Tour Report: The PHX Fringe

This tour was risky, we pushed ourselves further than we had before, trying to find our limits and learn our boundaries. It was our longest tour yet, 18 days on the road, going further distances with longer drives than ever before. It was the first long trip without Peter J Woods’ musical accompaniment. It was also our second swing at the Fringe Festival circuit (after Systems at Minnesota Fringe). It was also the last run of Paint the Town.

Some of these risks were more manageable than others, some of the expenses harder to recover. Some surprises, both good and bad, and definitely good lessons learned. Overall this tour was better than the summer run, but not as good as the winter tour. No shows sucked completely, but none were as great as NOLA on New Years or St Augustine.

Here's pictures!

PHX Fringe Tour

Here’s a city by city breakdown.

March 25th Urbana, IL. Urbana is a college town with an amazing Independent Media Center in the middle of it. Last time we were there it was winter break and we played for a small but super interested group of locals. This time, we unwittingly booked the show during the college’s spring break, so we played for a larger group of locals, including a fun conceptual music ensemble. These people were great, one woman who clearly has a problem with bio-determinism emphatically painted over the Mendel cross diagram on the set. We went to a great restaurant with super cheap late night food and talked about community organizing, political action and radical theory for a couple hours. Next time we come to Urbana, we’ll make sure school is in.

March 26th Birmingham, AL. When we got to Green Cup Books the garage door leading to the fenced off alley out back was open. It was a beautiful day expecting a rainstorm in the middle of the night. Seemed like the perfect opportunity to have our second ever alley performance of the show, so we did, and it kicked ass. Definitely one of the best shows of the tour, complete with trains in the background providing a soundtrack. We played for a good sized crowd with Yakuza Dance Mob, who are a completely insane noise / absurd / jazz group fronted by a 7 foot tall, 250 pound wildman who threw himself around the alley and the audience with completely reckless abandon, and then brought us home to a large communal house for polite conversation about Birmingham’s history (coal mines, race riots) and greek and roman mythology.

March 27th New Orleans, LA. We were super pumped to be coming back to New Orleans, site of our best show from last tour. Urbana and Birmingham had both grown in terms of audience and excitement since last tour, if New Orleans followed suit we’d be in heaven. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. I’d heard rumors that New Orleans can be fickle and unreliable, and now I’ve got personal experience backing it up. Things started out great, we got to our venue, Sidearm Gallery, a shotgun house with a courtyard beside it which had been roofed and converted into a Chinese laundry long ago, and then painted bright green and converted to a performance space more recently. Scott Heron, the proprietor answered the door in a frilly grey dress and welcomed us into his front room, a space furnished primarily with a slack-rope set up. Juggling pins and high heeled shoes littered the floor. He showed us around, introduced us to the sweetest pitbull I’ve ever met and recommended a café a few blocks away where we could get cheap food.

Then things started going down hill. We first went to pick up Krista, a friend of John’s whose been hitching her way around the country and would be our tech in the fringe in exchange for a ride back to Denver. On this trip we took a frustrating accidental detour onto a freeway that forced us to drive over a long toll bridge out of the city and back again in rush hour traffic. Eventually, we got food and got back to Sidearm, where we set up and waited for the bands and audience to arrive. One band didn’t show, and not much audience did either. We ended up performing for a couple of Krista and John’s friends, one guy who saw us on New Years, The Self Help Tapes, and a few really cool theatre people who heard about the show from Scott. It was a good show, solid, but definitely less than we had been hoping for.

After the show we went to a party at a bar a few blocks away featuring two European techno DJs and a 40 piece marching band. This was a good time, with dancing and a crowd of the uniquely New Orleans style of hipsters, who somehow seemed much less friendly than the ones we met back on New Years, but that’s probably based on our subjective position. Next morning, Scott made us a wonderful breakfast and sent us on our way.

March 28th, Houston, TX. After getting dead ends and silence from venues and contacts between NOLA and Austin, I resorted to cold-calling anarchist bookstores. Last time we played such a show (in Boston last August) we performed for one woman, so I wasn’t terribly hopeful about this show. But Sedition Books exceeded these low expectations. A small, but engaged group of people came out, donated generously, and enjoyed the show.

March 29th, Austin, TX. The Salvage Vangaurd Theatre is now on my top five list of theatre companies / venues in the world. In fact, it’s the only place other than Bedlam where I’ve been that makes me think the future of theatre won't be the utter collapse of the regional theatre system followed by punks and individual artists sifting through the rubble, but rather, a smooth and easy transition where companies and venues like these simply replace the obsolete institutions one at a time. This is a smart organization, diversified, hip, well put together and super approachable and friendly. I can’t wait to get back to Austin and spend more time at this place.

The show was great too, a mid-size enthusiastic audience, and some amazing noise bands including one remarkably self-indulgent guy dressed like a 70’s era Michael Jackson, who thinks that by hopping around and poking himself in the nuts with a stick he'll save his mom from cancer. His absolute commitment to this public display of grief and new age mysticism made for exquisitely uncomfortable viewing: you can’t take him seriously, but you get the impression laughing or walking out might like, kill his mom or something.
Spending the day in Austin was also a good time, we crashed with a friend who lives near campus so most of what we encountered was college-life, but it was mostly independently-owned-and-operated college life. Wish we’d been able to explore the city more, cuz it definitely gives off a vibe of being incredibly culturally diverse and exciting. We spent the afternoon in a park working out kinks and improving the second-to-last scene in the play and arguing about the hypocrisy of privileged kids like us getting food from Food Not Bombs.

March 31st Bisbee, AZ. This is one of those little counter-culture utopia cities. It’s precariously floating somewhere between the dangerous cliffs of hippy monoculture and bourgeois tourist destination, but navigating those waters well enough for us to enjoy our time there. We stayed with John’s sister and her adorable children and played at a new café establishment for a good sized crowd of locals.

This was one of my favorite audiences. We had a good house, probably the oldest and yet one of the most enthusiastic audiences we've had. The "lets get out of frankfurt, okay?" line got uproarious laughter, and some of the audience members talked about Big Reds that they've known (others, who looked big-reddish themselves were conspicuously silent). It was great performing with Eric Bang! and Gypsy Geoff and exchanging stories at the end of the night. Familiar Milwaukee faces were a welcome sight.

April 1st – 5th PHX Fringe. This was our second attempt at a Fringe Festival, and it turned out not much better than the first. I’m about to go on a little tangent about Fringe Fests for a second, some of what I say isn’t going to apply to PHX Fringe, and surely won’t apply to other festivals I haven’t experienced. So bear with me as I try to get my words around my thoughts on this subject.

The first thing I should say is that everyone we’ve ever met at either fringe festivals have been incredibly nice, well organized, professional and accommodating. These people are all clearly committed to making accessible and exciting theatre in their cities, and they should be applauded for their efforts. My complaints are not in anyway personal. It might just be that the fringe festival model can’t do what I think it oughta do, that the very idea of “fringe theatre” has been Adorno-style co-opted by mainstream capitalist culture.

Anyway, we’d swung and missed at the Minnesota Fringe Fest with “Systems” last summer. We came away with the conclusion that “Fringe Fest” is mostly a misnomer, as most of those shows were far from “Fringe”. With a few exceptions (Deviants, Boom) the shows that seemed to walk away with the most audience and the most money from Minnesota were also the most conventional. Meanwhile the most amazing experimental work in the fest (Depth of a Moment) were clearly even more frustrated than us with their lack of audience.

For us, Minnesota Fringe ended up being an opportunity to lose hundreds of dollars competing with hundreds of other shows who have a number of significant logistical advantages (local audience, crowd pleasing content, no day jobs) for an audience that was mostly uninterested in what we were trying to do. The festival made doing theatre feel like a zero sum game, like poker, where groups like us were dead money, feeding the pot for others to take home. I generally hate than analogy, cuz I think arts production is a lifts-all-boats sort of thing, not a zero-sum thing, but the festival made zero-sum feel (unfortunately) more accurate.

Of course, we don’t give up easily, and we like to blame ourselves when things don’t work out. We focused on how it didn’t help that Systems turned out much less funny than we’d thought it would when reading the script. We figured next time we’d put up a different show, applying lessons learned in Minneapolis, and maybe trying at a different festival would work out better. PHX Fringe seemed like a different festival, and it was, and Paint the Town is certainly a different show, but we still ran into some of the same problems, on a smaller scale.

