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Risking Innovation Day 2: Writing & Falling Girls

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Here we go again.  More ATHE conference Day Two for you.  Previous posts are listed at the end of this one.

  • Writing About Theatre Practice

This may be old hat for the professional writers out there, but I’m a lover of writing, not a pro so this little panel held a lot of useful info, even though I walked in late.

  1. “Nostalgia” for discoveries and experiences (as a teacher, director, whatever) can be a hindrance because these things need to be re-examined and formulated into scholarly language.  In other words, take a step back and take your heart out of it just long enough to see what’s there for others who don’t have your personal memories.
  2. Get a couple of samples of the journal first before submitting.  I’ve heard this before, and I have yet to do.  I guess I will now since it’s been said to me so may times!
  3. Articles need an argument and a theoretical exploration.  “reframing an experience in terms of an argument.”  Right, that would be why all my ‘essays’ read like poetry; I rarely have an actual argument.  Ha!
  4. Journals to explore:  Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Players Journal
  5. Don’t worry about cutting things down because it could be the case that “the thing that you have to cut from this article is the kernel of the next article.”
  6. Only peer-reviewed journals will be considered for a tenure track.
  7. “You must eliminate every word in that sentence that doesn’t deserve to be there…good writing is good writing and scholarly writing doesn’t have to be baroque.”  -Robert Barton
  • Risking Theatre for the Very Young – Art, Education or Experimentation?

This presentation was a delightful introduction to an educational program at University of Wisconsin-Madison spear-headed by Manon van de Water.  She discovered a script that was then translated into English for children called “The Falling Girls.”  Two girls fall from the sky into the dessert.  There is a girl in the dessert who draws them pictures.  The two girls fight and try to figure out how to get back to their planets.  I only saw excerpts and haven’t read the script, but is certainly reminiscent of The Little Prince.

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The goal, as described by the musician, Jonathan Brooks, was to “provide a landscape where very young children can making meaning for themselves.”  And, it appears they did just that.  The set was vertical, with many places to climb, swing and grab.  The three girls, dressed all in white were deeply physically engaged, having spent months working with improvisational movement techniques like viewpoints, Meyerhold, and Grotowski.  The children came to the theatre and went through a pre-show sensory/aesthetic experience that lead them into the theatre: a tunnel with textures, a “Hamster disco,” and lights.  At each point, children could choose to take another path around the sensory experience if they wanted.  They were empowered to make their own choices.

On entering the theatre, the actresses were already on stage, a disco ball rotated on the ceiling and the children could slide down a plastic slide before taking their seats on fuzzy faux fur mats.  Unlike traditional theatre that has a clear beginning, the beginning felt blurry, allowing the children, through various empowering sensory experiences, to slide effortlessly into the role of audience member.

One actress said the challenge was “combating adult preconceptions of what children enjoy and what is appropriate for them.”  And then the two actresses, in costume, did a gorgeous movement presentation for us.

What I found the most exciting about this project is that although the production was supported by an education team that worked with the children and created the pre and post-show experiences, the show itself was created by artists with very little knowledge of early childhood education.  Just enough humanity to understand that kids are smart, receptive, curious, and genuine, and that was enough to push this project forward with might.

Next Up:

  • Risking Innovation in Directing Training: A Presentation of Manifestos on the Academy’s Approach to Training Directors for the Future
  • Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Theatre: Support for Model Programs; Research Findings; and Collaborative Opportunities

Previously in Day Two:

Risking Innovation Day 2: The Glass Proscenium

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Now that I’ve recovered from NYC induced sensory overload, I figure it’s high time I gave you a full wrap up.  Let’s revisit Day 2, previously shared only in nutshell form.

The Glass Proscenium: The Current State of Women in Professional Theatre.

As I wrote in my last post, Holy Panel! The women included (forgive me if I miss anyone, I’m pulling this list directly from the conference schedule): Natka Bianchini (U. of Maryland-College Park), Jill Dolan (Princeton), Sara Warner (Cornell), Leigh Fondakowski (Tectonic Theatre Project), Nadine George-Graves (UCSD), Julia Jordan (freelance playwright/director), Sarah Lambert (Tectonic Theatre Project), Esther Kim Lee (U of Ill, Urbana-Champaign), Lisa Merrill (Hofstra), Priscilla Page (New WORLD Theatre/Umass Amherst), Sheri Wilner (freelance playwright).

