The DCPA is giving up on the future of theatre in Denver

This blog went on something of an unannounced hiatus last spring when my free time and writing energy were consumed by finishing my masters thesis, but that's all done now, so here is my return to action (at least until April, when I leave with the Peace Corps to teach English in Kyrgyzstan, at which point I hope to transition this into a blog about that experience).

* * *

It should be clear from some of my previous posts that I go pretty regularly to see shows at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and the availability of good theatre in Denver is important to me. In light of that, I was shocked and appalled by the news today that the DCPA is cutting the National Theatre Conservatory. At first glance this may seem to be just one more of the countless tragic minor tragedies of the recession, but a closer look reveals just how much the DCPA board is shortsightedly and dangerously throwing away something of great value to the future of theatre in the city of Denver.

The NTC is one of the top theatre graduate programs and the only congressionally chartered MFA program in the country. Like all forms of education, training top-notch actors is an investment in the future of theatre. In the same way that giving a man a fish is less work on that one day than teaching him how to fish, education rarely looks like a good deal if you only focus on short-term return on investment. The DCPA claims that the recession (including less success from recent touring Broadway shows) is forcing them to end the program in order to save $1.2 million that will redirected toward making sure that there are no cuts to the Denver Center Theatre Company and the Denver Center Attractions (those big Broadway shows). I don't dispute that maintaining the quality of the DCTC should be the top priority, but completely ending the NTC for $1.2 million/year is throwing away the future in order to avoid any uncomfortable belt-tightening in the present.

Like it or not, the value of an education is closely related to the reputation of the institution, and by completely ending the program, the DCPA board is throwing away all of the value that has been accumulated by the NTC name, and the tricky thing about good reputations is that they are easy to lose and very difficult to regain. Whatever the financial situation of the DCPA, their decision to eliminate the NTC rather than simply changing it says one of two things. One possibility is that they are so foolishly short-sighted that they cannot see that completely ending the program to save money during a time of hardship is like a panicky investor who sells his valuable assets when their price is at their lowest and then rues his folly when things recover and he sees how much value he has thrown away. The more frightening possibility is that they have bought into the prophesies of the doom-sayers who argue that theatre is a dying medium, and that they have decided to sacrifice the NTC in order to prop up their core programs for as long as possible until the whole institution goes belly up. Either way, this incredibly short-sighted decision casts doubt upon the future of the DCPA and the whole Denver theatre community.

I've groped for some way to see this as anything other than a disaster, and the best that I could come up with is that maybe the DCPA board is only pretending to be stupid and is really cynical and manipulative. The phenomenon of donor fatigue is well-documented, and one of the best ways to get people to open their wallets is to manufacture a crisis (just look at the way campaigning politicians have mastered the art of spinning each new development into an opportunity for their supporters to give money). They are saying right now that they will be eliminating the program with no plans to ever bring it back, but everyone knows that they would reconsider in a heartbeat if a deep-pocketed donor offered a big gift to keep the NTC going. Sad as it is, I actually find myself hoping that the board decided that making this shocking announcement suddenly and without warning was the best way to galvanize potential donors into providing the support that they need to get through the recession. Unfortunately, it seems equally possible that they might be killing the NTC as a way to spur donors into giving money that will go towards the theatre company and Denver Center Attractions: "Better donate now, or the plays you enjoy might suffer the same fate as the conservatory."

I could keep listing all of the different reasons why this surprise decision is really stupid and dangerous, but there's little to be gained by it. It all boils down to the fact that throwing away the future to "save" the present is a horrible mistake, and I can only hope that we will not someday look back at this as the beginning of the end of quality theatre in Denver.

Accomplishments and objectives

A year ago I posted a list of things I had done in 2007 and things I hoped to accomplish in 2008. There's not much point in recording such things if you don't go back and compare them to what did happen, so here's my review of 2008 and forecast for 2009. To start, this is the list from that entry a year ago, with successful accomplishments in green, failed accomplishments in red, and black being partial or incomplete:

Things I would like to accomplish in 2008:

1. Break out of my patterns of procrastination.
   
2. Be more proactive about dating.
3. Make more of an effort to write new poems, without getting away from the good revision work that I've been doing.
4. Find out why my brother gets under my skin and learn to be at peace with him.
5. Commit the time to write an academic paper that represents my very best work.
6. Make more connections among the department's faculty and graduate students.
7. Restore the university's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta to viability with undergraduate leadership.
8. Find ways to travel without screwing up my budget (my upcoming trip to NYC will be a good start).
9. Learn more about teaching methods, effective classroom skills, and good pedagogy so that I'm more prepared to teach college-level courses.
10. Embrace the fantastic path I'm on without closing myself off to unexpected opportunities.

