Artist Friendly: San Jose Artist's Town Hall Meeting

I live midway between San Jose and San Francisco (I actually live closer to San Jose). For the past 13 years I've produced theater in San Francisco. The birth of my first son changed all that. I started accepting directing jobs down on the peninsula so I could be closer to home. It was great to live 10 minutes away from the rehearsal space/theater. When my theater company disbanded and I went to grad school, I started looking for opportunities to work in my community or at least a little closer to my community.

I've discovered a number of places on the peninsula ripe for a theater/visual arts/media organization. The city of San Jose stands out from the others because not only does it have enormous potential w/r/t spaces, support organizations, etc, but the city itself is actively trying to foster its arts community. It recently conducted an Artist Resource Survey and is hosting its first ever Artist's Town Hall on September 13 from 10 am - 3pm at San Jose City Hall. The event is an opportunity for artists and creative entrepreneurs to meet and discuss ways to make San Jose a more "artist-friendly" place.

The day starts with a Plenary Session with an introduction by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and keynote address featuring Richard Chuang, co-founder of PDI/DreamWorks animation studio. The results of the Silicon Valley Artists Resource Needs survey will also be presented. You have the choice of attending either the morning or afternoon session (or both). If you opt for both, a light lunch will be provided (you must register in advance). Go here to register. The afternoon session is a series of round table discussions and there will also be an opportunity to meet and exchange information with funders, arts service providers, and other resources for artists in San Jose.

As it turns out, I'll be in Portland and will miss the event. But I'm going to see if I can deploy an operative to go check it out. If you go, please let me know what you thought about it.

After a preview of George Tabori’s Flight into Egypt, Harold Clurman wrote that he found himself less interested in whether the play would be successful. He reported that he hardly cared what he "thought" of it.

Instead:

While I watched it my mind registered certain objections – the uncertainly articulated theme confusing a plot line that might be considered trite; what was important to me was the fact that I was enjoying a certain relationship to what I saw that could hardly be defined in terms of opinion. It was a sense of contact with a living thing – noticeably imperfect – hence an experience that was pleasurably ambivalent. Only through such contact could I know anything about the play.

The experience of the play – the sense of each actor on the stage, their struggle with the material which was suggestive and intrinsically absorbing – was being driven from me by something that was not essentially of the theatre. It is true that part of the pleasure of the theatre is the arena-spectacle aspect of it – the who-will-win excitement of a sports event. But what is most characteristic of the theatre experience is the joy of looking into a strange, imaginative world, and observing it with more concentration, love and curiosity than we do our workaday activities. This essential pleasure we are being increasingly robbed of by the cash-register or race-track climate which pervades our playhouses. The severity of our theatre audiences before the signal has been given them by the press, rumor and gossip that it is all right for them to enjoy a play is not at all critical severity. Criticism bespeaks awareness, sensitivity, discrimination as to the nature of one’s feeling, above all and to begin with, an openness to the senses and the heart. Our critical severity is a commercial reflex: we don’t want to be fooled – we must like or praise only what is accredited. That is why we have so much “criticism” in superlatives of praise or blame – both equally distorted. And the tendency of our official criticism is to imitate our practice rather than to correct it. Our practice consists in treating the theatre as a business rather than as free expression and play – even though the playgoer is not in the theatre for business. Harold Clurman, The Divine Pastime.

Big List of Theater: Abreviated Summer Edition

I managed to see most of the shows and films on my last Big list. I'm in the process of writing about some of them. I post these lists for one pretty obvious one reason: I need a place where all the shows I want to see are listed. This eliminates all the postcards and newspaper article clutter (which makes very little difference in the overall clutter scheme at our house but I like to think it does). It certainly relieves some of the clutter in my head having to remember all the shows and when they are.

This month's list is short reflecting the falloff in the summer season.

Avant GardARAMA: An Evening of Short Experimental Plays
Cutting Ball Theater
Through August 16 @ the Exit.
San Francisco

Christian Cagigal's THE PANDORA EXPERIMENT
Through August 16 @ the Exit.
San Francisco







Twelfth Night
Shady Shakespeare Theatre Company
Runs in repertory with Comedy of Errors August 8 - September 14.
Sanborn-Skyline Park


Freedomland
Theatre in the Woods
Through August 31.
Woodside, CA







Then there's the little matter of deciding how or whether I'm going to be able to go to Portland, OR for PICA's TBA festival. So many good things to see - Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment, Mike Daisey. I've looked into flights but it's expensive to fly with three kids, so I'm wondering if I should maybe drive? Oh oh oh road trip with kids. Think hard.

Don't Stop the Dance

In July of 1518, a woman referred to as Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street in Strasbourg, France and began a fervent dancing vigil that lasted between four and six days. By the end of the week, 34 others had joined her and, within a month, the crowd of dancing, hopping and leaping individuals had swelled to 400.

Authorities prescribed "more dancing" to cure the tormented movers but, by summer's end, dozens in the Alsatian city had died of heart attacks, strokes and sheer exhaustion due to nonstop dancing. (h/t Hyde or Die)

Read more about Dancing Mania here and here.