Slow Down and Speak Up

On sound reinforcement in the theatre.

The new theatre season begins in schools and colleges, communities, and professional stages everywhere. As theatre faculty and artist I've seen and been associated with a great many wonderful productions - amateur, academic, professional - with many production concepts and approaches. I've seen performances in many venues and seating situations.

If there is one single personal frustration with my live theatre experiences as an audience member, it is the audibility, comprehensibility and sound of the dialogue. This is necessarily a theatre issue. It has little bearing on performance for film and video, which is never live and the connection between sound and performance is manipulated externally.

Sound is a mundane concern in the theatre, but often the most vexing. My hearing generally has been average, comparable to most theatre patrons. Sometimes the sound problem is the nature of the venue or the fault of the halls, but in the end it really is the job of the performers, regardless of the hall. Reinforcement can make a difference if it is "transparent," that is, not evident.

[Virginia State Theatre. Sound reinforcement is a clear requirement.] Established and working professionals in the theatre understand and correct for this. They "ring the hall" and gauge the response time, listen to fellow actors, and then adjust their performance for pace and volume. Untrained actors typically are steeped in "naturalism" and the dialogue in film and video. Compounded by anxieties, two fundamentals of live public performance get lost: pace and clarity. They speak too softly and/or too rapidly. Give them dialect and they make a run for it to show their proficiency.

As an amateur once-performer, I, too, fell to a belief that my proficiency and prowess was to be measured by how facile I could speak and act, and that this was more "natural." I thought that the internal life of the character ruled all, and that it was up to the audience to receive and comprehend it. If the art is there, the artist has done his job.

Just ... Wow. This is never the failure of the audience. Ever. Ever.

Excellent directors will give the note, but in terms of directorial concerns, "is it loud enough" doesn't make the list. Speaking too rapidly usually is overlooked as well, with the actor perhaps getting an occasional note questioning the choice to do so, not considering it an error. The director is preoccupied with interpretation, relationships, timing, staging, and leading the production team. Typically, she also is the production executive, tasked with logistical planning, promotion and public relations responsibilities. An experienced director may have no experience at teaching acting or voice production, the actor's most fundamental competence. It IS the actor's job.

(Manchester England - "All My Sons") Student actors at university level often are quite wound up. Remembering, relating, reacting, and investing in character is a challenge. Working in dialect further complicates matters. Still, they also need to slow down, speak up and shape their voice to be heard and understood clearly - in character - on their own. It is the final and most fundamental aspect of performance - what the audience receives aurally.

Reinforcement is a complicated answer. Even the best systems generalize the source and homogenize the character of the sound. It is pointedly louder than the actor, while changing the vocal quality and usually the spatial placement significantly. In musicals reinforcement usually is necessary simply to sing over the orchestra. Many large halls were never built for natural stage voice. Sophisticated audio imaging systems can be timed to allow the natural voice to lead the reinforcement by micro-seconds and balance multiple speakers to place the voice in the space. These systems are an elaborate answer to a human problem.

One common failure of reinforcement occurs when the actor relies upon it: "I don't have to speak up because I am mic'ed." Perhaps we'll hear you, but it won't sound "transparent," as most efforts to sound natural seek. It won't really come from where you are on stage, and the sound quality will contain frequencies that would be lost with direct voice at a distance. Over-driving the mic can distort, but it does need solid sound input. Often weak vocal performance by the actors results in hideously overdriving the reinforcement and everything comes from speakers at movie theatre volume levels. These and other factors influence performance audio quality.

People more qualified than I in voice production and directing may find my concerns misplaced. Nevertheless, character voice and song are fundamental competencies for stage actors. Whether I can hear and understand them well often deserves more attention, and reinforcement can be both a benefit and a crutch. It is not a matter of my competence as a play-goer. Ever.

Arthur Dirks

October 3, 2017

Art and History and People

When we think art doesn't matter....

The Walker Art Center and Museum in Minneapolis has come under fire for a very large installation called "Scaffold" (2012) by artist Sam Durrant recently installed on the Center's grounds. The wood and steel installation layers forms of seven historical gallows for US sanctioned executions until 2006. One section evokes the hanging of 38 Dakota native American men in Minnesota by Lincoln's presidential order after the US-Dakota war in 1862, the largest mass execution in US history. The executions incidentally occurred the same week as the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.

As nearly as I can ascertain, the installation is only the gallows. No ropes or symbols of those hanged can be seen in photos, although there must be some narrative aspect, even if it's just a label.

Indian wars were a significant concern in expanding America. One source lists 17 Indian wars in the 1800s, five each in the 1700s and 1600s. New Englanders will find historical parallels to King Philip's war of 1675 that burned and killed through settled villages in Massachusetts for a year-and-a-half, until the capture and beheading of Metacommet.

The execution of the Dakota is considered one of the greatest atrocities in American capital punishment history. That event is not alone in the artwork installation. Six other complex scaffolds in the exhibit placed around the Walker's grounds memorialize the executions of John Brown, the Lincoln Conspirators, four other Americans, and Saddam Hussein. Native Americans find the work insensitive and see no parallel in their treatment, in that their efforts were in defence of their lands and lives.

The actual history of the wars with native Americans in Minnesota is complicated with different groups at different times. Thousands of settlers were attacked in wars driving them into forts and forcing them to abandon harvests and homes throughout Minnesota and the Dakotas in the 1860s, just prior to the Civil War.

Walker director Olga Visio responded in an open letter to a publication devoted to native American news and arts. She regrets that they did not anticipate better how the work would be received by native American audiences. She first encountered the installation in Europe and saw a powerful artistic statement about capital punishment, histories of violence, and colonialist hegemony.

One must have some sympathy for the Walker, which fundamentally is an art museum. Art is a complicated matter, no longer confined to design and craft, inspiration and vision. It is culturally invested, and museums struggle to make aesthetic and critical connections while representing history and culture with sensitivity. Our times are fraught with conflict over who has the right to tell a story. The Walker is casting a critical eye and provoking thought about the enormity of the action in the past and present, to execute those who war against the state. The exhibit touches on the larger question of capital punishment, itself.

I have sympathy for the native Americans. They are in position to feel broadly connected, if not blamed, for the history of resistance to advancing Euro-American civilization. They rightly feel their heritage might be attacked or dismissed. Any challenge also risks being generalized into a categorical critique of the race. It's a good thing that they are vigilant and challenge easy narratives. To paraphrase Red Green, we all really do need to be in this together.

