eeeeeeeee-yow!

Just a quick update to everyone as to what's going on at the moment.

Right now we're still working out the kinks for our season slash waiting on some permissions. We're also setting up some fundraisers (read: chances to get drunk with us!) in the near future... I'm thinking uh, 1960s style rent parties, but that may or may not be true.

Also, keep your eyeballs glued to this space for info about being in Artemis the King later next month.

And of course the manifesto continues to grow and change, if ever so slightly. Thank you Nate for some lovely posts on said thoughts. What is it that Tzara said? "To put out a manifesto you must want ABC to fulminate against 123."

Off We Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder,
-Spencer









(hey, it's a birdie...)

Tuesday Friends...

The Red Party

Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge

Festival of Jewish Theater and Ideas

The Geographical History of America

If you'd like to have your event added, just drop us a line at, as always, feedthebirdtheater@gmail.com.

Friday Flights of Fancy

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz,
I wonder where the flowers iz?

All the boids is the on the wing...isn’t that absoid?
I thought the wing was on the boid!”

With apologies to Andrew Osborne

Rough Schedule

Hey All,

So! So our rough schedule through August is thus:

Exercises in Style*/Duck Variations*

July 10, 11, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25 (8 p.m.)
July 26 (2 p.m. matinee)

All at Roy Arias Studios, 5th Floor

Mix Tapes/Previews

June 7, 21 (8 p.m.)
July 12, 26

All at Roy Arias Studios, 5th Floor

Fundraisers (tentative)

May 8
June 20
Aug 15

Locations TBD

Auditions for Ex. Style/Duck Var.

June 13 (time TBD)

At Roy Arias Studios

Artemis the King

May 16 (8 p.m.)

Part of the Where Eagles Dare One Act Festival

All the Best,
-S.

* = permission pending

Shoe Strings & Timing Part Deux: The Reckoning

Quick recap from the earlier post - are "shorties" (groupings of short plays) of less value than full-length plays? At the end, big questions were asked - what is the value of art? Is it tied to length of the performance? Ultimately, does bang + buck = time + quality?

Last weekend I had an opportunity to view Andras Schiff perform a number of Beethoven's Sonatas. The performance consisted of 3 pieces and an encore performance of Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor. The central performance was, at most, eighty minutes long - not much "value" for the insane cost of Carnegie Hall tickets, no? But such a statement discounts the value of experiencing one of the greatest pianists tackle Beethoven. Absolutely breathtaking. I want to also note that the man did all the pieces from memory - which, I'm sure you can agree, is totally insane.

After the performance, I thought about my earlier questions. Did I get what I paid for? Was it worth it? Ultimately, I decided that, despite the "short" time I was in the theater, the experience was more than worth the dollars paid. The experience wasn't tied to the time spent in the hall, it was tied to the performance itself. I would have liked it to be longer, but I certainly didn't feel short-changed just because it didn't last another hour. As for the idea that "short"performances are less worthwhile than full length one? Preposterous. To my mind, Schiff's performance was as "valuable" as watching one of Beethoven's symphonies - probably more so, considering how often those symphonies are performed.

I'm going to have to abandon my rapidly collapsing comparative analysis - to continue to compare Schiff's performance to our "shorties" would entail us putting our work on the level of Schiff's - not something I'm willing to assert under any circumstances.

In the end, I feel value isn't tied to time but to quality. If you'll allow me another poor comparison, a 1940s Loony Toon short is better than a full-length late-70s Disney feature, right? Of course, now I'm just digging a deeper hole by breaking my own Granny Smith Apples to Golden Delicious Apples rule. A better example - a tight one-disc OutKast album versus the terrible Speakerboxx/Love Below.

So length doesn't necessarily equal value. Rather, quality is value. "Of course!" you say, "I didn't need to read all that to realize this! I knew that all along!" But what if that OutKast album was only 5 (the best 5) songs long, instead of 14? Would it still be worth your money? Or would you hold out for the "full" album even though you know the content isn't as strong as the already-released 5 songs?

