Aesthetics

Avant-garde performer and director Paul Zimet offers a brief overview of his role in Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and his forty-year history with Talking Band.

Jonathan Mandell looks at the questions raised by stage-to-screen adaptations, and wonders what theatre can learn from these successes.

Could the theater offer to both theater artists and theatergoers a kind of substitute for the awe they felt as children towards a religion that they no longer can as readily accept intellectually or morally?

What conditions make life unlivable? Kate Kremer explores this question looking at performances by Forced Entertainment and Tehching Hsieh, ranging from six hours to one year.

Carol Kearns writes about Zoetrope: Part 1, a drama set in 1951 Puerto Rico, looking at its multimedia aesthetic, bilingual presentation, and political themes.

In his essay, Director Evan Caccioppoli explores the future of sex in American theatre.

Shakespearean Actor Samuel Taylor shares his insight on how to make Shakespeare theatre more attractive to a contemporary and millennial audience.

The 2014 Latinx Theatre Commons Second National Convening at Los Angeles Theatre Center's Encuentro 2014 runs November 6-9, 2014 and is open to all theatermakers, artists, scholars, administrators, and advocates with an interest in Latina/o theater (or the New American Theater). If you plan to come to any Convening events, please RSVP here no later than November 1, 2014.

Influenced by Greek tragedies, Andy Boyd sheds insight into the complexities of writing contemporary dramas.

Brighde Mullins provides insight into her journey of becoming a playwright. 

I feel fairly confident that if some sort of census was to be taken from the last decade of American theatermaking, counting up the total number of productions by playwrights who are dead versus playwrights who are alive, The Zombies would outnumber those of us with pulses by a large margin. Which sincerely begs to question: Do artistic directors have a bias against playwrights who are alive? Are they “Life-ist?” “Pulse-Phobic?” Do they hate my heartbeat?

P. Carl interviews playwright Sarah Ruhl on her collection of short essays titled "100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater." 

Miranda Wright doesn’t want to be pegged – not yet. The theatrical environment that she’s creating is both local and global—theater for a world that is simultaneously more connected and isolated, more expansive, more community-oriented, more lonely. More than anything, she’s concerned with the present moment.

Whereas the old avant-garde was oriented toward an imagined future and engaged in a revolutionary project of overthrowing stale regimes and remaking art—and society—according to visionary principles, the new avant-garde is focused on the current moment.

Alex Ates and DCW3 offer an overview of the how the internet has shaped theatre.

Sound design alone is not immersive performance. Immersive performance is reliant on the audience experiencing related sensory stimulation to the performer and a multi-sensory design. The experience of sound can be the most recognizable and common part of our otherwise foreign immersive experience.

P. Carl reflects on the power of the brain and how it relates to creativity. 

Jonathan Mandell writes about seven tropes of the NY Fringe Festival, highlighting productions which fit into the reoccuring genres.

There is a prevailing sense that the millennial avant-garde is not creating political, activist theatre to the same extent as the avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s. I don’t think this is true. But I do think that the challenge has changed.

Idris Goodwin investigates the potential financial and critical success of Hip-Hop-oriented theatre.

Translator Henning Bochert and playwright Carlos Murillo talk playwriting and directing US theatre.

The keynote address delivered by Caridad Svich at the 6th annual Graduate Theatre Syndicate Symposium at Ohio State University “Position: The Power and Politics of Witnessing" on February 28, 2014 at OSU in Columbus, Ohio.

There is much that can be done in a truck that cannot be done in a conventional theater—and vice versa. The shows we create for a truck will forever only be performed in a truck, as they’d be much different shows if we wrote them with a brick and mortar theater in mind. Working in trucks is a great primer in how to exploit the particulars of a given environment, and a great reminder that we shouldn’t take theater spaces and the assumptions that come with them for granted. Conventions are great, but using them should be a choice.

The Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC), in association with the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC), is proud to announce the 2014 LATC Encuentro: A National Latina/o Theatre Festival. This groundbreaking festival will be the largest national Latina/o theater festival in over twenty-five years, bringing together 100 artists from across the country to explore the aesthetic, thematic, and cultural diversity in the field.