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