Flux Theatre Ensemble

Isaiah here with yet another overly-long, thoughtful-to-the-point-of-pedantry post.

So, over at HowIRound there's a very interesting piece by Lydia Stryk about this "theatricality" thing. You should definitely read the whole thing (and the comments, and the response at Parabasis, and the comments there), but here's the money quote if you're pressed for time:

Theatricality in America today, I would argue, is an MFA-inspired phenomenon produced almost solely by playwrights and duly supported by directors. The resulting highly theatrical plays teeter on the edge of magical realism or plummet over the top with plot elements and stage directions that seem derived from a handbook on wizardry. It’s worth noting that this new theatricality is woven into the plot, making it impossible to ignore in the way the old stage directions (She stands, he sits) were and are ignored.

The implication here is that "stage directions that are woven into the plot," particularly whimsical ones, are (a) something unique to recent American theater, and, because they cannot be ignored, (b) bad.

In a comment on the original post, Taylor Mac has already made a case that realism is actually the recent trend, so I want to respond to the second implication. I want to ask this: what's wrong with stage directions out of a wizard's handbook? Yes, they can be used lazily. Yes, they can be spectacle. Yes, they feel contrived or out of place or distancing. When they do these things -- and I won't lie, they often do -- they fall on their face.

But they aren't necessarily so.

The image I used above is the last moment of The Lesser Seductions of History, Flux's most well-received show, and I believe its greatest artistic triumph (so far!). A brief overview: the play was set in the 60's, and each scene was a different year. With each new year, one of the 10 characters makes a choice between a life of personal fulfillment and a life devoted to a greater cause. Those 10 lightbulbs were in the ceiling the whole time, a new one lighting up as each character made that choice and a new year dawned. Then, in the final scene, they descended as eight of the characters, each for deeply personal reasons, danced, then slowly became the astronauts on the moon, before finally forming a circle looking in at the eleventh character, One, who is the force of History that "seduced" them (hence the title) and in her final monologue asks, "wasn't it worth it?"

The lightbulbs were the years, and the characters, and the choices, and the stars, and pretty, all at the same time. This is just the sort of thing that Lydia doesn't like. It's wizardy, and it's weird, and it's whimsical. It was also profoundly moving, BECAUSE it was those things, not in spite of them. That moment wouldn't have worked, or would have worked in a profoundly different and (I believe) less successful way, without those lightbulbs, or some other director-picked design element that ostensibly served the same purpose.

Flux has talked a lot about what we mean by "Transformative Theatre" (sometimes we've even used other words for it); it's so central to what we do that it's in our mission statement as well as our list of aesthetic values. One of several things you can't do in a film, but you can do on a stage -- and therefore seems like the best definition of a term ("theatricality") whose definition few can even agree on -- is make something be two or more things at the same time. In the film version of Lesser Seductions, if you wanted to see the moon landing you'd show the footage. You'd probably cross-cut that with the characters, and others around the world, watching it at home (that's what the very powerful HBO documentary From the Earth to the Moon did). Which works great for film.

But there's something amazing, and powerful, and theatrical about seeing the other actors, who you've spent the last two hours with, dance around the stage as though on the moon, and it spoke to the central idea of that moment: that on July 20, 1969, it was as though everyone in the world, no matter what they were doing, was bouncing about the lunar surface with Neil and Buzz. I've got to say, I'm just thinking about it and I'm still moved by the memory of creating that poetic moment on stage. And I wasn't even alive in 1969.

I guess what I'm saying is that there are plenty of highly theatrical moments out there that you can effectively create with a whimsical stage direction or two. Lydia talks about the process by which she arrived at her theatrical stage directions -- essentially shoehorning them into her play to make it more marketable -- and I agree that this is a lousy way to create art that you're proud of, and it's almost guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth for the whole process, and make seeing other such attempts that much more grating. But I'd encourage her not to throw the theatricality baby out with the marketability bathwater.
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I wonder if every child that grows up without much religion finds those earliest, indelible rhythms of what faith they have in books. For me, that was true, and no book burrowed deeper into how I live than Richard Adams' tale of rabbits, Watership Down. And as it is New Years Eve and time for resolutions, I thought I'd write a little while about why a band of silly rabbits remains so central to who I am, and my dream of building a creative home.

