Robert Butler

stagereads features Caridad Svich

September 11, 2012Ashden Directory15 September, 3 April, Artistic Associate, Associate Editor, Bp Oil Spill, Catastrophes, Cities In The United States, Climate Change, Features Interviews, Fishing In The Gulf Of Mexico, Goodman Theatre In Chicago, Gulf Of Mexico, Gutman, Henry Godinez, Interviews News, Lifetime Achievement, Obie Award, Playwrights, Robert Butler, Six Ways, Twitter

photo: stagereads, Fishing in the Gulf of Mexico

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Kellie Gutman writes:

A new website, stagereads, is publishing plays by emerging playwrights, which are e-readable on mobile devices. They are available by subscription, with a 155 discount for those subscribing before 15 September. Â The first featured playwright is Caridad Svich and her recent play The Way of Water.

Svich received the 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. Â The Way of WaterÂ has been traveling since 3 April, 2012, and has had readings in fifty cities in the United States as well as in the UK and beyond. Â The play, written after the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill, tells the story of two fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico, who have to deal with the after effects of the spill. The introduction to the play is written by Henry Godinez, Resident Artistic Associate at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

He writes in his final paragraph:

Many a great play has been written about corporate negligence and devastating catastrophes, but what makes The Way of Water so compelling is the way it exposes the after effects of such sensational evens in the most real of human terms.

Jonathan Jones faces the empty museum

September 10, 2012Ashden DirectoryAnimals And Plants, Art Critic, Associate Editor, Climate Change, Features Interviews, Foundations, Human Culture, Imaginations, Interviews News, Jonathan, Jonathan Jones, Meaning Of Life, Metaphors, Reflection, Robert Butler, Six Ways, Sixth Extinction, sustainability, Timeline, Twitter

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GuardianÂ art critic Jonathan Jones on the sixth extinction:

“Human activity endangers entire species, yet human culture is profoundly rooted in nature. The loss of a species is also a loss of the images, stories, symbols and wonders that we live by â€“ to call it a cultural loss may sound too cerebral: what we lose when we lose animalsÂ is the very meaning of life…The range of animals and plants threatened by the sixth extinction is such that it menaces the foundations of culture as well as the diversity of nature. We are part of nature and it has always fed our imaginations. We face the bare walls of an empty museum, a gallery of the dead.”

Greening Shakespeare

August 1, 2012Ashden Directory6 October, Artistic Staff, Ashland Oregon, Climate Change, Costumes, Fountains, Gomez, Gutman, Insulation, Merry Wives Of Windsor, Multitude, Operating Budget, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Osf, Plastic Bottles, Plastics, Recycling Paper, Robert Butler, Twitter, Windsor Iowa

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The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa. Jun 6 – October 13 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Kellie Gutman writes:

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Â was founded in 1935 and is one of the oldest and largest non-profit theatres in the United States. Â They operate over an eight-and-a-half-month schedule, with eleven plays, three theaters and 780 performances. Â Approximately 400,000 persons are in attendance at their facility in Ashland, Oregon. Â The OSF has an operating budget of $26 million.

Katie Gomez, Physical Plant Assistant, is the Green Task Force Coordinator. When asked how the OSF promotes ‘greening’ their operations, she writes:

OSF has a long list of things we do to be more sustainably aware and green. Â Besides recycling paper, one of the easiest things to do here, we are now recycling batteries, some plastics, and a multitude of items used in building sets. Â Many costumes are reworked from many made before, from our vast warehouse of costumes. Â We do not sell plastic bottles of water anymore – a container given or purchased is filled from fountains. Â The Scene Shop uses denim insulation. Â We use CFL whenever possible. Â As soon as LED’s are more affordable, we will switch to those. Â In some instances we do use them now. Â This is just the tip of what we do here. Â We are constantly trying to do more.

Katie added that although they have not done a production that is specifically “green”, the Green Task Force is working on promoting this idea to the Artistic Staff.

