Downtown Art - the blog

something more

2009-05-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

I have been reading the writings of Jane Addams, a founder of the Settlement House movement. She wrote a hundred years ago at a time when she felt our modern cities were dominated by the factories, run by the engines of the economy, when people’s primary value was their utility – how as laborers and consumers they kept the machine going, and how blind she felt the city’s leaders were to any other aspect, need or hunger of its citizens.

And she wrote of how young people, naturally – generation after generation, persist in dreaming of a larger future for themselves, how they revolt against the idea that what is dished up to them as reality is all there is.

Because of this, she says, all of us – the entire society – rely upon its youth to reassure us as to life’s charm and joy. This is what the spirit of youth is, this is what it delivers. And if a society dismantles, oppresses and overcomes the insistence of its young people that life be more than the daily round, then society succeeds in killing off the source of its own hopefulness.

Jane finds the spirit of youth in young people, and happily for us, she finds it in artists, whom she calls perpetually youthful, and, finally, thank goodness, she relents and admits that the spirit of youth can, with luck and the right circumstances, survive in a few of us older ones.

This weekend I saw the utube video of Susan Boyle, the 48 year old Scotswoman who courageously put herself through the ordeal of appearing on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, a kind of American Idol competition complete with Simon as one of the judges. Without a smidge of fashion, heavy-browed, square and dowdy, she went on that stage where she was sneered at by both judges and audience. Though she stood tall and smiled, in a lion’s den like that she looked wildly vulnerable and completely out of context. They booed the simple fact of her age, were ready to crush her pretensions in asking for their listening ear --- and then she sang. Jaws dropped. People rose to their feet. In the past week, 20 million people have viewed that utube video – a seven minute story that has made me weep three times. And I’m not alone.

It is rare that the spirit of youth survives in the kind of life Susan Boyle has led, yet some stubborn hope of finding more than she had been offered still held on after a lifetime of shyness, of caring for her mother, of the quiet paths of her own daily round.

I thank every young person that has ever performed at Downtown Art over the past twelve years, including, of course, every actor and musician on this stage tonight. In them I have found beauty, hope, and joy at times when I couldn’t find it anywhere else. Who they are and what they set themselves to do – how they come out nightly to show something about what is in all of us - moves me in ways I can’t articulate….but I can feel.

why the Illyrians can't see clearly

2009-05-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare enjoyed theatricality. I’m quite sure of that. One of the ways he shows his love for the colorful is in his choice of places – places quite foreign to the playgoers of his time – much more foreign than any part of the world is now to a culture that has film, photography, and airplanes. And he was interested in mythology and fable – in raising images, free associations in the minds of his listeners through the evocation of what was far away, long ago, dimly remembered.

Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria – which was indeed a real place in the ancient world. The coast of the Adriatic Sea – the Balkan peninsula – the Dalmation coast. An Eastern world, a seascape with a history of warfare and pirates, a part of the world that 200 years before Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night had been adopted by the Romani people, that travelling culture we call gypsies. (On a side note, gypsies and artists have a long association, share a common history of itinerant wandering, of being outside the bounds of established society – the French even dubbed the artist world Bohemia because of its gypsy affinities.)

And into this Illyrian world, a pair of twins are dropped, borne there upon a terrible storm against their will. Viola and Sebastian are from Messaline, which I cannot find anywhere in the world or even in mythology. They are well born, well educated, and orphaned since they were thirteen years old. They are not Illyrian – they are strangers in a strange land.

One of the ongoing puzzles of Twelfth Night is this: why can’t anyone tell Viola and Sebastian apart? Being brother and sister, they are fraternal twins, so not identical. Not identical. Yet no Illyrian can tell them apart. What prevents the Illyrians from seeing clearly?

Twelfth Night is filled with a kind of blindness. People project images of what they want to see on to others, longing makes them see what they want to see rather than what is true. Orsino is mistaken in Olivia, Olivia mistaken in Viola, Malvolio unable to see the truth, Andrew relies on the unreliable Toby to tell him what lies beyond the surface. And no one can tell those twins apart.

Blindness takes hold for different reasons, I think. Love and infatuation deliver it, longing and ambition give it a handhold for sure, but there is another cause as well. Difference. Culture, our own culture, can make it hard for us to see and understand people from another. We can be so struck by their difference, their external difference, that we cannot see clearly into the true nature of their minds and hearts. It’s my feeling that Shakespeare wanted to create a deep clash of cultures when he landed Viola and Sebastian into Illyria. Wanted them to be very different, apparently different… attractive to the Illyrians in their exotic difference, so attractive in their newness that they rouse passionate devotion from several Illyrians, but… also so different that the Illyrians cannot read them clearly, cannot see far beyond their clothing and manner, cannot distinguish them from each other.

Viola and Sebastian are not identical twins. They are however new. They are different. They dress in their own way, speak with their own language. And in order to see them, distinguish them, in order perceive the individual in each, we have to build our capacity to see beyond the assumptions of our own world, beyond the blindnesses of culture and habit, we have to look carefully, thoughtfully, with all the capacities of our mind and heart.

surprising ourselves

2009-05-04T10:44:00.000-07:00

Great plays do more than tell a great story – they illuminate something about human nature. In the midst of entertaining and surprising us, they give us the chance to reflect on what it is to be human. What we are made of, what we are capable of…

In Twelfth Night, people do surprising things… make surprising choices. Why does Orsino, powerful and in his prime, not woo Olivia himself.. but send messenger after messenger instead? Why does Viola, after surviving a devastating shipwreck, not seek help to get back to home and safety.. but rather stay in a strange country and disguise herself as her lost brother? Why does Olivia turn instantaneously from an extreme form of mourning for her brother to almost giddy infatuation? And what prompts Malvolio, whose dignity is everything to him, to willingly put on those awful yellow stockings?

You can decide that .. well, that’s just the way the playwright is trying to be funny, to tell a story. It’s not real. In other words, you can dismiss the entire play as improbable fiction. But, if instead, you are convinced that Shakespeare had more to him and that it’s worth digging deeper in hopes of understanding something that he seemed to understand about the human heart .. then you have to keep looking for the answers to these questions.

This is the joy of directing, of course. Digging into these questions and many, many more besides and attempting to answer them through how you work with the actors to shape the play.

There is a longing that pervades Twelfth Night. Its people long for transformation – they don’t want to stay in their grief if new love can deliver them from it, they have powerful desires for their lives to be changed entirely. Ruling Illyria is suddenly no longer enough for Orsino – he wants to know love and the powerlessness of love, being alive is not enough for Viola – she wants to keep her brother alive, too, and she wants a new love to give a reason for life, a noble grief turns out to not near enough for Olivia who reveals that we might be most susceptible to infatuation during the darkest moments of our lives, and Malvolio’s ambition, which he has nurtured with constant fantasy, conquers every other bit of good sense in him. They have unquenchable longings which they insist upon pursuing against all good judgment and prudence.