For those unfamiliar with the book, Wikipedia is here to help you, though if you saw Jacob's House, you saw as much of Watership Down as you did the Old Testament. A runt of a rabbit, Fiver, has a vision that sends a group of rabbits, led by Hazel, on a dangerous odyssey to find a new home. It is a gorgeously dark and vital book, and as a child, I remember it felt more like life than anything else I'd read.

Of all the characters, I connected most with Hazel because he was a completely different kind of leader than I'd read before. He was not capable of any skillful violence, he had no magical power, he wasn't the fastest or the strongest or the cleverest, he was not a favorite of destiny nor was his leadership defined by dominance. He wasn't, in fact, particularly good at anything except one thing: the capacity to see what was best in others and call it out into the world.

As a child, I was profoundly moved by this, even though I'm not sure I could've articulated why. Every other model of leadership I'd seen was entirely individualistic - a character accomplishes great things because they themselves are great - and today, whenever I read those endless streams of articles about leadership, most continue to define it this way.

The idea that the survival of community lies not in a single greatness, but in the capacity to see what is good in every one and call it into action, continues to feel like a radical and sacred ideal. As I get older, and see clearly I am not the strongest or fastest or cleverest, it is this ideal that calls to me with ever greater urgency, to find or build a creative home.

Home is such a powerful world; simply say it with intention and let it live in the air awhile, and some strong emotion will usually follow. I think this is because, like the characters of the Old Testament and Watership Down, most of us don't feel a sense of home; most of us are in exile.

For many, that exile is despairingly literal; some power prevents them from returning to the place they call home. For others, they live in the place but that place has changed, and no longer calls to them with that voice of belonging; they are exiles in their own house. So much violence comes from exiles trying to return and others trying to keep them out; from those wanting to keep their home as it always was and others wanting to turn it into the place they left behind.

A grace of Watership Down is that the rabbits do not try to return to their original warren after it is destroyed; home is not a location for them. Rather, home is a place defined by something else: safety, belonging, the capacity to speak in your true voice and be truly heard; a sense of destiny through community; a balance between continuity and change, difference and shared purpose; peace; love. It is home defined by people instead of place.

Theatre, through its powers of imaginative empathy, is one way to see what is best (and worst) in others and call it out into the world (or exorcise it); it can help create a home defined by people instead of place. It is one way, not the only way, though it is the way I love best.

There are many exciting things I'm looking forward to in 2011; marriage (!), directing Ajax in Iraq, producing Dog Act, trying to beat the seven full-length plays I wrote in 2010, writing my first book. But through all of that burns a singular resolution to better see what is best in others and call it into the world, to help all of us exiles find or create a home in each other.

What are you looking forward to in 2011? Any Watership Down lovers reading this blog? Read the full story

Mission Statement: Flux Theatre Ensemble produces transformative theatre that explores and awakens the capacity for change. As an ensemble-artist driven company, we believe that long-term collaboration and rigorous creative development can unite artists and audiences to build a creative home in New York.

Believe it or not, that mission statement is the result of four years of battling over the meaning of every single word. That journey wasn't easy in part because of my feeling that a mission statement was somehow antithetical to the creation of art, like pinning butterflies to the wall; and our mutual fear in crafting one of the interchangeably generic mush statements that abound.

But gradually, others in Flux made compelling cases for how a mission could prove useful, and we lurched fitfully towards carving one out. At our annual retreat, we finally hammered it out. What follows is an unpacking of our mission statement, with an eye towards both its conceptual history and practical application.

Flux Theatre Ensemble: That's us.