There are three things I like about the PHX Fringe. First that it’s a juried festival. This means that works are selected based on being experimental, challenging or somehow different. One of the organizers explained this to me using the Edinburgh festival (the first and biggest fringe fest in the world) as an example, apparently that has the same problem MN has, lots of crowd pleasers and sketch comedy crowding out the truly “fringey” work. MN Fringe and Edinburgh are random lottery based, an idea that, on the surface is appealing, but in practice seems to not produce or benefit “fringe” work.

Second, Phoenix Fringe is newer and smaller. There were only 30 groups, and this was only their 2nd year in existence. We figured this would mean fewer cardsharps at the metaphorical poker table. Unfortunately, it seems it also means much less audience at the festival in general. We saw as many other shows as we could and only two had more than half their seats filled.

Third, PHX Fringe is cheaper both for audience and for artists, and a larger cut of ticket sales go to the artists. Everything added up to make us think we might be able to at least break even, or make something to recover some of the cost of traveling down here.

Long story short, we played for houses of less than ten every show, half of whom were other artists (ie not paying) and almost all of whom loved the show and promised to tell their friends. If generating word of mouth is the way to succeed at a Fringe Festival, we shoulda been golden. Our wonderful amazing venue manager took our promotion materials to his classes, and called everyone he could think of, we hit the streets during First Fridays, we seem to have impressed our small audiences, we were in many ways the most exceptional and unusual show in the festival (being a traveling DIY group, with a large set, a longer play, radical political themes, and an audience participation painting finale) and still, momentum never caught on, the houses never got bigger, and we ended up losing at least a couple hundred bucks.

Of course, we don’t do theatre for money, so this isn’t the end of the world, but we can’t afford to regularly lose as much as we did here. Economic sustainability is a requirement of our success, and if instead of the festival we’d done 5 more shows in the style of the rest of the tour we’d have made more, spread the driving out more evenly (or just not gone so far) and spent less. We probably still wouldn’t have made a profit, but we surely would’ve lost a lot less.

We also had trouble finding things to do in the city of Phoenix itself. I know it takes a while to get to know a place, to find the most interesting neighborhoods populated by the most interesting people, but, after 5 days of driving around Phoenix with a map of hotspots and galleries, we left with the impression that the city is mostly an endless strip mall with very little unique independent local culture or neighborhoods, or space for people to wander and loiter in public, this impression was reinforced by many of the people living there. It sure made Milwaukee, Riverwest, and Bayview look good.

We definitely had some good times in spite of these frustrations. We got to spend time with Tracy’s old friends and get to know them better. Saw some great interesting shows (Los Torresnos) We got to do the play in the same place a few nights in a row, which allowed us to work on it in ways we can’t when we’re preoccupied with traveling, loading in and out and meeting new people. Also, meeting and working with people like Steve and Matt is always a great experience. We’re willing to spend money on these types of experiences, but simply can’t afford to do so without eventually running out. We’re also more willing to lose money if it’s in the name of bringing theatre to non-theatre audiences, which doesn’t seem to happen at fringe shows as much as our other shows.

April 7th, Salt Lake City, UT. This was a strange show. After a long night drive through some beautiful mountains we got to another city even more bereft of my favorite the DIY culture than Phoenix. There’s something about driving on precarious cliffs, through narrow passes and across wide dark valleys by moonlight that’s exhilarating and romantic, but there’s also something about the lack of poverty, or even much working-class environment in SLC that makes this shiny well-organized Mormon idyll feel more than a little creepy and constraining.

Everyone in SLC was incredibly nice and accommodating, the whole city gives off a vibe of, “hey, there’s nothing to worry about, let’s be happy and c’mon, look at this big beautiful park! Or these wide clean streets with small buckets of bright orange flags on the corners to help children and pedestrians cross without being run over. Pet the bunnies and have some coffee!” The venue even accommodated their next door neighbors (a fancy restaurant) by promising not making any noise louder than soft “indoor” voices until 9 when the restaurant closed. Unfortunately, our show was scheduled to start at 6:30.

We managed to push the start time back a few hours and only had to do the first half of the show at low volume, which was completely strange and energy-sapping. Somehow the audience loved the show in spite of the lack of projection or realistic speaking volume levels. They bought a bunch of merch and encouraged us to come back soon.

April 8th Denver, CO. This was my personal favorite show of the tour. We played the Blast-o-mat, a punk rock garage in the warehouse district with a skate park out back. Dun Bin Had and 10-4 Elenor, a couple of great pop-punk bands played with us, for an audience of 40-50 of the counter-culture lifestyle types we’d been achingly missing since Bisbee. I realize this fashion-based assessment is going to make me sound superfiscial, but dreads and black denim seem to go well with insurgent theatre.

The Blast-O-Mat is great. It’s a legal-enough punk venue, run by a collective, hosting shows of all kinds: noise, metal, punk, folk, with a tiny indie record store and art gallery inside. They’re looking to host more events that expand beyond standard music and parties, and responded enthusiastically to an email from a perfect stranger asking about doing a theatre show there. They also had a warm meal waiting for us, and accommodated our every request and question. I woulda liked to spend more time here, but we left for Boulder shortly after the show ended so that we’d have a whole day with no driving.

April 9th, Boulder, CO. John spent the day hanging out with old friends while Kate and I climbed a mountain. We’d been working on Ulysses’ Crewmen (doing a last-revision / first read / table work) whenever we had down time on tour. We finished this process on top of the mountain, infusing the project with the spiritual energy of the beauty and majesty of nature, or some such romantic bullshit.

The show was at Naropa University, a Buddhist College founded by Alan Ginsburg and a couple monks. John’s friend set it up, and wasn’t able to make it an official show in the performing space, so we played a class room, which was probably more appropriate and exciting. The first classroom we’ve performed in! We played for a dozen or so people who mostly knew each other along with a couple of great experimental music sets. This audience was one of those dead silent groups that make me nervous, no laughter, no reactions, makes me feel like we’re boring them or completely fucking up, but then when you steal a glance or talk to them after the show you find out they are (for the most part) silent because they’re completely absorbed in the show, contemplative, I guess like Buddhists’ oughta be.

After the show we hung out in Boulder (a fairly sad future vision of Bisbee after it’s crashed into the bourgeois tourist destination cliff) and talked about the play and art and ethical lifestyles with people for a couple hours.

April 11th, Chicago, IL. The last performance of Paint the Town came after an 18 hour drive and a short nap on a fold-out couch in Todd and Marrakesh’s apartment above Room’s Gallery. Due to unforeseen circumstances out of our control (our Chicago crash pad’s cell phone malfunction) we had to ask the Room’s people to give us more than they’d bargained for. Rooms is where I’ve seen some of the best theatre I’ve ever seen (Bunbury Me, 7 Jewish Children). I respect these people a ton, and I think we’re the first out-of-town group they’ve hosted, or at least after 18 days on the road we’re certainly the dirtiest and most out-of-it. Having to call them and ask if we could show up 8 hours early and sleep in their house somewhere sucked. But they were totally gracious, in spite of having had an event and a long night the night before and feeling under the weather.

The musicians showed up on time and set up quickly and everything was ready to go, except for audience. When we left Milwaukee almost a month earlier I’d predicted that New Orleans and Chicago would be our best shows. We’d had good shows in both cities in the past, good musicians were playing with us, we were playing great venues, on weekend evenings. Instead, they were both some of the lowest turn outs of the trip. I’m trying to figure out why. Both shows had some return audience, one or two people who’d seen it before coming back for more, so it’s not that we’re delusional about our previous shows in these cities. I think the problem is the day of the week. Big cities like Chicago and New Orleans have tons of stuff going on Friday and Saturday nights, things that a small out of town troupe with a weird show like ours can’t compete with. This conclusion is supported by previous experiences in other places. From now on, I’m going to avoid playing big cities on weekend nights unless we’re sharing a bill with very popular local acts.

At any rate, our Chicago performance was totally weird, we were out of it, uncomfortable, low energy, confused and disappointed. I felt worse after this show than any since at least August.


SUMMARY. All in all, we had no terrible shows, but also none as good as the best shows of our winter tour. Being on the road 18 days didn’t take a very serious toll on us, no strained relations, no fights, we did a lot of good work, continued to modify the play up until the very end (this is becoming my favorite thing about theatre, you’re never finished creating a piece). Financially, we more than covered the cost of gas and food, but between renting the van, repairs, two flat tires, and what we lost on the fringe fest we’re down over $800 which is totally unsustainable. Specific numbers can be found below.

The future of touring: Kate and I are starting work on Ulysses’ Crewmen and planning the next tour. The current plan is to be on the road for the entire month of September. To tour with Peter’s new one-man performance piece about suicide called “Pity”. To focus on the east coast and try to spend more than one day in some cities. We’ll also be taking our third strike-out swing at a fringe festival. This time in Philly, which is organized completely differently, it costs much less, but also provides much less. This is exciting because it gives performers more freedom, we’ll book our own venue, choose our own dates and prices, so the experience is likely to be closer to DIY touring than festivaling. If any kind of festival will work for us, this should be it.