And this is a truth of the human heart. Shakespeare while letting us laugh and shake our heads at his story, still has it right. Our longings take hold of us and some go so deep that we cannot shake them off, they grip us and bother us until in a desperate desire to be free of them, we finally ignore all the voices of caution and do surprising things. Very surprising things. Come what may.

where it counts

2009-03-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

I have a great affection for many things in STAR WARS, but there is a line that I feel a particular personal connection to. Han Solo says it right after Luke sees the Millennium Falcon for the first time.. to Luke’s reaction of disbelief at what’s in front of his eyes, Han says “She may not look like much, kid, but she’s got it where it counts.”

Han is a proud papa – ready to take offense if anyone makes a crack about his precious baby ship. In an earlier time, he’s the guy with an old beat-up looking car that he hauls up to the starting line while the other race car drivers and their gorgeous groupies snicker and whisper, until, of course, his beloved car leaves them eating dust.

Sometimes I imagine that in bringing someone new to our theater, a loyal Downtown Art audience member might say to them – “Look, they’re small, the company is really young, they’re on the 6th floor of this funny old building and you have to wait in a kind of funky staircase and there’s no lobby and.. well, it may not look like much, but they’ve got it where it counts.”

I like respect as much as the next person. I kind of have a little chip on my shoulder about it. You don’t know how many professional meetings I’ve had to go to in which being the artistic director of a theater with a budget under $75,000 doesn’t do anything to enhance your standing. It’s generally assumed that you don’t know how to run your business since you’re clearly poor. You (I) obviously need some good advice – advice about how to charge tuition for young people to be in your program, how to raise your ticket prices, how to remodel your organization so it will be more attractive to the current fashions of funders.

When it goes pretty far and I’m being condescended to by people twenty years younger than me with little experience and no history of community involvement, I am always sorely tempted to find a way to drag my Ivy League credentials into the conversation. A master’s from Yale in theater management tends to quiet them down. But, even I’m aware, that by pulling it out and flashing it around, I’m losing on principle.

And my back goes up a bit when people, while complimenting me and the company, go on to say.. ‘You’re almost as good as Broadway; you could work on Broadway; these actors might go to Broadway.” I’d like to say – would they want to? I know Broadway looks like a lot, but does it have it where it counts?

Respect can be hard to come by if you don’t look like much. Heart, courage, integrity, and wisdom are qualities that don’t make you any easier on the eye. Only time reveals them… and time is something we can all feel short of.

I struggled long and hard in making the commitment to spend my artistic life working with teens – it had the air of a career nosedive, it’s a part of the theater world that is certainly considered a backwater, closely tied as it is to the idea that those who can’t do teach, and I had worked hard to have some standing in the professional arts community. I’m so glad I got through that struggle. I got through it because three forces were able to break through my confusion:

1) Honesty: I could see that I was making a difference in the lives of the young people I was working with and they, in turn, were making a huge difference in my life,

2) Love: I loved making art with them and I felt deeply that the art was good, and

3) Trust: I became willing to earn respect the slow way for myself and this theater, not through being impressive to the eye, but by doing our best to make sure that we have it where it counts.

seeing the play

2009-03-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like best about theater is its humble origins. It’s an art and craft that grow out of something every human child does without thinking twice. Play.

For all the ancient images of people sitting around a small fire listening to a storyteller, there aren’t nearly enough ancient images of how the children of the tribe played out those stories. We luckily inherit many highly ritualized performance traditions from cultures all over the world that tell, with extraordinary skill and polished precise detail, core stories through dance, music, and theater… but I also like to think that over the ages, during the afternoon after the fireside storytelling, a lot of unofficial versions got invented by young ones so that they didn’t just have to listen to a story, but could see it, hear it, be in it.

Tonight you’ll see a play. Playing is at the heart of any and all theater – it is its lifeblood. When you lose the capacity to play, you lose track of what being an artist is all about.

You can still see lots of theater which is immediate and improvised like what I’d watch small children do in my daughter’s kindergarten class, or what I remember doing myself in kindergarten. But other traditions and skills have been added that make most theater slightly different from this play – writing that creates repeatable dialogue, consciously developed designs of place, costume, lights and sound, and many many hours of practice.

We do all of this here at Downtown Art, even if we do it in a minimalist fashion (although this might seem sort of high falutin’, we do actually consciously practice an aesthetic that came out of 20th century theater theory.. a movement dubbed ‘towards a poor theater’.. a destination I think we can claim some success with reaching..) but whether you call our work underfunded or deliberately streamlined, Brechtian in its rough simplicity or ingenious at stretching the budget in its use of materials…because we are not a theater overloaded with stuff, it is I think easier to see the ‘play’. Which I like. And perhaps we can also see the ‘play’ a little more clearly because our young company is young and has so far evaded the restraining influences that can settle on us as adults, so that making play, which was once so dear and deeply understood, is just a distant pleasant memory.

STAR ARGUMENTS is about play in many ways. I mean the story is a classic fairy tale, a young hero coming of age, rescuing a princess and saving a galaxy, but even George Lucas designed his original Star Wars as play – his actors always seemed to be kind of winking in good fun at their characters and George and Stephen seemed to have the time of their life playing a high tech game. I guess you could say here at Downtown Art, STAR ARGUMENTS is our chance to play just as full out, but our game is a very VERY low tech one.

Our city is an intense experience and most of our lives full to the bursting point. We all have developed strategies for wriggling out of the pressure vise that can grip us, for finding ways to clear our minds and sleep soundly through the night. But sometimes I feel we are such a serious bunch… we can be almost grim in our efforts to relieve our tensions. I am as serious and intense as anyone…but I have a major advantage to help me ease up. I am surrounded by young creative people. And they remind me all the time to prize fun, to treasure light heartedness, and that fresh ideas often arrive, new perspectives often come to visit, because we let ourselves play.

magic

2009-03-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

I’m a sucker for the movies. I’m also a little kid about the movies. Everyone that knows me knows that I get too scared at scary movies, too upset at violent movies, (I suffer from an overactive imagination) so I’ve got kind of a limited range.

I like movies that are really fun, exciting, not too scary, and kind of spectacular. I’ve studied every bit of the Lord of the Rings films, and no matter how lame the acting gets, I can’t miss a Harry Potter opening. I get all goofy and excited waiting in line to get in a movie, frequently kind of jumping up and down, and I’m totally addicted to popcorn. Since I was a very small person, I’ve had this intense connection to movies… I could be six years old and watching Fred and Ginger on our old tv, but I would be so glued to the screen that I couldn’t hear you talking to me even if you were yelling in my ear. This has never been my family’s favorite character trait of mine.. but it’s been part of me since I can remember.

