"Arts Left Behind?" by Out & About | San Diego Reader

This appeared in Jeff Smith;s San Diego Reader blog Thursday. I am quasi-involved in InnerMission's production of "No Child...", which wakes place during No Child Left Behind. Unlike me, the play doesn't preach. It makes a statement, powerfully, by showing the children. Some of them were left behind.

"Arts Left Behind?" by Out & About | San Diego Reader

An OpEd Piece about No Child Left Behind...

and other things on the mind of former arts administrator Kevin Six...

When I think about my involvement in arts education over the years, I remember the productions I’ve done with students in two categories: before No Child Left Behind and after No Child Left Behind. 

Before this legislation, the non-profit I worked with, then called City Moves!, was welcome with open arms when we would bring theatre projects into public schools.  After this legislation, our invitation for a “free, standards-based program” was often declined because, as one teacher said, “No Child Left Behind means no child left untested.”  

In light of InnerMission Productions upcoming play, No Child…, an inside look at the effect of introducing theatre to a group of unruly Bronx high school students written by teaching artist Nilaja Sun, it might be worth another glance at the state of arts education here in San Diego and how important the message of the play is right now.

The truth is that art for art’s sake does not exist in California schools.  The arts now conform to some fairly rigid state-wide standards.  Since 2001, when the education bill was passed in this country, everyone who wanted a piece of the educational system’s pie talked about “standards-based arts education.”  As a result, every other arts program that did not include these standards was dropped. 

Standard Number Eight, the one that dictates arts education now, states that the arts must connect to the other curricula.  Every time this connection component came up in committee meetings as a potential reason to refuse our program, I would always ask one question:  Are the other standards required to connect to the arts?

No, as it turned out.  Curriculum areas like math, science, history and English were never required to reciprocate the relationship.  But this wasn’t surprising because as artists, arts educators, and arts administrators, it had always been our job to do that.  So, we did.

Or, we tried.  Projects were still refused.  And other projects were accepted but rescheduled at the last minute.  Rehearsals were often canceled.  And teachers would freak out because a test was coming and they were afraid that the kids wouldn’t do well, and if that happened, funding would go away and…

So, some of my colleagues and I tried to prove that arts in schools helped improve test scores.  But, that was a difficult proposition.  Most of the programs were free and most free programs happened in schools with a lot of poverty and schools with a lot of poverty were already among the lowest performing schools in the area, test-wise.

But there was one thing we could prove: attendance.  Kids in after-school arts programs came to school on the days that they had their program and did so more often than on any other day.  I remember a principal coming to a dance class to look for a specific trouble-making student.  The principal could not believe that the kid, who was in detention every day, always behaved on Tuesdays.  Coincidentally, that was the day he had dance class.  And another thing about this kid:  He was a born leader, something the principal didn’t recognize at the time.

I’d like to think we changed the culture of the few schools where we did run programs.  But, we had help.  Schools are run by three equally powerful people: the school secretary, the principal’s secretary and the janitor.  If a school was fortunate enough to have a principal who understood the value of the arts, those three people were supportive and there was a chance of success. 

But if they weren’t on board…

How many children were left behind during No Child?  How many kids weren’t seen in a new, positive light by teachers who had pegged them as troublemakers? How many kids didn’t find a reason to go to school and stay involved (at least on Tuesdays) because of their arts program?  Too many to think about, is my guess. 

And I thought I was done thinking about it.  My career as an arts administrator folded with the economy.  The program went on, in good hands, without me.  People I trained are still doing the work and I try to forget about the lost children.

Then, my wife got cast in the play No Child…, which opens Saturday, May 12, at 8 pm at Mesa College’s Apolliad Theatre.  Turns out playwright and teaching artist Nilaja Sun spent six weeks teaching/directing a play during No Child Left Behind.  Sun takes this experience and tells a very compelling story about what it’s like being an outsider in a system that is troubled, working with kids who are troubled on a project that never had a chance.  She gets it all pretty much right.  It is a bold and insightful piece of theatre that doesn’t preach, doesn’t name names.  It just shows one powerful experience.

And it leaves no one behind.

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No Child… by Nilaja Sun.  Presented by InnerMission Productions, in collaboration with the Mesa College Drama Department.  May 12-20, 2012, at Mesa College’s Apolliad Theatre.  Tickets to may be purchased online at www.innermissionproductions.org,

at the box office an hour before curtain or by calling 619-324-8970.

