Flux Theatre Ensemble

By August Schulenburg

"...but there are some ideals we cannot relinquish; there are some dreams that we won’t let go. The ideal that every human being has a right to peace, freedom, and creative self-expression; the ideal that every community is sustained by that creative self-expression; and the dream of a global stage where the stories of those communities are freely exchanged; we hold onto these things, because without them, theatre has no meaning.

Because theatre does not exist in opposition to Facebook and Twitter; theatre is not in competition with television or film: all of these forms, old and new, are in service to the expression of the human spirit. When Twitter helps spark a revolution against an oppressive regime, that is a victory for theatre..."

"If we look forward to 50 years from now, we will see this period as a precursor to a time when physics is totally reformulated in the language of holography," he says. "Once the theory is properly fleshed out, we will be able to apply it to almost any problem."

Menders: I recently discovered this blog Gender Across Borders, which recently posted a penetrating look at the Saudi Women Drivers movement, #Women2Drive, and the movement's surprising lack of support from the United Nations' UNWomen.

"The traditional one-way vertical relationship from the mass media to the audience does not exist anymore. Indeed, the whole notion of audience does not exist anymore, as users are now taking an active role in the creating and distribution of media."

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Why do we need to dream? In Jonah Lehrer's beautiful essay of the same name, dreams are much more than "neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance." The essay speculates that dreams serve three essential functions:

• Strengthening important memories by replaying them and linking them to similar past experiences
• Consolidating memories by deciding what events from the day to forget
• Juxtaposing new memories with seemingly unlike older memories to see if unexpected patterns and connections emerge (hence, bizarro dreams)

This last potential function is inherently connected to creativity. Our capacity as artists to see unexpected patterns and connect unlike things through juxtaposition is at the heart of the creative process. The essay shares several studies that link sleep to enhanced creativity.

And as Jonah Lehrer will be the keynote speaker for the upcoming TCG 2010 National Conference (disclosure: my employer), I wondered if we could travel a little further down this hypothetical road and imagine how theatre connects to dreaming and memory.

It begins with the evolutionary hypothesis that pattern recognition is essential to survival. Our capacity to notice unexpected patterns allowed us to better predict future outcomes. Over time, that capacity to understand patterns became so deeply ingrained in our consciousness (perhaps even giving rise to consciousness) that this capacity became pleasurable. It became what we call beauty.

Our capacity for beauty, for pleasure in the manifestation of a meaningful pattern or design, is linked directly to our capacity to survive. With apologies to Oscar Wilde, all art may be useless, but our hunger and capacity for it is essential.

Back to Jonah Lehrer and dreaming. One thing may have stuck in your mind while reading the above - if dreaming is so important, why do we have to be unconscious while it happens? Lehrer speculates that the conscious mind cannot relinquish enough control to discover unexpected patterns and let go of useless memories.

So evolution told our consciousness to take a nap. The wild and bizarre juxtapositions of dreams are necessary for pattern recognition and memory maintenance; our consciousness would hold on to the wrong things (if it was willing to relinquish any memories at all) and see only predictable patterns.

It's a strange thing: evolution would rather have us sleeping and completely defenseless than have our conscious minds solely responsible for the patterns of our memory. Sleep is like a stern parent, sending the conscious mind to bed so the difficult work and hard choices of assembling the self can begin.

Is it any wonder then we choose to sit in the dark and watch the pattern of a play unfold before us? It is a waking dream, where the artist assumes the role of our unconscious, but allows us to stay up late, juxtaposing unexpected connections and revealing unseen patterns, expanding our capacity to predict what may happen, helping us to remember the right things, and let go of the rest.

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Flux will be celebrating by, well, rehearsing theatre all day.

BUT, if you're not in rehearsal all day, there are all sorts of exciting things happening:

- If you're in NYC, check out the NYC World Theatre Day Coalition for flash and mobs and more
- If you're in the USA, check out my goodly employer's webpage for more national and international events, and a great address from Lynn Nottage
- If you're on our little Earth, check out World Theatre Day's blog for even more excitement

It's always good to be reminded that we are a small part of something much larger than ourselves, so whether you're flash mobbing or just blocking, have a wonderful World Theatre Day. Read the full story

Rob Weinert-Kendt has a great post about the most produced playwrights at TCG's Member Theatres* (with a few Broadway productions thrown in to boot). Maria MacCarthy has a follow-up looking at the gender ratio of the list; 99Seats and Parabasis widen that lens further; all good reads.

These posts got me wondering about productions at the rest of the theatres in the country. Do Samuel French or Dramatists Play Service ever release the number of productions they license? I'm not sure of any other way to survey the other 2,000+ theatres in the country, and it seems as important as measuring what our leading institutions are producing.

For example, my most widely produced plays are written for Equalogy, a theatre for social change. Twice a year for the past ten years, two 1-act plays I wrote on dating violence and acquaintance rape have toured colleges of the Northeast, performing for thousands of students. I have no doubt that nothing I've written has had as positive an impact as those plays. And yet, in that world of theatre we call "the field", those plays are essentialy invisible.

I'm sure this is true for many, many other productions, performed in the streets and prisons, cafeterias and gymnasiums of this country. I wouldn't be surprised if the impact on their communities is just as profound as the work of the larger institutions, and yet when theatre's measure is taken, they are often invisible.

A fully inclusive metrics of real value...what would that look like? Is it even possible?
*TCG is my goodly employer Read the full story