Ten years ago I foolishly, whimsically decided it would be fun to stage Star Wars. Ha. It was the hardest thing I’d ever tried as a director (except for the first time I tried to direct.) My lovely and willing cast took it on the chin. Yes, I’d say, after a shopping run at Kmart, that’s your costume. Yes, that’s the Princess Leia hologram. Yes, uh huh, that’s the Death Star. And the amazing thing was that my cast went for it… and because the cast believed that this was, indeed the Death Star, well. then.. the audience came and they believed it was the Death Star, too. And I learned what has become one of the core values of Downtown Art.. the power of human imagination can transform anything.. and I mean anything.. into theater. Our minds love stories and reach towards them, willing to transform the most mundane of materials into whatever we want to see. This, is, of course.. magic.

We are all hoping that a little magic will happen tonight. We work and work, rehearsal after rehearsal, in hopes that when you come… when tonight arrives.. you will bring the final piece that makes transformation take place.

The news is daunting these days. Economic stormclouds gather darker and more threatening daily. The way ahead is unclear but the scouts report that it will test us all. Last summer I foolishly, rather whimsically decided that it would be fun to stage Star Arguments again. But lately, I feel a bit more confident in my heart that Star Arguments is not a bad choice for these darkening days. It’s good to laugh, to find a respite from the day’s worries… it’s good to follow the story of a young hero willing to take on an intimidating task on behalf of the world, the galaxy he cares for… it’s good to remember how our inventiveness and ingenuity isn’t limited by the size of our budget, and that when we come together we are always more, magically more, than the sum of our parts.

hearing the call

2009-03-20T07:13:00.000-07:00

Every season has its themes. Whether because of what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in the lives of the people here, or whether that theme is something I found emerging from our rehearsals, each season has its meanings. Since this is a launch party for the 2008/09 season, I’ve been pondering its underlying themes.. what connects Star Wars, Twelfth Night, the spring Festival of new Plays and our first Citywide Street Festival of Young Artists and Leaders, me, you, these young artists here, our city, our country.. the mundane answer might be, well, Ryan you, uh, chose the plays and cast the company.. but, in all honesty, my choices are not truly my own, they are more hunches, gut instincts… sometimes later, if I’m lucky, I’ll be visited with a little insight that shows me WHY those choices seemed right. In fact, the more I make art, the more I’m convinced that the creative process is not about being in charge, but about doing your best to listen and follow. Even when your brain keeps trying to point out that it doesn’t appear to make sense.

And so, in sync with the idea of listening and following, I want to talk about ‘calling.’ A nice big romantic notion for a November night. What is ‘calling’? What does it mean to be called to something? Here’s a definition for you to consider: Calling is, perhaps, how we are invited to become more of who we truly are. Each of us is singular, so each of us has the opportunity to live a singular life, perhaps similar in shape, but, in the actual details, unlike anyone else’s. A life which uses all of us - our talents, skills, and idiosyncracies. And I believe that happiness rests on whether or not we are willing to follow that call. That happiness depends on us taking steps to become all that we are, in lives that make it possible for each particular flower to blossom in its own necessary and individual way.

This year, Downtown Art will graduate a great number of amazing young artists from the company. I say it now, but I don’t want to think about it too much because it’s too early in the season to let myself get sad. This year, I get an extra hit of the separation experience, because my own daughter is one of those soon-to-be graduates. At the theater and at home, there are daily reminders of the search going on as these people, who are very very dear to me, wrestle with decisions about where to go, what to aim for, what should be next? .. they are very practical, of course, but they are also on the hunt for something else.. because it turns out that more than college brochures and overnight tours, SATs and the odds of acceptance.. there’s a deep current running beneath all the wordly concerns that asks what excites me, what do I want, what calls to me? And they know that this is the real question they must try to answer.

Star Wars is the most traditional of all fairy tales wrapped up in a space age suit. A young hero who tragically loses his family has a mission dumped on him: he must rescue a princess, learn how to wield a magical weapon, defeat a dragon, find his inner strength, and save the universe. After years working on his uncle’s farm, obsessed with flying his landspeeder and dreaming of doing great deeds, he is called.

In Twelfth Night, Viola loses her beloved twin brother, the only family she has left, in a terrible shipwreck.. some instinct tells her to disguise herself, to, in fact, become her twin brother, and start a new life in this strange land. There, she finds her future… as do many of the other characters of 12th Night.. and calling, for all of them, announces itself as love. Powerful love that none of them can fight – and which may or may not lead them to the right mate, but certainly leads them to their own newmade future.

That’s one thing I really like about calling. It shows up as love. Love for a person, for a place, for a practice.. it beckons us to step towards something. It might be a light whimsical kind of ‘oh.. that would be fun’ feeling, or a heartwrenching devastating crush like the one Orsino develops on Olivia. Calling does not promise happy endings.. it only promises that if we have the courage to follow, we will become more of ourselves, we will enter more deeply into our own individual lives, and that, if answered, the chances are greater that our hearts will be more peaceful and our lives more satisfying. Which are, if you ask me, the necessary conditions for happiness. A peaceful heart and a satisfying life.

So I will take a big breath and declare: the theme of this season is calling. I admit to a big hope that everyone here tonight feels at least a little bit called to this theater, to the community it helps create. Downtown Art is a small piece of a very big city, but I think this is an extraordinary place. This is a place to pin your heart to. This is a highly imaginative, creative theater company made up, not of 30 or 20something actors, but of teens whose work is vivid, hopeful, disciplined, and laced with joy. This is local, handcrafted art. Local and handcrafted is not the most direct way towards wealth and stature, but I am convinced it is the surest road to quality. To community. To a true expression of the human spirit .

Everyone here has already taken steps to keep this place going and it is deeply appreciated. Tonight I’d like to beckon you to take one step closer to the center of this place. I’m asking you to consider sharing in the task of keeping this small, handcrafted, outrageously imaginative, exuberant and lovely human endeavor well.

During the difficult times ahead, I am hoping that even as New Yorkers will likely have to be hardminded and pragmatic about many aspects of our economic lives, that we won’t ignore our more tender selves, and that we will continue to in our willingness to be called towards whatever mysterious music enchants our ear.

following wisdom

2008-05-11T14:44:00.000-07:00

April 25, 2008

One of the most compelling aspects of the 2008 presidential race is the widening gap between young voters and their elders. The media is filled with stories of how young people have become passionately involved in the election. Most of them are Democrats, which seems to both stun established party leaders – and simultaneously impress them. Young voters have coalesced around BarackObama’s candidacy in particular. In the myriad of op ed pieces written both before and after the Pennsylvania primary to explain Clinton’s win there, the one that struck me most forcibly identified the state’s population as the 2nd oldest in the U.S., after Florida. Young people have left Pennsylvania in search of jobs.