ECONOMIC TRANSPARENCY:

Clearly we've got a ways to go before we make either touring or fringe festivaling economically successful or even sustainable. We've learned a lot of lessons and have some tricks up our sleeve for future efforts. Merch and donations provide significant earnings and can be expanded. Promotion can also be improved and expanded and should get easier over time. Ulysses' Crewmen is a much tighter smaller show that should travel far less expensively. It is also shorter, less challenging, more emotionally intense and, well, should end up being just plain better.

Here's the specific information about this tour:

Income: $703.5
Door $481
Donations $108.5
Merch $114

Expenses: -$1276.06
Gas and Oil -$560.98
Food -$94.51
Hardware -$25.75
Car Rental -$400
Car Repairs -$194.82

Balance sans Fringe Fest: -$572.56

Cost of Fringe Fest -$335
Expected earnings at fringe fest: maybe $75
Estimated Fringe Fest loss: -$260

Estimated Final Balance: -$832.56

Here's a comparison with previous efforts:

Systems at MN Fringe: loss $871.94
Paint August 2008 (14 days) loss $790.34
Paint October (4 days) loss $120.23
Paint Winter (8 days) gain$152.30
Paint Bedlam (3 days) gain $19.30
Paint at PHX Fringe: loss $832.56

Tour Report: Bedlam!

We returned triumphant to the even colder than here land of Minneapolis for a weekend of shows at The Bedlam Theatre. A great and wonderful experience. We performed with a short and exciting piece of "theatre of disruption" from Lamb Lays with Lion called The Little Skeleton That Could Not. This strange piece is open to many interpretations, often offensive, and quite confusing, which is to say: i loved it. I hope to bring them down to Milwaukee sometime in the near future, so i won't say more about my particular interpretation of the play. If things go according to plan, you'll have the chance to see it for yourself.

Another group we performed with who i hope comes to Milwaukee soon is To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie a great group of musicians whose songs combine ambient shoegaze with noise and psychedelic elements to create a compelling experience somewhere between a rock show and an experimental soundscape. They played with us all three times, along with their side project, Navy Wife. This is a straight-up noise two piece that builds layers of textured sound to immense complex compositions in a truly unique way. A couple of more conventional but highly capable rock bands wrapped up the night shows. Speeds the Name on Friday and The Wars of 1812 on Saturday. When these bands played kick ass music, Minneapolisites show up their Milwaukee counterparts by actually dancing, a lot, and un-self-consciously. It's too bad that Minneapolis exceeds Milwaukee in every way: including areas like coldness, distance from other major cities, and cost of living. It puts me in the position of being jealous, but unable to just move there.

The shows themselves went well. Friday night I felt anxious, first time performing for a couple weeks, but it went well. Saturday kicked ass, a large responsive audience, and energetic performances from all three of us. Sunday had the weird matinee feeling, but still at least 20 people came out, and we'd just eaten Bedlam's big delicious brunch, so there's no room for complaints. On saturday afternoon we had a sparsely attended, but interesting discussion of my Theory of Artist Revolution and Jeremy (of LLwL) Catterton's Theatre of Disruption.

Now for the transparency, we did three shows, audiences ranging from 60-20 people. We spent $126 on gas $10 on food, and $34 on a parking ticket (hurns). Made $36 on donation and merch sales and are awaiting an official check in the mail from Bedlam for our cut of the door. Will post that in a comment when it comes. Not that anyone is actually paying attention to this stuff.

Discussion at Bedlam

Last Saturday i gave a presentation at Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis about my thoughts on art-as-revolution and theatre's role in that. Preparation for this presentation invovled first writing it out in long form, (cuz i'm a playwright, starting with writing a long monologue, somehow makes sense) then I condensing it to an outline and talked from that (so i wouldn't just be reading at people). At anyrate, this means i've got a rough essay-like document of what i said, which i will now post here for the reading pleasure of probably nobody but my own future self.

Bedlam Discussion

Our intention as a theatre company, or at least my intention as a theatre artist is to participate in and advance a revolutionary change of the global political economy, a change I've already observed in progress. Today I'm going to do four things.

1. Outline the change
2. Discuss theatre's role in that change
3. Explore how this intention impact the work we do.
4. Take questions. I plan on keeping the part where I'm talking at you relatively brief and general, then go more in depth about things based on what you seem interested in.

Objective 1: outlining the revolutionary change in the global political economy.

I need to start with Marx, since that's who I'm lifting most of my terminology from. Marx has been read many many many different ways, and I don't want to get bogged down in Marxist polemics, so I'm going to keep this as simple and concise as possible. There are two things about Marx, one is what he did right, and the other is what he got wrong.

First, Marx created a radically different and in many ways superior description of capitalism. He starts with the most basic abstract description of the relationship at the core of the capitalist system. From there he describes what happens in the aggregate, when that core relationship comes to dominate and define an entire economic system. This is where all kinds of wonderful concepts come from: exploitation, labor theory of value, commodity fetishism, worker alienation, the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Really beautiful stuff. Some of these concepts have proven more accurate or useful than others. I'd like to get into them all more thoroughly later.

The important thing is that Marx's predictions that in capitalism, the rich will grow richer and the poor more numerous, that these classes will be in conflict, and that this conflict can be seen at the root of all political conflict has been validated by history. His prediction that these trends will cause the entire system to collapse might be coming true now, with amendments to account for the unexpected craftiness of corporations, the power of advertising, and the alchemy of monetary and economic policy-making.

His prediction that this conflict and immanent collapse will result in the spontaneous mobilization of a class-conscious proletariat is where I think Marx went wrong. Some Marxists will defend his position on this. They'll say that historical examples like the USSR are a terrible misapplication of his theory, and they're right, but still, I think any approach that uses the dictatorship of the proletariat, or this kind of top-down-government-first revolution is doomed to follow a similar path.

The revolution has to start on an economic level. We need to develop a new more efficient mode of production, based on a different core economic relationship. Once we've done that, then we can let new classes, new political institutions and revolutionary actions grow naturally out of the conflict between this system and the dominant capitalist mode.

Marx considered this approach, but rejected it because he believed the ruling class wouldn't allow such a system to develop. He was unable to imagine a historical situation where something radically different can co-exist in competition with capitalism. There is a historical precedent for this though: the capitalist revolution.

Class antagonism in feudalism was between serfs and lords. The capitalist mode of production was developed by the merchant class, the bourgeoisie, who had a better way of doing things. They competed economically with and eventually politically defeated the lords, ushering in a new system. If we graph Marx's approach onto this historical situation, it the equivalent of serfs spontaneously rising up, taking the crown off the king and then designing a new society from that position. It's absurd. The proletariat can no more replace the bourgeoisie today than serfs could replace lords then, the revolution needs to come from a third class.

So, then the question is, how do we do it? How do we repeat the method of the capitalist revolution in order to replace capitalism itself? The answer is: we already are. If we look at art as a mode of production, a new "core economic relationship" then we can look at the "rise of the creative class" as the beginnings of a revolution. Punk Rockers, D I Y crafters, and independent musicians and filmmakers are building networks and institutions that function under a radically different sort of economy. As artists develop and improve these alternative approaches, we become a more powerful challenge to the capitalist world.

Capitalism responds, as Marx predicted, with all kinds of laws, barriers to entry, power grabs, bribes and attempts to co-opt the revolution even as it occurs. The creative class lives up to it's name, over the years we've worked our way around them all. Modern business practices, flex-time, profit sharing, informal work environments, and fake "independent" subsidiaries are all examples of businesses benefiting by adapting to and trying to imitate this radically different economy. Early capitalists were imitated, bribed and co-opted by the monarchy as well.

I predict that eventually, the growth of radical alternatives and the slow mutations of the establishment will result in an undeniably altered political economy. This is starting in the arts and entertainment sector, but it has the potential to transfer to other economic sectors.

Poll the audience: move on, or discuss?

Objective 2: Theatre's role in this

That last part, about innovations in the arts and entertainment sector transferring to other sectors of the economy is key. There is historical precedent for that as well. Capitalism beat feudalism because it was better at making wealth through the production and distribution of durable goods. Feudalism was all about agriculture. Capitalism rode the rise of commodities to the top, and then took over agriculture with great success and in the long term, disgusting catastrophic results like factory farms.