I've also done a lot of cool things in the last year that weren't a part of that list.

Things I accomplished in 2008

• Visited New York City for the first time, and I had an absolutely fantastic time.
  
• Kept up my quasi-regular correspondence of hand-written letters with a dear friend.
• Was an alternate delegate to the country convention for Barack Obama. I didn't get a chance to participate, but it was a great cherry on top of the very inspiring caucus process.
• My awesome trip to Germany and the Czech Republic.
• Developed a topic for my masters thesis that I'm genuinely excited about.
• Applied to PhD programs.
• Made significant quantities of fruits and veggies a regular part of my diet.
  

I feel pretty good about where I stand right now, so major, life-changing resolutions don't feel particularly neccessary. Of course, the next stage in my life will be shaped considerably by which PhD programs I get into, if any, but for now I just need to concentrate on reaching a positive finish to my masters program and writing a thesis I can be proud of.

Goals and Resolutions for 2009

1. Write my thesis and defend it in time to participate in the June graduation ceremony.
2. Build a new computer from scratch.
3. Take another big trip. (California?)
4. Buy a more adult set of clothing.
5. Go on a date.
6. Maintain my level of political awareness and engagement.
7. Change my own oil.
8. Write the play I've been thinking about.
9. Keep in touch with people in Denver after I move away.
10. Get better about procrastination.
    

There's more to life than annotated bibliographies

Once again, major thanks are due to Molly for providing just the right video to get my head back in the right place on a day when Foucault was on the verge of souring me on this whole thesis.

Yes We Can... Be Inspired

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I have been working on Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" for one of my grad school courses, and it has been on my mind so much that I've internalized it to a degree. Over the last few days I have occasionally found myself reshaping Byron's apocalyptic vision into a vision of Obama-inspired hope, and then I decided to just go ahead and actually write something. I drew heavily on Byron's poem and composed this re-imagining of "Darkness":

Light Returns

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
Eight years of darkness ended, and the stars
That had been mere pinprick spots of Hope,
Brightened, and grew, and the icy prospects
Of our country were thawed by Change in the air;
Morn came and the people brought about a new day,
And men remembered their passions and their dreams
Of this their country; and all hearts
Were warmed into a hopeful prayer for Change:
And they did live that change--and the desks,
The offices of the powerful—the homes,
The many homes at risk of being lost,
Were turned into beacons; cities were inspired,
And men who had gathered to cast their votes
Looked once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who'd felt eight years
Of fear invoked to trample down their rights:
A glowing Hope was all the world contained;
Jobs were still in danger—and hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the banking firms
Extinguished with a crash—but there was Hope.
The brows of men by the growing light
Wore the marks of their troubles, as they worked
To make the country whole again; they'd not lie down
And hide their eyes and weep; and some did rest
A moment to see what they had done, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and backed
Their words with deeds, and looked out
With resolute Hope on the wounded land,
The pall of the past eight years; and then again
With passion cast them back into the work
For healthcare and a living wage: the right-wing shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And spout their useless hate; the red states
Came together with the blue; and they united
And twined themselves to form one country,
No longer hopeless—they were America again.
And the war, which had done so much ill,
Was finally brought to an end;—the mistake was bought
With blood, and each sat and remembered
The brave who had been thus misled into gloom;
All earth was but one thought—and that was Hope,
Immediate and in the future; and the pang
Of the past fed their drive for Change—men
Would work to end the tragedy in which
The meager for the rich were devoured,
The country had assailed its people, all were wronged,
And none could trust that secrecy which kept
The press and anyone with questions at bay,
Till they gave up, and thus their actions had
Disdained all laws; himself sought no consensus,
But with a vicious and perpetual drive,
And a will to unchecked power, spurning Congress
Which answered not with censure—he was done.
The crowd was angered by degrees; but two
Republicans did present themselves,
And they were desperate: they met beside
The boardrooms and ill-used altar-places
Where had been heaped a mass of fear
For their usage; they raked up hatred,
And angrily flung their most divisive words at those
Who wanted change, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then the people lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
That Hope was real—saw, and turned away—
Even of their savage attacks they lost,
Unknowing that the people were tired of hearing men
Who called each other Fiend. The world was energized,
The populous and the powerful would unite,
Thoughtful, careful, truthful, purposeful, hopeful—
A land of Hope—the Change we needed.
The radio, TV, and papers all were still,
And for a moment all was silent thought;
The sun rose over the White House,
And a new government took shape: as it changed
The country's reputation surged—
Guantanamo was closed; the soldiers were brought home,
The mission they should have been on was achieved;
The country had security and civil rights,
And the economy recovered; Obama led the Change
They needed—Hope restored America.

