square white world

To write a letter to performing artists? to the performing arts community? sector? to theatre practitioners? to theatre workers? poets, makers & workers? (wouldn’t wankers be next in the series?) to whom it may concern … ? interested parties? partisans? compagneros? erroristas? (see <<empyre>> discussion for this month) insurgents? risk-takers? engagers??? fiance(e)(s)? actors? directors? producers? independent producers? (such as the group Stuart Devine contrived to bring together some years ago & because independence is good) resistors? brothers & sisters? (see “Miraculous Day,” pages opposite; it goes like this: “brothers, sisters, take my arms, lead me through the abattoir, where there is a swimmingpool; you cannot see the instruments, they are buried in the carcass, this is the environment.”) fellow victims of the beast that would eat your heart? (if you’d only give its teeth back; if only you didn’t prefer how it sucks) so, players? (but it isn’t supposed to be pleasant, not quite; we aren’t playing to have fun, otherwise, why work so hard?) small (because small is good, minoritarianist) independent (as above) professional (as in vocational, or even avocational) theatre groups? (yes, you! I can’t quite make you out in the crowd) (and groups still smacks of 1970s encounters with the id) companies? (doesn’t mean what it once did and recall that this is supposed to be a letter to elicit information from which is derived a Snapshot Of Real Theatre On the Fly, on the fly, not safe and established on delusional dreaming isles, atopic, SORT OF) so, emergent companies? emergent theatres? emerging performing artists? old & young emergers?

…addressing the letter to ‘fools’ might be deemed insulting (you talking to me!?) although it’s adequate. (See: yurodovstvo, in a previous post.)

To write this letter to you whose work is theatre or would be if you had the money and to find out what is useful to me without sounding like a prig (too late!) or to ingratiate myself so as to be confided in or to be plain and speak plainly and state upfront why I’m asking the questions I’m asking, what am I asking? Are you now or have you ever been … or do you like to hang around in bars? (Which calls to mean a delightful conversation with a member of the New Theatre Initiative, Auckland, now the Q, who tried to convince me that in building a theatre the bar was the most important because it’s like the engine-room of creativity, where alliances are formed, collaborations seeded, new work planned, dreams come true, alcohol is consumed, schemes are hatched, cabals, and knives come out … no, not this last. You get the idea. The bar!)

What is useful to me to know from other theatre practitioners is what kind of THREAT they pose to the viability of my business idea, as competitors after the ‘arts dollar’ of which there is a limited supply, we suppose. But to formulate it like this is immediately not useful, since it’s to be a literalist, to use the SWOT tool unimaginatively.

If I am to exploit a milieu, theatre, here now local specific, Auckland, 08, … ah, when I was young, golden and invulnerable, as Rimbaud says in Christopher Hampton’s Total Eclipse.