When I try to think of a time in America when young people got politically active, of course I think of the 60’s. Young people took the lead in the anti-war movement. ..which makes brutal sense when you consider that, given the draft, so many of them were paying an unbearable price for the Vietnam war. And young people rallied in formidable numbers to support of the civil rights movement, using powerful but peaceful means to protest racial segregation. We inherit too many images of the 60’s which denigrate young people as drop outs, druggies, and potheads… but historically it’s true that as protestors, negotiators, spokespeople, soldiers, voters, community organizers and students, they reshaped our country, that they passionately participated in legitimate nonviolent efforts to establish a more just, a more peaceful nation. They gave us a vision of America that many in this theater here tonight learned wisdom from.

And they weren’t very old. Just past their teens. Sometimes in their teens.

Given history, I think we have to ask ourselves… How is it so easy to dismiss young people? How is it so easy to decide that they can’t have the issues right? Why do we allow ourselves to assume that wisdom comes from age? That clarity must be informed by years, by experience?

Perhaps if age could indeed confer wisdom, it might be in the form of a little more humility. And it might keep us listening to young people… because they may very well be the leaders we’re looking for.

when to risk unreasonable... hope

2008-05-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

April 18, 2008

Hope and, by extension, hopelessness have been big themes of this year’s presidential campaign. They are themes that resonate with me, and themes that weave through THE PIEMAKER.

I think it’s an almost universal experience of childhood.. that at one point or another you have your hopes dashed. I believe most of us can remember at least one devastating moment of grief when some hope we’d been filled with, silently praying for, wishing and wishing and wishing for doesn’t happen. This might be because as children we are so willing to hope, to hope big, to hope unreasonably even. When I was 5 I hoped fervently and absolutely secretly for a year that my parents would get back together and I was inconsolable the day I discovered that my father was remarrying, the day I knew finally that my wish would not, would never come true.

Experiences like these teach us caution. Teach us how to temper our hopes. Loving parents, totally unnerved and distressed by the wild grief they’ve seen their children feel, do all they can to protect them from more, and with the best of intentions help them lower their sights, scale back, develop a sense of ‘reality.’

The trouble is that then.. we may turn around and find ourselves part of a world of people who have given up hope, who see others through a cynical lens, who believe there is no altruism in the world, no generosity, no real integrity, that everything is ‘fixed’ in favor of a few, and who are too convinced of this version of reality to hold on to even the smallest dream.

I’m an artist, and oddly enough, I make a living at it. Not famous, not rewarded much, but still.. I’m a working artist. Many people assume that means that I’ve followed my dreams, and that things have worked out. Not quite. When I was 18 I imagined myself an actor. I’m not. I’ve done a lot of non-artist things to be able to sustain myself in the theater, learned management, bookkeeping, fundraising, every form of nonprofit administration; I’ve done the labor too, cleaned, moved, painted countless sets late at night. I’ve pinched pennies, I’ve worred a lot. Its not all art. There was compromise, there were difficulties, there were times, when the door closed, and I had to look long and hard for an open window. My life wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I wouldn’t trade it.

Hopelessness is a passive state, an acceptance and belief in limitations… which may or may not be real. It can look bitter, or tired, or smartass, or sad. It tends to spread from the person whose inner mantra is 'I can’t', to telling others… 'you can’t, it won’t happen, oh puhleaaase.'

I don’t like the sort of cheerleading mentoring that just shouts out at young people, 'Hey, follow your dreams!' That’s not backing young people, that’s just trying to sound like you’ve got hope for them even if you don’t. But if instead, older people might say to younger people (and maybe even to themselves) … now what is it you hope for? Uh-huh. Well, that’s a great hope.. I think you can get there but there are going to be some obstacles on the way. How about we do a little research, begin to shape a strategy for how you might move down that road?

If a dream isn’t worth taking the time to strategize for, then it’s just a passing fancy. When you’re talking about a real heartfelt dream… there’s always the willingness to work for it. A dream like that should stay alive. A dream like that deserves support.

leadership is an invitation

2008-05-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

April 12, 2008

THE PIEMAKER emerged out of my struggles last summer to care about or feel engaged in American politics. As I wrote it, I tried to think back to a time when the country felt different to me. I found myself going way back to 1968, a turbulent moment in American history, a turbulent moment for me personally. That was the year King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the year my mother married my stepfather who is African American, the year I was a new arrival in my 4th grade class across the bay from San Francisco.

I was one of six white children in my class; my first time being in a minority. My teacher, Mrs. Goff, who was also black, was a kind, loving, hard-working teacher. She took a shine to me… perhaps simply because I was interested in school, in reading and writing, and it made her job a little easier. But she made her fondness for me obvious, and, in her own kind way, unintentionally added to the awkward painfulness of that year for me.

Mrs. Goff decided that I should run for President of the student body. I didn’t want to but had no idea at that time how to say ‘no’ to a teacher. To my great chagrin and her hearty approval, our student teacher, who had artistic aspirations, drew a portrait of me, and Mrs. Goff had it Xeroxed and posted all over the school as part of my ‘campaign’. Looking back, I can only say that Mrs. Goff was pretty naïve about how this would go over in child culture. I was a new girl, just arrived from the East, a white girl in a predominantly black school, receiving a lavish amount of praise and attention from my teachers, and now with my picture was plastered everywhere. I didn’t want to be President. I didn’t want to win. I just wanted peace and a few friends. Instead I found myself at the center of a schoolyard controversy, a battle of shifting lines, shifting allegiances, and powerful feelings about race. In child culture, which actually may be one of the clearest minded subcultures that America has, dialogue about race simply came down to this – one people had been slave owners, the other had been slaves. I thought a tremendous amount about the horrors of slavery that year and fervently, with all my soul, wished I could be free of that awful legacy. I think many, many, people have wished the same for America.

At one point, the scuffles, threats, and fury that were roiling through the 4th grade came to the attention of our Principal. He was a young man, with a reputation for being cool because he’d sometimes join our kickball games and play fiercely. For the first time in my life, I got summoned to the Principal’s office. He asked me what was going on in the 4th grade… such a huge open ended question… as I began my attempt to answer, I got choked up, began to weep silently and his phone rang. He took the call. I sat there weeping while he had his talk, and when he got off, I was quiet. He looked at me, then told me to go back to class.