"Darkness" by Lord Byron

I'm working on a presentation about one of my favorite poems, Lord Byron's "Darkness." It's popularity was such that there were a few paintings based on it, and I had hoped to find at least one of those images to use in a handout, but I haven't have any luck with that search. One thing I did find was this video, which I probably won't use in my presentation, but I'm going to share it here:

I love books (and hilarious online video thingies)

I've been meaning to check out Goodreads for a while now, and this evening I finally got around to it (along with discovering the delightful online series The Guild). It would be madness to try to go back and write reviews for all of my favorite books, but there are a some books that are too dear to me for a simple star rating to suffice, and I'll cross post them here (I'm also filling in some of them with past posts from here in which I talked about books I'd read).

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ender's Game captured elements of my childhood that no other work of fiction (or anything in any other medium) has ever presented in a way that felt believable. There have been countless works in which I sympathize with the protagonist, but the character of Ender captured something about me that I probably couldn't even have articulated before I read the book.


Dune by Frank Herbert

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The sublime is a pretty elusive quality, but my definition has always been closely tied to a sense of transport. A truly sublime work of art is that which transports me out of myself, and Dune is one of the few books that achieves that rare feat. The rush of ideas in the passage describing Paul's emergence into his power managed to produce in me a visceral sense of vertigo. It's hard to imagine a more compelling example of the power of fiction.


Paradise Lost by John Milton

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Milton's masterpiece is not only the greatest epic ever written in English verse, it has actually had significant influence on the way that people think about the Christian mythology. In my conversations with mainstream Christians, the things that they say about things like angels and Satan are much more consistent with the way that those concepts are depicted in Paradise Lost than how they a represented in the Bible.


His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This trilogy starts off as a seemingly simple jaunt into the realm of adventurous fantasy, but the intellectual depth quickly reveals itself. Few books even attempt capture the agony of the conflict between romance and responsibility, and of the few that try, it's rare to see an author avoid the slippery slope of melodrama. The worlds that Pullman conjures are magnificent in and of themselves, but his true achievement is that he captures the joy and pain of growing up without romanticizing childhood or looking down on it.


View all my reviews.



Also, if you haven't checked out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, what are you waiting for? Act II is up now (and is even more super-awesome than Act I). Even my friend Ben, who hates musicals, loved it, so nobody who is reading this has any excuse for not checking it out this weekend while it's still available for free (magic word!). I'll be done with my MA soon, so you'd better take my advice lest you find yourself on the wrong side of a guy with a PhD in Horribleness (I hear Duke offers five years of funding).

Words are pretty

Kudos to Jess for introducing me to Visuwords, a graphical dictionary/thesaurus. I found it very relaxing to type in the first word that came to mind and then free associate based on the results to find new words that might yield interesting results.

These words gave my favorite results so far:
Character
Jerk
Heart
Bust

What a cinematic painting! It's so much better than that theatrical novel.

Robert Pinsky has a piece about poetry in Slate today that I couldn't let pass without comment. Why Don't Modern Poems Rhyme? is set up as a casual FAQ about poetry, and he makes some interesting points, but some of his responses are oddly lacking in analysis for a piece that is supposed to be answering questions. "Read this" is a rather unsatisfying answer when one has a legitimate question. He also makes a great point about the false nostalgia that imagines that there was some kind of Golden Age in which poetry was "easy to understand and great".

What I really wished he had addressed in more detail was the question of song lyrics as poetry. Ben (who is a musician) and I have debated this point on a few occasions, and the point I always come back to is that they are two different forms of art that work in different ways. One of the flaws that turns me off to a lot of contemporary music is that each song is so packed with lyrics that the balance between the emotional content of the words and the emotional content of the sound is thrown completely out of whack. The claim that song lyrics are poetry implies that music cannot stand on its own merits, that it needs to draw upon poetry because the medium lacks artistic validity.

