a bargain, my friends

HATE TO AUDITION?  TURN IT INTO AN EFFECTIVE AND CREATIVE EXPERIENCE

OBIE award winning and internationally acclaimed director John Clancy  offers an intensive workshop for actors at all levels of experience interested in acquiring the tools, technique and understanding to audition effectively, creatively and enjoyably, regardless of the audition set-up or situation.

Be on both sides of the table, learn the three simple tasks all actors must perform in the audition process, and through the use of basic Laban movement technique gain the confidence to make strong, clear, fully committed physical choices and adjustments on a dime.

Four sessions, starting in June.

125.00, discounts available. 

Class size strictly limited to 12, register now to reserve your place.

Call 917.539.3153 or john@clancyproductions.com

www.clancyproductions.com

let me help you. Let me. Help you.

The answers you need.

Because we built the one thing and are old hands at the other.

Come on, there must be a hundred of you guys out there, just got accepted to New York, wondering what you're about to do and a hundred more heading to Edinburgh with all of your dreams and very few clues.

Give us a call and we'll talk you through it.

YES

We did it.
Thanks all who pitched in all who helped spread the word.
I'm looking at you, Tom and Elena.
The Living Theater lives.

today, not tomorrow

In about fourteen hours from the moment I type this the Living Theater will have raised 24,000 dollars and be able to to pay its rent, bring in a consultant to develop a 5-year strategic plan, and turn itself into a financially sustainable arts organization.

Or it won't and they'll close the doors at 21 Clinton Street.

They're a little less than six grand away.

Here's the link.

And think, today, that if we don't honor our own history and give to our own living institutions, we cannot be surprised or upset when others don't.

Six grand, folks.  This can be done.

fires and the road

I won’t be on the road with the Transient Theater this summer, but I’m very excited about the experiment and here’s why:

I’ve got a fireplace in this little cabin we have out in the Poconos.  And whenever I can convince my wife that it’s cold enough, (doesn’t matter if it’s in the middle of summer, we’re in what passes for “mountain country” around here, so it can get cool even in July) I build a fire and sit in front of it and stare, tossing in logs like a madman. 

It was during one of these self-induced pyro-hypnotic states a couple of years ago that I realized a great loss, for me and for all of us, for our species; a loss we don’t even recognize, one we don’t even know has lessened us.

Ever since we were us, we’ve stared into the fire, alone and shivering or together and feasting; fire and language (and also the ability and willingness to pick up a stick and smack the shit out of that other guy) are some of the very basic things that make us us.  When you watch a fire you’ve built, you watch a living thing dance in front of you, you watch it feed and lick the wood, you watch it collapse, die, roar back up to life. You can see a show you’re working on, a project  you’re about to begin, a political campaign, just about anything.  You can see civilizations rise and sputter if you look, not close enough, but without any hard focus.

You can learn a lot staring into a fire.

In much the same way, the modern theater artist has lost something important she doesn’t even know she used to need.

Up until quite recently, theater was a mobile enterprise.  You couldn’t just sit around the same town square doing the same damned show day after day. People would start throwing things at you or worse.  So the jongleurs, the bouffons, the jugglers and troupes would be on the road every morning, literally walking down some road that snaked or crawled between two towns, rehearsing new bits, congratulating each other on yesterday’s performance all the while keeping an eye out for highwaymen or worse, the Law.

This isn’t some romantic hokum, this is how it used to be and how it always was up until the moment patronage got involved in Western theater.  And even then, after some duke had built you a theater or more often just granted you the right to perform in his banquet room, you still made your money out on the road. 

 And just like the old simplicity of staring into a fire, you can learn a lot being out on the road.

Most important to the craft, the show gets better, stronger, leaner and sharper.  Forced to adjust the performance to different playing areas, the players are much more aware of the physical reality of the performance each time, they are paying more attention to the crowd and each other than they will when they are comfortable and taking the space for granted.  Different playing areas keep the show alive and electric in a way that it is impossible to replicate in a fixed location.

The other thing the road clarifies is the implicit agreement and relationship between the player and the town, which is a way of saying the contract between the artist and society.

On the road, you’re a stranger, again, a visitor bringing something new to the place.  You’re back in the Marketplace, out of the dreaded, deadening Temple of Art, that place where parishioners nap and you dutifully recite the words, hoping to connect again with the Old Magic.  You’re in the rough and rolling world again, peddling your wares. And yes, your wares may be made of dreams and sweat and spit and magic, but the relationship is the ancient, universally understood  transaction: give me your time and your coin and I’ll make it worth your while.  And to take the time and coins of strangers and have them applaud and smile at the end is the only reward any player, ever, is really looking for.