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Kevin Six is an actor and playwright.  For a time, During No Child Left Behind, he was the executive director of City Moves!, the chair of the San Diego Regional Arts and Culture Coalition and on several arts and arts education boards, committees and round tables.  He really thinks you owe it to yourself to see No Child…

The MENding Monologues by Kevin Six

I have seen courage.  It comes in odd shapes.  Rarely, if ever, does it look like Clint Eastwood makes it look.  For he's a wiley pro who knows what we think we're looking for.
No, courage comes when ordinary people are exposed to awfulness and act like humans in the face of it.
It was the case last night (3-23-12) at InnerMission's production of the MENding Monologues.
The story of the movement is as courageous as the men who performed last night, to say the least.  As is usual in society a woman spoke up first.  Eve Ensler had basically seen enough violence done to women and decided to do something about it.

As luck would have it, Eve Ensler is a brilliant writer and her courageous step (what, if anything can one person do in the face of overwhelming awfulness?) lead to more steps and, well, a movement.
Then Derek Dujardin did something equally courageous (and maybe more so because men are raised to be stoic in the face of just about everything).  He called bullshit on men sitting idly by as the Vagina Monologues were performed, on men getting away with telling rape jokes and, really, men getting away with rape.  Really, the statistics are staggering.

Ask the men of InnerMission's The MENding Monologues.  They put those statistics up there for everyone to see.  Along with a bunch of excellently-wrought soul searching, a bunch of great words and, both my favorite and least favorite moment, the legal names of all 19 people who knew what Jerry Sandusky was up to at Penn State and did nothing.

Nineteen men associated with the scandal. Big men. Well respected men. Athletes.  Strong.
But not courageous.

No, my friends were courageous.  They stood up there.  Sp

Publish Post

oke from the heart and the gut and called bullshit and basically made everyone cry.  And it was very cool.

Hopefully the people in the audience will go home from last night's experience and think twice before letting someone get away with... a joke at the expense of women, the maltreatment of women, children and other men and maybe rape and violence will cease to exist.

Oh, and the Vagina Monologues is probably just as good.  I'm seeing that tonight.
Tet your tickets at: http://innermissionproductions.org/

Kevin Six on writing and directing "The Blood Countess"

I belonged briefly to the Lotus Theatre Collective, which produced "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)" and co-produced my last world premiere "Love Negotiated".  One of the projects we talked about but never did was a play about Elizabeth Bathory, about whom I knew nothing until I saw a Discovery Channel documentary on her.  It turns out that the exploits of Elizabeth Bathory made her more of a vampire than Dracula.

After watching the documentary, I pitched my collective-mates on a story that juxtaposed the historic countess with modern "psychic vampires".  Psychic vampires are a group of people who seek to take the energy of willing participants through odd made-up ritual.  But there are people who can take your energy in the form of time (by being late), money (by screwing up in business) and life (by driving like a zombie on California freeways).  I call them psychic vampires but they’re also known as “Crazymakers.” 

Crazymakers were first introduced in The Artist's Way.  "Crazymakers thrive on drama, and melodrama requires a sense of impending doom. ... Theirs is a world of trumped up conflict, confusion, and chaos."  --The Artist’s Way at Work – Riding the Dragon. Twelve Weeks to Creative Freedom by Mark Bryan, with Julia Cameron and Catherine Allen

This type of person has haunted me for years.  A committee member who brings business to a screeching halt because she "doesn't understand" any on a number of small things; that member of a sports team who is always getting himself hurt; and probably every cast member on every reality series ever made.

I was ranting about this while volunteering for DangerHouse on their production of "An Evening of The Grand Guignol".  DangerHouse and Grand Guignol were made for each other: theatrical realism, melodrama and blood all mixed together to make for theatre that makes people wonder either why they're so afraid or why they enjoy being scared so much.  Marie Miller, a DangerHouse founder, is an excellent lighting designer who has worked on two of my previous productions.  She mentioned that there was a very Grand Guignol-esque theatre that DangerHouse rented and asked if I had anything to put in it.  I gave her my Elizabeth Bathory vs. the Psychic Vampire pitch and told her I had "almost a whole play written".  She agreed to a commission (because she knew full well that I didn't have more than a few pages down but a very good idea).  And she wanted a bloodbath.

So I began writing about three Goth Girls from UCSD on a trip to Transylvania to give Elizabeth Bathory her due.  Then Marie took me to the Victory Theater.  It was perfect!  The building is old -- circa 1920 -- and has housed, among other things, a movie theatre and an evangelical church.  It is the current home of Technomania Circus.  The Techno-Maniacs welcomed me with open arms and Castle Bathory began to take shape in my mind.  I had thought of doing the play originally at Sweedenborg Hall (where I was the playwright in residence until recently) but the sheer amount of blood, blasphemy and breasts meant that I probably couldn't do the show anywhere near a church.  But a former church?  In a bad part of town? OK!