Mrs. Goff was an intelligent extremely well-meaning adult who, like many others, including my Principal, didn’t really pay close attention to young people. If she’d allowed herself to cross a bit further into the child culture that was raging all around her, she might have been a great help. She might have brokered a truce, maybe even a new alliance. But her leadership remained at a distance.. and she never grappled with the difficult realities of the school’s community life. She had gifts, she even offered comfort of a generous sort, but she was reluctant to get engaged. She never placed herself in a position where we could know what she really thought… she never spoke honestly from the heart to us or listened with an open mind to our concerns. It was more than was required of her position …. And she didn’t choose to go that extra distance.

Life too often teaches us that leaders let us down. That we shouldn’t get our hopes up that someone will really listen, and that, having listened, then offer us a new insight, a way forward we hadn’t seen. But the truth is that all of us have been called to lead, that life is always inviting us to lead. That all of us are needed. In fact, there is so much need in the world, it can be overwhelming. Still, I think that in general we can challenge ourselves to see if we have erred towards the side of generosity, if we’ve been willing at least sometimes to go the extra distance, if we can pay… without for one moment regretting the cost.. attention.

on opening THE PIEMAKER

2008-05-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 04, 2008

When I began dreaming up THE PIEMAKER last summer, I was thinking about how little interest I had felt in American politics for quite some time… for some time I had taken to concentrating on the events in my own neighborhood, my own small world, and letting the larger world picture drift by without much attention. And I was feeling a bit worried about this.. about my ..well, lack of interest. For me THE PIEMAKER began with that question… what is our relationship with civic life, what causes it to wax and wane, how do we cope with our inspirations and our disappointments in our community, our town, our leaders, our nation?

I was only 10 years old in 1968, but it was a powerful year for me. I was living in California for the first time, across the bay from San Francisco and its Summer of Love culture. For the first time, I was in the minority in my school – the majority of the students and my teacher were black. I wore beads and floppy hats, I was used to flashing Peace signs to people from our school bus, to ‘Black Power’ fists in the friendly and familiar hands of my classmates, to the Jackson Five and to the scary stuff on TV about guerilla warfare and Vietnam. I felt the hope and inspiration raised in my mom and other adults by Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. And then the killings began. 40 years ago tonight, King was shot and killed. Two months later, in my own California, Bobby Kennedy died the same way.

Hope and despair, chaos and optimism.. my 1968 was made of these things. For me, redemption arrived that spring when my stepfather, Mel Mister, who is African American married my mom and made me feel I was part of what America could become – a loving diverse family.

As I was beginning THE PIEMAKER I thought about those times… and how there seemed to be no question in the adults around me then as to being involved in the world, in the shaping of their nation. They were active and engaged. And this gave me, as a child in a turbulent time, hope.

Ten years later, America was as disillusioned as it could be. That is when the story you’ll see tonight begins. When people, in a kind of retreat, went ‘back to the land’, when American culture got dubbed the ‘me’ generation, when civic life no longer seemed an avenue towards a better world.

I have grown up in a family who believed – and I inherit this belief – that working together we can make things better. That in community is the power for change. That being active on behalf of those who are poor, those who are treated with injustice, those who are getting a raw deal is a good thing, an important thing.

It may not seem at times that the arts play a very significant role here. But on the other hand, the arts can create community – a theater, this theater here tonight, can bring people together – and we can think about things, explore ideas, wonder about our lives as we follow the stories of other lives, consider our choices, look towards our future in a place like this. At this theater, we can also think about and look closely at the young members of our community. Think about who they are, what gifts they bring, what we, the older ones, want for them. In these ways, art has the potential to connect us to each other and help us shape and develop our thinking, our decisions.

Many of you know Downtown Art has been engaged in an uphill battle to open a new expanded arts center on this block. We’ve passed some important tests, bought a vacant building, raised a great sum of money, and though a long slow construction and further design process is ahead.. this spring the work begins. What is much more important than the building though, is what will be in it. Young people, of course. And theater. But more… we will launch programs in music (we have already got a community of young musicians, composers and singers here) and video… and finally, my own breakthrough happened, when it came to me that we should launch, side by side with these programs, a program of community service projects. Opportunities for young people to lead efforts and get involved in issues they care about – with support and helpful experience from a few adults. I think that the liveliness that will be fired up by having creative work and community commitment live together in one home will be a source of inspiration and hope for all of us.

looking back - looking forward

2008-03-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

Downtown Art started out 20 years ago here in the East Village as a company making original theater as well as a company dedicated to supporting and advocating for young artists creating new work. (Young in those days of Downtown Art meant artists in their 20’s and early 30’s. Original can be loosely described as the equivalent of avant garde, edgy, or ‘indie’ theater.) I was one founding member of four and we turned our hands to everything… within 5 years, we had won OBIE and BESSIE awards, had collaborated with over forty artists to produce pieces at every alternative performance space in NY, from Dixon Place to Dance Theater Workshop to BAM, sent work out to tour all over the world. We were getting funding from a broad range of sources, and we were homesteading a new space in a dilapidated city owned building on East 4th Street. We were also burning out. We were being hit with the politics of censorship (many of the artists we worked with were gay or lesbian), AIDS was devastating the arts community, and we were absolutely and without a doubt poor. Within the next few years, I was the only founding member left to run the company, and I, too, wanted a big change.

I was extremely proud of the art work we had created and supported… but there was a disturbing gap between the makeup of our audience and the makeup of our community. Our audience was mostly young, white, and artistically inclined. Not a bad crowd… but not the diverse local community I wanted to engage.

For two years in the mid 90’s, as the city (with funding from Ruth Messinger) slowly renovated our first home on East 4th Street, I moved our programs to Judson Church, a few blocks west. There I started over. I folded old programs, let go of funding, and began to try new community based efforts… of the many we undertook, it was my work with teenagers which took hold of my heart.

I began working with teens in rural New Hampshire, about the same time we founded Downtown Art. For six summers, I managed to escape the city and keep it up... and I loved it. It was like the best parts of summer camp, theater, and vacation rolled together. My first attempt to work with teens in New York, in 1994, on the other hand, was grueling. Brought up all my doubts. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to continue if it hadn’t been for one 15 year old boy, James Faller, who was in that first project. James was a tall gangly African American teen who was so shy that he could never even look me in the eye when he was talking to me. But I cast him in that first project, giving him bit parts in the background, and watched his humor show itself in subtle ways. After that project ended, despite how excruciating I know it must have been for him; James would call me every few months and ask if I was going to do another project. Finally, I just couldn’t take it any more. I said yes. Come on, James. We’ll make something happen. And we did. (As an aside, James became one of the bravest and funniest actors Downtown Art has ever supported.)