Before I re-cap, I went and double-checked the meaning of “glass ceiling.” Looks like it was originally coined by Wall Street 20-odd years ago. It, as I remembered correctly, refers to the “unofficial” and “invisible” policies and non-policies that prevent women from gaining top positions, climbing career ladders, and receiving equitable wages. Since then, the phrase has been modified to fit various sub-cultures and minorities. The term “Glass Proscenium” does, indeed, seem fitting in a theatrical setting.

We started out by getting to hear Emily Sand’s recent thesis presented by her. This was well received, as expected, and I, personally, was thankful for it. I’m not an economist so when I went to read her thesis and look at the slides (when the original NYTimes articles covered the story) I felt a little lost in the numbers. I also had questions about the inherent flaws within arts studies due to the nature of judging art itself. This answered a few questions for me and opened the floor to some interesting comments from panelists.

First of all, there are two beginning theories accounting for WHY fewer plays written by women are produced: Human Capitol (Fewer plays are written in the first place and submitted to theatres.) and Discrimination (Gender bias prevents the production of plays written by women). Second, she used doollee.com to find some basic statistics about playwrights, gender, and the gender of characters in plays. According to Sand’s findings, women are more likely to write about women and they make up for it by writing about fewer characters. First of all, the stats at Doollee are far from a complete picture of women playwrights (which she admitted as a potential flaw) and secondly, to assert that they “make up for it” by writing plays with fewer characters is placing an assumption on choice. That’s probably grounds for yet another study.

Sands sent out 4 different scripts–and here’s what I was most curious about–written by established playwrights of both genders. My original thought when I read the study was “women and men write different plays; how does she account for that artistic factor?” It was nice to hear that she did. She included an unpublished script by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Lynn Nottage, who is a woman and black. The rest you can glean from articles: they were sent out with fake names to 250 theatres along with 18 questions concerning economic viability, audience likeability, artistic quality, etc. The results included clear stats that plays perceived to have been written by women, although considered equally artistic, were deemed as “lower overall quality” and with “poor economic prospects.”

There is no qualitative or quantitative evidence that audiences prefer plays written by men, but apparently artistic decision-makers are making that assumption. She continued to posit that scripts with male protagonists did far better than scripts with female protagonists. And she concluded with the poorly received quip “You may be better off trying to disguise your gender.” A well-placed line that hit home all to well and felt like salt poured into our existing scratch marks.

Esther Kim Lee responded:

She’s been taking informal surveys from women playwrights and of 51 submissions was able to use 49 playwrights to gather some additional information. Aged mostly 36-45, only one had a play produced on Broadway. Their success has an “upside version of what we perceive as success,” most plays had been produced at colleges and local community theatres with the least number being produced off-Broadway. Which led into self-perceived questions about how certain items had affected their careers as playwrights: 45% said gender, 38% race, and ethnicity was even higher than gender (sorry, no percentage was provided). She interpreted these findings to suggest that these playwrights were interested in finding a community in which to create their art.

She continued to ask about the importance of various items, of which she shared a few: the gender identity of the audience was the least important, 60% said the diversity of audience is important, 50% said a Broadway production is not important to them. Finally, 65% said it is not advantageous to be a minority when writing about which she shared many quotes which followed along the lines of it initially giving them an advantage based on being trendy but “when the novelty wears off” the Artistic Directors lose interest.

When these 49 women were asked to look at Emily Sand’s study, the responses were two-fold: 1 – “I’m not surprised” and 2 – “I’m not interested in mainstream Broadway productions.”

Here’s where I should interject and note that Sand’s study includes another part about economic impact. Because it is virtually impossible to get a hold of economic impact data from regional and small theatres which are by nature and definition non-profit, she included an economic impact study of Broadway. So, the ability of women playwrights to create revenue was based on Broadway productions. This is important to remember because it meant raising the question, “What IS the measure of success for women playwrights?”

Priscilla Page responded next:

She did even more informal questioning, gathering entirely qualitative anecdotes and opinions from women on FaceBook. She raised the initial doubt concerning using Broadway as a basis for measuring success. The doubt as o the effectiveness of Doollee.com as an accurate stats tool. As an example of success, Lynn Nottage just won the Pulitzer Prize for Ruined, and yet it continues to run on off-Broadway not Broadway. Furthermore, her company, New WORLD Theatre which produces 60% women-led projects just had its funding pulled.

Julia Jordan chimed in:

Plays about war and rape written by men are on Broadway, why shouldn’t Ruined go to Broadway?

Based on Sand’s Study: if these are the numbers here in NYC [with women’s plays on Broadway bringing in MORE money in LESS amount of time] why wouldn’t you think they match up elsewhere?

