2012 ART/NY Internship Fair

Mitch and I spent the morning at the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York‘s 2012 Theatre Internship Fair.  We spoke with over 70 bright and enthusiastic students from all over the country – folks from New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and as far as Texas.

We look forward to welcoming a great group of new interns to the company this summer and the following autumn.

My personal thanks to Mitch for volunteering his time to meet potential interns with me, and to ART/NY for hosting a wonderful and crucial networking and staffing event.

I snagged a few minutes early in the morning and in the midst of the hustle to snap these two photos of Mitch hard at work.

Enjoy.

Identity

The Deconstructive Theatre Project’s Managing Director Arielle Lever and I recently participated in the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York’s three-part Organizational Planning and Process workshop.  Within the context of the series, I was asked to describe how and why The Deconstructive Theatre Project came to be and the relationship we hope to cultivate between our artists and our immediate community.  I though it might be nice to share those thoughts with that community via this outlet.

A warm thank you to the kind Nello McDaniel for encouraging us in our work and in this thoughtful process.

Identity

When I founded The Deconstructive Theatre Project in 2006, I was looking to create a safe space in which artists from a myriad of different disciplines would come together to think about creative process.  I wanted to create a playful arena in which company members might discover how the different vocabularies of performance could work together or push against one another to create dynamic theatre.  I wanted the artists to find as much surprise and delight as audiences did, and I wanted audiences to understand the full life cycle of a piece of theatre.

These goals remain the foundation of the company’s activities.  I hope that The Deconstructive Theatre Project will continue to serve as an instigator of questioning: how is something made?  How can it be made differently?  How do artists and audiences communicate both inside and outside of the performance arena?  How can performance reveal process?  I want The Deconstructive Theatre Project to prove the value of collaboration and to steer individuals away from a concern over individual ownership.  All art is by nature stolen.  The Deconstructive Theatre Project champions a collective trading and shaping of ideas and a shared ownership of curiosity, process, failure, and success.  When we produce a performance, I want the collaborators to stand together and wonder where one person’s contribution ends and another’s begins.

I want our community to be an extension of this collective mindset.  It is frustrating to see communities lose investment in the presence of art.  It is frustrating also to be driven to seek funding for artistic process outside of the community in which the work is being made.  This happens, I think, because artists and their larger communities do not communicate with one another as regularly as they ought to.  There has been a lot of talk about transparency lately.  I think the entire artistic process should be transparent and the community should be invited to view and partake in it.  The rehearsal room is sacred, yes; but keeping it sacred is not a matter of barring the outside world from entry, but rather a process of empowering that outside world with the tools necessary to understand that sacredness and its local, national, and global value.  Just as I hope The Deconstructive Theatre Project teaches artists to forsake concerns over individual ownership in favor of the powers of collective mentality, I aim to inspire the company’s audiences with that same shared investment in the failures, successes, and livelihood of our members and of our work.

The First Community Supported Theatre Roundtable

The Deconstructive Theatre Project conducted its first Community Supported Theatre Committee Roundtable on November 3, 2011 at Roebling Tea Room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Committee Members (L to R): Founding Director Adam J. Thompson, Board Member Ryan J. Davis, Kaylen Ratto, Becky Leifman, Managing Director Arielle Lever, Chrissie Rouse, David DeParolesa.

Stay tuned for more information about Community Supported Theatre, The Deconstructive Theatre Project’s new audience engagement project – launching in spring 2012!