Effort. Webster’s defines effort as “work done by the mind or body: energy used to do something.” I spend more time than you can imagine thinking about, analyzing, and trying to minimize effort required by a body to achieve anything – including the effort required to do nothing. My senses...
education
We are not doing a great job of teaching our actors to care for their instruments properly. This is clear to me when I read (regularly) about an actor in a particularly difficult physical role answering questions with an attitude of “of course my back hurts every day,” “I have...
I would wager that, when faced with a show you don’t know, you do something similar to the math I do. You cobble together the basic geometry of the show from the elements you do know. In the spring of 2014 I had some of that math to do… The central...
Actors are not alone in needing to manage nerves, but compared to most professions, yours is unique in terms of how frequently you are placed in nerve inducing situations in order to get the job. Think of the engineers, nurses, teachers, etc. you know, and then of the frequency they...
The 2014-15 theatre season is underway, causing me, desperately, to try not to fret over photos of strangers in first table reads as they begin to train their instruments to say those words (repetitively) throughout the rehearsal process and within eight shows a week (plus student matinees). I see actors...
A production of the musical Monty Python’s Spamalot, slated for the South Williamsport Junior/Senior High School in Pennsylvania in 2015, was canceled by the school’s principal due to “homosexual themes.” In case you haven’t been following the story, you might check out Howard Sherman’s overview at Slate for background, Drew...
For many viewers, this week’s episode of Smash was their first introduction to the word dramaturg. Unfortunately for the TV show’s musical, Bombshell, (and for those of us who need to re-explain what we do to our friends and families) the function of dramaturg was misapplied. Many of my colleagues...
Terror and Courage, Hope and Art We can’t claim to engage our communities in important conversations if we run away from them One of the plays to generate the most interest at our recent National Showcase of New Plays was Pluto, by the prolific and supremely-talented Steve Yockey. An alum...
No matter how deeply you bury yourself in new plays and new play creation and theory, theatre remains largely a reflection of where we’ve been (check your local listings). Right now I’m in two shows that combined are more than 800 years old. So the tone of this Culturebot article...
Biodiversity is the practice of cultivating and sustaining a broad array of species in a given ecosystem. The opposite is monoculture. Monoculture is the practice of limiting species in a given ecosystem. Agriculturalists and eco-warriors promote biodiversity because they have found (and history has proven, see: Potato famine) the prevalence...