So I learned, bit by bit, the hard way. In 1997, we reopened on East 4th Street as a theater of teen artists. The city, perhaps through generosity, or perhaps through oversight, was only charging us $145 a month for rent, so I turned my attention to the work, and not to fundraising for, building or running a company. I just focused intently on making theater, learning about young people, figuring out how to be real artists together. We began putting together three and then four productions a year at the theater; they volunteered their time, working afterschool and weekends with me. Together, we staffed the theater and besides directing, I learned how to write a play, design a set, choreograph a dance. I wanted to learn more so I approached Judith Foster at the Neighborhood School, volunteered to make a theater piece with one of her 5th grade classes (not teens, but it seemed a good place to learn), and she took me up on it. Within another three years, I’d been hired by her school, and two other public schools in the neighborhood... the Earth School, and Tompkins Square Middle School... to create theater with their students in year long programs. I was making theater all day long with young people, a dozen projects a year, each with a company of 15-18 actors, it was crazy but it was wonderful, too. I didn’t sleep much, the bills were tough to meet, but I felt I’d found my ‘calling.’

And then two things happened. We heard the city was going to sell the arts buildings on East 4th Street, including our home. And 9/11. Every once in a while, there’s a moment in your life when a sudden opportunity is presented to you and you have to choose whether to take it or not. And there may also be a moment in your life when you realize that you’re in a position to do something now that will affect many people later. That you can actually leave a small legacy to your community. 9/11 made me want to leave my community something. The city opened the way.
I gave up my work in the schools. I began to work with Fourth Arts Block, a coalition of all the arts groups in the buildings that the city now wanted to sell on East 4th Street. With help and some chutzpah, we got the city to transfer 6 properties to us for $1 each. Properties that would now and forevermore be arts buildings. And, with tremendous neighborhood support, Downtown Art became the majority owner of a rundown 4 story vacant building and the adjoining vacant lot behind it. Today, after a host of even more hair-raising adventures and challenges, we’ve raised $4 million from the city to renovate it.

I think that everyone, in their own way, wants to make a difference. I’ve chosen mine. I want to work with a community of like minded adults to open a new arts center for young people, where they can demonstrate their extraordinary creativity. Where they can make a claim for adult respect, for adult admiration. A place where they can test their inventiveness, their minds, their capacity for fresh thinking... and where they can play. A place which is open, diverse, and accessible to all without economic barrier.

Downtown Art is known for treating young artists with respect, challenging them deeply, and giving them real responsibility for running a small working theater. Our future home makes it possible for us to expand that work into three new disciplines. Besides theater, we will start parallel programs in music, video and teen-led community service projects. We will have a theater (a bit bigger than our current temporary one) and add to that a second rehearsal studio, a café lounge, a video/media center, a music recording studio, offices. Through the city’s renovation funding, we already have the money to open the first floor with the new theater and café/lounge; they will also turn over the rest of our space -- another floor and a half -- strong, clean and raw. We’re just beginning to pursue the final funding that can transform that empty space into the rest.

It took a big push by you and people just like you to convince the city to sell us the building. There were letter writing campaigns, neighborhood fundraisers, phone calls, get togethers. It was that enthusiasm and those smaller commitments of money and time that convinced the city to bring the big money to the table that will renovate the building.

Now, we need to launch a new grassroots campaign. … this time to help us build our organization, bring in additional staffing, and make us competitive for foundation grants… to raise our visibility here in our community and around the city… to open us up to more young people and families. There are lots of simple steps in doing this... things like signing up to be a Bowler and recruiting friends to sponsor you for our Rock and Bowlathon in May, our yearly fundraiser. Coming to shows and bringing newcomers to introduce them to the theater. At all levels there are ways to get involved. The members of our new Board, most of whom joined us within the past year, have already taken strides to provide leadership for this campaign. I hope you will consider joining them and me in this effort. It’s what we do here, at a community level, that will make success possible.

People sometimes ask me “Have any of your young artists become famous?” I want to be very clear. Our goal is not famous graduates. Our goal is creative hopeful people. I’m not against them becoming famous or rich, but I’m focused on now.
Every life is full of challenges. It takes creativity, persistence, and hope to meet them. It also takes a clear idea of who you are, in your heart, and it makes a big difference to have a community where you are liked and respected, even admired, for what you contribute. No, we can’t lay claim to any famous artists. But we have consistently made theater that has astonished and delighted our audiences. And we have a growing collection of letters and messages from young people throughout the years that say over and over again how much difference Downtown Art has made in their lives.

To close, I have an announcement I saved for tonight. Next year, we’re going to expand our annual Festival of original work by young artists. In fact, we’re going to take a new big bold step. We’re going to add a Young Artists Street Festival on East 4th Street, a day long event with multiple stages, featuring performances and presentations by extraordinary youth groups from all parts of the city. Theater, music, dance, video. This will be the first time such a festival will take place. And we want to take this on because we want to go beyond doing the work we do… we also want aim ourselves at being a champion and advocate for young people, their creativity, and their leadership. That’s what opening up a new youth arts center really means.

being proven wrong

2008-03-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

DREAM is the 109th project I’ve directed. But it is the first time I’ve tackled Shakespeare’s language. I’ve wanted to. I’ve created modern day versions of Shakespearean stories several times… but, until now, I never aimed our company to tackle the Bard himself.

Why? Because despite how many ways I should know better, I thought, like every other adult I know, that teen actors couldn’t make good theater out of Shakespeare. That the language would defeat them; they would just look stiff and ill at ease, and as for them enjoying doing Shakespeare.. well, the odds were heavily against that. Shakespeare, the thinking goes, is like olives or wine.. an acquired taste, and one rarely acquired until adulthood. Sometimes not even then. Teens and Shakespeare? A losing combo. This has been my thinking and I’m one of the most outspoken champions for teens and their capacities that you’re likely to come across. Which I think demonstrates how deep prejudices run.

Tonight this young company will once again prove my original prejudices wrong. Hooray.

Last season, I thought that, as I had several older company members who’d been working with me for five or six years, it might be a good stretch to tackle some Shakespeare before they head off to college or other futures. So I took a big deep breath and put DREAM on the table. But, much to my chagrin, I realized as the auditions and schedule juggling played out, that instead of working with those old Downtown Art pros, I was going to be launching my big stretch project with a company, the majority of whom were only 12 or 13 and had never worked with me before - young actors who, as yet, had only limited and sometimes no experience making theater. Ai yi yi. I got good and nervous then, good and nervous that as game as this intrepid band was, we just didn’t have the chops, the strength or the experience to succeed against Shakespeare’s challenges. And I’m telling you, in the English speaking theater world, I’m not convinced there are tougher challenges than him.

But here’s what young people prove to me over and over again. They bring gifts. They have the intelligence, the will, and the capacity to do extraordinary things. What they need is the support. What they need is good coaching, graspable tools, a step by step breakdown of what we’re doing, what we’re aiming for and why. They are bravely, trustingly doing many things for the first time – of course they need good support!