One problem with bringing this story to the stage is that Elizabeth Bathory spent a lot of time in the tub.  I wouldn't be surprised if the term "bloodbath" were traced to her.  You see, she bathed in the blood of virgins because she liked the way the blood made her skin look.  In the TV special, there was a scene of the Countess striking a servant girl with a brush.  So the bathtub and the brush would be recurring props.  The twin constructs would be power and bloodlines, along with a strict upbringing and liberal use of the brush on little countesses who don't respect those constructs.

Meanwhile, in San Diego, we couldn't find a tub! Until we found a 350-pound faux-brown-marble tub I had nightmares!  The tub was one of those things that fell into our laps after five minutes on Craig's List and one phone call -- and it was literally sitting ten blocks from DangerHouse (yes, it's a place; Marie lives there).  Providence! A theatre and a tub!

Then I worked to make the play a commentary on the youth-obsessed American psyche.  Well, actually that was easy.  I watch TV commercials like only an under-employed actor can and you’ll see it in a day.  Now my three Goth Girls were smart and socially astute -- something DangerHouse's Marie Miller had insisted on.  Three smart girls, a Renfield-like castle handyman with a secret and a mysterious minister of culture who doubles as Thorko, Bathory's manservant/lover/occultist .  Now to draw the Blood Countess.

She was easy as well.  It turns out all those Crazymakers from my past came in handy.  She is more powerful than smart and more smart than nice.  And she wants to tell her story.  To do that, certain rites must be seen to.  Then, when she breaks out of a statue (yes, that cost a lot of money, thanks for asking), it's a simple thing to reunite with her servant/lovers and compel the American girls to set the story straight.  But what would make a woman kill and bathe in the blood of over 500 local virgins?  Her violent past?  Her mysterious lover/manservant Thorko?  An evil father?  How about yes to all three!  So the tale she tells is a brutal one.

The Goth Girl in charge is the self-proclaimed Psychic Vamp Ilona Black, who began life and her stay in Transylvania as Eileen Brown.  The Scene Vamp Darcy Sainz is her friend and consort in any number of occultist dabblings and Darcy's kid sister Dot, the smart one, does all the research.  But three smart, privileged American Goths are no match for The Blood Countess. When The Blood Countess gets into their heads, they play all manner of characters from the Blood Countess' life and some get stuck in character...

There needed to be bondage.  Bathory's victims needed to be kept somewhere between bleedings and bound and gagged seemed like the best bet.  To represent this, we're asking the audience's indulgence.  Four lucky audience members will be tied up on stage each night. The cast are all well-versed in knot-tying... I looked into various knots used in the bondage community and the interesting thing was that they were all pretty much the name knots I use in theatre and circus rigging.  Yes, I have done time as a circus roustabout and a trapeze catcher, hasn't everyone?

I might as well give the rest of the plot away.  I recently read that Romeo and Juliet is, and always has been, the most popular story in history simply because everyone knows what's going to happen.  And, if audiences don't know this, they are told in the prologue AND the epilogue of the play.  So my Elizabeth Bathory comes to life on Valentine's Day (Marie Miller's idea not mine, I wanted Halloween).  She does this only when there's a full moon on St. Valentine's night.  Romantic?  Yes, she and Thorko are lovers in this play -- one of the benefits of preparing a play for a Feb. 14 opening.  So the statue comes to life, finds the Goth Girls charming, and compels them to tell her story properly.

A first-person narrative from the Blood Countess' own lips as acted by the Goth Girls with the help of János and The Minister, who are always in for theatrical fun on Valentine's Night.  Then she turns the Americans into her servants from the old times.  The sisters Darcy and Dorothy Sainz are a perfect match for the witches Dorottya and Darvula Szentes and Eileen Brown (or the newly minted Ilona Black) is a perfect match for the nurse Ilona Joo.  The story is told, the audience is bled and the American girls pay the ultimate price for their fawning affection for vampires.

And that, my children, is the story of “The Blood Countess”.

Play Readings, a Primer

A great and inexpensive way for playwrights and theatre producers to inexpensively look at a play is a staged reading.  I have been in a lot of play readings and seen more.  I have been involved in readings for 30 years as actor, audience member, writer and producer.  So I think I know what I'm talking about when I offer advice for actors, directors and audience members regarding the play reading.

Actors: Hire professional actors and pay them if you can
Actors know how to read plays and, especially, how to read them aloud.  They can take direction with little or no explanation.  Actors also ask very good questions about scripts and they will make choices like actors.  Non actors and playwrights (unless they are also professional actors) not so much.  Plays were meant to be acted so have actors involved as early as possible.

Directors: Don't direct.
What?  Really?  Yes!  This is not the place or the time to make a statement.  A reading is for audiences, playwrights and theatre decision makers to hear the play.  That's it.