Revolutionary artists can do the same thing. The arts and entertainment sector of the economy has been growing faster than any other sector except for the military since the war started. Artists are better at making art than corporations, we can dominate this sector, ride it to the top, and then transfer our efficiencies to other sectors. This transfer has already started. Craft fairs are multiplying like little crocheted rabbits. Organic and community farming is growing rapidly, with results that are quite the opposite of disgustingly catastrophic.

So, lets look closer at the arts and entertainment sector of the economy, this thing we're gonna ride to the top. Different economic systems create different environments in which arts and culture themselves are manifested. Different mediums function differently under these changed circumstances. Painting and sculpture did well in the feudalism because the art economy there is based on patronage, art products are symbols of status. It's essential that they be one-of-a-kind, owned by some powerful figure and on public display, preferably larger than life. This kind of patronage continues to exist today, and it continues to fund visual arts. Under the patronage system performing arts were reshaped to fit the funding model. Theatre developed the proscenium stage, musicians assembled into symphonies. Everything was based on showing how big and glorious the art that the patron financed was.

Capitalism changed that. It created the age of mechanical reproduction, which as discussed by Walter Benjamin, greatly altered the way art is created and distributed. Within the capitalist world the art forms that best fit mass production do best. Photography, film, recorded music burst unto the scene and largely replaced everything that came before. They were easily commodified and mass produced. The biggest profits came from moving many small cheap identical replications, rather than a few unique expensive objects. This created a desert for theatre and live music, who hobbled along on the crutches of merch sales or the holdovers of patronage.

We're now entering a new system of reproduction. The age of virtual or digital reproduction is going to change the landscape just as drastically as the age of mechanical reproduction did. Now mass identical units can be created and distributed by anyone at almost no cost. This has three effects: 1. the evaporation of profit from mechanical reproduction, the RIAA will inevitably lose their war against piracy. 2. the democratization of these art forms, anyone can make the stuff, you don't need a record contract anymore. 3. a sea of mediocrity. If you've spent anytime on YouTube or myspace, you know what I'm talking about. A few diamonds in the rough, but also lots and lots of unremarkable shit.

If the profits of mechanical reproduction evaporate, then we're going to see far fewer successful big budget movies, or high profile bands. This is already happening, the logical conclusion is replacement of movies and TV with YouTube and myspace. Which means these mediums are going to drown in the sea of mediocrity, just like they starved theatre and live music during the age of mechanical reproduction.

So, if reproducible mediums become awash of mediocrity, what'll happen next? Consumer demands shift. People want something valuable, something remarkable. They can't find that in film or recorded music anymore. If they do, they don't have to pay for it, which means they can spend their money elsewhere. They'll want to spend it on an experience. And, that's what theatre can provide.

But, not theatre as it exists today. Theatre as it exists today is defined by the system of patronage that helped it hobble along for the last 100 years. It's mostly still stuck on proscenium stages, and full of snobbery, polish, and ornamental status symbols. It's a weak form, a dying art. Which means it's vulnerable. Which means the revolutionary core of the artist class can gain control of it. If theatre is now near the bottom of the ladder of art mediums, but has an opportunity to rise to the top of that ladder, and is vulnerable to an insurgency, then that insurgency can ride the rise of theatre to the top of the arts and entertainment sector of the economy, and then ride the arts and entertainment sector to the top of the economy in general. From there, we can take the efficiencies we've found and apply them to other forms of production.

Poll the audience: move on, or discuss?

Objective 3: how these intentions impact our performance technique.

So far I've been working under the assumption that "new" is better. That a post-capitalist mode of production will be an improvement. I don't want to give the impression that this is an unexamined assumption. I think the new mode of production will be like organic farming v factory farming. It will solve many of the problems created by capitalism. Most importantly, the new mode of production seems much less hardwired for gross and arbitrary inequality than the capitalist mode.

I can go more in-depth with this, but first I'd like to get through the part about how we produce and perform theatre. There are three parts of this, the organizational part, the context part, and the technique part.

The organization part is most important to me. It is essential that Insurgent Theatre be run by artists for artists. The large bureaucracies that mediate and dominate the theatre world are counter productive. The "artistic temperament" that says 'I am a creative soul! My genius cannot be encumbered by monetary of business concerns!' is equally counter productive. These set up a division of labor, a conflict of interests because the artist group and the admin group. This conflict naturally exists in any artistic endeavor, but dealing with it by making two groups of people exacerbates the problem, and privileges the admin group- who has the power of the purse, over the artist group. Mike Daisy's monologue "how theatre failed America" explores the negative effects that this division has had on theatre. I instead approach the creation and organization of Insurgent Theatre as an exciting creative challenge on par with any of our productions.

How it's organized: All profits from any production are shared equally by the people involved in the production. These profits are small. The people involved need to be motivated by the work as it's own reward. The shows are mounted with little or no budget. All advertising, design, promotion, and admin work are done either by the artists involved, or by volunteers.

We hold open auditions for most of our productions. Artists involved in one production are encouraged to take part in discussions of future productions. Decisions are made and tasks distributed by consensus and volunteering. In this way we've built a constantly evolving ensemble. People come and go, only 2 of us have been involved in every production.

Many aspects of this organization aren't radical at all. They're typical of many small theatre companies, they are the product of necessity as much as by choice. What I hope to do is to identify the virtues of this organization, the ways in which it is more efficient than other production methods, and focus on developing them in order to successfully compete with the increasingly corporate approach that big theatres take. One exciting aspect is the organization of labor. Our evolving ensemble is based on labor that is at once liquid, and empowered.

On context: this is also very important. Our versatility and low overhead allows us to produce theatre in non-traditional contexts, to connect with non-theatre audiences, often the exact demographic that traditional theatre's talk about needing to get in their seats. We were inspired to get even more ambitious with this and start touring when we met The Missoula Oblongata. Now we've performed Paint the Town in bars, basements, art centers, black boxes, a public park, an alley, and a dining room. We've performed with a wide variety of different musical acts: folk, noise, punk, metal, hiphop, experimental, pop, shoegaze, etc. Often the audiences don't know that they're coming to see a play, especially not a full length, text heavy, esoteric reference ridden one like this, and they are usually pleasantly surprised.

Organization and context are more important to me than content. What we do doesn't matter as much as how we do it. But, the more we develop the organization and push the context, the more the content reflects these processes. At least in the projects I write or spearhead.

What I'm trying to do is continue the experiments that Bertolt Brecht pursued. Creating a critically engaged audience that makes decisions and isn't merely inspired to act, but is forced to take a side in an argument and let that argument shape their life. Many of the techniques we employ come from Brecht, Grotowski, Peter Brook, and others, with our own interpretations, and punk-rock conventions. Most of us are self-taught, researching these things on our own, and those of us who have formal training, it was mostly in a much more traditional direction.

Perform for intimate audiences.
Perform on the same level as the audience seating.
Lights and tech operated by the actors themselves.
Direct address to audience.
Actively involving the audience.
Reciting stage directions while performing them.
Brechtian "distanced" acting methods
Actors prepare in the open, and mingle with the audience before performing.
Setting up the scene on stage after the show has begun
Disregard for dramatic suspense.
Presenting audience with naked exposition
Presenting images as symbolic puzzles for the audience to solve.
Most importantly: stories that serve as little more than a vehicle for an ideological argument which remains unresolved on the stage.

Tour Report: Down South Tour

Insurgent Theatre! The triumphal return!!


General impression of last weeks tour: IT WORKS! Taking a full length, intense, esoteric reference ridden, unpolished, original work of theatre, with a mostly self-taught cast, a full set and a few totally unorthodox flourishes that can make a real mess of a venue on the road WORKS! The more we do this, the better we get at it, the more contacts and skills we build. Now we’ve just got to find day jobs flexible enough to allow us to do this more, until we get good enough at it that we can make it completely economically sustainable. See more pictures here.

I’m increasingly convinced that grants and foundations whose mission is to “promote, advocate and revitalize” the “dying art” of theatre aren’t ever going to understand or support us, even though over the last week we’ve performed for at least a couple hundred people across this country who’ve probably never chosen to see theatre in their adult lives. Young people. People who the theatre world DESPERATELY needs in their seats.

Oh well, the big theatres can have their dying art, we’re building something else, and at this rate, I think we might be able to get it running sustainably before that corpse the bourgeois theatre institutions coddle, embalm and display rots too much more.

