Flux Theatre Ensemble

Readers of this blog may remember the profound impact the 2009 Network of Ensemble Theatre's Conference had on the thinking of myself and fellow attendee Heather Cohn. So we were thrilled to attend Micro-Fest LA, NET's mini-conference on new play development in Los Angeles from December 3rd-5th. It was indeed a jam-packed 3 days - what follows are the recollections I keep several weeks after.

FRIDAY, December 3, 2010
We began with a welcome from the ever-wonderful Mark Valdez and continued with presentations from a psychologist looking at creativity and John Malpede of the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

"Loose and tight" was how the psychologist described the brain's creativity, saying that creative activity was not confined to one side, but required a focused relaxation that allowed unexpected connections to be made on the right and then articulated by the left. This makes stress the great enemy of creativity; a heightened playfulness is required to summon the muse.

Malpede's speech was moving because of the clear impact LAPD continues to have on a community afflicted with poverty. Malpede's conversion from East Coast performance artist to West Coast missionary reminded me of John O'Neal's move from NYC to the the South to form Junebug, and struck again that chord of uncertainty of my own work here in theatre-stuffed NYC.

The night ended with a performance of Clown Town City Limits by Two Headed Dog. It was clowning by way of Sam Shepard, and while I loved the tonal dissonance of the piece, I wish their had been more consequences to the characters' actions (my own aesthetic baggage, yes). After a brief talkback, there was a party we were too jetlagged for, and we rested up for day two.

SATURDAY, December 4, 2010
I started with a Dramaturgy workshop (Heather went to movement) where I was given the great gift of Elinor Fuchs essay, Visit To A Small Planet. These questions approach a play as if the dramaturg is traveling to a new planet, with its own laws of physics, social structures, and ecosystems. There are no accidents in the world of the play, and through a series of questions, the unique ways the world works are brought to light. But this essay deserves its own post, so I will leave it for now.

We then were treated to 10+ minutes of physics which, as readers of this blog know, I could have easily wished to be 10 hours. It was pretty basic stuff, but he approached the second law of thermodynamics in a way that was new to me, and conceptually very helpful (again, probably a separate post).

Then we were up on our feet, brainstorming what made an ensemble structure's approach to developing new plays unique. There was a flurry of exciting ideas that now live on paper, and I look forward to NET sharing those with us!

Next up was Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut by Theatre Replacement. I loved this play: a rabbit-suit wearing man describes his obsession with a suitcase full of family pictures he finds one night by a dumpster. His increasingly obsessive quest to understand these strangers leads to legal consequences and a beautiful reversal near the end of the play.

Obsessive love is something that has always fascinated me dramatically; the need to control the beloved's story, however benevolently, is almost always catastrophic; except, in this case, in the instance of pets; which, while sometime master of their own actions, have less agency to change the stories we invent for them. The obsessive purity of a central character's love of her pet dog is mirrored in the narrator's obsession with the photographs; for all the staging's whimsy, it is an unsettling piece that makes you look at the strangers you call family in your own life. The rabbit-suit device may have blunted the emotional impact of the play (the actor's face was obscured by the costume a lot of the time), but that didn't prevent the performance from moving me (and thinking deeply about it after).

We then saw two short Art-Bursts: the energizing krump and spoken word performance of Buckworld, and nightmarish dreamscape of Sadam Hussein set to the music and voices of Killsonic. There are more ways to make theatre than are dreamt of in my philosophies.

And there was more theatre to come: at 8PM, we saw two performances, The Ghost Road Company's Stranger Things and Post Natayam's SUNOH! Tell me, Sister. I responded most strongly to the second piece, especially the haunting second dance which featured a woman made featureless by fabric over her face and body, dancing to escape and transforming the fabric into wings. Heather and I both walked away thinking of possibilities for Ajax in Iraq and Menders...and then collapsed asleep.

SUNDAY, December 5, 2010
The last day began for me with a group discussing Culture & Creation (Heather went to group talking about Space). I attended this group hoping to learn tactics for successfully building a collaborative community of cross-cultural artists to bring into Flux Sunday, but time kept us mostly conceptual.

Then, there was a truck, and this truck had pancakes. 'Nuff said.

At 1PM, we saw our final round of performances, Critical Mass Performance Group's Untitled and Watts Village Theater Company's Clover and Cactus. I loved the first piece: I don't think I've ever seen excellent traditionally naturalistic acting merged so seamlessly with a poetic staging before. Devised work often leaves me feeling removed from the heart of the play, but grounding the more abstracted peregrinations of the piece with really detailed, nuanced human conflict and change gave me a way in. I wish I could see what happens next with this play in development!

