Theater For The Future

Theater for the Future is going on vacation, y’all.

For the first time in… um… seven years? six years? I have the holiday week off – especially those coveted days before and after christmas.

So my mom and Marni and I are meeting up at my brother’s new pad – in Oahu. If you think I’m nuts, you should see Zack – who is learning to navigate by the stars on a traditional voyaging canoe and is contemplating a sea voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti. Crazy bastard. We like to say to the in-laws that ours is a family of pirates. (I’m just a music pirate. Arrrr.)

The funny thing about this is I’m one of the few people that is loving the weather in Chicago these days – you know, the cold, stormy, snow-dumping weather. I guess I like a little variety, but I’m actually gonna miss being locked up for the winter with my blanket and hot cocoa. I’m not going to complain, but…

In any case, I’m excited to put my computer down for a while, and will certainly be picking it up with verve before the new year – Two designs opening and a big old O’Neill Festival to load in and tech in the first week of January. Until then, as much Zen as I can swim in.

For those of you braving your way through a busy holiday run schedule, my wish is that it will be your turn next. I got your back next year.

Mele Kalikimaka.

A quick and dirty Theater Media Roundup for you today: Because this one is simple, and good.

Long-time foundation of the American theatrosphere (with one of the most prolific sidebars I’ve ever seen) Matt Slaybaugh of Theaterforte took some time off of blogging this year and recently returned with this video:

This is an ideal shoot-from-the-hip use of media to communicate an idea, and here’s why:

1) It’s edited. Do not. Ever. Say. The Word. Ummmmmmmmmmm. On Camera. You’d edit your blog post or play, right? Edit your video / podcast / smellcast. What’s bizarre to me is that many people fall into a habit of thinking of video & media editing as a way of *over-complicating* the content of the video. Editing a video is functionally no different from editing an essay, play, book, what have you. It’s just the art of focusing your delivery mechanism to your communication. I cannot stress this enough: The choice we have when we tap technology to serve our message or story isn’t as simple as “Ornamentation or Nothing at all. If you’d like a great example of how effective low-budget and low-time-investment simple spliced transitions can be, see also Ze Frank. I do like how Slay doesn’t overedit here – he lets us in on the energy and humility of generating honest and personal thought, without letting us get completely mired in his moments of unrehearsed distraction.

2) I know what Slay sounds like now. I cannot stress how important this is to an online collaborative culture. The big difference between the page and the stage is that you have to make choices about your voice, the words (and therefore ideas) that you stress, the intention of the words that you’re saying. Same is true of blogs versus online video. The web strips our emotions and irony out of our words, unless we’re consciously adding them back in, like this: Bam! Not so with video. Slay communicates his sincerity and excitement for the new direction of his theater company without fear of misinterpretation.

3) Slay stays honest in video. A little bit like staying crispy in milk. When you’re able to communicate honestly in one media, that’s no indication that you’ll be able to communicate in another media. This was the big leap I had to make when I started this blog: I felt like I could communicate honestly through sound, but I still struggle every post with keeping my writer’s voice honest, because it’s not a muscle I exercise as much.

The answer is often: simplify, and return to doing what you do, even if you do it in a new format.

4) Form follows function. The idea: The internet is an important tool for generating discussion and collaboration. The form: let’s remove the normal misinterpretation of tone and intention that comes with most blog posts and put a human face to things. That’s why this is a better video post than a blog post.

I think this struggle with honesty where most theaters are at right now with their New Media experiments – in both attempts at marketing and attempts at incorporating video projections into shows – it’s about learning to be honest through a new method of communication. Clearly, I still need to learn that blog posts should be short. It’s frustrating, and there are failures. It’s very surprising to me that there is so little patience in the theater community for this process, that there’s this idea out there that adding video to a theater’s website or incorporating technology into a play’s design is either universally pointless or necessarily detrimental to the work itself. Of course, we have to concede that theaters hurt themselves when they use new media in ways that are inappropriate to their identities as artisans, and that happens when they don’t take the time to develop and incorporate the technology all the way. But when a theater’s use of new media does match their aesthetic closely, sparks fly. It’s like what happens when a performer learns to really project for the first time. The voice begins to soar around the space, jettisoned from their diaphragm, and suddenly, a simple technique has amplified the performer’s power and presence. Do you need it? No. Does it help? If appropriate, hells yes.

