Opinion: Houston: A Town Without Critics by Robert Bales, Arts Journal

Arts writer Theodore Bale is moody about the lack of arts writing and criticism in Houston. ALT attention was caught by opening paragraphs in his blog Texas, A Concept at www.artsjournal.com:

A Town Without Critics

December 15, 2011 By Theodore Bale

Many years ago in Cambridge, I had the pleasure of meeting the esteemed former New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff. The lecture she’d delivered that night at Harvard was so inspiring that I decided I was going to become a critic as well. In a hopelessly naïve gesture, I went up to her after the talk and asked if she could explain my next move. “Well,” she said with a sigh, “the first thing to remember is that you’re going to have to conduct your education in public.”

Many decades later, that advice continues to ring true, and it’s particularly applicable to the contemporary blog. Gone are my fact-checkers, my editors, my copy desk, my headline writers and photo editors. Or rather, now I am all of them. This isn’t big news to anyone who started in print publications and moved to blogs. In my case, I continue to play both fields, writing for newspapers and trade publications as well as websites.

The theme of this week’s blog is so unwieldy that I couldn’t possibly cover it thoroughly within the “confines” of this ever-scrolling page. “Don’t write in a way that forces readers to click for too long,” I’m learning that lesson. With this delayed lede, however, I’ll proceed and try to convey a current crisis in Houston’s critical culture.

Read more at www.artsjournal.com . . . .

Robert Faires on the Disputaciousness of Austin's B. Iden Payne Awards

From today's edition of the weekly

All Over Creation

Award Fever

Whenever you feel like throwing a pillow over the Payne Awards, consider this

by Robert Faires

[ . . . .] You'll find [. . .] fume and froth anywhere awards are handed out – the Oscars, the Grammys, the Daytime Emmys – and in any judged competition where "one day you're in; the next day you're out." [. . . .] [B]y virtue of their longevity, the Paynes have the greater claim on a local tradition of disputatiousness.

So why even have these arts awards if they're so divisive and infuriating? It's not as if every profession recognizes its work this way. Plumbers aren't honored for the year's best installation of a kitchen-sink disposal, nor are waiters for outstanding recitation of the daily specials. If they don't require awards, why do artists? Well, awards have become valuable to us in building community, bad attitudes notwithstanding. In our fractured, cocooning culture, the handing out of these awards is one of those increasingly rare public rituals that can still draw us out of our separate corners of the community – like homecoming dances and Independence Day parades – and into a shared space, to gather us together in acknowledgment of our common bonds. Even with all the carping, the Payne Awards reaffirm the shared commitment of people making theatre in Austin.

Read the full text of Robert Faires' meditation at the Austin Chronicle. . . .

Opinion: Theatre and the "Odd Man Out" syndrome, Charles Isherwood, NY Times, April 15

Found on-line, Isherwood's thoughts about reviewing theatre when your reactions differ from those of the audience:

Theater Talkback: Odd-Man-Out Syndrome

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

“Am I missing something?”

If you attend the theater with any regularity, chances are good you’ve had the occasion to inwardly ponder that question at least once in the course of your culture-consuming adult life. You may also have found yourself asking it aloud, of a companion, as you hurtle toward the bar at intermission, or even hissed it, sotto voce, during the show itself. The query, usually arising with a prickly feeling of insecurity or mystification or angst, is a byproduct of a common but little-discussed cultural phenomenon: the odd-man-out syndrome.

This can roughly be described as the experience of attending an event at which much of the audience appears to be having a rollicking good time, while you sit in stony silence, either bored to stupefaction or itchy with irritation, miserably replaying the confluence of life circumstances that have brought you here. (“Curse that Isherwood!”)

The syndrome was perhaps most memorably dramatized on that classic episode of “Seinfeld” – and by the way, there are those who remained immune to that sitcom’s allure – in which Elaine is brought to the edge of nervous collapse by her distaste for the movie “The English Patient,” over which the Oscar voters and most of the rest of the world swooned. (For the record, I was right there with you, Elaine.)

The experience of seeing live performances – or movies — is both personal and collective. Everyone interprets entertainment through a distinct, idiosyncratic prism shaped by taste and experience, but we’re also exposed to the responses of the people around us, who are also interpreting the show through their own individual prisms.

Read more at the New York Times on-line. . . .