Arthur Dirks

18 September 2017

Recorded Music Collecting

This is a musing about music collecting evolution, the mystical appeal some people find for vinyl over cds, and a note on collecting practice.

For a few years now, I've been reading about a fetish that privileges vinyl over cds. There are technical reasons that might support this: vinyl is analog and continuous physically encoded sound, but cd's are digital bits that are read and interpreted in sequence electronically. Some people claim to be able to hear the difference on a high quality system, pronouncing the vinyl "warmer," and a modest vinyl resurgence seems to come and go, usually at steep prices.

Savvy folks know an mp3 is an encoding that loads the entire digital file for play. It is compressed at variable densities, but usually quite small. A wav file typically is less compressed, but it, too, is sequenced digitally in "samples." Freeware low-end encoding and home-grown editing may not produce the quality of the best commercial encoding, but it can be at least as good as many off-label "collections" that are burned en-masse in limited runs from original sources of questionable quality.

For several years now, Diane and I have a practice of buying a half-dozen new original issue cds for each other as Christmas gifts. We do have our preferences, but we try to be generally open. We feel a little like we're driving a Model A in the Tesla era. With streaming and its convenience, the shrinking of brick-and-mortar music retailers like Tower Records and the fading of "alternative radio" as universities sell off their frequencies, a paradigm shift of sorts certainly has occurred - or evolved.

I began collecting singles retired from juke boxes. My father bought them in mixed boxes from the vendor. It was a great source of obscure artists and b-side gems which, incidentally, had received very little play. Record stores were rare to non-existent, but music stores sold records. I ordered several singles and albums by mail through the music store in the city. Like many others I joined a record club and wound up with expensive albums I didn't like because I didn't submit the refusal.

Diane shares my interest and we have schlepped our increasing collection of music from living place to place over the years.

In the 1970s We discovered used music at Salvation Army and Goodwill. Often bare vinyl, often ethnic and foreign, rootsy R&B or obscure pop, and always somewhat over a decade old - sold for 50 cents to a buck when new music was over $8 everywhere else. I developed a procedure and tools for washing and cleaning and sleeving them. We'd prowl used record shops we passed when travelling. We scored some really great music we would not have bought at new prices in immigrant cities like Omaha, Sioux City, Kansas City, Colorado Springs, Milwaukee, Chicago, Hartford, Portland, Boston, Brockton, New Bedford, Fall River and Providence.

"Alternative radio" was not a real thing except near universities. We made careful collections on reel-to-reel tape to accompany our lives and our parties. Those were mixtures of jazz, regional pop, and evolving hip hop. We moved to cassettes and then home-burned cds, with elaborate box art and labels. Often they need to be re-burned after a few years of play, so I archive the files together.

There are a couple points here. One is the slow fade of this audio model. A few years ago I sold 3 large boxes of vinyl. We have many more albums and maybe we'll digitize some, but we don't really play the vinyl. The CD model is becoming less durable for music sales. The time may come when consumer music will not be sold on physical media.

We may all lament a second paradigm shift, which is the broadcast audio medium itself. Broadcast radio - AM and FM - remains a significant advertising medium. It may be heard mostly in commuting cars, offices and other work places. Commercial music programming tends not to be adventurous, and talk tends to dominate radio. Internet "stations," trying to displace home audio, offer a variety of music and personalized programming free with ads and by subscription. The MTV effect is a thing of the past, and exposure and promotion of consumer music is becoming increasingly fraught.

All things said, I think we're still ahead of European radio for popular music programming. Our broadcast paradigm is entirely different.

13 September 2017

Historical Pageants

I've been thinking about historical pageantry this week - with new beginnings, lots of hope, lots of promise as the season turns to the new academic year.

As a culture we stage re-enactments and re-creations of past events as commemoration of our historical roots. Crowds today flock to "King Richard's Fair" and such fanciful re-creations of the late 1100s in England for novel entertainment. But there also are serious hobbyist re-enactors who focus on authenticity of Revolutionary War and Civil War battles, down to study of an historical person. Over the years, commemorative mock battles have been features of various festival occasions around the world.

The post-Civil War period in America was a muscular and optimistic commercial era. The west was being populated, the expansion was being consolidated and Americans needed to celebrate their achievements. Periodic grand pageantry was the answer for the times, as was seen in Victorian England and Europe.

In 1800 the US was 17 years old, contained east and south of the Ohio River, plus Ohio newly added. The total citizen population of 5.3 million included 1 million slaves. A century passed and by 1900 there were over 76 million Americans spread from coast to coast. The cities in America mounted big commemorative events, celebrating their founders and founding.

In 1900 learning and knowledge meant experience with classical sources. In secondary school the classics were enforced study for a disciplined mind. Latin was a graduation requirement, not just for Catholics. Learning was dominated by reading and recitation. Memorization was highly valued. The Victorian love of symbolism and metaphor pervaded literature. It all was a formula for pageantry and grand symbolic gestures, usually with Greek or Roman themes. Some high schools had exercises with costumes and ceremonies conducted in Latin, typically celebrating virtue and honor.

Communities also established periodic festivals celebrating their own founding in the national expansion of the 1800s. Wrapped in community boosterism and celebrating growth, they featured pageant re-enactments, commercial preening, and always a parade or "procession." These were - and many continue to be - offered on a long cycle of once in five or ten years. The celebrations commemorate early settlers and public figures in the town and region, their hardships and their notable achievements, in many cases not a century past in the 1950s.

Older sections of the country had their own celebrations. Hathitrust listing of historical New England founding festival pageants includes six in Massachusetts 1897-1916, others in Vermont and Connecticut. By that time those states were approaching 250 years old.

There are contemporary re-enactor groups today that focus on particular wars and battles. Participants may research specific historical characters and authenticity is highly valued. These differ greatly from the community boosterism of the founding pageants.

I have a particular pageant memory from the early 1950s in Kansas of seeing my father, as one of Coronado's soldiers in a skirmish with Indians, had fallen from a horse on the football field. He was a farm boy, although not a horseman. The horse was spooked by the shiny cuirass and clamshell helmet he wore - it looked like a foreign creature on his back. My father was unhurt, but it stopped the battle for a time. The field was full of faux-Indians and make-believe conquistadors. The grandstands were full of everybody else in several towns around.

