Re: RAT Re: Tickets

[Nick <nick@whirl-i-gig.com>]

Box Office is real the way the Lemonade Stand is real. 

The Lemonade Stand is the most important arbitrator in the neighborhood.  Here the parents teach their children well.  We sometimes forget that the first definition of commerce is something that may have little or no relationship to money: 

 commerce 1. social intercourse: interchange of ideas, opinions, and sentiments.

The big bully of the neighborhood has always been KeepingUpWithTheJoneses.   But if Box Office remains as deliberately ineffective as Lemonade Stand, it becomes the only real contender for that first definition of commerce.  Otherwise all that Theater is selling is one more product, one more ticket. That OneWayTicketToPalookaville.

The Xmas Tree is the perverted Box Office.  Santa has sat his fat ass down on Baby Jesus.  The gifts are X'd out by bar codes. 

Theater is a gift first, not a product.  "presents" sounds like "presence"; the actor gives his unmediated presents to the audience.

The Sistine Chapel is the exact dimensions of the Temple of Solomon as given in the Old Testament.  I imagine the Lemonade Stand as scale model where the parent has commissioned the child to paint the ceiling.  So the gaze is not pedestrian, but upward.  Michelangelo instructs the Holy Father and vice versa. The angry christ is a tot throwing a tantrum when He chases the buyers and sellers from the Temple; he is able to do that only because his Father is the landlord.

The Lemonade Stand and Theater create fictive realities that become the wise and ethical guardians of our social intercourse.  Patron/Artist Parent/Child conflate.  Box Office is at best a funny-house mirror for viewing our "patronage."   Free Market Capitol is our true parent, affording us the leisure that allows us to create art.  Especially in this country the artist, even with a day job, is merely one more Landlord of Leisure. 

As landlords then we should be conscious of how we exploit the resources of the world both overtly and covertly in the creation of our art.   I thought another wise thing that Erik said at NYC Conference that relates tangentially to No More Box Office was that one ought to weigh the value of producing a script written about finding a serum to a disease against actually producing that serum.  

As landlords we can differentiate between being a proprietor and a host.

Host, from the Latin 'hostia' Eucharist, fr.Latin, sacrifice.  

Proprietor, from the fr.Latin 'proprietas',  property. 

This is a matter of mindset and intent of both performer and audience alike.  Blanche DuBois always relied on the kindness of strangers.  But No More Box Office relies on the strength of friends and community.  The words sacrifice and donation are related.  The presents, say presence, of performer and audience are equal equal.  

The Sun Dance offers more than a mere ceremony or ritual then.  But for both the dancer and the audience (community) alike, the Sun Dance sympathizes fully with nature and provides a serum.

--nick