RAT Re: Compromise (was Marx)

[The Independent Eye <bards@independenteye.org>]

D.D.-

	Really enjoy reading your posts - you have a style of circuitous
rhetoric that kinda circles the wagon train and then closes in for the
barbecue.  (not being ironic - really like it!)

	[Note to other RATees:  D.D. and I had the experience of working in
companies in a small, hyper-conservative locality where progressive theatre
was a bit of an anomaly, and also did some good work together.  Many wounds
over that span of time, but we seem to have survived.]

	I dunno.  The institutional question, as you know, has always been
a tough issue for us.  Over our years in Lancaster, PA, we went from being
a 3-person touring ensemble to a mini-institution; then, when it became
clear to me that the only way it could survive would be to stop producing
our own work, pulled up stakes and left.  So in one sense, yes, the
building, the corporate structure, the community perception, all these have
a strong gravitation that seriously affects what you do as an artist.  In
this case, nobody - even though we had a pretty conservative board - ever
told me that we should change our programming.  But I'm no dummy:  you just
had to look at the attendance figures and the revenue.

	But was the institutionalization a "compromise"?  I wouldn't use
that term.  Yes, aspects of it were unacceptable, and that's why we left.
I realized that the Eye's best work, e.g. our mask/puppet Macbeth or
Camilla's Cabaret, could not have been done in this circumstance - I didn't
have six months to work on a piece or the ability to tour it and keep it in
artistic evolution over a span of years - instead, I had to jump into
rehearsals for Show #2.  On the other hand, I had more money to realize the
product of even a "compromised" imagination, as opposed to the present,
where I have a helluva lot of imagination and no bucks to make it real.  In
one of the most difficult working circumstances, a collaboration with a
local community theatre on the old warhorse Dark of the Moon, I think we
produced one of the best productions in my career, and that absolutely
couldn't have happened without the cooperation of that Instutition.  What's
swung us back, twice now, to an "institutionalized" structure has not been
the desire for security but for the resources - space, production money,
other actors, etc. - to manifest the vision.

	These discussions tend to revolve around terms like "compromise"
and "selling out."  I think those terms are misleading.  People who are
*conscious* of "selling out" aren't going to sell out very effectively.  I
sometimes feel that I've been saved from mediocrity by a lack of talent for
it.  Compromises are usually made to save the vision, not to abandon it.  I
think, for the most part, that we're all doing the work we're suited to;
people working in institutional theatres, of whatever scale, are simply
doing the best work they know to do within a structure that supports that.
It's not what I've chosen to do; I think I'm a very good stage director,
but I don't do particularly well in that context, for a number of reasons.
But I can't fault people for finding the context that best suits them.
Right now, for any projects we envision that take a certain level of
resources, we'll have to find a co-producer and do the elaborate mating
dance to make it happen - for us, that's been sometimes a wonderful
experience and sometimes less so, but that too is a mating with an
"institution."

	And right now we're in the early stages of evolving a whole new
style - in formal structure, in occasion, a revisioning of Dionysian
chorus-based performance - that will indeed be money-free.  And I'm very
excited about it.  But I also know that somewhere down the path I'm going
to be cursing the problems of working with amateurs, etc.  It's all a
balance/counterbalance dance, says this Libra.--

***
	Yike.  Left this unfinished in the out box for a day and a half.
Enough.  I ramble on.  Will send it now, whatever it says.

Too many people saying "Cheers"?  Damn, I've never quite managed to be on
the cutting edge.  Ok.
Warm & hairy vibes to y'all-
Conrad





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at <http://www.independenteye.org>.





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