I could write about many great and exciting anecdotes, good times and tour stories: tales of wonderful people, great musicians, swims in the ocean, Katrina damaged punk squats, New Years Eve dance parties, dumb entertainments invented on the long drives, satanic noise acts, naked people getting arrested, thrash jazz, grandmothers with dementia, long debates and revolutionary discussions. All kinds of fun stuff happened on this tour. This blog isn’t about that, though. It’s not a story, it’s a lesson! It’s about transparency, about exposing the methods of our magic and spreading the word on how punk rock theatre tours can be Done Yourself. Think of it as a miniature, ongoing “Our Band Could Be Your Life” for theatre geeks.

First, and most important is show booking. Having a good contact in the city who is excited to have you coming to town is the single most important thing about taking anything on the road. These contacts are the backbone of D I Y touring, they are amazing and wonderful people. The best way to have a good contact is to develop a relationship with them. The best shows we had were set up by contacts who had seen the show before, knew someone who had seen the show before, or even who just agreed with my side of some strange online debate about the definition of words like “noise” “revolution” and “punk rock”. Now, this isn’t always possible, especially when going new places, and even the best contacts are often incredibly busy people, who aren’t getting anything out of it other than the opportunity to share shows with their community and the promise of reciprocation should they or their friends ever come through Milwaukee with something. Good contacts are so wonderful and remarkable, that you can’t really expect people to do it, and you can’t really get upset when things don’t come together as well as everyone would like, or even if a show falls through all together. It’s frustrating, and sometimes bad contacts seem like they’re just plain flakey, but getting bent out of shape about it is pretty unjustifiable. Taking a show on the road like this is a risk, a series of risks, risks that only small, tight, no-budget, dirty, versatile, committed, theatre companies like ours can afford to take.

Fortunately, last week, all these risks paid off- sometimes amazingly, every night.

For each date I am going to summarize the relevant inputs and outputs (to the best of my memory) and share any tips and tricks we discovered. We spent money on gas, some food, tolls, and a few miscellaneous things. Attendance numbers are approximated and from memory. Peter probably kept better mental track and I expect him to correct me, he is the minister of numbers after all. Also, audiences vary over the course of a performance. It’s a pretty long play, with two intermissions, and music acts in between. We don’t believe in captive audiences and sometimes people had to leave. Sometimes they didn’t like the play and chose to leave.

So, attendance numbers listed are PEAK for the largest group watching at one time and CORE for the number who watched the whole show through. If this distinction isn’t made, it’s because the whole audience watched the whole show.

Income we kept tighter track of. It’s broke down between DOOR, DONATION and MERCH. The DOOR money is stuff collected by the venue or the booking contact, admission was often “suggested donation” but sometimes the venues charged rental or fees and admission (always less than $10) was sometimes more strictly enforced. I hope we didn’t turn anyone away. DONATION is additional money that audience members gave us by hand, usually after the show was over. MERCH is scripts, essays, and T-shirts sold.

Okay, here it is:

TOTALS:
Gas: $305.30
Food: $150.40
Tolls: $12
Misc: $10
Total Expense: $477.70

Door: $457
Donation: $122
Merch: $51
Total: $630

Balance: +$153.3

Sunday Dec 28th - Independent Media Center, Urbana, IL. 8pm.
Audience: 8-12 Door: $18 Merch $5 Drive: 4 hours
This is an example of needing to be versatile. We had a show booked in Carbondale for this date, and it fell through, we scrambled to re-schedule, thinking that any show would be better than nothing, if for no reason other than to break up the drive to Atlanta. We got a hold of Mark at the Urbana IMC (thanks to the Nonsense Company) and set this up on very short notice, right before the holidays. Then Mark got the flu. But, he still brought a good handful of very engaged people who hung around to talk about the play and political action, and theatre, for a good long time afterward. I have no idea how long because my sense of time goes out the window once the show starts.

Mark put us up, and we’re making plans to hit Urbana again, with more notice, when all the students (it’s a college town) aren’t out on winter break. We left for Atlanta at about 6 in the morning.


Monday Dec 29th - The Eye Drum, Atlanta, GA. with: Offerings and 09A.
Audience: 20-25 peak / 10-15 core Door: $26 Donation: $40 Merch: $0 Drive: 9.5 hours
Monday nights are always the worst nights on tours, if you can get something set up, you're lucky, if anyone comes out to see a show, you're even luckier. We got plenty lucky in Atlanta. The Eyedrum is an amazing space. It’s like the Borg Ward on steroids. Big gallery, huge PA, 501c3 status, projects with funding, lots of volunteers, all really cool people. We played with good musicians: distorted sad bastard music and satanic power electronics. An excited energetic audience of mainly noise folks came out. There were some nice (and some kinda shoddy) comics-inspired paintings in the gallery. I wonder what this show woulda been like later in the week.

We were invited by a young man in the audience to crash at a foreclosed condo/townhouse belonging to a former art gallery owner who was selling all his possessions and playing internet poker when we left in the morning.

Tuesday Dec 30th - Cafe 11, St Ausgustine, FL. With a TON of bands.
Audience: 75 peak / 20 core. Door: $80 Donation: $9 Merch: $10 Drive: 6 hours
When looking for venues for the tour on a noise message board, this guy Travis, who participated in the abovementioned internet debates, said he’d try to make it out to a show in Atlanta or Birmingham. I asked him where he’d be coming from, cuz maybe we could bring the show to him. He said St Augustine, Florida. St Augustine is further east than we’d plan on going, but if this guy was thinking about traveling 6 hours to see our show, we wagered he’d be pretty enthusiastic about us coming to him instead, and he was. He set up a great show: a great venue, (beachfront café) something like 8 very eclectic acts (some of whom were a bit ‘providence’ for my taste, but others totally kicked ass!). I guess there’s this weird curfew on the island Café 11 is located on, and one of the bands had an epically long sound check, so for a little while we were worried that everything wouldn’t fit in, and much of the audience was from Jacksonville so attendance dropped off as the night wore on. But we made it through and everything ended well. We started the third act of the play before the band preceding it had cleared their gear off the stage, and slammed through in record time, then asked the audience to help us strike the set. That’s audience participation!

We left St Augustine directly after the show to drive through the night to New Orleans. I wish we coulda spent more time with the Floridians, but the night driving turned out to be a very good idea. We got to New Orleans with enough time to nap on couches in the venue and be well rested for the performance.

Wednesday Dec 31th – Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Art Center, New Orleans, LA. With Self Help Tapes, Evolve, and Illusion Fields.
Audience: 80 peak / 65 core. Door: $107 Donation: $10 Merch: $1 Drive: 9 hours
This was a personal highlight for me, so please forgive a little gushing here. Our amazing Nola contact was Simon Severe. She had seen us perform Paint at the Borg Ward when Realicide, the hardcore noise punk band she was traveling with played with our homecoming show after the summer tour. Being a radical who has spent at least the last few years living in conditions not completely dissimilar to the characters in our play, Simon loved the show and invited us to come down to her home town. She works a regular job, volunteers at the Nola infoshop and anarchist library, and runs a books for prisoners program. She doesn’t normally set up shows, but for us, she found the time, and did an amazing job.

First, she hooked us up with a perfect venue. Zeitgeist hosts events at the intersection of art and activism almost nightly. They helped Simon promote, discussed tech and theatre theory with me and even read the script before we got down there. Second, Simon set up some great bands, inspiring hip hop, complex ambient/experimental, and a beautiful jazz / spoken word / film group. These elements together brought out a large enthusiastic crowd, who mostly stayed through the entire show. We were worried that we’d be competing with lots of New Years activities, but apparently the citizens of New Orleans are willing to sacrifice some party time for experimental political theatre.

This was perhaps the best performance we have ever done. No slip ups and tons of good energy to feed off of. We took New Years Day off, and wrapped the show up early enough that we were still able to go out and have some New Years fun ourselves. Saw a huge bonfire, went to a party for the Nola chapter of the Black Label Bike Collective at a small, dirty, hedonistic club with just the right space-to-dancer ratio. We danced for an hour or so with half-dressed and cross-dressed revelers, many of whom kept coming up an telling us that we’re amazing and they really love what we do. At first it took us a few seconds to realize that they had been at the show and weren’t just complimenting our dance moves. Then the sleazy hip hop got a bit dull so Kate and I went to the van and busted out the Lucky and Pozzo gear and performed for the drunks outside the club who were (perhaps fortunately) mostly too poor or too intoxicated to request many actions.

That night and the next we slept at Simon’s place, a huge punk space called Nowe Miastro with all the amenities: brownwater sink, dumpstered pizza, D I Y utilities, and rooftop access. After a relaxing New Years day of hanging out in New Orleans and doing laundry at John’s relatives’ house and another night at Nowe Miastro, we hit the road for Birmingham.