We have many distractions today, with multiple broadcast media, streamed movies and serialized entertainment, social media and other online resources. It's a far different entertainment environment than the early 20th Century. The sense of community is challenged as people select a home for other reasons. The broad range of media makes organizing perspectives difficult, and the pace of living makes broad participation problematic.

Historic celebrations today tend to be much more nuanced in interpreting events through modern American thought. Treatment of Indians and non-Caucasians is particularly difficult for some historical narratives. With a few years of retrospection, it does not appear that the turn to the 21st Century exhibited quite the robust pageantry and assertiveness as the beginning of the 20th.

Arthur Dirks

04 Sept 2013

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Artistic Fringe

For theatre people, the greatest theatre experience on the planet may be the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, conducted each summer in Scotland since 1947. Theatre artists and organizations from around the world, big and small, pro and am, conventional and unconventional, gather for the month of August to present to the greatest crowd of theatre patrons ever. Lots of street performance and side-show work, of course, but some quite meaningful in content.

I've never attended but have followed it. The 2017 Edinburgh festival is gone as of this weekend, but in 2018 it will run August 3-27.

The Fringe began in 1947 when eight groups were refused performances at the newly formed Edinburgh International Festival. They performed on the streets, the "fringe" of the main event. 2017 marked the 70th anniversary of these groups' defiance, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is now the (self-proclaimed) largest arts festival in the world. The online program lists some 700 events.

Nobody is denied entry. The nature of the fringe events vary from generally traditional small-cast or one-person works that are quite provocative, to larger scale events that might engage and incorporate the audience. From images of the festival, it also includes many street acrobats and jugglers, rope walkers, flame eaters and the like.

Several years ago there was an attempt at a Boston Fringe. It didn't get far, I think because there was no concentration of venues and events. I attended a few productions listed, but the venues were all over the larger Boston area and poorly promoted. The few shows I saw were somewhat unconventional and fairly well put together, but poorly attended as I saw them. Other major cities likely have more organized fringe efforts.

University theatre can be the most exciting theatre around, and the annual regional festivals sponsored by The Kennedy Center offer some unconventional work that is quite good. Annual high school festivals very often have conceptually exciting pieces, as I've learned from years of judging them. There's quite significant festival cross-fertilization among schools. It's more difficult to find theatres, players and audiences to support that work outside educational environments. The EMACT community theatre organization in Massachusetts maintains a festival for committed groups that also features interesting work and theatre ideas developed primarily for competition.

There continues to be something vaguely called "experimental theatre," a term that once had some actual meaning, when most theatre was conventionally scripted stories with conventional characters - today's TV mysteries and sitcoms. Those experiments largely have yielded their results and much has been incorporated into convention. We have learned to become sceptical of strangeness for it's own sake, while at the same time celebrating things that are different because they are different.

American Repertory Theatre notably has always had a reputation for unconventional works under Brustein, Orchard, and now Diane Paulus. ART's audience-centered cabaret event called The Donkey Show is quite popular. Other theatres routinely take unconventional approaches to works. Such shows as Blue Man Group have become popular, which have much to do with theatre and nothing to do with the drama.

I reflect on John Lahr's 1973 tome Astonish Me about the experimental theatre at the time. The Edinburgh Fringe festival pushes to astonish us. It's easy to be astonished by what is racially/sexually/politically/religiously offensive to us. But we still have the capacity to be astonished by art. And acrobats.

Arthur Dirks

August 26, 2017

Tugging Freshmen

We approach the season when people are scrambling to ready for school. Memories of early college experiences make brief amusement in our lives.

When I (first) attended Fort Hays State -then- College in the mid-1960s, I was part of a routine freshman humiliation - the Freshman-Sophomore tug-of-war. A friend from another town I had known over the years through scouting and DeMolay was a mover and shaker, and he brought me on as part of what today might be called his "posse." We ramped up a campaign for him as freshman class president, which had student senate positions and other perks to hand out. An election was held the first weeks of classes, and my friend won handily among people who barely knew each other

By tradition, on Homecoming morning, a sophomore team and a freshman team face off in a tug-of-war across a Big Creek tributary that ran through campus. It was hardly the magnitude of the modern day tug-of-war between LeClaire, Iowa, and Port Byron, Illinois, residents across the Mississippi River, but it was a festive humbling of last year's high school seniors. The creek was a 15-foot-wide water course through the campus and countryside, often nearly dry but flowing gently in fall - mostly about 2 feet deep with a very muddy bottom you'd sink half-way to your knees

My friend, as class president, and I put together a team of fellow freshmen we had gotten to know from towns in the region through scouting, church retreats and various high school activities. Six guys in all. Calculating traction and weight, I wasn't the best choice, but it was more about rewarding supporters than winning the tug-of-war

[{1910 East Oregon State tug of war.]

All excited about doing this, we strategized on what to wear and the best for traction. It all had a very festive feel and we were festive as you could be at 10:00 AM. I remember that I wore shorts, T-shirt and boots, because the creek bank was dense mud. On Homecoming Saturday morning we gathered early as the crowd was beginning to show up for the 10:00 event. It was a bright, clear October day with temperature in the 60s. We stood around on our side of the bank, shivering a little in morning chill, excited in anticipation. The rope had been laid across the stream.

At 10:00, five guys came over the embankment. They were all business, in their jeans and white T's and boots. They said nothing, walked over to the rope, picked it up, and waited for the signal. I think they wore shades, didn't talk or high-five or greet anybody. On our side, we picked up the rope, too, and dug our feet into the muddy embankment.

The signal was given. The guys on the other bank, counted out "One, Two, Three!" and hauled our freshman butts, in our gaudy shorts and random T's and tennis shoes, right into the water. We dug our heels into the mud and slid right in. Then they dropped the rope, turned around and walked away, the epitome of cool. We stood up and staggered through the mud back to the bank, slopping mud off our elbows and butts, to the very happy jeers of the crowd.

As school life transpired, I never participated in campus politics and my friend and I drifted apart. But that tug of war was a fun introduction to campus life.

Long Fade of Pool Halls

Recently, Diane and I stopped by a billiards parlor for a few games of pocket pool. Willaby's is a clean well managed room with a dozen or more tables in Swansea on Rt. 6, a 40 minute ride from Taunton. We're pretty rusty players, but I was thinking how much this differs from Schwein's, where I learned to play. The tables and the room are quite different from where I miss-spent too many hours in my late high school years.