As promised, I’ve written a little something on the process for Touch that will be showing up on the New Leaf Theatre blog today. It includes a little narrative peak into my sound design process for this show. Hope you like it – and thanks for all the words of excitement for the show, you local gang you. I can’t wait for you to see it.

A follow-up for you content-lovers out there:

I just got back home from my second design run of Touch. Something happened tonight.

Something Something Something.

Something Something Something Something I can’t tell you yet. That was EIGHT somethings, not one that got repeated. EIGHT. SEPARATE. SOMETHINGS.

I will say this: I have never had to take care not to spill tears onto my computer while I took notes for a cue list before. While gut laughing as if my life depended on it. That is a first for me now. I keep that with me from this point on.

The cast and crew have been exploring the specific and for me whole-body-shuddering content of Touch over at the New Leaf Blog for a couple weeks now, and I’ll be weighing in, oh… Thursday.

I think this play might have cured my insomnia for one night. I’m going to need to go hug my wife now.

This post is cross-posted over at the CTDB Data Blog

Two important notches off the Chicago Theater Database road map this month.

On December 8, we tackled the problem of capturing the convoluted data of repertory festivals, using the models of The Side Project’s Cut to the Quick Short Works Festival and the Goodman’s Eugene O’Neill Festival. Both festivals basically act as a big melting pot for artists, combining directors, playwrights, performers and designers in dozens of teams that create unique one-act experiences and a more general community-driven whole.

We wanted to be able to look at each festival as both a whole and as the sum of its parts. That meant separating festivals into three kinds of production records:

1) The One Act, or “child” production. We’ve been wanting to capture one-acts for a while now, as they form an important part of a playwright’s development – just as one act festivals form an important part of a performer’s and directors development. Each one act acts exactly like a normal production record – there’s a play, there are artists, there’s a show.

2) The Evening / Program. Many festivals organize their shows into themed evenings or programs to provide patrons with a more curated form of choice and variety. In the case of Cut to the Quick, we have three evenings in the festival that each contain a number of child one-acts: Splinters and Shrapnel, which are war-themed works, Static/Cling which centers around the family, and Splayed Verbiage, which features a deeper grab bag of hyper-short works.

3) The Festival. This parent record can either consolidate a number of plays as a single artistic unit, as in the Eugene O’Neill Fest, or it can consolidate a series of programs.

Each “Parent” record consolidates ALL the director, performer and design production credits from its children, and provides a quick view of the plays contained within that festival or evening. So you can look at the whole picture, or look at each one act granularly.

Best of all, there’s a quick-edit link to add a new one-act or evening to a festival that pre-fills a copy of the data from the festival into the new record – that makes updating the information for each festival play a snap.

Dan and I have a bit of a soft spot for theater festivals… they’re powered by a bigger community and they require a unique blend of organization and organic chaos to create their unique kind of energy and excitement. So don’t miss Cut to the Quick which wraps up on Dec. 21st and be sure to catch the O’Neill Fest at the Goodman, opening Jan. 7th.

————–

Along those lines, we launched yesterday two important pieces of Web 2.0 technology that we hope will fuel our online community of CTDB contributors. Our contributions and users sections now give credit where credit is due – each edit to the database is now tracked in a permanent audit history. This allows us to provide some necessary protection against internet vandals by creating a e-paper trail of changes and linking those changes to a user account. In the (we hope) unlikely event that a disreputable party begins taking credit for founding Steppenwolf, the entire community of contributors will quickly be able to track down the culprits and restore the changes.

More important than user accountability however, record auditing allows us to draw attention to the contributions of some pretty dedicated volunteers – such as CTDB powerhouse Laura Ciresi of Trailing Spouse Blues. Since we began auditing database records at the beginning of December, Laura has been steadily updating the entire production history of several theater companies, including Steppenwolf, Naked Eye, and her home Infamous Commonwealth. She may have even helped you get listed for one of your credits.