And this is where I get a boost up from those 108 productions that came before DREAM. I’ve learned a lot, they’ve taught me a lot, about how to make things clear, how to break things down, how to turn a task that looks daunting to something do-able. DREAM was an experiment for all of us – at the core of which was how to connect Shakespeare to our actors, how to make Shakespeare’s language feel natural and real in their mouths, his story clear; and then how to share that story with an audience.. as we’re practically performing in a foreign language.

I’m so pleased with the DREAM company. I look forward to each audience experiencing what they have created. And I’m so grateful for the powerful reminder they provide us about how easily adults continue to make judgements about the capacity, intelligence, and creativity of young people… how ingrained these judgements are…prejudices we rarely question… and yet how absolutely ready young people are, given the chance and the tools, to prove us thoroughly wrong.

of beauty and performance

2008-03-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

Beauty doesn’t get talked about too much in theater. Or at least not in the theater circles I’ve been a part of. And that’s probably because it’s a word of too many meanings.

The definition of beauty that I think is most familiar is the beauty of surfaces… a beauty of colors, shapes, lines, and arrangements. Certainly some of the pleasure we feel, this visual pleasure is spontaneous… but a lot of what the eye tells us is beautiful is deeply informed by what a particular time and culture calls beautiful.

I’ve been as enthralled to visual beauty as anyone. I enjoy spectacle, I like design and detail, I’m often helplessly in love with movies for their look… but for some reason, when it comes to the visual part of my own work, I can’t bring myself to aim for such perfectness…no matter where I start, I end up wanting (and making) something more homespun, simpler, more everyday in its look. I like a kind of modest honesty in things. And I like things that bear the marks of human touch, a bit of imperfection.

And that affection I have for the beauty of humanness is at the root of what I think is the second meaning of the word. This isn’t usually a beauty that’s very pretty in its surfaces and rarely has any kind of arranged composition to it. It’s unexpected and often bursts upon us out of the blue.

Such as when you’re with someone dear to you who is crying, heartbroken, while you attempt to comfort them… and even at that painful moment, you suddenly sense them as profoundly beautiful. It’s the kind of beauty that stops you, frozen in your tracks, when you walk in a room to speak to your child, any child, and catch them deep in play, full of imagination, alone and engaged, unmindful of the world.

I would call this sort of beauty transparency. When we catch a glimpse of the true nature of another human being -- of, perhaps, our common human nature.

I’ve spent most of my working life as an artist with young people. I’ve done this not because the adult theater world rejected me, but because I chose to. And I chose to, because young artists have given me many… more than they’ll ever know…. of these moments of beauty.

Adult actors, like adult people, can become so highly skilled at putting on ‘the mask’, the ‘character’, that sometimes I can hardly glimpse the real human inside the performance. Young actors, like young people, can be awkward at times, they may stumble… but what I love is how transparent they can be. How much I can see, simultaneously, like a visual overlay, of both the character they are playing and the human being at play.

I love stories, and I encourage all my companies to find their way deep into the heart of the story, into its reality. The paradox is that when young actors are most fully engaged and alive in the story, is when they most ‘forget’ themselves, and when they most ‘forget’ themselves, is when I can perceive them most clearly. I see the story AND I see the humans, these wonderful, fabulous humans, who are making it. And what they demonstrate so powerfully is how creative, how loving, how tender, how intelligent, how deserving of respect all human beings are. Beautiful

story making

2008-03-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

Stories enchant. When I was little I was fortunate to have a mom who made time to read stories to us .. when I was four she taught me how to read… and by the time I was seven, stories engrossed me so entirely that my family would have to practically shout and wave or have the house burn down for me to be able to pull my eyes off the page. I was charmed, enchanted, pulled into worlds and lives different and strange from my own.. which, somehow, became my own. I lived each of these stories, learned about myself and my world from them… they are as deep in me as any of the facts of my life.

Every night stories overtake me yet again. In dream. Dreams, something I am assured that every single human being does whether they remember in the morning or not… dreams bear witness to the deep, profound importance of stories in our lives. Remembering our dreams, we puzzle over them, knowing somehow that these stories hold keys to understanding our lives… that though they are full of mystery, yet they are full of meaning as well.

We are born dreamers… it follows, clearly, that we are born storytellers.. and born story readers. Stories fill our lives, coming to us in books, movies, theater… on the news, through history, television, gossip… what did he do? What did she say? How did it happen? How did they get through it? What does this story help me to know? It appears to me that it is largely through stories that we both understand and re-imagine our world.

500 years ago, Shakespeare created stories… he created them not only from his extraordinary mind, but he himself was pulled to stories from an older age.. he retold them, but this time, with a sense of language and insight into human beings that was dazzling in its depth. Today, despite the barriers of those 500 years, despite the poetic language which so distant from our modern English that it could just as well be a foreign tongue.. we still go to listen to his stories, our actors still undertake their difficulties and attempt to bring them to us with their meanings intact. We can feel that there is something in these stories which, like our dreams, is filled with meaning, cloaked in mystery, and which may somehow be, in a way that is hard to understand, important to our lives.

Perhaps the best stories, and I’d put Shakespeare’s among them, move past our daylight minds and speak, in a language we don’t fully comprehend, to the dreamer, the wakened watching dreamer in each of us.

dreaming

2008-03-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

In this, our home city, every day over 8 million people of all ages work and learn, face challenges large and small and try to figure out how to overcome them. And remarkably, each of those 8 million plus also does something that human beings have been doing, mysteriously, ever and ever, through the ages … they sleep and.. they dream.

Dreams, those strange and vivid worlds of image and narrative, poetic fragments, mysterious but meaningful stories. One ancient human theory believes they are profound messages sent to us from.. perhaps the gods. Another, that we ourselves are the creators of our dreams. That, in fact, each one of us is a gifted imaginative being without limit. That the creation of these nightly images is one of the most deeply embedded characteristics of human nature.

I think that dreaming in its daytime clothes is creative imagination. And that this kind of daytime imagining doesn’t come so easily and naturally as the night variety – that we have to encourage it, strengthen it, sometimes wait patiently for its arrival. But there is no doubt in my mind that the more we practice creativity, the better we become at it.

We live in a world filled with challenges. And we know, those of us who’ve lived at least long enough to have accumulated a nice string of failures, that challenges don’t respond to one size fit all answers. Invention, persistence, and creativity is required. Required. In fact, when looking a tough challenge in the eye, I think it is the failure of imagination that causes a descent into hopelessness. Hope requires imagination – and meeting challenges requires a sense of confidence in our own powers of invention. No dragon, large or small, gets vanquished without ingenuity.