It's a back-handed compliment when an artistic work is compared to another medium in a way that implies that the other medium is inherently superior. It reminds me of a recent class discussion about what it means to say that Henry James has an "Impressionist" style of writing. A novel is not a painting, and it is demeaning to the writer's craft to give up on trying to understand a piece of writing on its own terms by clumsily applying the language of a different artistic discipline.

Crazy week of activities (Having a social life is hard work!)

Because the first week of classes is usually pretty mild, I decided that I would catch up on having a social life, as well as trying to get a head start on my coursework. Since Wednesday I have done the following:

• Gave a big presentation on Madame Bovary for my graduate seminar on Modernism (and came up with vague notion for a possible thesis topic)
  
• Watched the first disc of Battlestar Galactica Season Three with my friend Ben as we try to get caught up so that we can watch Season Four on TV (with a few more marathon sessions scheduled for the coming week because the first episode airs this Friday night)
  
• Went to see an excellent touring production of My Fair Lady (the first time I had ever seen that show)
  
• Went to a Saturday matinee of the play Gee's Bend and got an idea for how I might write one of my story ideas as a play
  
• Cheered on the Nuggets in a thrilling victory over the Golden State Warriors in the first live basketball game I've been able to attend in years
  
• Drank a few beers with my buddy Frank and had the first non-depressing conversation about academia that I've had in far too long

Now I must get back to all the reading that I neglected while I was having so much fun.

Wishes and Memories

I recently received an email through my grad school list for a project that is collecting anonymous wishes and memories: www.nowisnotenough.com
This looks pretty interesting, and I regret that I no longer live close enough to Louisville to go see it when it goes on display.

Interesting may make life worth living, but sometimes it also makes me sad

Last night I went to see my friend Jenna perform in her class project, the play Mad Forest: A Play From Romania. She is a friend from my undergrad years at Evansville, and now she is in grad school for theatre here in Denver. She is an outstanding actress, enough so that I would happily watch anything that she's doing, even a play about the Romanian revolution, which I actually knew enough about beforehand (thank you history degree and international studies minor!) to question whether it would be a good subject for a play.

As it turned out, the setting and subject did suit the play, providing good raw material for the energy and vitality that can only be fully expressed in chaos. When used effectively, confusion can be a powerful emotional tool, and the fact that it was difficult to tease out the humor and pathos made those elements more intense.

It was a very interesting play, and it succeeded largely because the performers brought a profound energy to what might have been a sluggish mutant of political satire and surreal theatre. That said, I can't say that I liked the play. It was interesting in the same sense of the word as the old curse "May you live in interesting times" and it makes me sad to think about how so much of the energy of life is the product of confusion and chaos.

It shreds stuff AND lights it on fire? Tell me more...

While celebrating the end of the winter quarter with some classmates in a bar last night, the drunken conversation somehow ended up on the colossal geekiness of my teenage years (and all the nonexistent dates that ensued because of it).

I had consumed enough at that point that I told a story from my time playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game, in which my character (a teenage mutant ninja moose) defeated the heavily-armored villain who was standing on a shipping container full of Styrofoam packing peanuts by firing a machine gun at the container until the peanuts burst into flames.

The point of sharing that story is that it reminded me of the following unspeakably awesome video clip I watched a few weeks ago from the show Mythbusters, in which they demonstrate that you can in fact cut a tree down with a Gatling gun.

Tell me what you eat, and I'll smile and nod

I have finally made it through the my winter quarter finals, having just barely finished both term papers in time. During that time I had to impose strict limits on myself in terms of how much I would sample the endless treats that the Internet dangles in front of me, and part of my method of self-control was to write down each nifty website and video I came across so that I can come back to it later. Now that I'm basking in the light at the end of the tunnel, I'll have time to check those things out and post about the cool ones on here.

My self-imposed Internet diet was necessitated by the fact that last week I wasted a bunch of time exploring the joy of Iron Chef clips on YouTube.

It all began with a presentation in my Style class on the writer M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote about food and the experience of eating in a way that deeply resonated with me. I hadn't heard of her before, but I'm now planning to read more of her work as soon as I have the chance, which may not be until this summer.