But you don’t have to take our word for it any more. You can see Laura’s work – and others – as it happens, and thank our users yourself!

Here’s how I know how important coffee is in my life:

I recently ditched Quicken (which was more of a clutching / heaving action that ‘ditch’ implies) in favor of the online tool Buxfer, which while very much in beta (who isn’t these days?) has a powerful tagging system that I can use to quickly assign each financial transaction in my life to various projects, which is a must when you freelance as much as I do. This helps me boil down the holiest of holies: A project-by-project summary of which projects reward me and which bleed me dry. It also keeps me on a very simple weekly or monthly budget for things like eating out.

Also, Buxfer has a really sweet iPhone interface, which has allowed me to balance my checkbook while on the train, saving me a ton of work time without appearing to be that guy. Is it good for theaters? I think if you’re small enough and aren’t doing fully audited financials yet and just need better organization, yes. Buxfer is primarily designed for just-post-college folks who tend to share a lot of bills and need to manage their finances with roommates. This has led to a host of features that are good for collaborative bookkeeping –

A) You can link multiple accounts relationally, which means you can pretty easily create an accessible abstraction of your current financial situation – one account per department, or personal accounts can track loaned money to the company account – however you need to organize it.

B) It’s online and syncable with multiple bank accounts, so it’s easy to get a quick snapshot of your cash flow.

C) You can keep show AND department AND company budgets organized on top of each other, and because of the tagging system, any single transaction can be deducted from any number of budgets. Each budget can also be tracked annually, monthly, weekly, or an a number of different schedules.

D) Buxfer was designed with purpose of tracking mini personal loans between people, so it’s “Money Owed” section allows you to very carefully track personal reimbursements that need to be repaid to any number of individuals or companies.

D) There is a bill scheduling system (and a day-to-day cash flow projection graph) which can help immensely with cash flow tracking if you’re waiting on renting those dimmers until your grant is coming in.

F) If you’ve got an iPhone, you can stand in your theater next to your set that clearly needs another coat of paint and quickly get an answer to: “Yes, we have room in the budget for $36.40 of additional paint expense. But don’t go over that.”

It’s not all roses and honey bees. Buxfer feels like a late beta web application – not quite all the way done yet – and while I’ve been able to successfully load in six years of complex freelancing financial data without too many hiccups, one of those hiccups has been periodic duplication of synced transactions, which has given me one or two heart attacks so far. The user interface sometimes does slightly wonky things, but even in playing with it for a couple months, they’ve developed new features at a rate that makes me confident that they’re heading in a really exciting direction.

Buxfer is free, with a very affordable upgrade (a couple bucks a month, paid annually) for unlimited budgets and bank accounts. That means it has to monetize a bit more somehow, and in their case, they have you by the crotch – they know where you spend your money, so they can serve you with cut-to-the-heart ads that they *know* you’ll fish out the wallet for.

Here’s what greeted me in my Buxfer sidebar this morning:

What do you think? A coffee franchise might just be the thing somedays, that last thin mint of life management that will help reduce my cost of living to a couple pennies while providing great benefit.

I want an Intelligentsia in my theater.

Not really. But kinda.

I just wrote this mini-manual for a client. And it occurred to me as I wrote this that for some time I’ve wanted to collect this info for a number of friends and, well, spouse of mine who are interested in enriching their knowledge of web design and share it with them.

So you know what? I’m going to post it for you too, in case you really want to trick out your WordPress/Typepad/whathaveyou Template or pick up a really useful side skill in your free time.

It’s step one to learning really great, simple web design in the modern era: Cascading Style Sheets.

CSS – Styles & Layout

Free Resources to help you Learn by Doing –
FIREFOX WEB DEVELOPER PLUGIN
Adds a toolbar menu to firefox that (with CMD-SHIFT-Y) will help you identify and locate specific CSS classes and styles to help troubleshoot layout issues and changes. It does some other really cool stuff too.

CASCADING STYLE SHEETS TUTORIAL
An excellent online guide. Especially useful – check out the cascading order so you can see which style rules overrule others.

CSS PLAYGROUND
You can only learn how something works by breaking it. So you can break someone else’s site, not your own.

