John Stewart

I watch this every year around this time and it still gets me:

The Daily Show
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Jacques Ranciere

Here is a quote from Jacques Ranciere, who has been instrumental in shaping the way we think about City Council Meeting

From Dissensus, page 58 (in my edition)

"In the winter of 1995 in France there was a long public transport workers' strike. An outpouring of...arguments sought to portray these workers as individuals out to protect their own private and immediate interests to the detriment of the political search for the common good and the political ability to act in the interest of future generations. However, in the course of the strike, it became increasingly clear that its main object was to decide whether a specific group of men and institutions had the exclusive privilege of determining the future of the community. The canonical distinction between the political and the social is in fact a distinction between those who are regarded as capable of taking care of common problems and the future, and those who are regarded as being unable to think beyond private and immediate concerns. The whole democratic process is about the displacement of that boundary."

(Italics mine)

Less With More, part 1

When I teach, talk to artists and think about my life as a theater artist, I have been using the phrase “Do less with more,” as a counter to the crisis mode that seems embedded in much of the art production I see around me. I've talked about this in other forums - last year with Collective Arts Think Tank - but I want to start using a few blog posts here as a clearinghouse for more of what I (think I) mean on the subject.

I invite challenges, support, comments, questions and delicious pies.

I’m talking most about live performance, because that’s where I work, but it can often apply to visual art and film as well.

The simplest way to define doing less with more is that it means bringing more resources to fewer projects, rather than trying to get a lot done with a little.

The Frustrations

I started saying do less with more because I was frustrated by a few trends I was seeing:


The opposite refrain: “Do more with less,” which I hear from artists, administrators, venues, and funders alike, constantly, started to bug me because I don’t see the value in it. Doing more with less has led us to under-resource much of our work. In institutions it often means institutions are preserved at the expense of increasing the number or pay scale of artists in the house. To my eyes, it has led many of us to let down the very fragile and elusive form we work in.


I don't see other disciplines relying so heavily on scrappiness. It's okay to be a filmmaker and do a movie every five or more years. No one says a poet who puts out a collection every 10 years is "not writing enough". (Whether the poet or filmmaker wishes they could produce more is another question, but to me they are addressing the market more honestly.) But in theater there is this pervasive myth that rate of production equals relevancy. Like, by putting up a show or two every year, I'm somehow more legitimate. I'm proving I'm a pro.

I’ve heard “do more with less” in boom and bust times, so it can’t just be about the current economy.

I think doing more with less has become a convenient excuse not to try and make great work. If we are always doing more with less, we can always fall back on the excuse of not having had enough resources.

I don’t think work is made better by doing more with less. Doing more with less is the efficiency model, it’s how capitalism works. You try to cut down the cost of production while increasing the rate. I think art is about partaking in a seemingly inefficient activity to create something amazing for it’s own sake. So we think bigger, so we take in the world with our imaginations. So we confuse ourselves into understanding more. That takes more time than we usually give it.

I think the market is oversaturated. If there are always so many shows going on in a place like New York at any given time, and we’re all desperate to pull in audience, and our houses aren't filling up, maybe we are not meeting demand the way we ought to. Maybe we can build demand through anticipation (“wow remember how great that show was two years ago by those guys? I can’t wait to go to the new one!”, maybe we can collaborate on bringing better resources to each other rather than desperately clinging to our own small slices of a pie (traditional support models) that seem to be shrinking. Even if your houses are full, are you paying people? Are you surviving mostly on everyone’s donated, or partially-donated labor? And is that, as the funders like to say, sustainable?

The current funding model doesn’t really work for most of us. There are too many worthy projects for grantmakers to actually be able to fund all the best ones. I know this is true because funders tell me it is so. All the best projects do not get funded. This means that you may have a great idea, and you may feel you have to get it into the world on a timeframe that is supported by the annual funding cycle, or perceived cycle that is out there now. The fact is it might take more time to get those funds in place, to really get the work done right, than it seems like it ought to.

So...

In my experience, doing less with more leads to stronger work. I look to examples like The Foundry Theatre (where the work is not produced until it’s deemed ready, even if that’s years later than expected), Soho Rep (which cut it’s season to three productions, allowing each to be more realized and recognized) and ERS, which produces a show about every two years, which then continue to tour and bring in income and accolades for as long as five years.