Pool-playing long suffered a bad reputation. Think of Music Man, and historic community concerns for most male activities besides athletics. Bowling managed to re-brand itself, but pool-playing was consigned to barroom culture and suffered classist social prejudice. It gained some cachet in postwar because military dayrooms had well-used pool tables.

Schwein's was a standard mainstreet store-front, big glass windows and an inset door. In one of the window spaces was a barber chair, manned by one of the brothers, keeping eyes with his customers on passing life on Main Street. The rest of the space was the pool hall run by his brother.

The room had a bare wood floor with chairs and benches lined up against the walls, and a drink rail about head height around the room. Several cue racks were on the walls. A small bar in back - Kansas was "3.2 at 18" at the time.

There were two rows of tables - a billiards table, a pocket pool table, and 6 snooker tables with bright lights above. Wires ran across the room about 8 feet above the floor between tables. They were strung with wood beads for scoring, that you moved with a cue stick.

One paid by the game or rack. I think it was 10 cents for pocket pool and 20 for snooker. There was a "rack man" who hung out in the bar area and collected the money and re-racked the balls for each game. Or you could pay by the hour to practice if tables were open.

Most people today only know pocket pool, with striped and solid numbered balls. It is a modest sized table, and the two-ball-wide pocket openings have angled bumpers so you can bank a ball in. We routinely referred to the game as "slop." Mostly that table was played by beginners and people waiting for a snooker table to open up - or for a haircut.

[Early 1900s pool hall. Quite typical of all until the re-branding as "clean, well lighted places".]

Many people have never seen a true billiards table except on television. It is larger by a foot or so each way than a pocket pool table and it has no pockets. The game is played by two players with one red and two white balls. Each player owns a white ball (one has a red dot) and scores by touching the other two balls with his, usually requiring 3 cushion-bounces between the touches. It is not a high-scoring or speedy game and requires good skills.

Snooker was the preferred game by far. A large table, same size as billiards, but with smaller balls than pocket pool and only ball-and-half-wide pockets that have rounded bumpers. The game starts with a triangle of red balls and numbered balls spotted around the table. There is an arc limiting the placement of the breaking ball. You sink a red ball, then as high a numbered ball as you can. The numbered ball returns to table until the reds are gone, then numbered balls go down in sequence. Scoring is one point for a red ball and face value for a numbered ball. You maintain count by moving the beads strung above with your cue stick.

In terms of difficulty, snooker requires much more precision than pocket pool. It's not a very good game for taking out frustrations. Three-cushion billiards particularly is really quite difficult and does not reward frustration well. Compared to pocket pool, billiards is like chess to checkers. Snooker is a happy middle ground.

My nostalgia for this is mixed. It's cool to have had that experience, but there's little motivation to be good at it today. Three-cushion billiards and snooker are more demanding than my interest could sustain. In fact, I was pretty terrible at pocket pool today. It rewards practice. Diane enjoys the play, so we'll probably hit Willaby's again.

Arthur Dirks. August 13, 2017

Miniature Worlds

The town library in Ness City, Kansas, was a small affair in the 1950s. I remember it in my grade school years as a stand-alone building that was standard storefront architecture of the times. The librarian was a polite and encouraging older woman. I don't remember much about the collection, but what fascinated me were the dioramas. A row of a half-dozen lighted boxes along one wall modeled scenes depicting the early days of the area, mostly illustrating native American activities and settlements. There also was one showing white settlers building a prairie frame house. I spent so much time studying them that I was warned to turn out the light switch in each.

Several decades later, in graduate school for theatre design, I was introduced to the Thorne Rooms. These are a kind of diorama plugged in, but people are mostly absent. There are 68 of them at the Art Institute of Chicago, exquisitely rendered in about 1" scale, often including lighting, depicting mostly opulent interiors of different periods and styles.

As a sometime model railroader, more interested in the art of the layout than the operation and equipment, I was fascinated by these rooms. As stage designer they became great research sources and I visited the Institute rooms several times, whenever I got to Chicago. In detail and finish they go far beyond what I produced for designs, but they always represented a far-off goal in presentational model art.

It's interesting to me to think about why these exist. For theatre purposes, the value is direct and clear. Something will be built to reflect that model, and other artists and performers create their work in harmony with it.

But the dioramas have another purpose. They reify in miniature something that may exist no longer in the modern world. They share an experience and understanding of a place and time in ways that closely resemble reality. As three-dimensional miniatures, they convey a sense of space and allow one to grasp the whole of the design in a state of perfection. So, it is not just the subject of the miniature, but also the nature of the miniature itself that can be appreciated.

None of my theatre models rose to this level of care and finish, though often the goal was there. The model is not the art, it's the idea of the art. But the process of model-making is important for making design judgements and explaining the design. I rarely finished my theatre models, once I had worked out design problems and they became sufficiently explanatory to directors and stage craftsmen.

I truly would like to return and visit those rooms again. Google them and you will be amazed. Certainly visit them if you get to Chicago.

Museums in Modern Times

Some anguish in the New England art world has been prompted by a shift in mission for the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. I have not personally visited the museum, near the New York border. It was created in 1903 as the Museum of Natural History and Art by the head of the Crane Paper Company. In 2008 the museum opened a new 3000 square-foot exhibition space, the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, devoted to local innovators like Hermann Melville and Cyrus Field.

The institution houses some 40,000 objects in its permanent collection, including artworks and jewelry. It is putting 40 works up for sale, including a couple well-known Norman Rockwells. Others include Calder sculptures, Hudson River School painters like Albert Bierstadt, juicy Bouguereaus, curious Calders, Federic Church landscapes and Durrie's winter scenes popularized in print form by Currier and Ives. The sale is part of a $60 million re-visioning of the museum and a shift in focus to science and natural history.

The stated goal is re-invention as more of a "learning and discovery center." The museum points to other institutions in Albany and the region with significant historical collections of American painters. The plan is drawing extensive criticism from the art museum community, as might be expected. All museums face significant pressures and crises of relevance in the digital age.

I can't help feeling that the criticism is less about the museum itself, than the fading cultural necessity of museums of great paintings. Patrons tend to invest emotionally in the works with which they are familiar. The fine points of experience in the presence of a substantial work are lost on a digital screen or a book illustration plate, and they often fail to rise above just "a nice picture." For most of America, that difference matters very little. The romantic sense of being "in the presence of genius" has lost its imperative for them.