Speedier spring

July 11, 2012Ashden DirectoryApril 4, Associate Editor, Atlanta Georgia, Climate Change, Daffodils, Eastern Seaboard, Features Interviews, Fort Kent, Gutman, Interviews News, Metaphors, Miles Per Hour, Northernmost Point, Paideia School, Robert Butler, Route 1, Six Ways, sustainability, Twitter, Warm Spring

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‘Progress of Spring’ final report

Kellie Gutman writes:

The Â fourth and fifth grade class at the Paideia SchoolÂ in Atlanta, Georgia, has completed their year-long project documenting the progress of spring, as defined by the first blooming daffodil reported along the length of Route 1, from Florida to Maine. Â Their results confirm the general impression that this was a very warm spring on the eastern seaboard. Â At the northernmost point, Fort Kent, Maine, daffodils were spotted on April 4, 2012 – nearly a month earlier than last year, and the earliest in the twenty-two years that the class has been keeping records. Â The rate that spring advanced, 1570 miles in 93 days, was approximately 17 miles a day, or .7 miles per hour, which is about average.

Taking a book for a walk

July 9, 2012Ashden DirectoryBook Of Revelations, Buttermere, Divine Comedy, Friend Charles, German Poetry, Heddon, Hucks, Interviews News, John Keats, Nan Shepherd, Night Cap, North Wales, Oilskin, Peripatetic, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Butler, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Twitter, Werner Herzog, Writing Group

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Wallace Heim writes, with thanks to Dee Heddon

What book would you take for a walk…?

In 1794, John Hucks and Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked to North Wales. Hucks carried with him the poems of Thomas Churchyard.

In 1802, Coleridge walked through Cumberland, carrying with him ‘a shirt, a cravat, two pairs of stockings, tea, sugar, pens and paper, his night-cap, and a book of German poetry wrapped in green oilskin.’ He apparently read the Book of Revelations in Buttermere.

In 1818, John Keats travelled the Lake District and up to Scotland with his friend Charles Brown. Keats’ carried Dante’s Divine Comedy, Brown the works of John Milton.

In 2012, during August and September, Dee Heddon and Misha Myers are joining the Sideways Festival, walking from the west to the east of Belgium. For the length of the walk, they will carry a walking library – rucksacks filled with books that are good to take on a walk. The library will support a peripatetic reading and writing group.

Dee and Misha are in the process of building the library. So far, they will be carrying Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and more.

They welcome suggestions of books to take on a walk, including details of books taken on a walk by illustrious walkers/writers.

Email suggestions to Dee Heddon.

Eden and the overburden

June 25, 2012Ashden DirectoryBenevolence, Climate Change, Earthly Treasure, Eden Project, Education Projects, Francis Bacon, Game One, Miners, Normalizing, Novum Organum, Open Cast Mining, Open Pit, Phrasing, Public Image, Rio Tinto, Robert Butler, Robert Newman, Supporting Education, Surface Layer, Twitter

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Wallace Heim writes:Â

The partnership between the Eden Project and Rio Tinto has been billed as supporting education projects about sustainability and research into post-mining regeneration. This was a working partnership, not merely a “social license to operate” – the creating of a benevolent public image for corporations such as BP, Shell, Rio Tinto, through their association with cultural institutions, and now the Olympics.

One of the education projects of this partnership is a pop-up childrenâ€™s book, Earthly Treasure, full of pictures of dazzling jewels and brightly coloured pages showing how modern life can only exist through minerals that must be mined.

Thereâ€™s a page showing a huge open pit mine, a sombre, near-monochrome dug-out bowl. You can slide trucks to take away the “surface layer” and “pull down the tab and blast away the top layer of earth, called the overburden”.

The “overburden”. The infinitely complex soil that makes life possible is merely a weight, a waste to remove to get to the riches below. The phrasing harks back to Francis Bacon who wrote in his Novum Organum in 1620 that miners were the new class of man who would interrogate and alter nature. Nature could be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded”.

But now, the soil holds no more secrets. Itâ€™s only the burdensome surface layer.