The class discussion ranged all over the topic of food, and eventually the subject turned to the original series of Iron Chef. At the time I classed it among the many interesting television shows that I might someday check out if I spot the DVDs in the library, but that changed when one of my classmates passed along this clip.

Of course I had to watch the next part, which led to watching the whole episode, and it went downhill from there.

Sad Day

RIP Joseph M. Williams

I read Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace for the first time last night, and then I found out about his death this afternoon. I fell in love with the way that Williams debunked the invented rules that grammarians use to bludgeon writers and rant about the death of the English language. I don't agree with everything he said, but his book is the first style manual I've ever read that I would have no qualms about suggesting to others.

Breathing room

The last few days have been quite busy and stressful, with back-to-back presentations in both of my grad school classes. I think they both went well, and now I'll be catching up on the last few days.

I had the odd feeling of having missed a lot when I heard the news this morning about Castro stepping down (by letter) and Kosovo declaring its independence (and having it recognized by the US and the major EU countries). The news from Cuba has a lot of symbolic significance, but considering that the transfer of power actually took place a year and half ago, it doesn't look like much will change. It would be nice to be able to legally visit Havana in the near future, but I won't hold my breath.

The situation in Kosovo looks much more complicated than it might seem, and I hope that we don't end up with a situation in which Russia decides to flex its muscles while the US is distracted by the election. It does strike me as very interesting that this most recent result of Milosovic's attempts to create a strong nationalist Serbia out of Yugoslavia is that an independent Kosovo has received immediate international recognition that would have been unthinkable if they'd made the same declaration twenty years ago.

* * *

When I saw this story in the New York Times about the use a semicolon in a subway placard, my initial reaction was to be pleased that it was used well in such an unexpected situation, but I ended up feeling discouraged that it became such a big deal. I also can't help feeling dubious when the story makes the following claim without providing any examples:

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers.

I'd rather have a newspaper screw up a semicolon than to make huge unsupported claims about people being executed because of a punctuation mark.

Occasionally a geek will actually have a date to the prom

In a lovely bit coincidence, Ashley, an old friend of mine from high school, started a blog recently. She gave me a shout-out in her blog the other day (and was the first to comment here), so I'm returning the favor as part of my general policy of supporting anyone who gives me gratuitous praise.

Her boldly titled blog.

Coming from a mind crazy enough to be my date to senior prom, it's a safe bet that interesting will not be in short supply, so check it out. I've also added a list of links to some other blogs that I like.

* * *

In an earlier post I presented the following grotesque sentence that some friends and I came up with in class:

I have the awareness that the flesh of young humans, ideally humans within the age range typically defined as infancy, is indeed capable of being processed by the gastrointestinal tract, in ergo facto providing the necessary je ne sais quoi of a meal more delicious than the love of Baby Jesus.

After spending some time wandering through the Forest of Rhetoric, I thought it would be fun to list all of its stylistic vices:
macrologia- Longwindedness. Using more words than are necessary in an attempt to appear eloquent.
tautologia- The repetition of the same idea in different words, but (often) in a way that is wearisome or unnecessary.
cacozelia- Bad taste in words or selection of metaphor, either to make the facts appear worse or to disgust the auditors.
soraismus- To mingle different languages affectedly or without skill.
acyrologia- An incorrect use of words, especially the use of words that sound alike but are far in meaning from the speaker's intentions.
catachresis- The use of a word in a context that differs from its proper application.
hypallage- Shifting the application of words. Mixing the order of which words should correspond with which others.
cacemphaton- An expression that is deliberately either foul (such as crude language)or ill-sounding (such as from excessive alliteration).

* * *

Anyone geeky enough to still be reading at this point should get a kick out of this:

Children are edible

One of the things I love about grad school is the fact that I'm able to sit down in classes full of creative people and create things like the following anti-Strunk & White revision of a sentence from Swift's "A Modest Proposal":

I have the awareness that the flesh of young humans, ideally humans within the age range typically defined as infancy, is indeed capable of being processed by the gastrointestinal tract, in ergo facto providing the necessary je ne sais quoi of a meal more delicious than the love of Baby Jesus.

* * *

When I travel, it is important to me that my tourism provides me with valuable experiences and helps to make me a better person. It's encouraging to learn that Henry James also felt that sightseeing is serious business.