Museums do face a problem with static life. The largest museums display only 5% of their collection at any time, mostly rotated among the best known works. Smaller museums, such as the Berkshire, tend to display more of their works. Rotation of popular and critically recognized pieces becomes more difficult. It becomes a challenge to engender a sense of the museum as something more than a static archive. Rearranging galleries and fine art lectures are limited answers.

Art, particularly visual art, has become a much different cultural product over the century past. Much of the 20th Century was characterized by sorting out the aesthetics of hand work in the age of reproduction of increasing fidelity. A century ago there was no direct reproduction, no color photography, no digital media. Art products were tangible and dimensional. They could only be understood well through direct contemplation in their physical presence. Museums were the answer.

This isn't a benediction for museums, and the Berkshire isn't the only museum facing this kind of crisis. Predictably, the organizations of museum professionals attacked the sale. They are bracing against the tide. Smaller museums will define broader missions for themselves. Today, it's about much more than pictures and sculptures.

Arthur Dirks July 28, 2017

Flea markets and Sunday closing.

For a few years after we moved to Massachusetts in the early 1980s the state was among the few remaining that restricted commercial retail activity on Sundays, historically supporting workers against exploitation. Western states largely had abandoned the practice by the 1970s. The laws did allow sales activity by individuals as private sellers, leading to thriving markets of individual sellers buying, trading and selling - usually used or secondary market merchandise. It became a thriving ancillary economy, but it was tax-evasive and understandably opposed by brick-and-mortar retail business interests. Sunday closing laws died of irrelevance in 1983, but the secondary economy that they fostered continued strong for another decade or so.

The Sunday commercial activity in closed states was yard sale plugged in. Large parking lots, old factories and vacant warehouses were repurposed for a few hours for private vendors doing business the way its been done for several thousand years. A few such enterprises continue, but their social value waned without the policies that closed almost all other shopping and restricted Sunday employment. Certainly there isn't the scale of economy those markets provided.

In populous areas there were many roadside stands and groups of vendors in larger venues, open only on Sunday when the vendors were free from their regular employment. They opened early in the morning and were packing up after lunch. Parking lots of closed shopping centers and closed factories and businesses were markets for a few hours each week. A few of the more established markets continue today, but the large populist activity has long passed.

Brimfield Antique Flea Market.

This was widespread practice in Sunday-closing states, and eventually gave rise to a thriving Memorial Day-to-Labor Day flea market and perpetual yard sale strip in local stretches from north of Boston all the way down old Route 1 to North Carolina and Florida.

When we first moved to the region from the central states in 1983, we thought the Sunday closing laws were annoyingly backward and inconvenient. You do learn quickly to plan activities and shopping around it. Without alternatives, one can learn to like it. It was a true time out, and many of those busy things of life were put on hold for the day. The laws were intended to protect workers, including retail, but the social environment evolved when everybody wanted Sunday shopping and Sunday pay. The demise of the closing laws altered the agenda of the day on Sunday for most families and the small vendor markets faded.

In moving to Massachusetts we were in on the tail end of the practice and find ourselves a bit nostalgic today for that secondary retail activity as entertainment, and as a source for interesting and somewhat unique goods. Conversations and banter with vendors often were part of the experience.

One needed not to go far. There were notable large venues, such as a defunct dog track in Taunton (which burned down in 2001), closed factories (of which we had many in the region, since razed), large parking lots of Sunday-closed businesses, as well as many residential perpetual yard sales where permitted. The Taunton market had scores of vendors on the two concourses, the services ground floor, and outdoors on the track apron and parking lot where they spread blankets. This was as close as one can get to the historic early bazaars. Vendors also typically haggled, and goods were always buyer-beware.

There also were many smaller venues of perhaps a dozen vendors. Some were categorically focused, such as jewelry and small items and others more furniture or more glassware and ceramics. These more specialized bazaars typically were open on Saturday rather than Sunday morning, and occupied old vacant factory buildings and church basements. These businesses also have dwindled to scarce.

In 1983 Massachusetts began to free up commercial Sunday retail and the markets gradually eroded to a few year-round indoor markets by the late 1990s, brief holiday markets, summer vendor fairs at local festivals, and big events like the week-long Brimfield Antique Show in central Massachusetts three times a summer. Many people now worked Sundays, and it became a regular shopping day for most others. When it comes to flea market as a market, shopping as entertainment and opportunity for unique goods, and Sunday as a non-workday, it is a sad loss.

Other fairs with used and antique vendors that travel are spaced through the season, similar to Brimfield but much smaller, and there are several one-off holiday fairs. Those holiday vendors often aren't local and the sales are almost exclusively new, artist craft, or valued antique goods.

These are quite different from the local flea markets, such as the modest one in Raynham each Sunday morning that still thrives. Once there were a half-dozen substantial markets within 20 miles: small vendors, used goods, oddball goods, "antiques," and they were worth a couple visits each year. Today, one must know about the few remaining and where to find them. They're still worth an occasional visit if the goods change, particularly if one is a collector of anything.

This is a personal lament of the kind of progress that diminishes civic life in favor of churn. We reduce our interaction by buying online. We lose the social mingling of market shoppers and vendors. We miss the opportunity to engage actively with a vendor over price. And we retreat into a world of doing our own picking and even our own scanning to evade a vacant clerk. For the most part, we just don't have time for all that.

I have no bon mot here. We rarely visit a Sunday market because the entertainment value is no longer worth the effort or the loss of a sleep-in. We don't really need things. For collecting and trading, remaining markets probably are sufficient. The ramped-up, Amazon/ebay-driven retail space competes with Walmart/Target for our consumer shopping dollar for both new and old goods. The appeal of the old, odd, unusual has faded in favor a few special things. The world has changed, and after 30 years, it probably should.

Scenemaker, 19 July 2017

Hitchhiking Adventures

One of the ways that Americans used to get around over distances was hitchhiking. Certainly out of favor today, in the earlier days of automobiles, particularly during and following the Great Depression in the early 1930s, people traveling who could afford cars often generously shared rides with those who could not. Trains did not go everywhere.

It didn't end in the 30s, and hitchhiking was common in the west through the 1960s. Before WWII it was associated with "hobos" and workers following harvests, and it became common for soldiers on leave during and following WWII. My father had tales of hitchhiking on trucks to follow the wheat harvests, riding in the beds, much like one reads in Steinbeck stories of the Great Depression.