And having spent some time on the road, I can tell you that the best thing about it is the hilarious, very adolescent feeling you have of Getting Away with Something.  You’re traveling around, dropping into a place, doing your show for strangers, gone the next day, off to the next place.  When you tell a shopkeeper or a hotel clerk or someone at the bus stop what you’re doing:

“We’ve got a show, we’re on tour, we’re playing tonight down at the…”

they invariably nod, impressed, interested, like you’re some kind of exotic animal, like you’re the Rolling Stones.  They’ve never heard of you, they’re not coming to the show, you’ll never see them again, but in that moment you get this completely unearned but absolutely genuine respect from another human.  

And all because you were crazy enough to go out on the road.  

Simple things, fires and the road.  But it’s concentrating on and appreciating the very simple things that keeps you honest and focused on what’s important.

I won’t be on the road with the Transient Theater crew, not this time anyway. I’ll be home staring into a fire, even if it’s the dog days of August, but I’m very excited about the experiment and I can’t wait to greet them in New York.

An Open Letter to New York City

April 29, 2012

AN OPEN LETTER TO NEW YORK CITY

We’d like to report a crime in progress.

In 2012, Judith Malina lives under the threat of eviction from her apartment and her theater on Clinton Street.

In 1947, she co-founded the Living Theater with Julian Beck and it remains the oldest experimental political theater in the United States and is arguably the only American political theater recognized throughout the world.

65 years later, Judith Malina does not know where she will be sleeping next week. 

In 1959, Malina’s production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, designed by Beck, opened in New York.  The company had already been among the first American theaters to present Brecht, Cocteau, T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, but The Connection was a break-through event.  It was controversial, depicting drug addiction in a realistic, unromantic light and was honored with three Obie awards and the Vernon Rice (now the Drama Desk) Award for Gelber.  The Living Theater went on to perform the play 722 times around the world and the play has been translated into five languages.

53 years later, Judith Malina wonders if tomorrow will be the last time she showers at home for a while.

In 1963, Judith and Julian were convicted of contempt of court due to tax problems and received a suspended five year sentence.  The charges were later proved to be false.  They left New York and began a five-year European tour of creation and discovery which culminated in their production of Paradise Now, described at the time by Stefan Brecht in The Drama Review as “in content and form outside the social system- not structured by it nor, except as outlet, implementing it: liberated territory.” 

49 years later, the papers are prepared, the lawyers paid and the marshals are just waiting for the go-ahead.  The property at 21 Clinton Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side, the cradle and cauldron of both alternative theater and political activism in New York City, will be cleared of Malina’s possession and presence and it will be available for a new café/wine bar/organic bakery entrepreneur to set up shop and join the bustling businesses lining the block.

In 1971 the Living Theater toured Brazil, playing mostly on the street.  The company members were arrested, charged with suspected revolutionary activity and imprisoned for several months before being deported and sent back home. Personal letters from Mayor John Lindsay, Marlon Brando, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Jean Paul Sartre were undoubtedly helpful in securing their release and repatriation.  Throughout the 70s the company toured the U.S., taught countless workshops, created new work and inspired the creation of such companies as the Open Theater, the Bread and Puppet Theater and the Wooster Group.

This morning, Judith has to consider if she should buy any frozen food at the store, since there’s a high probability she won’t have access to a freezer during the period of her actual eviction and what’s the point in wasting a perfectly good package of spinach?   

In 1985 Julian Beck died and Judith buried her husband and partner of forty years and continued to run the company. In 1989 she received her sixth Obie Award, a small grant in recognition of the company’s legacy and influence on American theater.  In 2008 she received the Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theater Foundation.  In 2009 she received the Edwin Booth Award from the City University of New York, and two months ago her new play History of the World was greeted with universally respectful and positive reviews in the New York press, over half a century after some of the same papers praised her production of The Connection. 

And after 65 years of work, recognition, controversy, mistakes, triumphs, obstacles, resistance, lessons learned, friends made and lost, and always an unquestioned commitment to living her principles on the stage and off, Judith Malina is going to be evicted.

Imagine, for a moment, if Pablo Picasso were being evicted from his studio in Paris.  How would the painters and art world of France respond?

