Inspiration! I am taking the advice of my colleague, Mz. M.D.J and have pilfered a scene from my screen-play
to use as the jumping-off point for my one-act.
CHEERS and much adulation to Muse MDJ!
Gonna attempt to add a Bacot-esque character to help me pass
the Bechdel test this time around, as I so shamefully failed it with the
screen-play. I’m just six pages away from my goal and am hoping to get done
with it today so that I can read ahead for my Monday classes by this time
tomorrow and then dedicate Sunday to my book and article précis which is due on
Wednesday.
Depending on how the playwrighting goes, I may just flesh
this piece out to a full-length and bypass writing a second one-act since my
creative well seems to be filled with tumble-weed these days.
ALSO…something occurred to me yesterday and my thoughts are
fragmented still, but I was thinking about possibilities for my second U.S.
Theatre teaching week and was mulling over lots of ideas…
None struck me as overwhelmingly on-target, but I did get to
thinking about an area of study where I haven’t seen much scholarship.
After living in Orlando and performing for the Orlando
International Fringe Festival, I moved back to Louisiana for a while where I was
involved in creating a small mini-Fringe in Covington, Louisiana. After the
first year, I ended up letting the project cease because I was asked to return
to Florida and serve as Assistant Producer for the OIFF. The following year, I
took over and served as Executive Producer/Artistic Director of the festival.
The board voted to have me stay on in the same capacity the year after that
while I entered into my first year as an MFA student. But a few months into the
program, I realized that it would not be humanly possible to pull off an MFA
and a major arts festival with grace and sanity intact and so I stepped down from
my position with the Fringe to devote myself to graduate school.
While with the Fringe, I traveled to Canada for two Fringe
Producer Conferences, I was involved in PR, grant writing, venue management,
tech and staff hiring, volunteer relations, product design, advertising,
fundraisers, scheduling and special events. I’ve experienced the Fringe as a
spectator, performer and producer. While the Fringe was born in Scotland, it
has become an international phenomenon with a particularly strong presence in
the Unites States. And though it hasn’t been realized yet, there is (or at
least WAS) a collective goal among the U.S. and Canadian producers to create a
circuit that would ostensibly allow performers to cross state and province
borders in an unbroken chain of performance opportunities. While Orlando is the
largest and longest-standing Fringe in the states, there are others spanning
coast-to-coast with a comparatively new one now finding its legs in New
Orleans. Each of these festivals has a unique history and unique relationship
to the political and artistic goals which first inspired the Scottish Fringe.
Shouldn’t someone be writing about this? Why isn’t there a
proper history of the American Fringe? What a worthwhile project. As I said, I’m
unfocused still, but I’m really excited about the idea of doing some research
and scholarship in this area. I feel like my history with the festival might
position me as a good (and passionate) candidate for this work.
Gears turning…
No comments:
Post a Comment