“Women are submitting to theatres that produce them.” So it’s impossible to determine whether there are fewer submissions by women at theatres because they don’t bother submitting to places that don’t produce them. [That last sentence is mine, not Jordan’s.] Agents only want to represent writers who make money, so they are unwilling to represent women playwrights which means they can’t get produced or published. [Furthermore, I just discovered from a colleague that most regional theatres no longer accept scripts that are not represented by an agent. So, if an agent won’t take you on because women aren’t produced, you can’t get produced to convince an agent to take you on. Self-perpetuating circle.]

Plus some TCG facts I didn’t know: Of the most successful plays in the past 10 years, 70% have female leads AND 70% of Pulitzer Prize winners have female leads.

Nadine George-Graves came next:

“This leads to many questions…tend to dance around speculating about reasons..” How about we cut to the chase and say, “This is what’s happening. What do you think?” This statement came with a collective chuckle of relief. Personally, I felt like we’d been doing a lot of dancing and not much action-taking. Action-taking beings with frank dialogue. She suggested we combine personal data and hunches to make “provocative statements that aren’t polite.”

She continued to suggest: Let’s look at history and see what’s happened in the past? Male playwrights can make the excuse that they “don’t write women well” but we can’t make that excuse and chose to write more about men anyways. As an historical example she noted that the first black professional baseball players had to be better than their white counterparts to be taken seriously. On Broadway, there’s still an “old boys network” and women don’t benefit from mentorship opportunities because of this. And the word she repeated the most? Hegemony. Hegemony. Hegemony.

Finally, she asked us, What are NEW avenues of intervention. Ah Ha! Here’s that Innovation theme finally cropping up.

Sarah Lambert continued the success discussion:

Is it “making a living”? And yet, how many playwrights actually make a living at writing plays? What are the stats on how many men versus women are making this playwriting a living? And how many of them are “independently wealthy”?

Sheri Wilner changed the focus:

She referred to an ad by a now defunct theatre company that invited women to bring their female friends along for a free ticket, which allowed their male friends to “opt-out” of women-centered plays. Is this a good thing for production, or detrimental to allow men to get out of watching women on stage?

Personally, I’m not sure this really applies. Considering we had already visited the fact that 70% of the most successful plays in the past ten years had female leads which means male audience certainly are watching women on stage instead of “opting out.”

Here’s where we finally started to head towards action…

Lisa Merrill suggested:

Let’s look at unconventional places that account women in history. Women have not been recorded in history due to its being considered non-essential. We need to find their stories in gossip, letters, and journals.

How internalized is sexism and gender bias: The assumption of the universality of the male story.

She is “inspired by groups who raise questions.” like “How do we get invested in working against our own interests?” [She’s referring to the above statements about self-perpetuating circles of catering to agents and assumption-laden producers and artistic directors.]

Susan Zeitler continued the action refrain:

Can we look at youth data? Since we know we have it?

And “How do we develop these young audiences to not replicate our current adult gender issues?”

Julia Jordan chimed in again: “Women are prophesizing that people will be discriminatory to protect their economic self-interest.”

Jill Dolan:

Finally, we get a response to the NYTimes coverage of Sand’s thesis which picked up on the anomaly that it appears as if female artistic directors are more likely to turn away plays written by women. She points out that they included this fact and expounded it into a “women hate women” theory: it’s all our fault that we don’t produce ourselves. When, in fact, most regional theatres are NOT headed by women. The artistic decisions are being made by men so this media statement does not hold its own when looking at the theatre industry as a whole.

[Don’t worry, folks. Almost done. Yes, this 90min discussion was long, fact-filled and very powerful. My post does not do its dialogue justice.]

“How can we keep it visible to people?” Continue the discussion so it doesn’t fall by the wayside and then is “found” again in five years…as if gender bias in theatre is a new problem that’s never been tackled before. Cultural presumptions about gender, race, etc still exist even with new national dialogue thanks in majority to the respective races of Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama.

How can we generate more stories?

“We have to work on all sorts of levels to make ideology change.”

Priscilla Page:

“We are responsible” for adding our work to history and “documenting oneself.”

The Panel stated:

We guess 80% of the people at this conference are women.

————-

As you can see, the discussion ended up focusing on Playwrights, but their challenge is our challenge. In fact, our challenge is not just one of theatre. Just today, the NYTimes put out another article on women, this time about women in military service. We started this fight a long time ago and we’re not there yet. We are far further along than when my mother was 30 and when her mother was 30, but how much farther can we get by the time my daughter is 30? What will the gender landscape be in 27 years?

And, where can you find all those female playwrights?