Friday Jan 2nd – Green Cup Books, Birmingham AL.
Audience: 20. Door: $60 Donation: $63 Merch: $20 Drive: 5 hours
This was definitely our worst performance of the tour. We should’ve run through the show on our day off, or at least in the car, cuz we fucked up and felt flat as hell. Also, we realized halfway through the first narration that we left a pillow and blanket used as props (and as bedding) back in Nola. Peter ran down to the car and got some of our sleeping gear to use as a substitute. Everything was thrown off and goofy after that, but the audience was really into it anyway and hung out to chat afterward. Green Cup is another amazing space, an anarchist bookstore with a performance space for punk bands and poetry readings up above. Mike, the proprietor of the store is a playwright and theatre person with few opportunities to do or even see anything but big musicals in Birmingham, so he was excited to see us come through. We talked about all kinds of great stuff. We’ll definitely be keeping in touch and hitting this place again.

But, we had the longest drive of the tour ahead of us, and we decided to repeat the success of the St Augustine to New Orleans night drive. Left Birmingham just after midnight, I think.

Saturday Jan 3rd – Robindale Concert House, Toledo, OH. With Dr Rhomboid Goatcabin
Audience: 45 peak / 40 core. Door/Donation: $115 Merch: $15 Drive: 10.5 hours
So, there’s this crazy guy named Gabe in Toledo, OH. He’s a musician, works at a record store, has a silk screen press in his house, and hosts noise artists and other performers in the middle of his nice clean dining room, right next to the mantelpiece. He lets filthy travelers, who’ve been sleeping god knows where and might not have showered for a week crash at his house. In real beds! He provides snacks at the show, and is just plain all around awesome. He saved us from a complete loss of our Nashville show and set this great show up just a few days before we left Milwaukee. He’s coming here in a couple weeks, performing with a group called KBD (I think) at the Borg Ward on the 17th. GO THERE AND SUPPORT HIM! I’ll be performing up in Minneapolis, so I’ll miss it, but it promises to be a good show, it’s Nummy’s birthday.

Performing Paint the Town in this place was weird. The set was a really tight fit, but it worked out and the crowd was GREAT, lots of young intellectuals who stayed up discussing themes of the play with me until almost 4 in the morning. A really great time, almost makes me feel, y’know, important. Also, we played with I think, my favorite musical act of the tour: Dr Rhomboid Goatcabin. Really innovative use of noise equipment, nice dynamics, and a crackpot kitchen sink spiritualist aesthetic that verged on the much hated ‘providence’ look, but escapes it. The reason I hate the providence aesthetic is because these people are half-assing something that if they did it right, I would LOVE. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what I mean by “do it right” the line between success and failure is very hard to discern or articulate due to the clouds of ambiguity and irony employed. The Butterfly Kiss Effect up at MN Fringe succeeded. Eagle Ager succeeds. Buoyant Sea failed. Baltimore mostly succeeds. Providence fails utterly. Some of the Darling Hall and Green Gallery stuff succeeds, but some of it fails. Alejandro Jodorowski blows em all out of the water.

Anyway, we slept in real beds at Gabe’s for a couple hours in the afternoon before the show, and for a couple hours afterward. Then drove home to Milwaukee. We left a second pillow and blanket pair (the last of our sleep gear, cuz Peter and John forgot to bring anything from Milwaukee in the first place) behind. Fortunately, we could get replacements from home before the Stonefly show.

Sunday Jan 4th – Stonefly Brewing Company, Milwaukee, WI. With Fahri and White Wrench Conservatory
Audience: 130 peak / 80 core. Door: $51 Donation: $0 Merch: $0 Drive: 5.5 hours
After a harrowing summer of abysmal audience attendance in our hometown, the fact that we have to pay Stonefly to have a soundman and door guy, and that we’d be out of town and couldn’t very well promote ourselves had me honestly quite skeptical about this show. But Milwaukee really came through for us, in spades! It made me significantly less bitter about living here. I’m very unsure about the high numbers listed above, too distracted to get a good look at the crowd, but Stonefly was quite full. After only a few minutes of shouting over some conversation and background noise (it’s a bar, people are used to performers having a lot of amplification) we had this large group of people watching silently and attentively. It felt strange performing for familiar faces, and John and I both feel like we were pretty flat. No big mistakes, but just not feeling it right energy-wise. But Kate looked great. Her performance in the last few scenes at this show was, I think, her best.

The bands kicked ass, the staff kicked ass, the audience kicked ass. Maybe we’ve just been performing in the wrong places in Milwaukee. Our Borg Ward show in August was also a decent turn out, but I’ve mostly attributed that to Realicide, who has quite a following. It’s really too bad we can’t get more of these people to go to the Alchemist, or more theatre people to come out to these non-traditional venues. I didn’t get a sense that many theatre people were coming to any shows we’ve put on anywhere in the country, though. Seems a large majority of the theatre world won't dare leave the hall of mirrors they live and work in. Oh well, looks like we don’t need em anyway.

In two weeks we perform at Bedlam, who are a great example of theatre artists who don't sequester themselves in the theatre world. This will be our first show returning to an out of town venue we've already performed in, with our reputation preceeding us. Also, we're playing with Lamb Lays with Lion, who saw one of our rehearsals. With these contacts, i'm figuring we don't need anyone to wish us luck up there, but, do it anyway!

Tour Report

This weekend we did a short regional tour with Paint the Town, hitting Chicago, Madison, and Minneapolis. These were the last shows Jason Hames will be able to do with Paint the Town. When you see him next, give him a pat on the back for good work. He did these shows with a broken toe.
Special thanks also go out to Ed and Rachel, Ron and Jeff in Chicago, Tim, Ester and other coop members in Madison, John, Maren, Thor, Kat, and everyone at Bedlam or Kat's house in Minneapolis. These people kick ass. They're doing the often tedious and sometimes risky work of maintaining a space, promoting a show, and otherwise enabling our anarchist and DIY art to happen. They're clearly motivated by a love for art and artists. They should be applauded and emulated by anyone claiming to share that love.


Reports:

Thursday October 23rd, Chicago
We performed in the basement of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, a gallery and studio space in Bridgeport run by Ed and Rachel from Lumpen Magazine. Our enthusiastic friend Ron helped organize and promote this show. He also dragged some friends to help us load in and take care of everything. Ron is great.
We left Milwaukee at around 5, after Hames got out of work and hit some ugly traffic on the way down to Chicago, not making it there until after 8.
We used the basement because Ed didn't want us painting his gallery floor, basements look awesome and fit the setting of the show so well, and there is a whole punched in the wall, Kool-Aid man style which we incorporated into the set (Ron took this picture of it). The ceiling was too low so we had to put the set up sideways, which works fine. Hooray for versatility!
John Kuehne who will be taking over the role of Arthur Pratt in future productions came down with us, and familiarized himself with our process. He had a good enough time that he almost came with up to Minneapolis, but couldn't get out of work.
We performed with two musicians. First was Cecil, an good ambient/drone guitar and laptop guy and second Instinct Control, who does something very dangerous and impressive with a broken reel to reel machine. Basically he takes the back off the machine, plugs the auxiliary output into a PA and then touches the circuitry to generate and control the static and noise, achieving amazing control, range, and composition without accidentally touching any of the exposed components which could seriously electrocute him.
Our first performance with a live audience since the end of August was really quite rough. Having only done a few pick up rehearsals, swapping some props and needing to accommodate and adapt for Hames' broken toe (with one of those big plastic boot things on it). But, we pulled it off well enough that the audience remained thoroughly engaged and very complimentary when it was all over. We had at least 15 people throughout, peaking at 25. This was the best turn our and most lucrative show of the tour. Having Ron on the ground, drumming up support harassing radio stations and bringing people out obviously helped. Jeff Grygny also helped spread the word down there.
We drove back to Milwaukee after cleaning up and making plans to come back in January. Got home with enough time to get a few hours sleep before going to our day jobs.

