Tagged: Exchange #2

New Orleans Exchange – Day #.05

A Note from Lisa

Today we walked into Catapult, the shared space of Artspot Productions, Mondo Bizarro and New Noise (where Haymaker will perform their new piece on Thursday), and Sean La Rocca, Managing Director and Resident Composer for Artspot Productions, was talking on his cell phone and sweeping the floor.  And Emily said — Hey! That guy stayed at my house when New Noise presented Runnin’ Down the Mountain!

And I realized —

Haymaker volunteers to perform in PearlDamour’s How to Build a Forest (Fall 2012)
Phil Cramer, of New Noise in NOLA, was one of the performers.
PearlDamour and Haymaker begin this NET exchange (Spring 2013)
New Noise decides to tour a house party version of their show Runnin’ Down the Mountain to places in and around Appalachia.
Haymaker volunteers to host them (Spring 2013)
Haymaker comes to NOLA to continue exchange and perform I Know You Are But What Am I?
Catapult / New Noise offers to host them (Fall 2013)

And so on and so on….

Yesterday Haymaker also got to meet with Will Bowling of Goat in the Road Productions, who also works for NPN and is an active NET member.  I set up the meeting mainly so they could learn about how NPN works, but as it turns out the most meaningful part of the meeting was comparing the growing pains and growing triumphs of being a young company (Haymaker is 3, Goat in the Road is 5).

It makes me realize how much I love just setting things in motion…..knowing that there is no way in hell to know where it’s all going to lead….whether that is setting a project in motion or a set of meetings……it’s about, I suppose going into it with the right intentions, ready to improvise…..

Really looking forward to the performance today…..

Traveling the Learning Curve

HELLO AUDIENCE.

Over the last several months we’ve traveled a long slow curve towards understanding who our MILTON audience might be and how we want to build a relationship with them (both before, during, and after the show). We’ve moved towards understanding in a couple ways:

1. workshopping material to audiences of our peers

2. wrestling with the relationship between long term community engagement and the show itself

3. visiting the Milton communities, maintaining  email contact, and starting to build partnerships for presenting the show in each town.

Here are some examples of what we’ve learned from each:
workshop
Workshop showings are, of course, always incredibly useful– especially when you get written feedback after.  These were particularly great as we seek to get at the tone of the show.  This piece is going to be a combination of speaking and singing, and also will have a combination of abstract imagistic text with more straightforward, linear text.  Are we creating something that is both mysterious, interesting, and also accessible?  Some useful feedback questions we asked were:  “what were the points of entry (“doorways”) for you in the piece?”  “were there times you felt shut out?”  “what did you crave more of?”.   We also are working with using objects from and photographs of each Milton, letting the audience handle these things and talk amongst themselves about them.  There was a lot of enthusiasm about that idea, and cravings to have it pushed farther– mostly as a way to feel and create the community within the audience that the piece seems to be talking about.

It was also really important to have Ashley Sparks in the audience… Ashley is working with us on the durational community engagement, so she was watching from a “miltonian” perspective.  How will those audiences experience hearing about themselves, witnessing themselves?
wrestling
We know that in order to have an audience for the show in each town, community engagement throughout the next couple years is vital.  We have to build relationships in the Miltons so that people will come see the show, but also we have to build relationships because part of the project really is about that: relationships.  Us meeting new people, the project providing an opportunity for conversations and intimate encounters to happen between people who would not otherwise be in contact.

We now say that this is a 3 part project: a live performance, a durational community engagement effort, and an interactive website.   We are slowly sculpting the engagement plan to be something we can handle (it’s so easy to let it get way too big), and something that feels vital to us as artists and to the content of the piece.  The umbrella term for this work “intimate encounter.”  We are in the final stages of developing a new website that will really serve this goal of creating opportunity for engagement and encounter.

We will do another post about the website itself, and how it will be the “doorway” for Miltonians to go through.

visiting
It has been a struggle to schedule more visits, both because of scheduling on our end and money.  If only we had enough money to go as much as we want to!  We have been keeping in email contact with a few key allies in each town, and Ashley is jumping on the site-visit roster as well.  Generally we find that even if we wait several months between visits, people are happy to see us and ready to pick up where we left off.  So whether we’re visiting in person or just over the internet, we always want to keep in mind how the conversation or the activity is preparing the ground for the performance.  Are we activating the performance space? Engaging people in the questions the piece asks/raises? Facilitating a creative encounter that will get people’s art-minds going?  Whatever it is, we recognize that each meeting is a different chance to move into the content of the performance.
 Looking forward to the NOLA Summit, and seeing Haymaker’s show!

Katie / PearlDamour