Your first job is to search locally. Just ask. Start conversations and find out for yourself. Welcome your doors to writers who are not represented by agents. Make a concerted effort (goal, even) to create a season that is made up equally of male and female playwrights.

For a list of emerging playwrights, you can check out the archive for the Jane Chambers Award run by the Women in Theatre Program.

Next Up:

  • Writing About Theatre Practice
  • Risking Theatre for the Very Young “Art, Education or Experimentation?”
  • Risking Innovation in Directing Training: A Presentation of Manifestos on the Academy’s Approach to Training Directors for the Future
  • Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Theatre: Support for Model Programs; Research Findings; and Collaborative Opportunties

 

Risking Innovation Day 2: Nutshells and Photos

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I am propping my eye lids open with rye crackers.  Yes, I’m really that tired.  Today was packed.

  • The Glass Proscenium: The State of Women in Theatre Today. Holy Panel.  These ladies are in the tops of the field and in the top of their game.  It was a good good panel.  I will report in full tomorrow when I’ve had time to disseminate.
  • The Falling Girls: Innovative Theatre for 4-6 Year Olds. Incorporating pre and post show sensory, kinesthetic and artistic sessions for the children.  A fantastically innovative approach to bringing them into the space, and a beautiful sample performance by two talented actresses.  The rye crackers are starting to crumble so you’ll have to wait for this one too.
  • Publishing Your Practice. Editors of three theatre journals told us how to get out writer’s game on.
  • Many Studies and Examples of Research that Prove that the Arts in Education and in Collaboration Make Us Whole People.  If I couldn’t write about the Falling Girls, there’s no way I can get into this one.

Since you’re not getting anything remotely resembling a re-cap today, feast your eyes on 2.5 days worth of photos:

Day One

Only at a theatre conference would there be actors rehearsing in the lobby and making weird whooping noises.

Howard Gardner

Check out the sneaks.  Holy ’80s, Batman!

Day Two

Glass Proscenium

Falling Girls

Risking Innovation Day 1: Directing, Debuting and Intelligencing

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Well, after my 24 hours of crazy hunger, elevator riding and luggage pulling, I finally made it back to the actual conference in one piece, registered and got me all settled.

I squeezed in two sessions which I will now mis-name because my huge conference booklet (it would be more apt to call it, instead, a medium-sized text book) is up in my dorm room and I’m not trudging all the way up to get it.  My photo uploader is there too so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for photos.  Oh, yes, I’m the geek with the huge camera who’s taking photos of random things.

Let’s see…

The Directer/Choreographer Relationship in a Non-Musical. I dropped in on this one unexpectedly since I skipped out on my original choice which I found it highly uninteresting.  This one, it turned out, was significantly more interesting.  Three Director/Choreographer pairs presented slides and videos of their work that used movement or dance in a non-musical and discussed how a Choreographer and Director relationship might work in such a situation.

The moderator and lead presenter was non-other than the woman I’ve been contacting via email about grad school next year!  Score!  I made sure to ask a couple questions (which was easy since it was a very interesting topic and they were genuine questions) and then said hello afterward.

All three pairs did a good job discussing their process and collaboration.  If you know my work, you know that I love incorporating movement and usually do so even when it’s not called for in the script.  I’ve never worked with a choreographer to create it, so now I’m inspired to do so in a future project.  I love to collaborate with designers so I imagine it can only be beneficial and exciting to have yet another artist with which to throw ideas around.

AATE New Guard Network Debut Panel. To be honest, I’m not sure why they’re called “New Guard” but they were all young professionals who have not presented at this conference before.  Four very interesting talks about their scholarly work:

  • the first uses video and sound media to work with children in a hospital who create their own stories about their lives.  This was really interesting and clearly beneficial but it was never made clear what his has to do with theatre.
  • the second discussed the uses of Facebook by middle and junior high students and how that intersects with theatre.  His general conclusion was that since there is no proof that social media is bad for students and there is proof that it actually increases real life social interactions within the community, then he figures he’ll go with the flow.  What he didn’t say, is how he actually uses facebook with the kids.  That’s what I was really interested in.
  • the third was a fantastically articulate and well-spoken young woman from Chicago who has been spear-heading, along with her colleague, a city-wide program to promote dialogue, integration and innovation among the disparate arts education groups in the city.  I’m envious of her ability to articulate her agenda; she has garnered dozens of high-profile advisory board members and is beginning to get actual funding, all in under a year.
  • the fourth speaker read her article concerning love in theatre: not the acting of love or telling of love, but the love from which stems the heart of a teacher who teaches applied theatre.  I will be reading up on P. Friere as a result; I’m unfamiliar with the author.