And then, after some parting words, we packed and went our separate ways. I'm looking forward to the synthesis of all the ideas and energy generated by these busy three days. Thanks to good people of NET!

Read the full story

One of the Core Values being discussed at our 4th Annual Retreat at Little Pond is Ensemble Structure. This value is currently given this rough phrasing:

"Flux values a collaborative decision making process that respects the voices of all Ensemble members involved."

In practice, Flux votes on the plays and directors of the season. Occasionally we open up other decisions to the Ensemble as a whole, and try to solicit Ensemble feedback during the process (I have many pages of notes from our last Lesser Seductions workshop to work through).

But collaborative decision-making can quickly become cumbersome, and it's impossible to keep all Members equally informed on the factors involved in a particular decision.

Additionally, in a culture that values the efficiency of the corporation, models and best practices of non-hierarchical structures are hard to find. It was partly to address this need that the Network of Ensemble Theaters was formed.

However, reading through John Laurence's excellent The Cat From Hue (researching the Vietnam War for Lesser Seductions), I was struck by this quote:

"In the bubble of unreality that surrounded the daily war news, the farther away you were from the front lines, the less you knew what was actually going on. Men like Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara and William Westmoreland, who were the farthest from the front and consequently knew least about the reality of the war, were the very ones who were planning the strategy to fight it."

It's dangerous to extrapolate from the tragedy of war, but taking into account the difference in the scale of loss, the warning is the same. Truth is diluted with each turn it takes in a bureaucracy, and struggles most swimming upstream. In a hierarchical organizational structure, those with the first hand experience of a crisis are often the furthest from those finding a solution.

The box office staff hears all the angry complaints over a choice senior management made; but by the time the complaints reach senior management, they've been diluted by the desire to sugar over the bad news. Each rung on the ladder adds a little more sugar, so that like a game of telephone, the original message bears little resemblance to its final incarnation.

The tech crew knows what is possible in the changeover, but their feedback doesn't reach the designer; the actor knows the moment isn't working, but isn't given access to the playwright; the volunteer knows the audience leaves grumbling, but the Artistic Director only reads the big review.

Whatever the flaws of artist-produced theatre and ensemble structure, the front line truth is much less diluted. The artist-producer feels the consequences of their choices first-hand. It may be that the value of that front-line experience is worth the cost of consensus-building, multi-tasking and knowledge-sharing. Either way, articulating that balance is a big part of our conversation at this upcoming retreat.

What is your experience of this tension between the differing strengths and challenges of hierarchical versus collaborative structures? Is it possible to find the best of both worlds? Any thoughts you can post will be greatly appreciated. Read the full story

I had meant to post a link to Arlene Goldbard's talk at the NET Summit in San Francisco some time ago, but time keeps on slipping, slipping. However, now is still as good a time as any, maybe more so after posting Ellen McLaughlin's commencement address on the twin births of theatre and democracy.

Both are concerned with art's role in civic life, and both engage with that concern by widening the possible/necessary in exciting ways. Read together, they offer one compelling answer to the question of value I raised here.

Here is an excerpt from the talk to tempt you into going to her website and downloading the whole thing:

"Now it’s up to us to apply this knowledge to the problem of national recovery and the challenge of building a humane, sustainable civil society right here in the United States. Now is the time for a radical re-understanding of the social role, the critical importance, the public interest in creativity, specifically artistic creativity. We can close the gap in understanding that has prevented so many people from seeing that artistic and cultural creativity is not just a nice thing to have around, and a really special amenity when you have the resources to invest in something extra, but a necessity for recovery, survival and sustainability.

How do we do that? We have to begin by enlarging our own thinking, speech and action. I estimate that I have been in about a trillion conversations, read about a billion arguments, that end in the slogan, “support the arts.” Accustomed to long-term deprivation, conventional arts advocates tend to think small, focusing on saving the tiniest government agencies, on hoping not to lose too much more this time around. Many conventional arts-support arguments are silly; for example, the “economic multiplier effect” of buying theater tickets: people who go to the theater may eat in a restaurant or pay to park their cars, they may have a drink after the performance. Each additional expenditure multiplies the economic impact of a dollar spent on tickets. That’s the economic multiplier effect, and, yes, it all adds up to jobs. But so what? Going to a dog show or a football game or lady mud wrestling has the same economic impact. And that’s one of the strongest conventional arts-support arguments! After decades of this stuff, conventional arts advocates have worn themselves thin stretching a point, with almost nothing to show for it. Adjusted for inflation, even the recently expanded 2009 NEA budget is worth only a bit more than half its value in 1981, the year of Ronald Reagan’s first budget cuts.