In the early 1960s, I had a few of those experiences. I was a broke enlisted army Spec4 from Kansas studying at the Department of Defense language school in Monterey, California. No money to spend on tickets, but I wanted to see San Francisco. I tended to be a selfish traveler, impatient with interests of companions, so I actually preferred traveling alone. Military basic training gives one confidence, physical fitness and personal fighting skills sufficient for self defense if necessary. I decided to stick out my thumb near the base, and readily wound up in The City, about 100 miles away.

It was my introduction to managing on the margins. I found a tiny cheap junky room with cheesecloth sheets on a narrow lumpy bed, a window to an airshaft and quite a bit of noise, as I found out. I toured the city core on foot for two days, Lombard street and all.

I saw a Dizzy Gillespie set at a club, which was a tiny dark cellar with a dozen tiny tables and a hog wire screen wall separating bleachers for the under-21 crowd - which I was. That underage area was jammed well above any modern fire code. It was interesting, but I really didn't understand jazz as much as I wanted to, not being a musician. I left after one set, quite bored. I also went to a Dave Brubeck concert, but he had moved on to more esoteric jazz than I liked.

The next day I stuck my thumb out for return to Monterey. I walked a lot, dodging cops on the expressway - a few hours of walking before I caught a ride - with the same guy, a sad older gay guy, who had given me a ride in. Apparently cruising, but he was kind enough when it was clear I was straight. This is 1963.

I returned home to Kansas for Christmas that year. No transportation money, but I caught a ride with a fellow serviceman as far as Laramie, and then stuck out my thumb again toward Denver. It was late and a trucker took me to Cheyenne, where I caught a ride south to Loveland. Standing along the road about midnight in winter with my thumb out, I caught the attention of some early 20s girls from Denver who put me up on the floor of their apartment. The next day I took the bus home, 300 miles east of Denver.

I had arranged to meet a return ride in Salt Lake City, but when I got off the bus a clerk told me my ride had called and cancelled. I didn't have the fare, so once again I stuck my thumb out, and managed to pick up rides west, back to Monterey. I was on the shoulder for a few hours, joined by one or two others, and we managed to catch rides through the night that are no longer memorable because we slept.

I later was transferred to Maryland and Fort Meade, where I also tried to hitchhike, but the east coast lacked the body of clear long route traffic that benefits a distance hitchhiker. I walked a long way out of Washington before I decided to find a bus. When I was later stationed in Germany, hitchhiking wasn't tolerated.

It was an interesting period, and a real adventure. I made many mistakes I had to walk my way out of. I walked miles out of San Francisco and Salt Lake City and Cheyenne and Washington, D.C. As many solo explorers and travelers find, you revel in applying your own resources - intelligence and knowledge, judgement, energy, endurance, patience, and resourcefulness. You come away knowing yourself and your capacities much better.

The times have changed immensely. Transportation has changed, and the webs of trust are frayed today. I wouldn't do it again, but I know I did it and learned a lot about myself. One of those life passages.

Scenemaker, 20 June 2017

Trusting Dates in Family Research

One of the problems for genealogists is sorting out conflicting stories and references.

Many official records exist and are being made available online, but the character and condition often is problematic. Courthouses burned with shelves of ledgers, and town meeting notes and ledgers in New England are barely decipherable today. Nevertheless, the family history industry is expending huge efforts to make existing records available.

This entry is about history and genealogy in conflict, and the need to inspect the history behind reported dates.

The first documented person in my Woods study is Jeremiah P. Woods, born 26 May 1797 in Dayton, Ohio, according to his tombstone in Missouri. We have no reason to doubt the date, but the location is curious. The city of Dayton lies fifty miles up the Miami River from Cincinnati in today’s Montgomery Co., created in 1803 from Hamilton. The first settlers arrived to establish Dayton in 1796, the year before Jeremiah’s birth. Travel was quite challenging for the founders.

< Dayton in 1800, fancifully portrayed about 1880.

In March, 1796, Dayton's founding enterprise left Cincinnati in three parties, led by William Hamer, George Newcom, and Samuel Thompson. Hamer's party was the first to start; the other two companies left on Monday, March 21st, one by land, the other by water[Miami River]. Hamer's party came in a two-horse wagon over the road begun, but only partially cut through the woods, by Cooper in the fall of 1795.

"The sixty miles from Cincinnati to Mad River was a tedious and exhausting journey. The road was merely a rough, narrow, unbroken path through the woods and brush, except that part of it which led to Fort Hamilton, which, as it was used by the army, was kept in tolerably good condition. They suffered from cold and dampness in camp, as it had rained and was spitting snow."

The Woods name is not listed among those settlers. By these accounts and date, and given the date of Jeremiah's birth, it seems the family arrived within weeks or a few months after the founding and built among the first dwellings in the city. The absence of the Woods name in early accounts and available records is confounding. It is possible and perhaps likely that Jeremiah’s birth in Dayton is self-reported and subject to some error. And yet the later known character and occupations of the family show they were builders who pioneered towns.

The census records for Ohio before 1830 have been lost, making the task of tracing Jeremiah Woods’ family quite difficult. The estate of a possible father or uncle of Jeremiah, Samuel Woods of Dayton, born probably before 1786, was probated in 1807 in Montgomery Co., confirming a Woods family, perhaps this one, was established in that town in its first decade. Jeremiah (1797) named his ninth child Samuel in 1840, but other evidence of his parents’ names has not been found.

The take-away here is the need to be thorough about dates and places. It always is helpful, if not mandatory, to attempt to understand the history of the moment regarding dates. They may be from reputable sources, as from a grave marker, but it's helpful to know the life of the time.

Opportunity or Exploitation

Two recent rule changes will bring some adjustments to some theatre production considerations. One involves the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, and the other involves theatres employing unionized performers, with emphasis in southern California. They're related in that both are forcing accountability and reality checks for exploitive arts employment.

A European theatre, actor's view.

A major part of ART continuing from its inception under Robert Brustein has been its Institute. Fundamentally, it is an actor-training program. I'm sure students receive some great instruction in their experiences with performers, but the relationship may appear to be exploitive to an outside observer.

The Department of Education has concerns about the debt-to-expected-earnings. Students can become trapped into hefty loan repayment without realistic employment opportunities.

