The Arts Knight Returns
Meanwhile in St. Paul
By god, you've done it! Well, 40 of you did, anyway. Yes, the Knight Foundation just gave out $1.29 million in grants to 40 projects for round two of the St. Paul Knight Arts Challenge. Welcome, all 40 of you, to the vaguely-defined world of creative placemaking.
A good deal of those were theater and dance projects:
(1) Alberto Justiano from Teatro del Pueblo will be producing an update on Romeo and Juliet set in St. Paul and recasting the warring Capulets and Montagues as latino Garcias and Hmong Vangs.
(2) Ice skate/dance/performance group Brownbody will be rolling out a "new production that combines figure skating, Afro-modern dance, live vocals and Ida B. Wells’ speeches".
(3) Dangerous Productions will be invading St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood with "a yearlong series of street-level pop-up performances and adventurous educational opportunities".
(4) Flamenco dance group De Danza Espanola will be organizing "a traveling flash mob of flamenco singers and dancers creating Christmas and spring processions".
(5) Full Circle Theater (a group that features former Mu Performing Arts director Rick Shiomi) will be producing a new show exploring "how theater has changed the lives of diverse St. Paul artists."
(6) Kaotic Good will be creating a performance piece about fear of water and "the disproportionate numbers of people of color who cannot swim".
(7) Playwright Katie Ka Vang, will be producing a new play about severe illness, based on her experiences with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
(8) Levi Weinhagen, who, among other things, is one half of Comedy Suitcase, will be bringing a literal comedy suitcase to life with a small mobile comedy stage that will make appearances around St. Paul.
(9) Political improvisation group Theater of Public Policy has a grand scheme involving the "delivery of improvisational performance telegrams to offices, parks and homes".
(10) Dance group Flying Foot Forum will be organizing "a roving, summer adventure where the audience travels to performances at six Lowertown locations, culminating in a group song and dance party".
Congratulations to all the winners! You better get started on fundraising, because now you have to match that sweet grant money dollar-for-dollar. But, hey, it's all part of the creative placemaking process, right?
In the meantime, Creative Minneapolis' foray into "creative placemaking" is doing something, I think. I mean I'm pretty sure. At least I'm still getting emails from them.
Be one of the cool kids
The hippest thing in town right now is to get new leadership for your theater company (Well, that and opening brewpubs just everywhere), and now it's time for another hep cat to step up. Bloomington's Artistry has a new Producing Artistic Director in Benjamin McGovern.
"What's Artistry?" you say? Come on, guys, don't you remember? That's what we're supposed to call the Bloomington Theatre and Art Center now. It's like how the Minneapolis Institute of Arts wants you to call it "Mia", or how Gordon Sumner decided he should be called Sting, or when your little sister starting smoking cloves and insisting that you call her just "M". (You're not fooling anyone, Marissa.)
You might remember Ben McGovern from way back when he was the associate director of studio programming at the Guthrie. (He resigned from that job in 2011 because he said he was "an artist, not an arts administrator", but I guess that didn't take.) While he was at the Guthrie, McGovern was key in getting the Dowling studio to open its doors to small local groups, so I'll be curious to see what he does with the reins of Artistry, nestled, as it is, in the embrace of a larger performing arts center.
Speaking of arts centers…
Hey, you know what's really hard to run? Performing arts centers. Balancing the beautiful mission of involving and enriching their communities with the thorny problem of paying for a big building is more difficult than juggling chainsaws on a tightrope. Unfortunately, it's usually the building that wins (as I've discussed before). If you want to know how it is that the building usually wins, Duncan Webb at the Clyde Fitch Report has an article up all about how easy it is for a big shiny new performing arts building to spiral into both artistic and financial mediocrity.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of arts center that didn't need to constantly compromise on its vision in order to pay the bills? And while we're dreaming, wouldn't it be great if unicorns strode up and down the streets dispensing double-chocolate chunk ice cream that cured cancer?
Well, Argentina has supplied us with a model (for the arts center, not the ice cream). That country recently opened a gigantic repurposed government building as a completely free public arts center, effectively declaring access to the arts as a public good and a right.
Huh… I'd like my unicorn now.
The proper thing for you to be mad about
Aren't you tired of not having something to be outraged about? Dammit, I am!
Fortunately, I have two major controversies for you to enmesh yourselves in, and I'll let you decide for yourself which one is your personal cause du jour:
(a) Way back, oh, say, three weeks ago, I mentioned in passing a yellow face production of The Mikado in New York that was cancelled after people called it out as racist. I thought this would blow over pretty quickly, especially considering that we just went through this exact same thing last year with a production in Seattle, and nothing really changed.
Boy was I wrong. A lot of people in the theater community have written about this latest Mikado, and fewer and fewer of them are willing to give Gilbert and Sullivan a pass this time around. Heck, HowlRound commissioned a whole series of articles about it, and you know that they never go overboard in discussing anything to death.
So, once the anger has worn off, what are the takeaways from it?. Is it time to *gasp* rewrite Gilbert and Sullivan?!
Well, according to the people who write comments on these articles, no it is not. Also, according to the comments, they're not racist. You're just too sensitive, and you need to lighten up, you big sissies.
(b) Then there was this thing I mentioned two weeks ago about Oregon Shakespeare Festival's ambitious project to translate Shakespeare's plays into more modern English. I was so sure that this story would float away pretty quickly, but plenty of shouty people in the theater community have reacted to the news as if OSF were planning on beating their mothers to death with flaming copies of a bad quarto.
Theater makers used to mess around with Shakespeare's words all the time, but somehow these scripts (which are mostly patched together out of multiple, sometimes contradictory, sources) have been turned into sacred texts, and now, apparently, you're just stupid and wasteful for trying to make them sound remotely like how actual modern English speakers speak.
Never mind the fact that OSF's project actually began with the pilot project to update Timon of Athens, the Shakespeare play that nobody does unless they're forced to by some silly pledge to produce all of the Bard's work. That "translated" script was produced at Alabama Shakespeare Festival last season, and it got really good reviews.
But, of course, the comments sections will tell you that this will just destroy theater, Shakespeare and the English language all in one fell swoop.