I know that the adults in this room have already worked hard to ensure that the younger people in our lives have a place to live, good food to eat, the opportunities which education can offer… I think we also have a responsibility to encourage their imagination, their creativity… not only for the pleasure it can bring both us and them, but for the way it can support their future survival. So, while we do what we can in our neighborhoods, our communities, our city, our state, our country and our world to make its challenges less challenging – let’s also work to support the capacity of our younger ones to take on those challenges that will inevitably come their way with hope, with confidence, and with imagination.

jan 31 2008 - a special event at DTA

2008-03-05T09:14:00.000-08:00

Hi. I’m so glad you’re all here. We have a few things to share with you about what’s going on with us today, how we got here, where we’re going… but, as many of the theater people here know, there are a lot of ways to tell a story. Because this isn’t just Downtown Art’s story.. this is our story. Your story.

Downtown Art is here today because of you… because you, and I really mean you, have worked so that this neighborhood can continue to be a home for diversity, for art, for differences living side by side. This block, which recently officially became the East 4th Street Cultural District, has been a home to immigrants, artists and working people for generations. The first Yiddish theater was created here. Working people organized on this block – in 1900, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union was founded across the street, at what was then the Labor Lyceum. This block, like this neighborhood has always been about community. And so first I want to honor the people here tonight, who represent these ongoing, living traditions that are the backbone of our neighborhood’s character… from those on this block, La MaMa, Teatro Circulo, WOW Café, to beyond at Third Street Music School Settlement, Henry Street Settlement, DCTV, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, everywhere we turn we find you.. and we are extremely proud to be in your company, to be your colleague. Communities of places like these create an environment where a company like ours can grow; truly, there wouldn’t have been an ‘us’ if there hadn’t have been ‘you.’ So you are the story.

And Councilmember Rosie Mendez and her colleague and chief of staff Lisa Kaplan – they are a big part of this story. As is Margarita Lopez, our feisty former Councilmember. These amazing women have fought hard on behalf of this neighborhood – to keep it economically and ethnically diverse, to meet its very critical needs for decent affordable housing, for strong schools, for life’s real necessities… but they have also been able to support elements that go beyond the concrete and practical, they’ve taken leadership to see that the imaginative, inquiring, spirit of this community is encouraged, is nurtured… because as human beings, as much as we need shelter, food, security… we can’t avoid our need to dream, to invent, to long for stories that help us see into ourselves, for new ways to understand this world, this life. We are all of this, and Rosie and Lisa made a big commitment this year when they led the way to find money – over $3 million in new funding – to turn that broken down vacant building across the way into a home for imagination and enterprise. Our future home. This story is their story.

This story is Ginny Louloudes’ story – I think her organization ART/NY may actually the story of every small theater in this city – but it’s also of her good advice and ongoing encouragement, of the support of her and her staff every step of the way towards making this mini Cultural District a reality, of those amazing arts advocates at NYSCA, including Robert Zukerman and Ann Van Ingen, and of the staff at NYC’s Dept of Cultural Affairs, specifically our smart, committed colleague Alicia Grossman.

And this is Dolores Vanison Blakely’s story, the Executive Director of Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance, along with her partners Enrique Cruz DeJesus and Donna Clark, who’ve walked every step of the way with us through the ups and downs, good days and not so good days, that are now, inevitably and most definitely, leading us to a new building where they will also have a home. Finally. A home they truly deserve.

Of Judith Foster and the Neighborhood School and Mark Pingitore of Tompkins Square Middle School, who gave me the chance to work in two amazing public schools that really believes in artists, that can actually think of young people as artists of validity, real artists not some kind of ‘human work in progress’, but people with something extraordinary to offer right now, if those of us who are older could just see a bit more clearly. Of Sofia Pereira, the first teacher I ever collaborated with, who became a very close friend, and who took to theater-making like a duck to water, whose enthusiasm for the work we did not only lit up her class with courage, imagination, and the determination to master new skills, but who spent countless, unbelievable hours working side by side with me here at Downtown Art or home in my apartment to make costumes, props, anything… who has left her mark indelibly on us. Her story.

The story of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper of Nature Theater of Oklahoma who fired our imaginations last year and who helped me to grow as an artist and director, of Nello McDaniel who has been councilor and advisor to me and Downtown Art and who, and this is unexpected, is as creative and imaginative at tackling nonprofit organizational structure and adapting it to suit us and move us forward as any of us could ever be with a piece of script, of Tamara Greenfield, whose arrival a year ago as the Executive Director of Fourth Arts Block has made this Cultural District leap forward with renewed energy and hope,

And the board members of Downtown Art, the astonishing and enthusiastic Elena Feliciano, the generous and wise Bruce Morrison, the thoughtful, cheerful Guillermo Franco, Sam Greenhoe who will tackle any carpentry or technical problem we can dish up with enthusiasm and skill, Rosemary Quinn who embodies a hearty, passionate, joyous love of young people and their creativity, Cliff Scott, who co-founded this company decades ago, who pioneered and homesteaded our first home on this block, who literally spent an entire summer singlehandedly putting a roof over our heads, whose commitment to Downtown Art is only equaled by the pleasure with which he greets, commends, and praises each and every effort he sees us make.

It is the story of my family, of their astounding and never wavering support, of my beloved daughter Dakota and the way she has embraced the sometimes odd life of a theater family, and of my partner, my Board Chair, my musical collaborator, and .. new this year.. my husband, Michael Hickey, who has so generously placed himself at the heart, the need, the very center of Downtown Art that I can’t even get enough distance to praise and thank him elegantly, and will have to just tell him, like all of you, that there is no story without you.

Finally, Downtown Art’s life and history, is the story of every young person who is here tonight, and the hundreds more who have been part of these past 10 years when Downtown Art committed itself to them, who are loved and honored in this community as individuals, as artists, as people of courage, intelligence, wit, humor, and who bring life and hope to all of us.

That’s how we got here today. And what is today? Three years ago I had hoped that today might be the day we opened a new season in a new home. A year ago, today might have been the day that I told you, I’m sorry, it’s no good, we did our best but obstacles like water damage, renovation budgets that escalated from 1 million to 4 million, and a host of other delays and hurdles were too much for this small company to overcome. But, miraculously, today is the day that I can tell you that for the first time, I can see that opening date. It’s two years off, it won’t happen until 2010, but it is now inevitable. It will arrive. Everything is in motion.. that new arts center will be made and those doors will open.

And so I can tell you that you got us through the wilderness. And I can tell you something about what’s ahead: that when we open that new space, we will expand our theater work with young people with three new disciplines: music, video, and community service. We will be a home for young artists and for young citizens, for creating, recording, writing plays, composing music, drafting lyrics, making documentaries, and finding ways to connect who we are with our world. And we intend to make everyone that created this story proud of where it leads next. Thank you so much.