This normalizing of open cast mining and mountain top removal is given to children as if a game, one more gem to absorb in their education. Many reasons may lie behind using that phrasing, but the license it condones is not merely cultural benevolence.

h/t: Robert Newman in the Guardian

Edinburgh’s greener Fringe

June 20, 2012Ashden Directory, FringeAssociate Editor, Bevy, Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Themes, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe, Features Interviews, Interviews News, Japanese Earthquake, Macbeth, Nuclear Leak, Oil Spill, Remarkable Number, Robert Butler, Sensibilities, Silent Prayer, Six Ways, Theatre Pieces, Twitter, Urban Architecture

Fukushima – A Silent Prayer of Poetry

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Wallace Heim writes:

Among the bevy of shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe about Hitler, adolescence, Macbeth and stage spiritualists, there is a remarkable number of dance and physical theatre pieces with ecological themes. Consumerism and happiness, oil and politics, the Japanese earthquake, undercover policing, urban architecture and fear of the woods are among the ideas and sensibilities these shows are expressing.

Theatre shows number highly this year, too, with around 70 that have ecological themes varying from the strongly activist to the bucolic. Shows about animals, food and an apocalypse always feature. This year, there are three shows walking to Edinburgh; shows about abattoirs, about the Deepwater oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear leak; and shows about a swamp, plastics, population and the price of milk.

Indie-theatre take on Deepwater spill

June 12, 2012Ashden DirectoryClimate Change, Corporate Malfeasance, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, Fighter Jets, Fuel Tanks, Horizon Oil, Indie Music, Interviews News, Lavery, Low Budget, Music Event, Oil Spill, Phantom Fighter, Photo Encyclopedia, Plotline, Robert Butler, Senior Lecturer, Theatrical Experience, Twitter, Young Actors

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photo: Encyclopedia Britannica online

Wallace Heim writes:Â

During April and May, The Way of Water, Caridad Svichâ€™s play about the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill toured over fifty venues in North America and Brazil, and in Berlin, Aberystwyth, Glasgow and London. The play toured not as a production but as script-in-hand readings by actors in each place.

The play, marking the two-year anniversary of the spill, traveled quickly, more like an indie-music event than a theatre tour. This new kind of theatrical experience is low-budget, international, tied in with social media and carbon-light.

The play deals with the toxic effects of the spill on four people, on their health, livelihoods and sense of community. The playâ€™s impetus is towards taking action against corporate malfeasance, a revision of the plotline of An Enemy of the People.

Seeing the reading in Aberystwyth, Carl Lavery, Senior Lecturer in Drama, blogged ‘Ten Thoughts on The Way of Water‘. Here are three:

When I think of The Way of Water, I think of its linguistic rhythms and poetic beats – its politics of voice.

When I think of The Way of Water, I think of 4 young actors in Wales finding its meanings, walking its lines, tracing its shapes.

When I think of The Way of Water, I think of my Dad who died from a lifetime of exposure to the toxic fuel tanks of Phantom fighter jets.

The right environment

June 5, 2012Ashden DirectoryAssociate Editor, Climate Change, Ecology, Extinction, Features Interviews, Flowers, Fringe, Interviews News, Jonathan, Jonathan Brown, Last Of The Curlews, Lunch, Metaphors, Playwright, Reflection, Robert Butler, Six Ways, sustainability, Timeline, Triptych, Twitter

from The Last Lunch

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Wallace Heim writes:

The Best New Play Award, offered collaboratively by New Writing South and the Brighton Fringe, is an award that has nothing to do with ecology. But this yearâ€™s award was given to two productions that have something to do with ecology.Playwright Jonathan Brown won for his play about meat-eating, The Last Lunch.

The company Feral Theatre won for Triptych, three productions on loss and extinction: Papusza, The Last of the Curlews and TreeStory.

One Day on Earth

June 2, 2012Ashden DirectoryArts Programming, Associate Editor, Center Materials, Charities, City Materials, Climate Change, Department Of Cultural Affairs, Features Interviews, Gutman, Interviews News, June 3, Materials For The Arts, Metaphors, Proceeds, Reuse Center, Robert Butler, Showings, Six Ways, sustainability, Timeline, Twitter

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Kellie Gutman writes:

On Friday June 1, and Sunday June 3, New York’s premier reuse center,Â Materials for the Arts, will be the recipient of proceeds from screenings of One Day on Earth. Â It was made in 2010, and filmed in every country on earth on the same day. Â There will be a week of showings to benefit local charities in New York City.

Materials for the Arts is a program of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Â It collects unneeded materials from businesses and individuals and donates them to arts programming across the city.