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2013 HowlRound Journal End-of-Year Roundup

January 2014 marks the three-year anniversary of the launch of HowlRound. Since our beginning, we have published nearly 600 theater artists who have contributed a journal article or blog post, which have been read by 350,000 unique visitors to the site—an average of over 15,000 regular readers each month. Thank you to our contributors and readers; thank you for participating in the ongoing conversation about American theater.

Success for me might just mean creating theater with more gravitas—a profession that has more weight and bearing in the world—by making theater in whatever way we do it, we succeed when we become more gracious and generous people.
This Year Let’s Redefine Success by Polly Carl.

In an era when we mistake mimicry for mastery, information for explanation, there is something downright enlivening about a group of people who craft experiences that engage the community where they live, ask questions of which they do not know the answers, and labor with one another for decades. This is what ensembles do and in the process they bravely approach the eradication of the instant results cliché.
Turning Problems into Parades by Nick Slie

In academic theater, as in professional theater, transforming an audience must not be left to chance; it must be the raison d'être. The educational theater audience is a less easy audience, predisposed to be distracted or bored. To them, relevance resides not only in content, but also in form.
CUI BONO? A Critique of the Conscripted Audience and, Perforce, a Manifesto by Craig Fleming

If we measure our artistic success by the personal fulfillment of our artists and artistic leaders—and not by our impact on audiences—then we deserve every empty seat in our theaters. And if we repeat the same rigid formulas in an effort to cling to the aging audience of the past, we’ll only find ourselves further away from the audience of the future.
The Firewall by Miriam Weisfeld

This is what I shall say to you, my young playwrights who are black. Without you, the black theater is not going to last, because the voice of a generation—your generation—is squarely rooted in the details of your specific story. Don’t allow your voice and unique black experience to be muted by this country’s efforts to move us all past race.
What Shall We Tell Our Young Playwrights Who Are Black? by Carla Stillwell

Today I try to think of art, among other interpretations, as thought patterns that are more inclusive and less fettered than the bottom line calculations of business dealings. One channels artistic impulses, through effort and media, in pursuit of an authentic outcome—a painting, a sculpture, a play, or story. …Is a new way of thought, one that feels organic, a reasonable expression of self? If we are what we think about, then the answer is yes—and to have my mind rewired for art made the disruption of a midlife MFA not only worthwhile, but necessary.
Reflections on the Mid-Life MFA by Geoff Kronik

I could tell you Austin took my cherry, but the truth is I gave it up. I’ve always been a fast boy trapped in a Puritanical trick bag; but Austin got me sweaty, swayed me, got me open. And like a bubblegum cracked-voice teen wallflower perched next to a humming speaker singing along about that good love, sweet love, let’s stay together, cuz I feel for you, wanna be your lover, let me be your angel, please baby, please… I had been dreaming about Austin long before I met it. Austin was the Valentine you wish was in your class. The cool one, lean, long, with the shiny eyes, copper brown skin, silver smile, raven blue black hair sweeping half his face. That one. Smelling like peppermint on a hot day.
Austin by Daniel Alexander Jones

… the most complicated part in making a case for your art and your theater will be to understand what part of what you’re doing belongs to you and what part belongs to civilization. As a practitioner you will spend a lot of time with your individual sense of things. You’ll define your aesthetic, your voice, and your vision for the work. And the more you define it, the more confident you’ll become in what I call the “I” of your practice. I see it this way. I like this play. I think we should produce this play or this season. You risk becoming obsessed with your own survival. You risk forgetting about civilization.
This Is It! by Polly Carl

I want to know how to say hello. I want our artists to know. Maybe that’s why I can’t get the phrase out of my head, why I repeat it to you today. I want to greet you from the deepest part of me and hear from the deepest in you. I want nothing less from our theater. I want theaters to feel like rooms. I want what passes in them to engender intimacy, even if the performances are wild, flamboyant, artificial things. I want to speak in your ear and have you speak in mine. I want performance that feels like revelation. I want to be in it—whatever it may be—together. I want to know how to say hello.
One for All and All for One and Every Man for Himself by Todd London

We’re in this period of rabid anti-institutionalism. I have to say for women that’s a huge mistake. To rail against the institutions is not ultimately helpful. I have found, as a woman, that there is solace and possibility in being part of an institution, because what women need is a structure to be able to sustain their lives, and that has to do with children. So we might as well admit it.
Interview with Carey Perloff by Brad Erickson