BOOM - Do people have certain preconceptions regarding length regardless of value? Stay tuned to part 3!

Tuesday Friends

Links

The Red Party

Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge

Festival of Jewish Theater and Ideas

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Other Events

















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THE GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF AMERICA
by Gertrude Stein
May 14-23, 2009 @ 9pm
The Red Room Theater
Performance begins in the KGB BAR

If you'd like to have your event added, just drop us a line at, as always, feedthebirdtheater@gmail.com.

The Painted Bird

From Jerzy Kosiński's "The Painted Bird"

"Sometimes days passed and Stupid Ludmila did not appear in the forest. Lekh would become possessed by a silent rage. He would stare solemnly at the birds in the cages, mumbling something to himself. Finally, after prolonged scrutiny, he would choose the strongest bird, tie it to his wrist and prepare stinking paints of different colors which he mixed together from the most varied components. When the colors satisfied him, Lekh would turn the bird over and paint its wings, head, and breast in rainbow hues until it became more dappled and vivid than a bouquet of wildflowers.

Then he would go into the thick of the forest. There Lekh took out the painted bird and ordered me to hold it in my hand and squeeze it lightly. The bird would begin to twitter and attract a flock of the same species which would fly nervously over our heads. Our prisoner, hearing them, strained toward them, warbling more loudly, its little heart, locked in its freshly painted breast, beating violently.

When a sufficient number of birds gathered above our heads, Lekh would give me a sign to release the prisoner. It would soar, happy and free, a spot of rainbow against the backdrop of clouds, and then plunge into the waiting grown flock. For an instant the birds were confounded. The painted bird circled from one end of the flock to the other, vainly trying to convince its kin that it was one of them. But, dazzled by its brilliant colors, they flew around it unconvinced. The painted bird would be forced farther and farther away as it zealously tried to enter the ranks of the flock. We saw soon afterwards how one bird after another would peel off in a fierce attack. Shortly the many-hued shape lost its place in the sky and dropped to the ground. These incidents happened often. When we finally found the painted birds they were usually dead. Lekh keenly examined the number of blows which the birds had received. Blood seeped through their colored wings, diluting the paint and soiling Lekh's hands."

Preview Department

Feed The Bird's Artemis the King (which will make up a third of our Evening of Chorius Events later this year) will be performed as part of a one act festival on May 16th.

The Details:

Date: May 16th
Time: 8 p.m.
Location: Where Eagles Dare, 347 W. 36th Street
Price: $20

More details to come...

"A fitting end
To some very noble creatures of the sky
And a lotta Greeks,"*

-S.


















* David Mamet

Typeface

I'm pleased to announce that we will be using Vin Rowe's "Painty Paint" font in a variety of material (an example of which can be seen in our new title bar).

Vin's other work can be seen here.

Mahalo,
Spencer Soloway
Artistic Director
Feed The Bird

Wednesday Whimsey

Wither would William wander
When wife Wendy whines?
To the Ten Tramps Tavern
Tripping toward titillating times.

- BOOM; A Nate Root original

Our Residency

Will take place for the next six months at the Roy Arias Studios on 43rd Street and 8th Avenue... More to come soon...

(also be on the look out for a soon to be posted tentative schedule!)

-S.

Shoe Strings & Timing

Here is something I've been struggling with for a while - My therapist says talking about it with a mass audience of faceless strangers might help. (Kidding - I don't have a therapist - I have theater instead! Nowhere near as helpful.)

So my problem - many of the plays/productions I've done in the past and those we plan to do in the future tend to focus around a number of short plays rather than full-length, three-act epics. As always, part of this is technical - short plays require less from actors, are easier to put together, cost less, and don't live/die on their own.

These "shorty-groups" also tend to be quicker. Hamlet, they are not. They can't be - without common characters/themes/problems, audiences can't stay engaged for hours on end. There is no hook in a shorty group. Without a hook, even an hour of small works tends to test an audience's stamina.