CSS ZEN GARDEN
A truly inspirational – and open-code – collection of CSS skins that help you see both what is possible and how to achieve different design effects with CSS.

Books
My favorite guru for CSS is Eric Meyer, who wrote at least one indispensable book,
CSS: The Definitive Guide

and at least one inspirational book,
Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design

TESTING
Especially with layout and justification, remember to test your work in at least:

IE 6 – Windows
IE 7 – Windows
Firefox – Windows
Firefox – Mac
Safari – Mac

Text styles and colors normally track safely, but things like padding, margins and floating get screwed up between browsers very easily. Be careful, and save a backup so you can revert if you make a mistake.
.

Be <b>.

The events of our lives – and an organization’s life – flow like a river. A big, powerful, deep river. The river brings potential – maybe it’s transportation, resources, energy, trade. But it also brings a daily supply of erosion. Silt buildup chokes our harbors. Periodic floods overflow the banks and destroy existing homes while at the same time providing rich fertilizer. Organizational infrastructure – our skills and resources – are the tools we can use to harness the river.

Do we have-to-have-to harness the river? No, we can chose to let it go by like wise Buddhas, free from attachments. Do we need to consider other fair uses of the river downstream and upstream before initiating that giant dam-building project or sewage-disposal strategy? Absolutely, because we’re creative people, not dickheads.

Sustainable solutions only come from asking three basic questions

(on personal, local, and global or life-long scales:)

What do we want to accomplish? (Our Mission)

What do we want the world to look like when we’re done? (Our Vision – and our Values)

What is the best tool to achieve the short term goal AND the long term goal at the same time?

Dan asks this question on a human and personal scale today, and he reminds me of two three things:

1) I think that’s the closest my name has ever come to being used as a verb.

2) I owe several people a further exploration of the ideal company retreat process, myself included.

2) Dan’s geeking out about the iPhone app Things (and the similar and decidedly more geeky and sync-friendly OmniFocus, which I’ve been beta testing for nigh on two years now) reminds me that it’s once again time to plug the idea behind it. David Allen’s common-sense driven Getting Things Done approach to holistic project management, which inspired countless to-do applications and personal calls to creative action – this blog included – is the core reason I’m able to maintain a high rate of productivity in my work without wanting to set my hair on fire at the end of the day. In case you were wondering.

Not that I’m particularly good at doing things David’s way – but that’s not the point. It’s just that David’s Book
and his approach to problem solving through is smart, efficient, clarifying, and ultimately, liberating for an artist who wants to accomplish something and simply wants to get their act together. If you’re excited by the possibilities of Things, check out the source.

Seriously. Read it.

More to the immediate point. I just got this [web 2.0 generated form] email from Obama’s campaign. If you donated time or energy to the campaign, you’ve probably gotten one as well: “Change is Coming”, you know the one? Well, it got me thinking. I’ve setup a few informal meetings of Chicago storefront arts organizations in the past, and this seems like a particularly important time to discuss the social and political work that needs to be done – that can be done by us in our work – and it might just be useful to coordinate the way in which we want to do it. I think it wouldn’t be inappropriate to just use Obama’s format and infrastructure to set the thing up. Who’d be interested in that? If I get five takers on this blog post, I’m gonna make it happen.

Because we should meet like this more often.

H/T to Mirror up to Nature for drawing attention to Isaac Butler and Rob Kendt‘s latest project – The Critic-O-Meter, which Isaac at least has been hinting at for a couple months now. Using as much data collection as allowed by nature with subjective reviews, their project seeks to derive a letter grade from the collected reviews of every Broadway and Off-Broadway show in Le Grande Pomme. Stamp. of. Approval.

New Leaf company member Kyra Lewandowski also pointed me in the direction of this handy tool which demonstrates how beautiful data analysis can be. I’ve been thinking for a while now about collecting some word clouds from theater company and blog sites and displaying them to help provide some biofeedback about the words coming out of our mouths. These Wordles are only made from the most recent 6 posts from the following blogs, So as always, the more data you feed in, the more illuminating the analysis.

Theater for the Future:

Don Hall:

Steppenwolf Blog:

Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones:

All images created by Wordle under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.