Painting the town Essay Example For Students

Painting the town Essay In Sentimental Journeys, her essay on the 1989 Central Park wilding, Joan Didion argues that Newyork is defined in the public mind by narratives that obscure not only the citys actual tensions of race and class but also the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable. As exhibit A, Didion offers the testimony of Central Parks architect Frederick Olmstead, who feared that while Central Park could provide a haven for bourgeois New Yorkers during the day, at night criminals and have-nots might find a refuge there. Accordingly, Olmstead sank the transverse roads below grade level and insisted on bright lighting to prevent marauders pursued by the police from escaping into the obscurity of the park. Despite this evidence of class division inscribed in the very drafting of Central Park, the wilding spurred opportunistic politicians and angry joggers and op-ed writers to imagine another scenario. They claimed the park had once been safe and now was not. During and after the trial, there were those who insisted that going into the park at any hour was their right, as if they could, by sheer will, pave over social and economic grooves that had been worn into the citys asphalt for at least a century. Since much theatre in New York also relies upon those sentimental narratives Didion detects ignoring race and class issues while yearning nostalgically for an imaginary past it is at once refreshing to talk with Anne Hamburger, artistic director of the site specific company En Garde Arts. For seven years, Hamburger has produced theatre from a network of dilapidated offices, the most recent of which is on the second floor of a downtown Manhattan parking garage. On one side of the room, a row of windows overlooks an indoor sea of Mercedes and Volvos. Another wall is pocked with electrical outlets proof, according to Hamburger, that the office used to be an illegal gambling outfit. The whole space is about the size of a one-bedroom floor-through. Grubby furniture fills the front room, where the two full-time En Garde Arts staffers stare into computer terminals. A pressed-board table dominates Hamburgers office. Black filing cabinets sulk in one corner. A Post-it on the wall nudges the staff to raise $30,000 by August. Hamburger jokes that En Garde Arts manages to produce two shows a year because they have a low administrative overhead. Her office could easily be the site of one of her own pieces. In this drama, Hamburger could star as herself: producer of a site-specific company tiptoeing through a minefield of sites, each of which stands empty, unused, a testimony to neglect and abandonment: a sentimental narrative waiting to explode. Hamburger is the Joseph Papp of the 21st century, says Ben Mordecai, chairman of the theatre administration department at the Yale School of Drama, where Hamburger received her degree in 1986. Joe Papp did his first work in the park. Anne did too, Mordecai points out, referring to En Garde Artss first work, The Ritual Project, which took place on a grassy knoll in Central Park in 1987. Mordecai remembers that Hamburger, who studied sculpture and performance art before attending Yale, knew what her first project would be within two weeks of her arrival in New Haven. She wanted to produce The Odyssey on the banks of the Charles River. I told her there were no rules against that, but that it was impossible, he chuckles. Mordecai continued to play devils advocate by alternately encouraging Hamburger and impressing upon her the difficulty of her self-appointed mission. Hamburger never wavered. Instead of doing the traditional assignment for third-year administrative students an internship at Yale Repertory Theatre Hamburger asked to start a site-specific theatre company. En Garde Arts was born. The fledgling producers focus on site-specific theatre stems partly from her frustration with the not-for-profit model. Artists have to come up with new ways of doing business, she announces, predicting that even if the National Endowment for the Arts survives its present crises, funds will be limited. She imagines En Garde Artss events binding together a diverse community: devout theatregoers and baby boomers who grew up with television and rock concerts, neighborhoods where residents wouldnt ordinarily go to theatre, and doyens of drama. Hamburgers vision differs, however, from that of Corner-stone Theaters Bill Rauch, whose company works with host communities in areas where theatre is rarely seen to develop gritty interpretations of classic plays. While both Rauch and Hamburger agree that theatre has to reach a wider audience, Hamburger eschews the classics, prizing eclectic voices influenced by other disciplines. Because Hamburger works so closely with areas of New York unaccustomed to theatre, she prides herself on neighborhood advocacy. Although En Garde Arts does not give away tickets to average theatregoers, it donates batches to neighborhood residents. Hamburger is also a hands-on producer, approaching her projects as part of an artistic team. One of her first collaborators, playwright Mac Wellman, gives Hamburger the ultimate compliment when he says that she didnt treat him like a widget in a machine. Part of her success springs from the types of projects Hamburger takes on. Many of them seem outlandish or undo-able; the odder the better. She brags about her ability to handle projects nobody else will produce with a heady combination of naivete and bravado. Squat Theater said, |We need a goat in our show; Reza Abdoh said, |I need a 120-foot table and we figured it out, she asserts as we speed uptown in the company of playwright Charles Mee Jr. to take a look at the gothic expanse of the abandoned Towers Nursing Home on 106th and Central Park West, the site of Mees Another Person Is a Foreign Country (1991). Mees script