With that said, shorty groups aren't in any way "lesser" works any more than a short story is worth less than a novel. They are simply two superficially similar narrative forms saddled with their own rules and audience preconceptions. Granny Smith Apples to Golden Delicious Apples.

What constitutes value in theater? Specifically, does "length" mean value? In video games, people expect the game to be 10 hrs long to be "worth it". Movies have to be over 70-80ish minutes to be considered features. Does a similar time = value equation apply to theater as well? Do people have expectations of how much "value" they get when they purchase a ticket?

As this is dragging long, I'll delve deeper in a later post. I just wanted to put this out and see what people thought first: Do you feel better spending more money for a long show than a short one? What sort of expectations do you have?

Nate

Tuesday Links

What will become a regular feature about what various friends of FtB are doing:

The Red Party

Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge

Festival of Jewish Theater and Ideas

If you'd like to have your event added, just drop us a line at, as always, feedthebirdtheater@gmail.com.

Facebook

Hey, have you checked out our Facebook page?

-S.

A Thought for the Day

"Je ne sais pas d'autre bombe, qu'un livre." - Stéphane Mallarmé

(for those of us who don't understand french: "I know of no bomb other than the book.")

Isn't that a wonderful quote?

Why don't we co-opt it into "Je ne sais pas d'autre bombe, qu'un théâtre."

-S.

Further exploration of FtBism

Thank you Spencer, for putting my disjointed ramblings in a better framework. Personally, I feel Theater of Regressive Evolution really captures it best. I'm going to roll with that, moving forward.

With that said, man on man that was a lot of -isms. Lets hear it for Liberal Arts education!


Witty closing signature remark (to be filled in when I can find a suitably snarky one online).

Nate

Rudimentary Wings

Well, as a response to what Nate was eloquently saying, I would mention this: that perhaps a lot of the problem with "modern [popular] theater" is that there's not that much honestly contemporary about it, we're generally either stuck with the same type of stuff we've seen for hundreds of years in terms of baseless spectacle or, and this is particularly true of the contemporary Broadway musical, things that are so post-modern and referential that they really lose meaning (see: Lion King, Little Mermaid, etc.).

I think that what we and others in what is slowly becoming a movement are doing is both [r]evolutionary in that it is in many ways a rejection of contemporary theater but it is also regressive. Regressive in the way that it calls back to minimalism, particularly in the way that it is not an embrace of abstraction or abstract expressionism, say, (in our case at least) but not quite post-modernism either and certainly not modernism. Somewhere in between abstract expressionism and post-modernism I suppose. And that's what minimalism ought to be after all, traditionally at least, right?

So let's call it a Theater of Regressive Evolution, perhaps.

Oh, and, to be a little more base, also A Theater of Economic Realities.

And perhaps most of all a Theater of Results, I think that Nate would agree with the great Donald Judge who once said that "after all, the work isn't the point; the piece is."

Sincerely,
Spencer Soloway
Artistic Director
Feed the Bird

Vestigial

So I was trying to remember the word "vestigial" - don't ask - and that got me thinking on the nature of modern theater and Feed the Bird's approach.

Yeah - try following that mental leap.

Warning: The following is just my thoughts on this theater group. (Scary, I know.) There is no overarching point I'm trying to prove or argue.

*Ahem*

My ponderous pondering focused primarily on the "lean and/or mean" structure of Feed the Bird - minimal actors, no lighting cues, only as many props as we can carry, etc. We chose this feature to be one of our theater's defining characteristics. Why? Partially because we have too, considering the realities of no-budget productions in NYC. Yet this was an artistic choice as well - our plays tend to disdain big set-piece productions.

From a FtB standpoint, the trappings of modern theater tend to distract from the point of it. We don't need a full helicopter a la Miss Saigon. We don't need a parade of animals a la The Lion King. Would the (hopefully) witty word-play of our Tradegy! A Series of Chorious Incidents really improve with a rotating stage and full choir? Perhaps, but I doubt it.