Friday October 24th - Madison
We were back on the road heading toward Madison by 5 am the next day. Hit traffic again, but made it up there with enough time to be ready to perform at 8:00. Unfortunately, Madison wasn't ready when we were.
The show was at the Nottingham Coop which is a great big house full of hippies and punks located right on fraternity row. The city lived up to it's reputation as the kind of town where people are too busy living in a liberal community college town to actually go out and see or do art.
Eventually, a few of peter's friends showed up, just stopping in to see if they had enough time to grab some food before the show started. Since they were the only audience, we all walked down to state street and got some food, walked back and started the show about and hour and a half late.
When we got started a half dozen or so coop inhabitants came out and we ended up performing for a small but impressed audience. Peter's friends left after he played the first intermission and then Tim Morgan, the booking contact at nottingham played an amazing prepared guitar percussion piece for the second. He put a cymbal on the strings of an acoustic guitar and beat the strings and body of the guitar and the cymbal with drumsticks and various other objects. he was damn good at it too. Seeing this alone made the stop in Madison worth it.
After the show we sold some merch, chatted with co-op denizens and repaired or replaced a few faulty props. I got the kind of impression i get after many of the more poorly attended shows, regret on the part of the small audience that more of their friends and community didn't take the chance on coming to see theatre from an unknown touring group. I don't know what i can do to prevent this situation in the future, other than coming back to cities we've already played so we'll have some reputation.
Kate and I wandered state street for a bit, getting some great food from one of those little cart booths, best tacos and quesadillas i've had since visiting Oaxaca. We sold some merch and got donations from our hosts, crashed in "the study" and were on our way to Minneapolis after a cheap meal but decent meal at a diner near the willie st coop.

Saturday October 25th - Minneapolis
We rolled into Bedlam, and found everyone very busy in the midst of their huge barebones Halloween spectacular. This is a giant puppet show version of Jason and the Argonauts with hundreds of performers, a flaming undead Greek army, and huge fire breathing puppets, staged in an inner city park. In other words, Bedlam is amazing. Minneapolis is amazing. I love this city.
I wish we hadn't been in competition with such a great show, especially since most of the people from the venue were out in the park and encouraging everyone else to go to the park throughout our show. Our friend Kat managed to round up a handful of audience, and a couple other people came out. So it was another small audience, but enthusiastic.
There must have been some miscommunication with Terricide, because they never showed up. Ice Volt more than made up for it though. He is one of the most commited and otherworldly performers i've seen. Attempting to describe what he does would be a disservice to anyone who hasn't seen it, let me just say it was remarkable and incredibly effective, musically and as a piece of movement theatre.
The puppet show did leave us a spare tech assistant. A great guy named Thor, who was very helpful and friendly, turns out he and Peter have some mutual friends. If we make it back to Minneapolis while he's still there he promised he would work it out so we'd get to use the paint.
We hung out at Bedlam with Thor and at the hard times cafe (Minneapolis' equivalent to Fuel) until two AM, then crashed on couches at Kat's house, much to the chagrin of an adorable German shepherd puppy who whined about Hames' snoring away on her couch almost as much as i wanted to, until i moved to the basement and got some real sleep.

Sunday October 26th - Minneapolis again
We grabbed some grub at The Wienery, another good cheap diner, with great hash browns and home made bread, and made our way back to bedlam for our 2pm matinee. We played mainly for the band (a great power pop band, with members originally from Milwaukee, The Liarbirds) and Bedlam staff (who missed the 3rd act because they had to go to the park to work on the barebones thing) This performance was one of our most energetic and just plain fun. A great note to go out on before heading back to rehearsing and workshopping the script with John.
Overall, it was a great weekend, and same as august, i hate being back in Milwaukee. The touring thing is rough, there's a lot we need to work on to get better at it (mainly promotion, booking and networking, but also with the play itself) but, even with poor attendance, we managed to cover gas costs and the company bought a couple of our meals without going bankrupt. Touring like this is difficult, but i think we can only get better at it. Once we do, we'll be much more fully realizing the insurgent theatre mission than ever before. At any rate, the prospect of perfecting a DIY tour seems more likely and much more exciting than perfecting a local Milwaukee production.

Financial Report
I've been thinking about expanding the online transparency of the company for a while, making information about our finances, our successes and failures, our trials and celebrations available to anyone who cares to find them out. Radical theatre is a very difficult thing to produce and promote in the US today, so I hope this information might help others with the same aims as us. This tour brought in $74 in at the door donations (mainly in Chicago) and $70 in merchandise sales (this is total sales, not net profit from sales, it doesn't take in the cost of the blank shirts). So that's a total income of $144. We spent $132 on gas, and $84 on food, for a total of $216 spent. That's a net loss of $72.

Of course finances are only one (and not a very important one) of the measures of success. I think $72 is a perfectly acceptable cost for the gains we got in terms of lessons learned and contacts made. I also prefer to measure success by the faces of the audience members as they watch the show. Ron describes the Chicago audience like this: "the most rapt audience I have ever seen at any Chicago production. That was something that continually impressed me through the night. Our audience of 25 or so, including house managers, was totally quiet and attentive. " Considering the informal setting, the fully lit house lights, and the lack of any pre-show requests for people to silence their cell phones or unwrap their candies, or even remain in their seats, this attentiveness is more impressive.
When we get to the final narration, when i sit up and look at the audience and see a group of people, no matter how big or small, whether they're the friends of the musician who mainly came to see him perform, or the artistic director of Bedlam, sitting on the edge of their seat (or leaning forward while sitting on the floor) mouths open and eyes unblinking, not absorbed in cathartic suspense, but puzzled, with furrowed brows, actively working to figure out exactly what it is this play is communicating to them, i see a success that is far more valuable to me than any monetary reward, shining review or accolade. The possibility that we are transforming audiences into critical engaged participants, not just passive entertained punters reaffirms my commitment to making the kind of art that can escape commodification and produce a revolutionary change in our society.

I Love This

Ten Things Theaters Need to Do Right Now to Save Themselves

Read it! Read it NOW! it's short and funny and TRUE!

here's my reactions to each of them.

1. Enough with the goddamned Shakespeare already. Yes! Please! Thank you for making this number one. Get his fucking corpse off of us!

2. Tell us something we don't know. Every play in your season should be a premiere—a world premiere, an American premiere, or at least a regional premiere. Every play in every Insurgent Theatre season has always been a world premiere and always will be.

3. Produce dirty, fast, and often. This is a little trickier. There's a limit to how much of this you can do. We found it last summer, and it's damn near killed us.

4. Get them young. This seems self evident.

5.Offer child care. This is ingenoius advice for the companies that have parents in their audiences. We don't have that problem so much.

6. Fight for real estate. When you lose that fight, perform illegally.

7. Build bars. i wish i wish i wish they weren't right about this, but the fact of the matter is, if americans (especially milwaukeeans) aren't able to get trashed, they aren't interested. I especially like the last line: Tax, zoning, and liquor laws in your way? Change them or ignore them. Do what it takes.

8. Boors' night out. This is another great idea, and one that we could actually use. For some parts of Paint the Town, every night should be Boors' night out.

9. Expect poverty. Sad but true. But, if we do these things, then poverty will be a temporary condition. Theatre can become sustainable art form providing economic stability for artists again, but we've got to tear it down and rebuild it to make that happen.

10. Drop out of graduate school. Not just grad school. Drop out of any and all theatre programs. They've got nothing to offer but debt and the opportunity to work for zombies. Get together and learn to act the way all the people your professors and classes romanticize, by experimenting in a tight-knit self-guided workshops, and by producing shows.

Impressions from Tour Part One: Appropriation!

This is the first in a series of posts, in which i recap recent experiences and put them into a context from which relevant conclusions can be drawn. The main purpose here is to create a record of these events and my reactions to them for my own future reference. This is not the whole story of our tour, many good times good people and simple yet inspiring events or banal frustrations aren't mentioned.

To summarize: After performing with some great noise acts in Boston, we went out to a party and then a bar, and managed to have some very interesting conversations about the play, post-modern philosophy, political aesthetics, and what-not with Karl Heinz (not Karlheinz Stockhausen, khznoise) and Mike from Sharpwaist before people got too drunk. At the Lemp Arts Center in St Louis, Kate and I got into a great argument with Mark Sarich (who runs the place), and Max Woods (Peter's little brother) about everything from creative economies to social determinism. Peter had been waiting all tour for this showdown, and it met his expectations.

This group of events has given me a better handle on what is required to realize and empower the DIY artist class against capitalism. This is largely a reaction to Adorno and Horkheimer's assertion that the revolutionary opportunity has passed. I don't think it has. I think a combination of DIY production methods and ethos, "corrosive unacceptability" and content-driven, intellectually stimulating work can come together to create a movement which cannot be co-opted by the capitalists.

Lets start with Karl Heinz . Karl is a very precise and exacting musician. He's rumored to have been working for over a year on a single piece of music. He's known on "the noise board" for vitrolic comments and devastatingly honest criticism. He had a number of very specific questions and comments about the play, but soon our conversation spread to the subject of noise. I mentioned Theodore Adorno's "corrosive unacceptability" idea. That some forms or experiments in the arts could be too harsh and dissonant to be assimilated into the bourgeois entertainment machine.