Imagine if Bertolt Brecht were being evicted from his apartment in Berlin.  Would the theater world or the wider cultural world or the city of Berlin allow this? 

There is no crime in a landlord charging a high rent in a desirable neighborhood.  There is no crime in removing a tenant who has fallen behind on that rent.  It does not matter if that tenant is 85 years old, suffers from emphysema and has contributed a literally incalculable amount of value and worth to the city’s cultural life. Capitalism is a cruel, strange, beautiful belief system, but it is not a crime.

That is not the crime we’d like to report.

The crime is that we are doing nothing to help Judith or the Living Theater. 

The crime we are all about to be charged with is one of the worst you can commit: willful negligence; failure to respect and support an elder, failure to support our family. 

Folks, it is not a crime we are willing to be charged with, let alone commit.

This is not something we want on our conscience, not now and certainly not in the highly unlikely outcome that we are blessed to work in the New York and world theater for forty-five more years only to find ourselves in Judith’s situation: back home where it all began, a shelf of awards gathering dust on a shelf, stacks of glowing, yellowing reviews in a box in the corner and wondering how to carry it all downstairs when the hard-working, impersonal fellow citizens in uniform knock on the door and tell us we have to leave, now. 

We have no money to give to Judith or the Living Theater.  We honestly don’t know how we can help.  But we’re going to ask and we’re going to figure it out and we’re asking every single one of you to do the same.

And since this is an open letter to New York City, we address our leader directly and ask him directly for his intervention.  

Mayor Bloomberg, you are a known supporter of the arts and a very, very rich man.  We ask you to personally end Judith and the Living Theater’s financial ordeal.  Allow this women who came to our city in 1929 at the age of 3; this immigrant, who like all of the immigrants, built this city; this New Yorker who stands as an exemplar of risk, conscience and commitment; allow her to spend the end of her life working, teaching and inspiring, not packing, worrying and wondering where the night will find her tomorrow.  You can stop reading this sentence and make a phone call, your Honor, and this shameful chapter of the history of the Living Theater and the life of the New York theater will end.

If his Honor does not help, and even if he does, we all must.  Not just for Judith and the Living Theater, but for our own honor.

Call the Living Theater.  Ask how you can help.  It’s not too late to get clean and do the right thing. 

John Clancy

Nancy Walsh

gettting closer

Honing down the idea, folks.  

Take a look, tell me what you think.

LIT FUND ONE SHEET

The League of Independent Theater Fund is designed to financially assist organizations and individual theater artists creating independent theater in the five boroughs of New York City.  The intent of the Fund is to help this vital segment of American theater thrive in a difficult economic environment and to have a positive impact on the cultural landscape of the city. 

Where does the money come from?

At the core of the LIT Fund is the simple idea of theater people helping theater people.  Money for the LIT Fund comes from organizations, companies, venues and individuals donating five cents per ticket sold to their performances.   Additional donations will be solicited from patrons of the arts.  No money from foundations will be solicited, as the Fund is conceived as an additional source of funding for the independent theater territory and not a “re-granting” mechanism.

Where does the money go?

All money collected will go solely to the independent theater territory, with a small portion dedicated to administering the Fund.  Funding priorities will be set by the field.  We are currently surveying the territory and we will use the results of that survey to determine first year funding priorities.  The survey is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JFJBVR7  Early results indicate that real estate issues, unrestricted funds and the creation of an endowment for independent theater are areas of interest.   

How is the money collected?

Money will be collected from participating organizations through their various ticketing agencies at the close of each run.  Individual artists and patrons of the arts can donate online or by check throughout the year.

Who is eligible for the money?

Only members in good standing with the League of Independent Theater will be eligible to receive money from the Fund.  League membership is free and is open to all companies, venues and individual artists who have worked on at least three independent theater productions in New York City.

How will people apply?

Applications will be submitted online on a rolling basis.  Applicants will be asked to provide a brief history of their organization, a description of the use of the money and a simple one page financial statement.  Applicants can also provide supporting materials such as work samples, bios of artists involved, etc.  Recipients will be recruited to serve on the Fund’s adjudication panel the year following their funding. 

Who decides who gets funded?

Applications will be evaluated by a panel drawn from previously funded groups and individuals with the goal of having working artists in the sector driving the decision-making, working within clear guidelines provided by the League.  In the first year of the Fund, the adjudication panel will consist of three members of the League’s Board of Directors, three members of the League and three individuals from the larger theatrical or philanthropic world in New York City.     