In a time of economic crisis, when people are worried about surviving, when it is hard to fund schools, housing and medical care (but still not so hard to finance war, unfortunately), arts support arguments become even more half-hearted and desperate, and therefore even less effective. You don’t need me to tell you what’s happening to your own organizations and your own communities right now. I am reminded of the dream of right-wing crackpot Grover Norquist, who said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That is what has happened over the last three decades to the arguments for arts support, which are circling the drain as I speak.

The remedy isn’t more shrinkage but the opposite, to think big. Conventional arts advocates claim art enriches, beautifies, expresses and entertains. These are important social goods. But the elephant in the room right now, the large, unacknowledged truth that we had better hurry up and shout from the rooftops, is that in a uniquely powerful way, art can save us.

Does the grandiosity of that assertion make you uneasy? Just give me another ten minutes before you make up your mind whether to listen to your uneasiness or to your hopes."

Read all of it here - and it's worth the read. Read the full story

UNPACKING NET, PART 2: DEFINING OUR AESTHETIC

One of the challenges of NET for Heather and I was talking about the work Flux does, aka, "The Elevator Speech". This is the phrase for that woefully inadequate yet necessary 30 second pitch about your company's work, a pitch useful primarily in elevators and, well, national conferences.

We're not there yet, so if you see us in the elevator, don't expect it.

But having to talk about the work we do to those who haven't seen it really helped articulate some hunches into thought. Also, at our last Flux retreat, we talked about the kind of work we're drawn to, and that conversation, along with the push of the NET summit, has led to this post.

I love Pandora's Music Genome Project; the idea that rather than music being identified solely by stodgy genre, it is rather composed of hundreds of interacting parts that together comprise the song's DNA. This approach allows songs to talk to each other across genre and discover surprising connections; it allows for complexities and fusions and restless boundaries; it allows music to be defined by the sum of all the myriad ways we can imagine talking about it.

You see where this is going. What follows is a rough guess at the aesthetic genome of Flux - the commonalities I see in the work we're doing - but it is very rough, and needs to be hacked at by all the Members and FOFs (or anyone reading this post for that matter).

Here we go:

1. NARRATIVE CATHARSIS: We are drawn to work that uses the imaginative empathy of character and the rising conflict of narrative to purge emotion.
Examples: Riding the Bull, Rattlers
In Practice: While we love to experiment with narrative structure, that experiment is never at the cost of the audience's bond of imaginative empathy with the characters, nor the integrity of those characters' journey through the story. But this leads into #2...

2. NEGATIVE CAPABILITY: This is Keats', talking about Shakespeare "I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Examples: Other Bodies, A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Practice: We are not drawn to plays with obvious morals or themes, nor where the actions of the characters are explained or explainable. This follows #1 because it serves as a necessary friction - we want the empathy and catharsis, but only if they lead away from certainty and into mystery.

3. TONAL DISSONANCE: In music, dissonance is considered an unstable chord, a tension that needs to move forward in order to resolve, and we create tonal dissonance in our work through juxtaposition of opposites - broadly comic moments following tragic scenes (Life Is a Dream), naturalism chased by expressionism (Pretty Theft) - often within the same moment ("So I made love to her" "What's wrong with me?" "And Ted here killed her").
In Practice: Along with #2, #3 keeps the impulse of #1 from becoming easy. This embrace of tonal dissonance is also the aspect of our work critics have the most difficult time with; I think perhaps because tonal dissonance is usually used to disengage an audience from narrative and character; with Flux, this dissonance is used to deepen and widen that engagement.

4. AUDIENCE INTIMACY: The fourth wall has been broken in 10 out of the 11 plays Flux has or will produced. In some cases, direct address is the primary motor of action. The bond of imaginative empathy, under duress from the necessary shocks of Negative Capability and Tonal Dissonance, is reaffirmed by the complicity of direct address.

5. EPIC SCOPE: None of the 11 plays have conformed to the three unities of time, place and action; when it comes to time, many leap rapidly through the years (The Lesser Seductions Of History, 8 Little Antichrists, J.B.); with place, several have so many locations a sense of traditional place is destroyed (Other Bodies, A Midsummer Night's Dream); and with action, not a single play follows only one plot (except maybe J.B.). Several have more than 5!
In Practice: Epic scope is one more way of fighting against tug of Narrative Catharsis to deepen and widen the impact of the play's action.