If you're familiar with Adorno and this idea, skip this paragraph. For the unininitiated: Adorno is among the most pessimistic of the anti-capitalists. He and his associates claimed that "advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed" (Wikipedia). He believed this containment was achieved through the culture industry, that bourgeois society re-institutes itself through the forms and formulas of art, especially narrative structures, catharsis, etc. He was a musician and inspite all this pessimism he did hold out that certain music: "only through its "corrosive unacceptability" to the commercially-defined sensibilities of the middle class could new art hope to challenge dominant cultural assumptions." (wikipedia). This earned him a reference in Paint the Town.


Karl Heinz and the other musicians that we played with (indeed Peter J Woods, who we traveled with) are noise musicians. Noise has got "corrosive unacceptability" in spades but, when I brought up the possibility that noise would remain artist-owned and not be co-opted by corporate capitalism, Karl asserted that it was already happening. He's not alone in this assertion. Peter has also been known to complain about PBR swilling douchebags showing up at his noise shows. This empty hipsterism is the first stage of mainstream assimilation of an art form. Also, lets face it, many noise musicians are tapping young white male angst more directly than metal, punk and hardcore ever could. In doing so they're also tapping a huge marketing demographic, the one Hollywood lusts after with every lame comic book adaptation film they churn out. Noise might not have much life left.

But, not if we can do anything about it, and we can. First, now more than ever, independent musicians have access to the equipment and networking necessary to produce and distribute their art without the industry. Secondly, it is possible to make art unappropriateable. Karl Heinz believes that capitalism always appropriates only the surface of an art movement, not the content. I think this nexus of corrosive unacceptability, DIY empowerment, and content driven work might allow artist/revolutionaries to thrive outside of capitalism. If not today, then in the future, as these trends continue.

Unfortunately, these trends might not be continuing. Fast forward to St Louis. Mark Sarich, who has run the Lemp Arts center for 8 years, and has been an active member of the DIY punk community and experimental music academia for i don't know how long, has a much more pessimistic perspective. Over the course of my approximately 10 years of involvement with underground art, i've witnessed an expansion. I've got the impression that we're more empowered and radical today than we were when i got started. Mark, on the other hand sees us as steadily worse off.

Mark's pessimistic conclusions are supported by other older members of the theatre and arts communities i know. John Manno and John Schneider have both also described a steady decline in ambition, quality, and popularity of avant-garde or experimental art. They seem paralyzed and alienated from society, avoiding art that they automatically assume will either piss them off or dissappoint and depress them. Now, it could be that these different perspectives have more to do with our individual attitudes and lives than objective reality. I see potential and reason for optimism because i'm still young (though 30 is kinda old for naivete) and haven't yet been defeated. They despair because they're getting older, are having a harder time connecting with new talent, and are nostalgic about the past.

But, i don't think that's entirely the case. Theatre X (John Schneider's company) used to travel the country and the globe. They had much more support locally and had a good sized group of people who were able to commit fully to the company in ways Insurgent has not been able to recruit or inspire. A large part of their success (or at least sustanance) came from university gigs, and grants. These options are not available today.

The optimist in me wants to believe that things like this swing on a pendulum. That yes, in the 80s we saw a great closing of the art world on all levels. The NEA and regional theatre movement saw their budgets slashed, the grassroots hippie culture burned out and experimentation ran up against a brick wall. But the pendulum swings back. The experimentation of the 60's and 70's were a rebirth out of the mediocrity of the 50s. The 40's and 50's were a clamping down on the dada-ists and flappers of the teens and twenties. By this logic, we're in for a strong resurgence of art and experimentation.

This resurgence might be even more powerful because it is not dependent on governement money, grants, or the university system. We're building a complete network and infrastructure that is artist controlled on every level. If we succeed, our opponents won't have a rug to pull out from under us the way Reganite's gutted the NEA during the culture wars of the 80s.

But, for us to acheive this more thorough and independent success, we need to be better, work harder, and stop short-changing ourselves. The capitalists and traditionalists are getting better and better at cutting off new movements before they can even start, and many within our communities are making choices that make us vulnerable.

There are three problems: First, we're too eager to participate in the capitalist entertainment machine. Second, we sell ourselves short, trying to make our products less radical and more palatable. Third, we like irony too much.

The first two problems are simple. We go see shit like The Dark Knight and forgive it's commercialism and excess and exaggerate it's few virtues. Then we hold ourselves back from fully realizing our work for fear that it'll be too dense or inaccessible to "the commoners" we want to attract to the audience.

The local run of Paint the Town has provided good examples of this. Paint the Town is an unapologetically intellectual play. It is dense with philosopher and artist names and concepts, characters name drop everything from "the Frankfurt school" to Genet to Hegelian "determinations of the will" and Nietzsche's "slave morality." After Russ Bickerstaff (local reviewer) saw the show, he gave me a warning: "I get some of those references, but most of your audience isn't going to know them at all" and he went on to write a review that, rather than judging the piece on it's own terms, reads like an apology to the audience, who Russ assumes will be entirely confused.

And, yes, as always, there were a number of people who didn't get it, radical theatre is not for everyone, and it never will be, but Russ and others seemed to think that the play had no hope of finding an audience who could appreciate this kind of thing. Once we hit the road and got some audiences who came to the shows cold (they were there to see the bands, not the play) these naysayers were proven wrong. The references got laughs, and compliments. "It's not often i get to hear so many Marx jokes" said one audience member in Baltimore (who was originally from Milwaukee). Also, many people who didn't understand the references at all came to tell us how totally inspired they were, by the play. They bought copies of the script and other merch with great enthusiasm. It seems the people who were able to recognize that the names were shorthand, and view them as character development (these characters are people who argue with each other on that level) rather than as content, were able to focus on and follow the over-all themes of the play much better than those who got caught up on the details and frustrated when something went over their heads.

This is who i want to make art for. These people appreciate the same things in art that i do. When i go to a show that's over my head, i love puzzling it out or trying to catch up. I've sat on the edge of my seat taking notes during The Death of Empedocles. Notes which then made it into the final scenes of Paint the Town. I love going back and seeing things that puzzled or enthralled me again and again. I want more of this art produced. I want more of these audiences discovered and cultivated, so more make the jump from viewer to producer and I get to see more of it happen. One way to do that is to produce this kind of art myself and introduce it to the widest audience possible.

Another great example from this summer: i had the privilege of producing John Manno's This is Entitled: This is Entitled. This non-narrative play takes on and destroys all theatrical structures and systems of thought, and even the very idea of systems of thought at a break neck pace, and with hilarious results. It's the most "inaccessible" play ever. Russ was relieved that he wouldn't have to review it because he assumed he was the only person in the audience who got it's references to quantum physics. During one of the performances of this piece, i sat near the back of the audience, and a few rows in front of me were two boys, who came to see the show together, they were friends of one of the actors in another piece. One of them leaned back in his chair a scowling with confusion and boredom. The other, sat forward, hands on his knees and a huge grin plastered on his face, his eyes darting around the stage not wanting to miss anything. There, two rows in front of me, i saw the extremes contrasted. These two boys had come together. They shared the same backgrounds, the same culture, they could have been brothers for all i know, and they were having radically different reactions to this work.

Experimental and avant garde work is so rarely produced that there is no reliable marketing data for it, no demographic predictors, no way to categorize or pigeonhole the audience. There are people out there who will like this stuff, on a base level, and the trick is to produce it as widely and in as many unexpected contexts as possible to find those people and build a niche market. That's why the Paint the Town tour was exciting and successful. So many people came to shows expecting a few noise or metal bands and instead, they got radical theatre. Some of them hated it, but many loved it, and wanted more.

So, we can sustainably make art that has rigorous intellectual content, if we're creative enough in our presentation. We can pursue Brecht's ideal of a theatre that educates as it entertains, without simple propagandizing or catharsis-based messages. If we get out of the universities, and bring this work to the masses, we can find people who are hungry for intellectual challenges. Then we'll have the audience and the community and the demand for an art that combines non-bourgeois form with critical content, and the means to create a sustainable production apparatus that will remain out of the hands of the entertainment industry long enough for us to develop a mode of production that rivals and competes with capitalism openly.

Well, that's what could happen once we solve the first two vulnerabilities i mentioned earlier. Which brings us to the third: irony. There is a growing subculture and aesthetic within the community that epitomizes the very opposite of my goals and threatens to lead us all into the marsh of a mediocrity worse than capitalism ever imagined. This is a whole different story. One that requires a new blog post and a gut wrenching account of our experience in Providence (duhn duhn duhn!) Yes, i'm talking about the mullets and mustaches crowd. Check back in about a week, when I'll thoroughly explore this subculture in the forthcoming "Impressions of Tour Part Two: Fuck your Irony."