Keynote Speaker: Howard Gardner.  I have to admit, this is what initially drew me to this conference.  I grew up with his ideas of intelligence.  Many similar ideas were integrated into the curriculums of the alternative learning schools I grew up attending.  I became even more interested when directing Electra last year.  I, for the first time, realized that I had an actress who was far more cerebral than I and I needed to learn to work within her style of learning rather than shove mine on top of hers.  I started to experiment with new ways of communicating ideas so she could comprehend them more fully.  After a time, it worked.  I began to wonder if anyone had really experimented with using the Multiple Intelligences Theory to teach acting and if it might just make the inside/outside acting debate entirely obscure.  However, I have found his books hard to understand so getting to hear it straight from the source proved to be too much of a draw to stay away.

He was an excellent speaker and held my attention easily.  He gave us a quick run-down of the history of measuring intelligence (IQ and standardized testing),  and defined Intelligence:  A potential to process information a certain way that is of value to a certain culture.  Wow, far more open-ended than I thought.

He rain down the list of intelligences, with an example for each.  At the start of the list are linguistic and logical/mathical which is, Mr. Gardner says, what Western education and intelligence is measure on so “as long as you stay in school, you’ll think you’re smart.”  Did I mention that his excellent speaking also included a very fine sense of humor?

I think the hardest part for the audience to hear came with the heading Do Arts Make You Smarter?  Because the scientific answer is “no.”  It’s exactly what the Wallace Foundation published in 2006 (this reference is from me, not Mr. Gardner).  There a plenty of intrinsic values that we all can find through anecdotal evidence and see through simple observation, but the research clearly indicates that there is no evidence that doing music will make you better at math.  This is because the research itself is inherently flawed.  Mr. Gardner posits that they are measuring the wrong end-point.  Of course music won’t make you better at math, but it will make you more aware of listening, feeling, and finding rhythms which make you a whole person.  And then he gave us the good news, he has a colleague who is being published later this year who has done research into Theatre and Empathy in children ages 8 to teen.  And the evidence is in..doing theatre makes children understand empathy!  We will finally have some proof as to what we all know.  So, Mr. Gardner continued, the idea is not to attempt to apply the arts to subjects and measure their affect, but discover what it is that the arts actually do and then find applicable ways to use those findings to create whole people.

His final message, though, was the most important, “I could care less what intelligences you use as long as you get to do what you want to do.”

And, then, of course, he pitched his next book.  And, yes, I went and shook his hand.  I hate doing stuff like that but my mom would have been very disappointed since she likes to remind me that he came and observed us at our alternative-learning school and then gave a talk in which he used me as an example as a specific intelligence.  He was very uninterested in my childhood story even though he took a prominent part.  Alas.

And so ends day one.

Stay tuned for day two and some pics.

Women On Top

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This past Sunday, the Board of my budding company, GAN-e-meed Theatre Project met to discuss, among other things, the mission.  We’re new so we need to define, enhance, and pinpoint what exactly we want to do.  We all agreed, in a nutshell that we “advance the role of women in theatre.”  What comes after that…precisely…we’re still working on.

Of course, along with this discussion came the question:  Where’s the proof that women theatre artists need advancement?  We all know that there are far fewer roles for actresses than there are actresses to fill them, but what about directors, designers, technicians?  Where’s the proof?  I was able to point to anecdotal references to a study published in 2003, citing that only %20 of theatre directors are women.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the actual study (That’s next on my list) but I did find a survey of studies published by the Fund for Women Artists in 2002, and an article published by tcg in February of 2008 about The Women’s Project and the reasons around its existence. Both articles include the aforementioned decidedly small percentage:  According to TCG, in the 2000-2001 season of the 1900 member theatres, 23% of shows were directed by women and 20% had “women on the writing team.”  These numbers actually decrease in the following season (2001-2002) down to 16% and 17% respectively.

Furthermore, I pointed out that as an attendee at this Year’s Elliott Norton Awards in Boston, I was pleased to note that the percentage of women nominees for fringe/small companies was high (sometimes 100%) but as soon as the budgets went up, their representation declined proportionally.  And I believe I can say this is simply because fewer women are hired at theatres with larger budgets.  You can go here for the results of this year’s awards.

This trend was reiterated just this weekend at the Tony’s and deftly summarized by blogger Laura Collins in her recent post, Where the Boys Are: At the Podium.

Whatever the reasons (and I’m sure a few good feminists can point you the way if you’re not entirely sure on your own) there is a definite lack of female representation among directors, writers and designers.  I know they’re out there, so it’s not for lack of trying; it’s simply for lack of hiring.