The fact is most producers these days don’t even want theater with the characteristics that Final Draft or other formatting software is equipped to generate. What really motivates my efforts here is the fact that there are plenty of theater artists who develop unique formats for notating their works; the form is the content. That is the work. The industry standards are simply nonrepresentative of what’s happening, yet the practice is taken for granted, and the format elicited.
Shaping the Conversation: Script Formatting and Twitter by Lisa Leaverton

Most arts organizations do not maintain cultures of similarity out of an innate desire to hold back diversification. Instead, the leaders of those organizations either consciously or subconsciously understand the ramifications of moving from “valuing diversity” to “managing diversity,” and that those ramifications can be scary. The idea of risking a stable, if dwindling, base of support in favor of an unknown group of new, often less-advantaged, less-educated, more-mobile, more-multimodal people, means confronting a future that may be, at least in the short term, less stable than the present.
On Valuing Diversity, Managing Diversity, and the Difference by Clayton Lord

Every citizen has at least one dramatic arc that is her or his life. Some are so agitated by it that they care to write it as a play. Spoken text gets separated out from movement and action, lights cue up here while sound punctuates or moods up the moment there. A three-dimensional space is posited and blueprinted on the page and collaborators help craft a performance where community and the curious can witness; and somewhere along the way, a worldview coalesces, describing our social moment through the writer’s most current lens—be it engagement or entertainment, or in the instance where scholar and market intersect, both.
Teaching Playwriting in the 21st Century by Anna García-Romero and Alice Tuan

I don’t, though, care about intentions, if the practices of our theaters impoverish and alienate the artists on whose backs they’re built. I don’t care about intentions of administrators if the work is boring and homogenous. I don’t care about how hard we work, if our work betrays bred-in-the-bones principles. Taking money from commercial producers, creating product for the commercial theater, bringing people from the New York marketplace theater in to meddle in the local, homegrown, nonprofit art theater, using commercial success as a lure for local patronage—these practices betray those principles.
What Price Idealism, or Who You Gonna Dance With? by Todd London

When a playwright creates gaps in language that compel our minds to remain on high alert so that we might learn the secrets of this world, we lean forward. Then—if a director understands how to enrich and complicate those gaps without explaining them—then we are vulnerable and open to a rich imaginative experience. Such was the case that night. I wanted to stay in my seat.
The Dramaturgy of Audience: Jayne Benjulian goes to the Theater as a Civilian by Jayne Benjulian

I dream to live in an ethical theater, one where the frame and its contents live harmoniously—where our process surrounding the creative act demands the same rigorous dramaturgy as the product. I know I will never know the secret to making this possible. I live in a constant state of surprise at my inability accept that the world I dream is just a world of theory.
Summer Dreaming by Polly Carl

Theater must be a rollicking discourse between artist and audience. Unless we get out of the buildings that house our work and change the way that audiences come into contact with us and our work, my view is that our audiences will stay the same (people attuned to hearing the “call” of our marketing), and the work that those audiences demand will also stay the same.
Soil, Sunshine, Fresh Air, and Water by David Schultz

And so, how do we make art in a world that seems obsessed with surface—a surface that is, technologically, and, ironically, about to disappear? The answer for theater, I believe, lies in devised theater—an art form that plays upon multiple surfaces in flux (the human body for one), and multimedia—all in order to reinstate a kind of underground. In a world in which surface is fetishized, devised theater tells the viewer, now you see surface, now you don’t, playing with the appearance and disappearance of said surface and echoing back, always, towards something deeper.
The Paradox of Devised Theater on the Twenty-First Century Stage by Vanessa Garcia

So the new artistic mission?
Get out of the way.
The Beauty of Complexity: Or the Death of the Pure Aesthetic by Polly Carl

No one prepares you for how sad life gets. People you love start dying like crazy. Better to be miserable from the word go. Arm yourself for sorrow.
Goodbye from Berlin: A Remembrance of Julie Harris by Lydia Stryk

The desire to tell a story and to retell a story arises out of a need to bear witness and ask others to do so.
Unruly Drama by Caridad Svich

Casting gets at the very root of how we tell our stories. The bodies we see onstage make our experiences visible. For invisible people, like trans and gender nonconforming people, it is necessary that we use ourselves to tell our stories.
Casting by MJ Kaufman

A life in art means that I purposefully make room for the indefatigable pursuit of the expression of the ineffable: the moments of individual and universal expression in (and between) joy and suffering, the harrowing and the celebratory. It’s a path that I invent and reinterpret every day.
On Becoming a Playwright-Producer by Adara Meyers
 

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