Sunday, March 20, 2011
Without new voices, stages will just echo the familiar
The Washington Post: "When the Kennedy Center puts its estimable weight behind a big theater project, the results can have inordinate impact. Consider the importance to culture in this country of staging the late August Wilson’s complete 10-play chronicle of black life in 20th-century America, as the institution did in 2008. Or the value in rolling six of composer Stephen Sondheim’s musicals into a summer repertory, the impressive offering back in 2002, near the start of Michael M. Kaiser’s term as center president.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
This article made me think about creating theatre vs. replicating theatre. Every performance is different, and each production has its own characteristics, but as the title says, we will soon just be echoing the old works, just slightly "distorted". New works generally start out at smaller theaters or in an educational environment, but at some point they will hopefully be produced on a large scale. For significant places to the culture of theatre, dance, and music, it would be good to have a mix of old works and new works. If they wish to gain revenue, have the most fascinating season, or produce the largest scale of productions, new works shouldn't be dropped. The Kennedy center does a great job at bringing a variety of shows, and a large scale of shows that help the arts, yet I agree that more new works would be a great addition to their season. Overall, there does need to be a balance between new works, and works that are being reproduced or touring.
Up until this point, I didn't realize the Kennedy Center even did new pieces of theatre. Although I agree with the author's claim that there hasn't been that much new theatre being produced recently, I don't know that using only the Kennedy Center as a case study was the best idea. I'd love to see this compared to other large-scale regional theatres that have produced new works in the past, and see what their trends are right now. With the success of the Ragtime revival recently (and other revivals as well), I can understand the Kennedy Center now becoming a "great revival" type of theatre.
Although I agree that it would be wonderful to have a greater, more widespread, variety of new works being performed, I can understand that it may be particularly hard, especially in our economy right now. People know the classics. They like them. Theatres know that they are going to sell seats if they produce them. And while new works are absolutely a very important part of the arts that unfortunately often times get lost, it's not too difficult to see why. New things are risky, and while it's a risk worth taking to progress the art, it's hard to get behind backing something that has yet to be tested for success.
I don't have much basis of validity for my claims, but they're just some musings that come to me:
Maybe it's just hard to write a good script? It seems like the development cycle for new plays is long and hard. And sometimes even when they do make it to a fully realized production, they're still no good. So then certainly developing a new work costs a lot of money, but if these new works aren't living up the artist level of some of the canonical works... then what's the point of producing them?
It seems like every artistic period disrespects the really powerful work which is being created, at least initially. Cubism, Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism,even the Gothic period were all named out of derision, and eventually were realized to actually hold a substantive weight which was not initially recognized. It is interesting to see our generation open to innovation, but unable to get it. we sit and wait for new works, and question why we are so reliant on the classics, but artistic periods are reactionary. maybe we are just awaiting something to react to.
The Kennedy center does a lot of great things to expose the public to music, dance, and theatre. Their children's theatre, as mentioned, is usually new and really successful in attracting families and young kids to the theatre. I used to have a season subscription to the national symphony orchestra that passed through there. I can see how these tours would fit into their mission of making classics available to the general community. I know their production of Snow White, Rose Red (and Fred) was nominated for Outstanding Production, Theatre for Young Audiences for the 2011 Helen Hayes. I also know that people are disappointed with the tours passing through this year. Maybe their just trying this out, doing something different. Making a little money. I hope they return to their typical work though.
I cannot agree with this article more. I never thought about the Kennedy Center's not producing work by new playwrights until now. When each season was announced I would think about which shows I knew, but I never really thought about how there were little to no new shows. What the Lincoln Center has done is create a mixture of old favorites and new works. That's what makes it so exciting. Even if the Lincoln Center has had some flops, it's interesting. I'm interested because it's something different--something I haven't heard of. Reviving shows or mounting critical successes is nothing new, but without new works how can we move forward in theatre? We'll simply create new production of old work with better (and not always necessary) technology and new actors. How can we move forward with theatre if the material that we base all of our work on is nothing new?
Post a Comment