The Cave Man Principle and the Theatre

Sometimes, over a few too many beers, I get in a tiresome conversation with fellow theatre types who start to piss and moan that theatre is a dying art. And while I think it is not nearly as relevant as it may have been at one time in history, it is not dying any more than any other traditional media is quote-unquote dying. 

My would-be conversational partners then become armchair futurists and make drunken claims that television and movies were wearisome, but now the Internet, in particular, is the juggernaut that will swallow live theatre. How can theatre compete? Theatre performed live for an audience in real time will soon be seen only in museums.

And here is what I point out... that actually, the internet is just one more thing, and not even in the same category as theatre. The two things are not direct competitors. 

Of course, the Internet has changed the entire media landscape, especially as media giants ponder over how to earn revenue on the Internet. But, seriously, it is not even close to wiping out TV, radio and cinemas... let alone live theatre. The lights of arts venue marquees still glow as brightly as ever.

The reasoning I give for this is based on something I read about a year and half ago in Michio Kaku's excellent book The Physics of the Future.

Kaku points out that humans have changed little since caveman days. That is to say, genetic and fossil evidence indicates that modern humans, who looked just like us, emerged from Africa more than 100,000 years ago. The thing is, there is no evidence that our brains and personalities have changed much since then. Basically, if you took someone from that period, he would be anatomically identical to us. Further, Kaku points out, if you gave him a bath and a shave, put him in a suit, and then dumped him on Wall Street, he would be physically indistinguishable from everyone else. Along with this, then, our wants, dreams, personalities, and desires have probably not changed much in 100,000 years either. We probably still pretty much think like our caveman ancestors.

This is where Kaku's "Cave Man Principle" comes into play. No matter what technology arises, we still default to our primitive desires time after time. Kaku explains that our forebears always demanded “proof of the kill.” 

It was never enough to brag about the big one that got away. Having the fresh animal in our hands was always preferable to telling a whooper about the one that got away. In the same way, we want hard copy whenever we deal with files. We instinctively don’t trust the electrons swimming in our computer screen, so we print our e—mails and reports, even when it’s not really necessary. That’s why the paperless office never came to be.

Also, Kaku states, our ancestors always seemed to like face—to—face encounters. This helped us to bond with others and to read their hidden emotions. Our cave man ancestors, many thousands of years before they developed speech, used body language almost exclusively to convey their thoughts and emotions.

This is the reason, Kaku says, why cybertourism never really succeeded. Sure you can see a picture of the Sistine Chapel, but it’s another thing to have the bragging rights of actually seeing it in person. In a similar way, listening to a CD of your favorite singer is not the same as feeling the sudden rush when actually seeing this musician in a live concert, surrounded by all the excitement, vibes, and noise. This means that even though we will be able to download realistic images of our favorite drama or celebrity, there is nothing like actually seeing the drama on stage or seeing the actor perform in person. Fans go to great lengths to get autographed pictures and concert tickets of their favorite celebrity, although they can download a picture from the Internet for free.

Kaku states:

"[The Cave Man Principle] explains why the prediction that the Internet would wipe out TV and radio never came to pass. When the movies and radio first came in, people bewailed the death of live theater. When TV came in, people predicted the demise of the movies and radio. We are living now with a mix of all these media. The lesson is that one medium never annihilates a previous one but coexists with it. It is the mix and relationship among these media that constantly change."

See, our ancient ancestors always wanted to observe or experience something for themselves. they didn't want to rely on hearsay. It was crucial for survival in the forest to rely on actual physical evidence rather than rumors. Kaku is confident that even far into the future, we humans will still have live theatre just as we will still chase celebrities. It is an ancient heritage of our distant past..

"So there is a continual competition between High Tech and High Touch, that is, sitting in a chair watching TV versus reaching out and touching things around us. In this competition, we will want both. That is why we still have live theater, rock concerts, paper, and tourism in the age of cyberspace and virtual reality. But if we are offered a free picture of our favorite celebrity musician or actual tickets to his concert, we will take the tickets, hands down."

So Kaku's Cave Man Principle is a wonderful argument against any notion of the theatre dying out. We humans prefer to have it all... we'll take both the actual and the digital (and everything in between).As more stuff comes along, we just make more room to fold more stuff into our lives. But, here's the deal: if given a choice we will chose the live, first-hand experience, like our cavemen ancestors.

Interested in the book? Check it out... HERE

CHOP at SoloMania Fest

CHOP in performance at Shadow Box Theatre, 2013 SoloMania Fest

I took my little solo show CHOP to New Orleans this past weekend. It went over well. Had some unique time slots (11 PM on Friday and 12:30 PM on Sunday), so smallish audiences, but got really positive feedback from most of the folks who saw it.

CHOP goes out on a limb

Brad McEntire's Chop Goes Out On a Limb

By Elaine Liner / November 5, 2013 / For the Mixmaster on DallasObserver.com

McEntire performing CHOP at the 2012 New York International Fringe Festival

"Do you really cut into someone's arm with an axe?" Dallas-based playwright and performer Brad McEntire hears this question almost every time he performs his kinky solo show Chop. "An uncomfortable number of times, actually," he says.

