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