Playwrights: Don't act or direct.
If you are an actor or a director and a playwright you already know this.  You want to sit in the audience and hear the play with everyone else.  You also want to watch the audience and their reactions.  If you're not an actor or a director, you need to know that actors and directors don't like playwrights to tell them what to do as much as playwrights don't like actors, directors and audience members to tell them what or how to write.  Also actors hate being given a line reading; that is when you show them how to say a given line.  It's like an actor spelling the word "the" for you.

Audience members: Don't rewrite the play.
If the opportunity to discuss the play arises, please remember that the playwright is the writing specialist in the room -- even if you happen to be a playwright.  Remember that the writer is interested in your experience as an audience member.  If you have a bunch of great ideas about how the play should go, please write a play and have a reading.  Before you do, please read the above.


Thanks!
Kevin Six

From New Theatre World Blogger Tiffany Tang

...I also moderate some of the readings for the San Diego Shakespeare Society, which Kevin frowns upon, but I actually get a big kick out of.

Last month we had students from Grossmont College who were studying Romeo and Juliet for the first time.  It was great.  They were getting up and reading and really getting into it (especially
after I told them that the guys basically clown around and talk about sex the whole time).  And then of course, we have solid actors like Steve Jensen doing amazing readings as Mercutio and Benvolio.

This one woman came up to me quietly during the break and asked if she might read the balcony scene as Juliet.  She was thinking, when will I ever get the chance to play Juliet?  And it was great.  Sometimes the readings make for very special evenings.  Would that be interesting for a piece?

-Read all about Tifany Tang here-

Shakespeare and Anonymous

Another film about Shakespeare is here and this one (gasp) puts forth the authorship question.  The film Anonymous, which carries the tag line "was Shakespeare a Fraud?", was summed up by the San Diego Reader's David Elliott thusly, "Here is a film for people who hated Shakespeare in school, who think that iambic pentameter was taught in geometry, and guess that the first Hamlet was, uh... Simon Cowell? The movie, to its shame, enshrines ignorance about Shakespeare."

 I'm going to see it.  I love Shakespeare and watching scenes of his, in the period setting, is what gets me going -- regardless of who wrote them.  Then there is the virtual cavalcade of Shakespearean actors to be seen: OK only Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Jacobi but they're worth the price of admission alone.

So there are the period settings, the costumes, two great actors and three or four really good ones.  Done.  Now, for the arguments...

Many Oxfordians believe that Shakespeare could not have written the plays, sonnets and poems attributed to him because he only had a grade school education, was a simple tradesman and was an actor.  Oddly, these are about the only facts extant about perhaps the greatest writer in the English language -- and the same Stratfordian arguments for his authorship as well.  I will take them in order...

Grade School
In Elizabethan England, grade school was 10-hours, six days a week of Latin and Greek and has been likened to a modern Masters degree.

Tradesman
Shakespeare's father John was a Glover and an alderman who tried most of his life to become a gentleman.  William ran off to be an actor and returned to Stratford a sharer in the best theatre troupe in London, purchased the largest house in town and got his family a coat of arms.

Actor
Actors in Shakespeare's time had to have an immense amount of words in their heads.  They performed a different play every night and many parts in each play.  Imagine TV but live, with a limited number of actors.  Oh, and they all danced and sang too.  So an actor would have an immense vocabulary, understand plots and characters, and know how to put them together.

But only a genius could create the characters who said these lines and Shakespeare, whether he was a Glover from Stratford, the Earl of Oxford or the Queen herself (oh, yes that's a theory too).  I offer  three nice sources on the authorship question:


How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen Marche.
This brief and witty book shares all the things Shakespeare brought into the world and some of the funny outcomes of actions by Shakespeare fans.  States that no one has ever been granted permission to write a masters' thesis on the Oxfordian argument.

My Name is Will by Jess Winfield
You might recognize the name of one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and 
authors of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged.  His story is simply the best look into the life and times of William Shakespeare even thought the journey is taken by a dude on mushrooms at a Renaissance fair in northern California.

The Beard of Avon by Amy Freed
Tough going as a playwright to write a play that has Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford, the Queen and possibly a few others as authors of the Bards work.  Tough because most theatres are Stratfordian and too few have produced it.  But read this play, even if you can't see it.  It brings Shakespeare to life as well as his theatrical partners and his witty wife.

If you want to have the argument, see the film, read the above and get ready.  It will be hard to change any one's mind.  After all the huffing and puffing, though, take your opponent to see a play!

Kevin Six is an actor, playwright and a self-described actorian who believes Shakespeare wrote his plays but had help from the actors in his troupe. He can be found at www.KevinSix.com.