Since premiering at WaterTower Theatre's Out of the Loop Fringe Festival in 2010, Chop has played at venues and festivals in Phoenix, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Portland, Seattle and New York. November 8-10 McEntire will perform it at the first SoloMania Festival at the Shadowbox Theatre in New Orleans. It's one of only a few out-of-town shows chosen for the eight-day, 29-play festival founded by a group of New Orleans solo artists.

Chop features McEntire as a lonely man whose life changes when he meets a strange tattooed woman who introduces him to a subculture of amputation fetishists. The topic -- the clinical name is acrotomophilia, referring to people who are sexually obsessed with amputees and then there's apotemnophilia, concerning people who are compelled to have unnecessary amputations-- draws great interest from two specific slices of the audience, McEntire says.

"The best have been the times I'm approached by sex therapists, which has happened a few times," says McEntire. "They just start chit-chatting with me after the show. One person had a patient who actually had apotemnophilia. It is a conversation-starter kind of show, I guess."

Then there are occasional fetishists of different kinds, attracted to Chop by its unique focus on what turns particular people on. But what they see, says McEntire, isn't exploitation of a certain group's macabre sexuality but a dark comedy about a man looking for love and connection.

McEntire explains that his inspiration for Chop began with his feelings of intense isolation during a gig in Hong Kong teaching English to Chinese high schoolers. "I didn't get along in Hong Kong all that much. I had a lot of good friends there and became part of the ex-pat arts community, but I stuck out like a sore thumb and my outlook on the world did not fit there at all. I started writing the play in 2007 while I was in Hong Kong." 

Growing up in Carrollton, McEntire, now 38, studied theater and performance arts at the College of Santa Fe. After appearing in the New York Fringe Festival in the summer of 2001, he flew back to Dallas on September 10 that year for what he thought would be a short visit home. Essentially stuck after 9/11, he ended up staying in Texas.

He founded Audacity Productions (now Audacity Theatre Lab) and started a working and performing partnership with actor-writer Jeff Swearingen (they co-starred in McEntire's comedy Dinosaur and Robot Stop a Train at this year's Festival of Independent Theatres). McEntire also got married and settled into a life of making theatre and "hustling jobs" to keep his creative life going. To make ends meet, McEntire teaches college film and theater classes, works with Junior Players and occasionally unloads trucks at the Container Store.

Since 2008, McEntire has written and performed half a dozen plays, with a special interest in solo shows. "A resurgience of regional theaters starting to look at solo performance as a 'thing' came with I Am My Own Wife, the Doug Wright play," says McEntire. "One of my credos is that theatre artists should be instigators. With solo shows, you can take control of your whole production, from the idea right down to the moment you're putting pictures in the scrapbook after the performance. For us self-initiating types, solo performance is fantastic." 

In May 2014 McEntire will produce Dallas' first all-solo festival at the Margo Jones Theatre at Fair Park (formerly called the Magnolia Lounge). He says he wants the event to "have a fringe feel" but he's handpicking performers and inviting a "really diverse" group of artists to participate. "One of the great things about Dallas is that if you invite out-of-town actors to perform here, they really feel that Texas hospitality. When I leave Texas and go to other places, I start to realize how hospitable we are here," says McEntire. 

In New Orleans for Chop, McEntire says he's hoping audiences don't think his play is some sort of autobiographical freak show. But for real, does he cut into somebody? "I do use an axe in the show..." he says and then adds, " It makes a very percussive sound, actually." 

"I guess because I'm talking about amputation fetishes and limbs coming off, the description of it makes people's minds go to work. It took me by surprise that some people could be distraught over potentially seeing this play. I just think of it as a dark comedy and a romance," says McEntire.

Make that a romance on the cutting edge. 

Chop plays November 8-10 as part of the SoloMania Festival at the Shadowbox Theatre, 2400 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans. For tickets and additional information visit the festival's website.

See original article HERE.

[NOTE: this article has been altered slightly on this blog from the originally published version to allow for factual corrections]

Late Bloomers

Pablo Picasso (age 26) and Paul Cézanne (age 57)

I'm a late bloomer. I have come to most of my big realizations and guideposts in life (vocation, serious relationships, marriage, political awareness, owning appliances, etc.) relatively later than the norm. I'm okay with this. It is how I operate and I can do little to change it. The process usually just takes longer for me. I explore a lot, if something is important, before I get to any sort of destination.

(Don't get me wrong. I make arbitrary decisions sometimes, so a decision is made and things progress forward... I hate the "well, where do you want to eat..." conversation with a searing sun-hot intensity.)

As for my creative endeavors, I have after 20 years in the theatre just come into my own since maybe 2009/2010. I wrote plays for over 12 years before I finally found my "voice" (and am still finding it). When I create now, I put my name on everything. These days I have purpose and pride in what I do. Everything that I do. Leading up to this point, I was pretty hit or miss. That is as it should be. Theatre, in particular, is a public art. You have to do it, live for an audience, in order to get better at it. 