6. METAPHYSICAL REALISM: Flux creates worlds that embrace magical realism with a twist: it's not just the intrusion of something magical into an otherwise realistic world, but a metaphysical conflict incarnated into an otherwise realistic world.
Examples: Other Bodies, Angel Eaters Trilogy, Life Is A Dream
In Practice: These conflicts have included: the fluidity of identity, the question of free will, cosmology, the nature of time, divine justice and more. In Flux's work, those conflicts take human form as the hearts, bodies, wills and realities of our characters are transformed in otherwise realistic worlds.

7. BIG CHARACTERS: We like characters of size, with size defined as their capacity to change and be changed by the world of the play and their own actions.
Examples: Lyza, Bottom, Joann, Segismundo, Allegra, Terry, Martha

8. TRANSFORMATIVE STAGING: Because of the Epic Scope of the plays, (and perhaps a little because of the un-epic scope of our budget), our staging uses the complicity of the audience's imagination to create the world: with a word, a single prop, a sound cue, we create the vasty fields of France; and then use these same tools to mean both that thing and something new.
Examples: The poles in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the kisses in Pretty Theft, the sounds in Other Bodies
In Practice: When something is transformed by an audience's imagination into something else, it never fully loses its previous incarnation, and these layers of meaning can build into a potency of expression that is unique to theatre.

9. ROUGH MAGIC: Flux loves the rough magic of theatre! Crazy fight scenes (Rue), on stage magic (Angel Eaters Trilogy), dances (Pretty Theft), rodeo showdowns (Riding the Bull), music (A Midsummer Night's Dream), all those dirty tricks of show business that feel good.

SO! That's a start.

What do you see in our work that I'm missing here? And what is the DNA of your own work? And how do we cram all that into 30 sexy seconds? Read the full story

You can read a nice day by day write up of the National Summit for Ensemble theatres here. I should have another post myself soon Unpacking NET, but this weekend was crazy with Have Another rehearsals and Flux Sunday.
More on all of that soon! Read the full story

We have returned from The National Summit For Ensemble Theatres, sponsored by NET for five days in San Francisco, and there is MUCH to unpack. Each day had enough material for several blog posts, and while I don't expect to have time to get it all down, I will try and focus on the bigger questions and idea that emerged for us from the conference.

UNPACKING NET, PART 1: QUALITY

One of the most exciting discussions that emerged from the conference was regarding quality. Often, the conversation seems to be that with better marketing, younger content, cheaper tickets or deeper funding everything will be fine and theatre will thrive. Left unspoken is the reality that a lot of theatre is boring or confusing, and even competent theatre-makers often wind up making mediocre art. It doesn't matter how hip, how young, how free and how supported bad theatre is - it is still bad theatre and no one wants to see it. But the question of how to make better theatre is often unexplored - why? And how do we use that question to make higher quality theatre?

This post will focus on five ideas that emerged from the conference and ensuing discussions:

1. The difference between quality and value
2. Understanding the rules of form
3. Critiquing from within
4. Sustaining the conversation
5. Clarity of intent

Hopefully, these five points will encourage you to post your own thoughts on quality, and even better, your practices for making your own work better.

1. The difference between quality and value
I think the primary reason we have trouble talking about quality is we so often confuse it with value. Artistic quality is excellence in an established cultural tradition. That tradition has a form with a set of rules and expectations, a unique physics of engagement, a shared language; and from that tradition, excellence is expressed.

You do not need to like or value that tradition to recognize when its expression has quality.
You only need to be familiar with the rules.

An example: I don't know much about the tradition of ballet. However, I know enough to recognize excellent ballet dancers from merely competent ones because I have had enough exposure to the form. Some cultural traditions have very simple rules: others are more complex. It may be that complex cultural traditions require more but give more in return because their complexity provides a greater range of expression. But whether that is true or not, if you have enough exposure to a tradition, you are able to discern, even without being able to articulate exactly why, variations in quality.

That doesn't mean you LIKE it. Thus far, I have not connected with theatre devised primarily from Viewpoints. I don't value it (though I'd like to, and perhaps would with more exposure to its tradition). However, when I saw SITI Company perform, I noticed a clear difference in quality from less experienced practitioners. I knew it was very high quality within that tradition.

Which brings us to value, which is a moral judgement, not an aesthetic one. Value judges what kind of work is important - theatre of social justice, devised work, Broadway, Indie theatre - and in doing so, also judges what kind of work is not important.

Quality is concerned with the use of a medium within an aesthetic tradition.
Value is concerned with the role of that tradition within a society.
Quality looks at how art works.
Value looks at why.

What happens when the two are confused? An audience that loves the tradition of experimental theatre begin with a set of values, and when experimental theatre validates those values, that audience is far more likely to believe the work is quality. An audience that believes theatre for social justice is more important than the classics immediately turns off when the curtain rises on a traditional production of Shakespeare. And so on.