LIT Fund statement of principles

Folks,

Take a look and please respond.

And come to the Town Hall meeting this Wednesday, RSVP at fund@litny.org.

This is a living document, based on the feedback and response we’ve received from the independent theater territory so far.  We look forward to revising, fine-tuning and strengthening the ideas and principles below with you.

LIT FUND BASICS 

WHAT IT IS

The League of Independent Theater Fund is designed to financially assist organizations and individual theater artists creating independent theater in the five boroughs of New York City. The intent of the fund is to help this vital segment of American theater thrive in a difficult economic environment and to have a positive impact on the cultural landscape of the city. 

Money for the LIT Fund comes from contributions from a number of organizations (listed below), who donate five cents per ticket sold to their performances. This five cent donation is not passed on to the ticket buyer but comes from the organization. 

Recipients of money from the LIT Fund are chosen based both on a demonstrated history of work and a proven responsibility in the independent theater sector.  Recipients will be required to serve on the Fund’s adjudication panel the year following their funding and will be ineligible to receive funds two years in a row. 

Fund distribution will be determined on an annual basis and there will be no set categories.  Our members have identified real estate costs, artist compensation, money to create new work, marketing, equipment purchase and touring costs as current areas of concern. We trust that the artists and organizations we serve know best where the money is needed and we intend to have them dictate where it is distributed.

At the core of the LIT Fund is the simple idea of theater people helping theater people. 

All money collected will go solely to the independent theater territory, with a small portion dedicated to administering the Fund.

We will strive for radical transparency throughout our entire process, from collection to deliberation to decision to distribution.

We will neither accept money from nor give money to corrupt organizations or individuals.  We are defining “corrupt” in this context as organizations or individuals that do not honor artists and arts workers in terms of financial compensation, professional treatment or basic human respect.

We recognize that the power of the Fund will be measured in the level of commitment and collaboration of theater people in New York City, not in the amount of money collected and distributed.  

The money is important, of course, but finally, it’s not really about the money. The power of the Fund is us working together and taking care of each other.

HOW IT WORKS

The legal entity responsible for the administration of the Fund is the League of Independent Theater, Inc.  Current LIT board members are Randi Berry, John Clancy, Jennifer Conley Darling, Martin Denton, Amanda Feldman, Chris Harcum, Christopher Heath, Robert Honeywell and Erez Ziv.

In the inaugural year, LIT will form a committee of nine members tasked with determining how the initial funds collected in 2012-2013 will be distributed.  Three members will be recruited from the LIT board, three members will be recruited from the LIT membership and three members will be recruited from the philanthropic and commercial theater sectors in New York City.  This committee, after extensive public and private discussion and review, will make formal recommendations to the LIT board by June 1^st, 2012.  These recommendations will be public documents.  The LIT board will review the recommendations and announce the first year fiscal priorities and objectives of the Fund by June 15, 2012.

Funds will begin being collected on August 1, 2012.  The first distribution of the LIT Fund will occur no later than December 31, 2013. 

LIT FUND PARTICIPANTS AS OF 3/23/12

Agony Productions, The Amoralists, Angry Bubble Productions Art House Productions, CSV Cultural Center, Caps Lock Theatre, Clancy Productions The Civilians, Decades Out, Deconstructive Theatre Project, Elephant Run District, ETdC Projects Lab, Flux Theatre Ensemble, Gemini/Collisionworks, Gorilla Rep, HERE Horse Trade Theater Group,  Inverse Theatre,   Irondale Ensemble Living Theater, Jewish Plays Project, John Montgomery Theatre Company, La Lupa Italian Cultural Arts Festival, Mabou Mines, Mind the Gap Theatre, New Georges, The New Ohio Theatre, New York Neo-Futurists, New York Theatre Experience, Inc., No. 11 Productions, Organs of State, OutOurWayProductions, P.S. 122, Parallel Exit, Peculiar Works, Present Company (producers of FringeNYC), Purple Rep, Rabbit Hole Ensemble, Reverie Productions, Sinking Ship Productions, Small Pond Entertainment, Sponsored by Nobody, Stolen Chair Theater Company, Surf Reality, Tectonic Theater Project,  terraNOVA Collective, Theatre Askew,  Untitled Theater Company #61, undergroundzero, Vampire Cowboys Theater Company, ViolaCello StageWorks, LLC, WET Productions, White Horse Theater Company, Wreckio Ensemble.