Monday, September 08, 2014
Art for All: What South Carolina Taught Me About Radical Theatermaking
HowlRound: Eight months ago, as I frantically tossed the last of my boxes at a UPS guy and almost missed my plane to Charlotte, North Carolina, I didn’t give a thought to what would happen when my six-month residency with HUB-BUB and the Spartanburg Little Theatre ended. As far as I was concerned, I would be hotfooting it straight from Spartanburg, South Carolina back to Brooklyn, ready to resume my seven-year career as an admittedly, even proudly, struggling indie theater artist.
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2 comments:
This article does a great job of presenting a really valuable perspective, that being that all theatre (or art in general) is not in New York (or Chicago, or whatever other big city dreams are made in). When I was really young, I thought I wanted to live in New York, but since high school I've never felt particularly sure about ending up in any specific place. Of course there is a lot of amazing theatre happening all over the country, but the more important thing that I took away from this article is that there are all these communities around the country where there is not theatre. That I hadn't thought of before, but these communities need theatre artists too.
I also think the point about presenting your work to audiences where you don't know that everyone will agree with you is an important one. It's one thing to put your work out in a community of 20-somethings, fresh out of their BFA programs, trying to make it in New York too, but its entirely different to do so in a town of people with different cultural backgrounds without the same exposure to the arts.
Most people are stuck in the mindset that the author brings up in the beginning, the idea that New York is THE place to do theater. It may be true that that city is a center of artistic expression or filled with theater enthusiasts, but it's really important to remember that art is not confined to anywhere. There is a lot of danger in completely stereotyping a place, as the author demonstrates with South Carolina -- if you avoid somewhere because of what you've heard about it, or even if you go there with a completely closed mind, chances are that you will be missing something you could never have expected.
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