Doing less with more means thinking hard - not about how little you could get a piece done for - but what would you do if you had everything you really needed to make it the best it could be. How long would it take to amass all that? Then set out to do the project on the project’s terms rather than on someone else’s (Equity, LORT, NPN, The Whitney Museum, etc.) idea about what a typical production schedule is. There will always be deadlines, crises, financial constraints and time crunches. That’s a given. But why compound them? I think we should aim higher with our work, and that might take a little longer to accomplish, even a little longer than we might like sometimes.

Next, maybe we'll talk about how to make art in a marketplace, rather than for it? 

What You've Done, 2005

Getting ready to go to Houston again, to work on The Frogs at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center and City Council Meeting, at DiverseWorks, reminded me how much I liked working down there before.

Below is a clip of a dress rehearsal for What You've Done, a DiverseWorks and Project Row House co-production, featuring Eleanor Colvin, Autumn Knight and Troy Shulze. The piece was performed in a row house. These three actors did lovely work and helped keep me honest.

(I don't know why there is a long clip of black screen after the credits. Chalk it up to the early days of youtube?)

Illinois

Jim Strahs

Jim Strahs died in Vermont on October 1. I was lucky enough to perform in a play he co-wrote with Richard Maxwell, called Cowboys & Indians, and perform with him in an early version of The Florida Project by Tory Vazquez. 

Jim Strahs in 1982.

I don’t think I knew Jim very well. I wouldn’t say I did if someone asked. He is among the ten most important writers for me, though. It was in the way he made you keep up with him, the way he got you to see things that maybe you didn’t want to, at the same time as he cracked you up.

My first interaction with him was at a party in the loft that a lot of theater dorks shared, over on Desbrosses street. He leaned over me (not many people can lean over me) and said, “You’re the guy that married Johanna.” I said I was. “Smart man,” he barked or croaked, and walked away, saying it again. “Smart man.” (He was right.)

He hadn’t introduced himself so I had no way of knowing he was the guy who wrote North Atlantic, which, for me, was like an hour and forty-five minutes of perfect time.

Maybe that was part of why Jim was such a good match for the Wooster Group – the company has a knack for controlling time in their shows. Jim even said that about Ron Vawter when we were talking once at a Cowboys & Indians rehearsal. “Ronny controlled time,” he said. And of course I had never thought to put it that simply when I tried to explain to people how Vawter had changed my understanding of what live performance could be.

A year or two after Cowboys & Indians, I would run into Jim every so often, at Amalgamated Bank on Union Square. I was putting pay in the bank, and he was running an errand for his gig doing payroll, I think for a labor union. He genuinely liked that job, in a non-condescending, almost guileless way. It was solid work; he had benefits; he was getting his teeth fixed.

Those conversations, usually about five minutes each, about doing payroll and writing plays, were moments I looked forward to because there was never any guesswork—he was always on the level. And he’d probably never have used that phrase. He’d have been able to put it more meaningfully, without doctoring it up. What I mean is that his incredible tone of voice, combined with what he said, and the way he ranged, physically, made everything that came from him truer than if anyone else had said it.

I realized the other day that since Jim left New York for Vermont, and largely checked out of the scene, I had kept a mental image of him up there, which I would wordlessly check in with every so often. I thought of him going through old notebooks, sitting in a small place, maybe depressed, maybe just quiet, writing when the urge hit him, looking out the window a lot, tracking through notebooks from years ago and thinking about what of it was worth keeping. Because it's how I knew him, I always see him in his long leather coat, doing all these things.

I keep him there because it helps me clear away my own bullshit, sit down again and just put down some words.

It’s easy to fall into clichés talking about a dead colleague or friend. It’s probably even easier when it’s someone you think of as an unconscious mentor. God forbid a kind of artistic role model. To get it out of the way: Jim had so much integrity. There was none of the separation between him and his language – the body and the word – that happens so regularly when we try to make a living out of our compulsions or callings. Jim didn’t bother with that, for all the right reasons.

For people who knew him or had an experience with his writing, the force of it is titanic. If he kept his focus narrow, it was because each sentence bore the weight of at least a hundred pounds of reckoning.

I am puzzled as to why Jim’s work has not had more reach. I think the failing is everyone else’s but his. I keep wondering why there couldn’t be more room in a larger world for someone like him – someone who’s never going to glad-hand or kowtow, who’s just going to get each moment. What do we say to this silence now?