Off Stage Conversations

Hello, this is Andie Arthur, executive director of the South Florida Theatre League with Off Stage Conversations, where I take a look at some of the conversations happening nationally and internationally in our field.

A Potential Problem

Ken Davenport talks about changes happening at gmail and what that will mean for the ubiquitous email blast.

Theatre and the Environment

We don't often think about the impact our art has on the environment. Jeremy Pickard has a great article at TCG on creating sustainable theatre.

On one hand, I do not wish to preach, for who am I to tell fellow artists what the content of their plays should be, or that it is their duty to recycle building materials? Other than encourage, all I can do is my work. But I also want to be as effective as possible, and theater artists who actively practice sustainability are the extreme minority. It occurs to me that if I actually care about making an impact on the world, I can’t be the only one doing it.

Meanwhile, there's a campaign to keep traditional lighting instruments, citing the economic issues for small companies of purchasing of more efficient instruments.

On Leaping Into the Unknown

Chris Croslan writes on how he left his arts administration job to become an independent artist. I'm more interested in what's not being said in this article than what is being said. There's such a divide between artists and arts administrators, even though most of the later are the former. And yet, there's a big push for our administrators to be administrators, not both a practicing artist and an administrator.

Tomorrow's Weekly Howl on twitter is going to be on creating a career in the arts and what that looks like.

Interview with Carlos Murillo

HowlRound has an interview with Carlos Murillo, one of the most insightful teachers I've ever had. I'm eight years out of my BFA and just a few months ago, I had an "aha!" moment about something that came up in class a decade ago.

Why are skinny white girls the main representation of femininity on stage?

Melissa Hillman's blog on the lack of diversity of feminine experience on stage.

All women everywhere are expected to see ourselves, find our humanity, and relate our experiences to the experiences of skinny white girls, most of whom (let’s be realistic) are under the age of 40. AND WE DO. We do it all the time. We do it so well we don’t even think about it most of the time.

Also...

I have heard, dozens and dozens of times, smart, educated, awesome men say about plays with female-driven narratives, “I think this play is well-written, but I don’t get it.” They see the difference and stop there, because they’ve never learned to translate. They’ve never had to.
This is a learned skill. You have to TRY to do it if you don’t already know how. It has to be a conscious choice to step over your privilege and learn to translate the experiences of people who do not share your privilege, finding your own humanity within them.