional theatre company show in Calgary now, odds are I'll recognize at least half the cast.  Okay, that's partly a function of me going to a lot of theatre, but it does tell you that those people are Calgarians who act professionally rather than imports from Toronto or New York.  The same cannot be said on the playwriting side (which I guess is part of why this post is turning into a rant).  I think you'll find that both the biggest and the hottest professional theatre companies in calgary are the ones doing big Canadian names (mostly from T.O.) or shows that were big a couple years ago on Broadway.  Next year we'll see Drowsy Chaperone roll through at ATP or Ground Zero or whathaveyou and it will be touted as a hot Canadian success (successful because it went to Brodway? maybe)  Meanwhile the state of affairs for the emerging playwright is largely one of starting out with a blend of readings (sponsored in part by companies who want to maintain their development cred without, you know, producing new work) and smaller, you-probably-haven't-heard-of-them semi-pros.  I'm not going to say that isn't an important training ground for new playwrights - its a critical part of the learning process.  But if a calgary playwright makes it through that process, it is currently only in order to get smaller and gradually larger theatres in Vancouver or Toronto to produce your work so that someday you'll be a name in those other places so that your home town might produce you.  It doesn't seem like my mentors are getting produced in Calgary either.  I know that they are writing too, but they've practically vanished off the main stages here because they haven't gone off to the hotter places to write "hits".  So what hope do I have of getting onto a home town mainstage?  Would it be too communist of me to suggest that any theatre company getting money from the province should be required to use a minimum percentage of albertans in their season - in each component considered separately - so a minimum percent of techies, actors, directors, playwrights, etc.  Not that it needs to be all by any stretch.

Last week I had the idea that I should apply for a grant from somewhere and study in a number of Canadian cities what percentage of the productions were local, provincial, or Canadian by script, actor, all staff, and where their money came from (private, grant, ticket sales) per show weighted by attendance (or something) but then I realized that while I could probably get such a random grant, I would then actually have to do the work - which would be work - and I'd almost rather not know the answer. 

There is one light of optimism in the Calgary theatre scene - seems like we've got a suprisingly healthy little political theatre scene blossoming.  That's almost necessarily local, but it's not really my scene so it's not much help to me as a writer.  

Maybe I should stop reading so many vancouver, toronto, london and new york theatre blogs.  It's like - if things are so bad there, are we about to get steamrolled by the fallout?  If I could, through another decade of work, emerge in a place where a Calgary mainstage would even consider producing my work - will there be any theatres left to do so?

Me (and my bald spot) used to actually make theatre:

Now we watch it.