When theatre does not conform to our values, it is very difficult for us to assess its quality. Why? I think in part because questions of value are so deeply connected with self-identity. Broadway theatre isn't just bad, it's everything wrong with theatre today! Theatres should only produce works by playwrights under 35! We should ban Shakespeare! Behind those firey calls for revolution is often, I think, a real fear that the work we're doing isn't valued, and so we must devalue work from other traditions.

And of course we should advocate for the kind of work we value, but in doing so, we should never confuse that advocacy with a clear-headed analysis of quality. The mediocre play with the beautiful process of international collaborators concerned with peace is just as deadly to experience as the millionth production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. So while I think it is worthwhile for us to talk about what kind of theatre we need to see, a cooler-headed look at how to make better work across all traditions is increasingly important. Because audiences across all traditions are looking at all these different kinds of work we're doing, and deciding not to come back.

2. Understanding the rules of form
So let's leave aside the question of value for now, and focus on the question of quality. I think the way we make our work better is by deepening our mastery of a tradition, and then innovating within and beyond it.

Part of it is simply practice: dancers and musicians practice their technique for hours every day as a path to mastery. Sometimes we theatre folk do, too.

But I believe that engaging in discussion about the work itself is also essential, and it's here that I feel like the blogosphere has some distance to go. Sometimes it feels like we talk about everything but how we make artistic decisions. Often I have reached an epiphany about artistic choices when forced to articulate my process. We like to veil that process in mystery, and often it is more important to simply try a million things and see what sticks; but after the sticking point, why not speculate why it worked? Why not share that speculation?

Excellence in theatre is often a matter of a beat longer, a foot farther, a minute faster, a line shorter, a turn away, a word that echoes, a gesture that lingers, a blackout that came a moment too late, a sound cue a hair too loud, a gel just pale enough, a set piece that finally makes a scene playable. We see each others work and we make judgements about these decisions, but we often don't talk about these choices, even within our own company, let alone outside of it.

And so we stumble somewhat blindly and a little alone into what niche masteries we carve out for ourselves; instead of moving the mystery inch by inch forward into the light, as scientists sometimes do.

How can we talk about the work we do, across judgements of value, to improve the quality of theatre?

3. Critiquing from within
Conrad Bishop from The Independent Eye brought up an excellent point at the conference: the best criticism functions from within. If you imagine yourself as a collaborative artist in the company you're critiquing, your criticism becomes the question "What can I bring to this process?" rather than "How can I analyze this product?" It forces you to work within that artist or company's cultural tradition as best you can, and helps remove the blinders of value.

But how do we imagine ourselves within another company when it is so difficult to critique work within our own? Flux has annual and post-play post-mortems, but they focus entirely on the process of producing, not on the quality of artistic decisions. And this is, of course, because feelings get hurt. And yet we must improve the quality of work, and we can do that best by talking about it.

So how do you talk about it within your company? Do you use the Liz Lerman Critical Reponse Process? Do you just say the ugly truth and wound each other terribly and then recover over beers to do the whole thing over again, like Valhalla? How do you do it?

And how do we bring that process beyond our company's walls? How do we help make each other better? It starts, I think, from stepping back from value, understanding the tradition, and critiquing from within.

4. Sustaining the conversation
Another good idea that emerged from the Summit was the idea that any critical process should not be a drive-by snooting but a sustained engagement. This happens, of course, in the ad hoc way we form trusted alliances with artists whose opinions we respect. How can we make that alliance a daily practice rather than an occasional interaction? How can it happen across companies?

5. Clarity of intent
There is perhaps nothing more important to this process than clarity of intent. At the beginning of the process, understanding why you are doing this play now, and how you think it might work, is essential. That doesn't mean you know everything, nor does it mean you don't ceaselessly revise everything throughout the process. But it is impossible in the heat of a rehearsal process to assess your work if you don't begin from a place of clarity and relative consensus. It makes it extremely difficult to talk about the play at production meetings, in rehearsals, and over beers after rehearsals if everyone has a different idea of what this play is, why we're doing it, and how it works. That does not mean conformity of opinion, but it absolutely means a destination with a map and compass and some wind in the sails.
That goes for companies, too. Flux is reaching the point where we need to start talking in language as clear as water about where we're going aesthetically and how to get there.
Where is your company going aesthetically?
How are you going to get there?

So...
That was a longer post then expected. But there's a lot to talk about here. We'll be bringing these questions to our Annual Retreat, and we'd sure love for you to post your ideas here. Read the full story