The second complication is a set of new rulings by Actors' Equity Association (AEA), the national union for professional stage actors. In Los Angeles, Equity actors can work for non-scale pay on a performance basis for a non-union, non-commercial theatrical production. But next year the AEA will require actors to be paid for all time spent on set, including rehearsals.

Both of these rulings battle the exploitive aspects of theatre employment for actors. Directors, designers and technicians are in a little stronger bargaining position or have union representation. Actors are more susceptible to exploitation because their employment is more contingent. Equal opportunity employment has little consideration where artistry and skill are in the balance, and very specifically competitive, as in theatre, music, and visual art. Yet, opportunities for under-represented groups to compete on a level field often are constrained and unconsciously limited.

Students in a training program promising employment deserve a reasonable expectation of finding employment. Actors who make a living from their work deserve to be paid for the work required.

All of the art forms use people who are willingly used because their work is fulfilling in some way. And yet it remains their work life and if it has value to us, we should be willing to reward it. Let's quit exploiting people because they love their work. It's not a functioning mantra in the current political climate, but for the health of our civilization, we should endeavor to compensate people for their work for us rather than exploit them.

Talking Back - Or Not

Playwright David Mamet has actively denied a post-play discussion of his work Oleanna, a 2-person play about the encounter between a college professor and his student. The play has the usual Mamet tension in power relationships and his powerful use of language to invest the characters. The production was mounted by Outvisible, a small Equity company in Detroit that focuses on powerful small-cast plays.

I really think Mamet may err in this. If you can't resolve the play for yourself sufficiently, you likely will dismiss the experience.

(Hogarth, Theatre Royal 1861)

Post-performance discussion is a common practice, particularly with smaller companies, when the play involves challenging social, moral or psychological perspectives. The company seeks to deepen the experience of the play by allowing - and helping - people massage the social and moral behavior of the characters. Typically, the discussion audience remains in or returns to the seats after other patrons depart.

One of the principal actors may join the discussion, but in truth, their perspectives on their character can complicate the response. Their perspective is narrowly individual, not contextual. The audience experiences the effect, not the intent. Directors very rarely participate (they have moved on after a show opens).

A moderator offers a preamble and does traffic control. In a large group a few people have something to say and people drift away. In a small group the discussion can be more intense.

Mamet's perspective is that the discussion truncates and settles the complex experience he tries to provoke in his plays. It may be true. One usually leaves a visceral Mamet play filled with troubling voices and thoughts about relationships, and about the moral perspective of the story. If one is familiar with the play, the nuances of the particular production are certainly on one's mind.

The question is whether the talk-back experience deepens or resolves those dilemmas. Mamet doesn't want them resolved. He wants you to be troubled all the way home by what you experienced.

People sometimes want help with a resolution. They want to make sense of what they've seen. Unless they saw the show with friends and share a drink after, they are left to massage the play's perspective with their seat partner or on their own. That is what Mamet wants - for you to be troubled.

I think he may do a disservice to his work by denying the post-play discussion. Not everybody stays for it - only those who feel a need to talk about it. The talk-back can become tedious and the audience drifts away. In the best experience, one comes away with a richer perspective on the ideas and dilemmas of the play and it's characters.

If people want or need to talk about it, and they can't, they may dismiss the experience. Even with plays by Mament, it's usually easy simply to put it out of mind as you navigate traffic home.

It's an hour's drive to a play in Boston. Personally, I am impatient with talkbacks and never stay. Diane and I agree that if we are still talking about the play half-way home, it was a good one.

26 May 2017

Theatre Designers' Collections

If you are a designer of any sort, you once had a file cabinet full of images. Shown is one of three file drawers of my "tear files." For most designers of all kinds, visual ideas rarely spring full blown to mind and we often need a stimulus. One of the things we once did, and I'm sure many continue to do, is collect images on paper to stimulate one's creative efforts. We still subscribe to magazines in paper.

In the case of a theatre scenic designer, you have a given subject. If you are at all methodical, you jot down a handful of image ideas as you re-read the play and a preliminary list of requirements. You reflect on discussions you have had with the director - the goals, themes, interpretation, and the feel and spirit of the show on stage. Directors' own requirements may be evolving, so this goes with you to every design and production meeting.

I discovered in discussions with architects and engineers regarding upgrading facilities, they carefully maintain "the requirements list," which they use to drive their design work. I jumped on that wonderfully rational approach and adopted it for all of my design work. I had it at every meeting and made certain it was current. ("So now you need to be able to do this and not that?") It lay beside my sketch pad and at the top of the drafting table. (Pencil work precedes CAD in the design phase.)

At some point, you have to begin thinking about the look of the show. And you have to enable the director's work by giving them a "machine" for the play.

Blind alleys and random effort are a waste of time. That means writing on a sheet of paper all of the current known requirements of the play and the director, and keeping it updated. This is your requirements list. You can bounce around possibilities, sketch outrageous responses and imagery, but you have to get a sense of what matters and what the director needs to be able to do.

Next, or perhaps before, I go on the hunt for things that will "trip your trigger." Colors, images, architecture, places, creative efforts of others. That's what the tear file is for.

Today, one can load hundreds of Google and Pinterest images on a topic search, and spend a couple hours ploughing through the collections. It's helpful for the stimulation of possibilities but it is limited by your search terms. It also tends to shortchange illustration, which is closest to what we do.

My practice was to avoid other stage designs, particularly of the same show. It's a creativity fettish; I want to solve the problems of the show myself, with the director.

For several decades I collected design resources - art books, illustration annuals, and tear files. I have files labeled for periods, countries, cities, illustration style, furniture, etc.

We still take magazines on paper in our house. Among them such visual resources as Smithsonian Magazine. Image collections on paper are probably an analog relic, I surmise.

An Appreciation for a Colleague

I attended the Bridgewater State Univ. production of The Importance of Being Ernest on Thursday evening. It was the final BSU production directed by my long-time colleague and friend Dr. Suzanne Ramczyk. She follows me into retirement after a three-decade career in teaching theatre at BSU.

Oscar Wilde's "'Ernest" is delightful and a light-hearted tease on the social program of marriage and the absurdity of British class practice. It was well done and featured two alumni in older character roles.

