Ensembles Making and Paying for Art

foolsFURY is a theater ensemble from San Francisco that sees advantages in working with playwrights and devisors, and seizes opportunities to become a touring company. As they come up on their fifteenth year, artistic director Ben Yalom sheds some light on their transitions, and lets me in on how they are working toward what is next artistically and financially.

Alvina Krause, one of twentieth century’s most famous teachers of acting, believed, “if you can act Chekhov, you can act anything!” In the summer of 1976 she was 83 years old, long retired, yet still taking private students in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Little did she know that seven students from Northwestern University in Chicago would come to study “acting Chekhov” with her, and end up settling into the town for a much longer stay as the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE).

How do you work as a group? How do you work without a script? How do you ask someone to fund a group without a script? And how are you still together—financially, artistically? The non-traditional model of creation is frequently mysterious if only because it is hard to understand without doing.