Produces: We used this word as opposed to creates because some of the work we do comes from outside the development process outlined in the second sentence; and our identity as artist-producers is important to us.

Transformative theatre: What on earth does this mean? We've long valued this expression without being able to quite define it. Our recently posted aesthetic values will give you a sense of what it means to us on the stage; we value the capacity for change in every element of production. This means characters who either enact great change in the world of the play or are themselves significantly transformed; themes which compound layers of meaning as the action builds; worlds that live on the edge of some fundamental shift; contrasting aesthetic styles in a single play that, juxtaposed, create some new way of playing; staging that celebrates the transformative power of the audience's imagination; and above all, a charged ambiguity of meaning that lives in the audience's body and mind long after the play ends.

That explores and awakens: The plays we do not only stake out new territory in the evolutions of the human spirit, but awaken the capacity for that evolution in our audience.

The capacity for change: The patterns of narrative that give human life meaning must constantly be challenged and expanded by the communal, creative act of art; doing so allows new, more vital narrative patterns to emerge, increasing our mutual capacity for life. That may sound lofty, but it is entirely practical; the plays we do must wrestle with some new way of seeing; they must create the possibility of some new pattern of meaning. It's important to note that doesn't mean a traditionally avant-garde style; we do not seek to take simple things and make them seem complex; rather we hope to take complex things and tell them as simply and directly as possible.

As an ensemble-artist driven company: This sentence has a blood-soaked pedigree! The battle between driven and led, the long journey to hold many values in those three words, "ensemble-artist driven", could hold a stage or two in terms of drama. We are artist driven, and so all decisions come out of the forward propulsion of our ensemble's creative interests. All administrative and producing decisions are driven by that creative propulsion; we are not an institution that exists to perpetuate an institution. However, driven rather than led allows the possibility of one day taking on administrators who are not directly participating in the creative work, provided the balance always tilts towards the ensemble-artists' leadership.

We believe that long term collaboration: Flux is not into one night stands! We hope that every artistic and audience relationship will develop into a long term relationship, allowing for the fact this won't always be so. Not only do we believe that a higher quality of work is possible when artists commit to a long term collaboration, but we believe that holds true for the audience, as well. Theatre is not a product to be made by temporary workers and sold to strangers, but an ongoing communal process between artists and audience. To that end, we are establishing a relationship category, Friends of Flux (hereafter FOFs), that puts audience, donors, and artists on equal collaborative footing, and places value on the sustained commitment of time, talent and resources between Membership and this community. More details on this anon!

And rigorous creative development: A company is defined as much by what they do as what they say, and one thing Flux does a LOT of is creative development. Through our weekly workshop Flux Sundays, through our more in depth processes of Have Another and Food:Soul, through our communal theme-wrestling of ForePlay, through our annual retreat and through the independent development process that many of our full productions go through; Flux develops not only new plays but artists, and the relationship between artists, and the relationship between the work, artists, and audience. We are developing a creative community, and that community is developing a creative process, and that process leads to new work.

Can unite artists and audiences: As you can see from the past two definitions, redefining the relationship between our artists and audience is very important to Flux. Our audience drinks with us at Have Another, eats with us at Food:Soul; responds to the work in person and online; and in a new bit of programming, SpeakEasy (stay tuned for more info on that), engages with us directly in the governance of the Ensemble. The goal is to create a more sustained, meaningful relationship between these normally divided partners in making theatre, to help them feel responsible to and for each other.

To build a creative home: One of the defining challenges of the field is the feeling of homelessness of artists in their relationship to institutions; and for the institutions, losing the subscriber base that made their theatre a home. Creating this home for both artists and audience is the ultimate mission of Flux; believing a vibrant artistic home united in exploring our capacity for change will lead to both more empowered individuals and interconnected community.

In New York: Cause that's where we live.

As we go forward here on the blog, I'll be trying more often to link the discourse here to the mission, core values, and aesthetic values as a means of clarifying their practical definition and sounding the Fluxy-ness of the things we do. Read the full story