And though I feel creatively successful, finally, I am by no means successful with my art in the marketplace yet. I am not known.

I will be. I have faith in that. But I know it is a process and I am just now at the point where I am confident in getting my work out there. I'm ready to market myself and what I do.

This late blooming is something I've struggled with. Some artists make a splash on the scene at a young age. They come out into the world seemingly fully formed. These sorts of artists, I believe, don't worry too much about if they will be successful, but just how successful.

In a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell entitled Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity? he cites two kinds of creative geniuses (as defined in David Galenson's study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.”)... conceptual and experimental.

He compares Cézanne and Picasso. Cézanne, though he started his artistic pursuits at roughly the same age as Picasso did, he didn't sell hardly anything until he was in his 50s. Picasso on the other hand, splashed on the scene in his late teens as a full fledged force of nature. Both had a major impact on art. One from the start. Another bloomed late.

Gladwell states:

The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

"Trial and error..." I like that.

And I relate to it. I don't feel like I had my art figured out early on (and even now, i still search), but I do feel like I've been on a journey through my process. I've tinkered and toyed with things and tried and failed and gone back to the lab so many times I've lost count.

The troubling thing is, while I go about the long exploration of figuring things out, I will appear to be nothing more than a small-time failed dilettante.

Here's how Gladwell puts it:

On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents.

The whole article inspired me. Being just good right now means I can still be great later. Just gotta stick to it. I'm a late bloomer. And that's okay.

I'm in it for the long haul.

More articles about conceptual vs. experimental creators HERE and HERE.

Also Galeson's book is really thorough. Check it out... HERE

John Golembeski

John Golembeski 1944 - 2013

As an undergraduate student at the College of Santa Fe in the 1990s, I had a work-study job in the library on campus, the Fogelson. I also worked at the computer lab off and on. To get to either of these places, I often passed a gentleman standing outside on a smoke break at the top of the steps out in front of the library. His name was John Golembeski. 

John spent most of every day in the library. He was on a mission. He was in the process of reading 1000 books over ten years. While I knew him he was closing in on the 900s. He smelled of Camel cigarettes and seemed vaguely crusty. He had bad teeth. He was always wearing the same denim jacket, the pockets filled with small note pads where he had scrawled countless notes. He always waved or nodded as I passed by. After I had spoken with him a few times he would wave and say "Keep up the thinking..." He could converse on nearly any subject imaginable. I was not the only student he talked with. He would start up a short conversation with anyone who approached him, and since he took multiple smoke breaks throughout the day, he spoke with a wide array of people.

John was homeless. He did odd jobs for the physical plant at school and I think he slept in a storage closet, especially when it was cold outside. He sometimes was around campus pulling weeds or planting flowers. Sometimes he would disappear for a while, when he got burned out on the reading. He did a lot of traveling. He told me once he had hitchhiked all across the country. A student journalist once asked him about this and he said he had been to 49 of the 50 United States and most of Canada.

He told the interviewer that he had been "exposed to different lifestyle levels." He had once worked at the top of the food chain, he had been middle class and now was concentrating on his reading. He felt if he needed to he could elevate himself "back to the top."

He took his reading seriously and when not outside smoking and talking, he was sitting reading thick books at one of the well-lit study cubicles on the ground floor of the library.

I lost track of him after I graduated. I went back to CSF (now called the Santa Fe University of Art and Design ) in 2010 and looked for John. The librarians didn't know who I was talking about. I lost track of him.

I have thought about him many times since I left Santa Fe. He was sort of an inspiration. He had stripped his life down to the barest of essentials for such a simple goal... knowledge. When I think of my liberal arts education I think of John. He gave up everything to build that holistic, broad foundation of knowledge. The resources were there and he utilized them. 

I recently learned that he passed away this past summer. I mourn his passing. He was a truly unique guy.

Here is his official obituary (with one correction by me)...

John E. Golembeski, 68, died Sunday, Sept. 9, 2013, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, Colo. 

John was born Oct. 15, 1944, to Anthony E. and Josephine Kevlinsky Golembeski in Holyoke, Mass. After high school John worked with his parents doing clothing manufacturing.

He later got into landscaping, where he ran a landscaping business. John became a groundskeeper at the University of New Mexico [College of Santa Fe] before he moved to Moab about 15 years ago.

Everyone in Moab knew of John. You would see him rain or shine, cold or hot walking around wearing that big puffy coat.

At John’s request, cremation has taken place and he will have his ashes scattered in Massachusetts at a later date. A simple gathering to remember John will be held in Moab at a later date.

Source: Moab Times-Independent - John Golembeski 1944 ~ 2013

Six Seconds Left

A while back I read David Hopkins' short story "Six Seconds Left" for an audio fiction podcast. I'm love the story. Ms. Chris Humphrey worked her audio engineering awesomeness on it. The project was a co-production between my theatre company Audacity an the sci-fi and comics folks at Space-Gun Studios. The image above, that accompanies the podcast, is by Space-Gun co-founder Jake Ekiss. Jake is the one that brought me on board the project.

Have a listen... HERE.