Opinion: Drama Critics Are Your Friends

Thoughts from Simon Ogden in Vancouver, B.C., on the role of those of us who write about your productions, published at his blog The Next Stage at Wordpress:


I know, I know, we’ve still got a real love/hate thing going on with the critics, don’t we? it’s terrifying having them somewhere out there in the house (Is that him? The one in the back row? How does he look, happy? Pissy? Bored? I think he looks bored, I’m going to kill myself now), lurking in the dark hunkered over their little pads, judging us, probably hating us…god, why do we even need them at all? Seriously, why do we even invite them? This piece is about the art. The art, dammit!

It is so past due for us to get over this. It’s time to get real perspective on these people and what they are doing. It’s time to talk about them, and to them – to engage with them. Professional criticism is not a one way street, it’s one half of a conversation that you start with your play. We need them. We really do, if we want to ever make money through theatre work, anyway.

The critics don’t work for us. Sure, it’s nice for our progressive marketing if they say some nice things in print about the show, but this can’t be the only reason we care about them, can it? Is their worth to us measured merely as a potential sound bite? Seems a bit mercenary, doesn’t it?

The critics don’t work for our audience either (we do), they are the audience, and what’s more, they know a lot about theatre, and they love it. And they can write, and they like to talk, so people listen. Everybody else at the show is talking to people about you too, but you don’t get to hear what they’re really saying. Now, I know that this is just fine for some of us. There are a lot of theatre artists out there right now who are delicate and sensitive and quite happy making their art for themselves and don’t want to hear what people thought about the work, because they think that it will have an effect on future work. And they’re right, it will. Is that such a bad thing? I guess it depends on what part you want to play in the bigger picture.

Remember, critics don’t make culture, artists do. Critics report on it. Let’s just be clear on our respective jobs. The critics, simply put, work for the theatre. They exist to maintain a conversation about something bigger than all of us individually, something that we all want: a popular, sustainable, trendy theatre. They keep the ball of public awareness in the air, and so we could use more of them, many more, getting the idea of theatre into the heads of more people.

Click to read more at The Next Stage on WordPress. . . .

Opinion: Band-aids Won't Cure the Disease, Don Hall, April 16

From the April 16 post by Don Hall, the great contemporary vulgarian theatre arts observer, in his erudite, aggressive and insightful blog An Angry White Guy in Chicago:

Thursday, April 16, 2009
Band Aids Don't Cure the Disease

. . . There is more American Theater patronized regularly by fewer people than ever in the short history of the country. In the desire to create permanence in the form of the Theatrical Institution we have slowly let the frog boil and in search of a sense of security in the form of profit and endowment we have created a theater for the masses. You can get it in any color you want, so long as it is beige.

The basic assumptions that seem to get in the way of progress in our shift of paradigm are obvious:

- More money will solve the ills of an under appreciated art form
- Long term sustainability is good for both the artist and the art
- Artistic success goes hand in hand with business success
- There is naturally supposed to be a tug-of-war between the artistic and the financial

These assumptions are the doctrine of a failing paradigm. Money rarely solves problems - it usually just band aids things up until the bills come due later. Long term sustainability is an illusion - institutions last for a while, and rarely to the benefit of the artist or the art. Success is defined by many things and often one definition has nothing to do with another. Finally, this self-imposed tug-of-war is only necessary when the money becomes as important as the art. . . .

The further into the corporate mentality of creating art for profit, the closer the art resembles a chicken dish at Applebees.

Go to an Applebees. Order the Buffalo Chicken Strips Appetizer and the Orange Chicken Entree. What you will get is five turd-shaped pieces of breaded chicken with some buffalo sauce and blue cheese followed by the same damn chicken turds smothered in orange sauce on rice. If the theater you create is nothing but a breaded chicken turd and you throw money at it to create the unique sauce, it's time to let the life cycle of your company pass on to the annals of history.

The symptom with theater is only a problem of perception. When enough of us (and with the economy dwindling in the shitter, the DIY aesthetic of the little gypsy theaters will grow) cease to perceive theater as a means to establish permanence and lifelong security and embrace the only aspect of it that matters - immediacy - the pendulum will swing. And like the life cycle that Thurman describes, it'll eventually grow bloated and self-involved and die. As soon as we have we shift gears to wanting keep what we have - its how liberals become conservatives.

The beautiful thing is that as organizations come and go, the art form continues. Theater institutions die - theater does not.

Don Hall's full meditation on the necessary impermanence of arts institutions