So - back to my original thought: "vestigial" & "theater". Is FtB shedding the much ado of major theater and moving forward? (Not alone, obviously - we're certainly not the only no-budget group in NYC. However, no-budget is currently experiencing a real resurgence.) Or are we regressing back to an earlier form of theater? Shakespeare did the travelogue "Antony & Cleopatra" on a blank stage. The original Greek productions took place in barren sandy amphitheaters.

If I was pushed, I'd probably argue that we're regressing, despite the negative connotations that word raises. My personal creative focus has always been on finding & manipulating the rules and conventions on media and genre. This, to me, doesn't seem like any kind of step forward. People have been messing with this sort of thing as long as "this sort of thing" has been around.

All said, I'm okay with where we are. I look to entertain - myself and my audience. I have no desperate desire to push the art of theater forward. In fact, I tend to think the people who actively set out to "progress" are pretentious assholes. Doing something successfully is, for me, more than enough.

I'll leave the argument about regression versus evolution of theater to those who care. At least, more than those who care for more than the length of a blog post.

Re: Labels

Believe me, Nate, each of those labels is there for a very, very good reason, most of which, admittedly, are classified, but you'll just have to trust me on this one... mostly because I [REDACTED].

And The Truth Shall Set You Free,
-S.

Labels

Wow - I just checked out the labels available for our posts - apparently this is something else I should be doing to ensure correct filing process is followed. But seriously - some of these boggle my mind - Democracy? Drinky Crow? Ridiculous? Variations?

This, sirs and madames, is the stuff genius is made of.

Nate

(How to label a post like this? I think I shall label it...labels)

Feeding the ducks

I agree with Spence on this one - there is something poetic about doing our first major event about birds. It was either this or "Make Way for Ducklings".

(Click here if you're not up on your kick-ass children's literature)

The Duck Variations

This much we do know. As long as the duck exists, he will battle day and night, sick and well with the Heron, for so it is writ. And as long as the sky is made dark with the wing of the Monster Bird, the heron will feast on duck. (also, they got barnyard ducks).*

Well, in dealing with realities (and, ah, rights issues of course), it's starting to occur that Exercises in Style might not be the most practical to stage (which isn't to say it won't be lovely if we do, more that we're keeping our options open).

To me it seems that a wonderful choice to keep open would be The Duck Variations by David Mamet (since we're still talking about variations and repetition and of course there's the whole bird thing!).

We'll see won't we?

All The Best,
Spencer Soloway
Artistic Director
Feed The Bird

* The Duck Variations by David Mamet, rights held by Samuel French, Inc., permission is pending shortly...

Big Day Coming...

Updates to come...

-S.

A Theater for the Hungry Birds

Hey All,

So, in between the throes of fever and the sound of rain today I was forwarded the obituary of Ronald Tavel, the founder of first what he called the Playhouse of the Ridiculous which eventually, of course, led to the Theater of the Ridiculous. What a wonderful, egotistical thought that somehow we might be able to do something similar, perhaps encourage A Theater of the Democratic or a Theater of the Anarchic, I'm not sure quite yet, but just think of all those birds flying out, perhaps we can migrate and create A Theater of the Tropics. The possibilities are both patently wonderful and, of course, ridiculous.

Anyway, you may have noticed a new voice on the page. Currently Nate is locked up in a room coming up with suitably englightening, awesomely brilliant sign off lines, but in the future (and the present) he'll be here with us.

Another thing we've been discussing is the possibility of staged or unstaged full length readings for some of our playwrighting friends. Most of what we're committed to performing and premiering is collections of shorter works, but there is certainly a place for this kind of thing as well. If this is something that interests you, let us know and we'd be happy to work with you in making it happen.

Mahalo,
Spencer Soloway
Artistic Director
Feed the Bird