initially called for a cast of more than 20, two little people, Siamese twins, and a deaf actor. Only the Metropolitan Opera or the Towers could have housed Another Person, Mee jokes. But because the Towers loomed far uptown of the theatre district, the play, a whirling meditation on the plight of social outcasts, was able to speak to a broader audience than Metrop olitan Opera subscribers. Blood Brothers Essay QuestionsThe story of Hamburgers latest piece, Vanquished By Voodoo, is also something of a cautionary tale. En Garde Arts commissioned performance artist Laurie Carlos to write a piece to be performed at the historic Freedom National Bank in Harlem. As usual, Hamburger planned a series of community meetings with neighborhood officials. In the months before Vanquished by Voodoo went up, Hamburger contacted businesses within the community to get them to sponsor tickets for disadvantaged people. She got in touch with the Housing and Urban Development Commission and Congressman Charles Rangels office. She hooked up with local arts groups, sent waves of fliers and posted signs on buildings to announce the upcoming event. But the bank site fell through. The cavernous, crumbling Dwyer Warehouse at the fork of St. Nicholas Avenue and 125th Street was Hamburgers second choice. Then Carlos declined to accompany Hamburger to community meetings, claiming that she did not want to be anyones black face in this project. Left to cope with squabbling factions alone, Hamburger floundered. Hostility oozed from Harlem, which she described as another city with its own rules. Here Hamburger was the outsider, a condition she might have blunted, perhaps, if Carlos had supported her. The Vanquished by Voodoo debacle, though, cannot be entirely explained by neighborhood hostility, since En Garde Arts had encountered resistance before. During rehearsal of Another Person Is a Foreign Country, some of the residents of the welfare hotel next door to the Towers complained about the noise. Hooligans threw bottles at the gates; Hamburger actually chased after some of the boys. In the end, the boys and the welfare hotel residents, leaning out their windows, watched the show again and again. When, days before the opening of Voodoo, the Safety Commission pronounced the Dwyer Warehouse unsafe, Hamburger and her production team hustled to compensate. They built scaffolding and moved the piece outside, to the front of the building. They barricaded a piece of the street near Hopkins Square and put up bleachers. But despite such efforts, the surrounding chaos absolutely overpowered the action onstage. The performers could not compete with the constant distractions of the area; at times the audience focused, not on the actors, but down St. Nicholas Avenue, where, it was clear from the wailing of sirens, unspeakable crimes were being committed. Still, neighborhood people slunk around the blue police barriers and sat in the bleachers. A pair of cops got out of their car to watch for awhile. Kids walked and rode their bikes through the area blocked off by barricades. Little girls jumped rope beneath the scaffolding. In the narrative about producing Voodoo that appeared in the pages of the Village Voice, a poorly chosen phrase En Garde Arts dared to dream to bring Laurie Carlos to Harlem was seized upon to accuse Hamburger of racism. As Beth Coleman put it in her feature-cum-expose in the Voice, Hamburger dared to dream to hire a chartered bus to carry an audience up to 125th and St. Nicholas Ave. Laurie Carloss main objection to this version lurked in the implied causal relationship between En Garde Artss dreams and Carloss appearance in Harlem. And Carlos ducing. People should not have to produce Afro-American work to get grants, she said in a telephone interview. In her own narrative, Hamburger ignores lesser charges and cuts directly to issues of racism and betrayal. If she had known that Carlos was not going to take part in community meetings, she would never have signed a contract with her, Hamburger insists. Whats remarkable is not the Rashomon effect, but the way these competing narratives, overlook the big picture: All three stories ignore history, the difficulty of En Garde Artss undertaking, and the larger uncontrollable forces in New York. Hamburger and Carlos, as Chuck Mee points out, fail to see that they were essentially on the same side. In the near future, Hamburger hopes to develop what seems to be an oxymoron: more general site-specific work. The two full productions she plans for the 1992-93 season, for example, are mobile, not New York-based. Mac Wellmans Strange Feet, a conversation between two dinosaurs, will be sent to natural history museums all over the country. Len Jenkin and John Arnones actorless Funhouse is a traveling circus with detachable segments that can be set up in any football field. Of the other three pieces in the works, Anne Bogarts Marathon Dancing, part two of her American Trilogy, can also tour, since, Hamburger says, theres an historic ballroom in every city. Anna Cassios Swapmeet, which takes place in a flea market, also seems to have legs. The new emphasis on traveling work fits handily with Hamburgers populist vision. But her politics are not only geographical. The sites she chooses also serve to expose the theatre communitys failure to address New Yorks diversity as well as the physical limitations of traditional theatre spaces. Tickertape parades drowning the city in white bright lights of Broadway; the revenge of broken hearts the safety of Central Park like the sentimental narratives Didion finds in New Yorks history, Hamburgers work suggests that anything can happen in the streets, that class and racial lines can be overcome and that theatre, brought to theatreless neighborhoods, can heal a city crushed by politics and indifference. Annie Hamburgers work suggests that one woman can change New York.