I have been reflecting on our long run collaboration, and the shows Suzanne directed that I designed:

[left: Comedy of Errors]

Machinal (2011), Cabaret (2009), An Ideal Husband (2008), How I Learned to Drive (2008), Urinetown (2006), "Theatre on the Edge" (2005), The Secret Garden (2003), Antigone (2002), Hotel d'Amour (2000), The Scarlet Letter (1999), Jack the Ripper (1997), Marisol (1995), No Trifling with Love (1994), Life Chains (1992), Step on a Crack (1992), The King Stag (1991), Madwoman of Chaillot (1989), Comedy of Errors (1988), Lock Up Your Daughters (1987), The Threepenny Opera (1986), Company (1985). I may have overlooked one or two.

I designed many shows for other directors over the years, but working with Suzanne was always an artistically rewarding experience. She and I shared a passion for exploration, innovation, social commentary, and the highest artistic standards we could muster. We both were followers of the revolutionary theatrical experiments in the 1960s and 70s. She received her doctorate at the University of Oregon, and she once trained under theatre fundamentalist Jerzy Grotowski.

Dr. Ramczyk is perhaps the most prepared and grounded director of any of the dozen or so with whom I have worked. I was particularly engaged by her openness to and respect for my perspectives on the work. Often beginning with a simple image or phrase, we would find a touchstone and anchor for artistic explorations in the production. It is notable that she challenged me to be more exploratory, she trusted my responses and defended my choices.

Scores of students over the years have benefited from her zealous investment in performance studies, the training she provided in movement and voice, and her continuing support in their performing careers. A life in professional theatre and film is difficult, the work is irregular and usually at night on stage, and out of town for film. Yet many students have realized that dream by way of her mentoring.

Suzanne and her husband Ed Zeldin deserve a long and rewarding retreat. I suspect she will find a way to remain active in theatre. I wish them happiness and great health for a well-earned retirement.

Arthur L. Dirks

30 April 2017

Reading the Country

One of the more difficult things for some people, including myself, is coming to terms with the difference between political sentiments where one lives and those elsewhere in the country.

I live in New England, specifically in southeastern Massachusetts. It's a working class world for the most part, with deep immigrant and ethnic histories. Historically, this region was and remains the first stop off the boat for many populations. Some towns are populated more solidly by one group or another, as evidenced in the surnames of the time, giving rise to small traditions and a character of sentiment in the town.

Taunton, MA, town flag

Taunton does have a long and proud history. It flies the "Liberty and Union" flag, commemorating it's status as earliest to commit to revolution. For well over two centuries it was a significant regional manufacturing center, but none of that remains as the last silver plant closed. It is a struggling mix of retail and services, somewhat passed by as expressways built through adjacent, less built towns.

The city consistently votes Democrat, but also likes less doctrinaire Republicans. Many of us believe mixing parties is necessary to keep the governing bodies honest. We sometimes refer to "Republican lite" to characterize those office holders. They tend to embace fiscally conservative ideas but recognize that poverty usually is not a personal choice.

It's pretty hard sometimes to read the comment streams on news items and social media. If you consciously seek a balanced understanding of what people think elsewhere, the result is really disheartening. The vitriol, the terms used, the extremes espoused do not endear me to more conservative parts of the country. While I may dislike conservative opinion, I still hope we can have a conversation.

Nevertheless, I do share the view on the left that our current president is incompetent. That is not based on his politics, which are fractured and expedient. The man appears to have no principles beyond service to his own needs.

A Bull, A Fearless Girl, Art and Respect

Popular culture partisans have been trading somewhat predictable arguments about the retention of the statue of a Fearless Girl that faces  down the Wall Street bull in a small plaza in New York's financial district. The Charging Bull was created by Arthur Di Modica in the late 1980s, and was placed originally in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but it was moved to a tight little park or plaza nearby.

Early in March 2017 a "fearless girl" statue appeared in the plaza facing the bull. The girl statue by Kristen Visbal was commissioned by a Boston financial firm. It has been given a year's lease on the plaza. Di Modica says he'll sue. Female comment predictably wants to make the installation permanent.

It would be easy to pick sides in this. I think I'm in a male minority. I like the bull statue and experienced it by accident a decade or so ago. We were walking around the financial district on a sight-seeing Sunday, the only day you can get around down there leisurely. We turned the corner and suddenly confronted this enormous bull in charge mode. It was very powerful. I don't know if the location now is the same tiny, forever-shadowed plaza it dominated when we encountered it.

At first one catches a glimpse of part of it, and in walking further around corners, the whole enormous beast comes into view. It is dynamic, powerful, and awe-inducing. It weighs 7000 lbs.

What does it mean? It's placement as I saw it was so incongruous and unexpected, lurking and dominating. I interpreted it as a symbol of the dynamic power and dominance of markets, the focus of nearby firms. As such, I thought it was an intriguing and artful abstraction. But it wasn't so purposeful in its origins. Di Modica had to push for its installation, where it was, for a time, near the NYSE. The Times notes that it was self-commissioned by the artist. The financial district has little interest beyond its own functional activity, and largely comprises its own audience. Public relations through artwork is unimportant.

The "Fearless Girl" was installed in March 2017 facing the bull. The girl was commissioned by a Boston financial firm and stands just over 4' tall. It was not designed specifically for the installation, where she appears to be defiantly facing down the bull, and was intended to promote workplace gender diversity.

Social media have some pretty strident positions on the statue. The easy interpretation is a celebration of the power of women in the market. The comment streams turn themselves inside-out on issues of power, authority, and gender in general. Some feminists find the Fearless Girl statue "infantilizing," and focuses too much on the personal power of women and not on the structural forces of feminism. (While nothing escapes critique, that just sounds like a refusal of any accommodation.)

One thing is certain. Many women find the installation to be very powerful and want it to be permanent. Fair enough, but I'm with the bull's artist Di Modica, who is going to court to restrict the installation of Fearless Girl. Whatever his intention of meaning in the bull, and the meaning one acquires in contemplation, it is changed and shaped - and perhaps trivialized by the Fearless Girl. As for the Girl, its meaning, too, is shaped by the bull. It makes the defiant attitude specific and targeted, not a profound stance to the world, which I think should be more meaningful.

In museums, great works are juxtaposed to enhance and deepen their meaning and appreciation. Usually this is exhibition-based placement, and the works will be re-positioned over time. The placement of Fearless Girl speaks to the times we are in, but it does also overlay and narrow the meaning of both pieces, in my view. It should not be permanent.


Arthur L. Dirks