Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Presentation at Emerson College

Art Hennessey, playwright, actor, and director who works with the Essayons Theatre Company and whose Mirror Up to Nature blog I frequently read invited me to be a guest presenter in his "Arts, Entertainment and Society" class this past Monday at Emerson College. The class is part of Emerson's certificate program in Cultural Journalism which provides journalists with the background to report on arts and culture.

I brought along some video and a couple of masks to demonstrate my work, but the presentation, led as much by the questions posed by Hennessey and his students as by what I was interested in discussing was free-wheeling and ranged from how I came to be in the arts, how I came to be a mime (which allowed me the opportunity to show video of my work with Bill Barnum and James Van Looy in Cosmic Spelunker Theater), to how do I reach my audiences, my interactions with the press, the rising importance of blogs for dialogue about the arts, as well as how outside economic pressures structures what form art work takes and how it is presented.

I even demonstrated a short excerpt from my "Arlecchino Ever Ravenous."

Hennessey and I, being both writers and performers shared the observation that sometimes maintaining our blogs seems to cut into energies we should be devoting to our "real" writing and rehearsing, while at the same time noting that it is becoming a more important outlet for writing than ever before. In my case, my blogging has had influence on controversies in Burlington, Vermont, been included on the reading list of a course at Royal Holloway, University of London, led to my being interviewed and even allowed Hennessey and I to talk about the more structural aspects of playwriting as we shared the subway ride home.

3 comments:

Alan K.Farrar said...

Reflectiveness - I spend a lot of time trying to get young teachers to write a record of their lessons - blogging in effect: Recently I introduced it to language learners too.
Far from 'taking time', pause to reflect can improve ones uptake and output (yuk - sorry, not in good form this morning).
Never enjoyed reading so much for years as I do now knowing I'm likely to blog the book I'm reading.

Art said...

Hi Ian,

We enjoyed your company as well.

Hope to have you in again sometime.
I look forward to seeing how the script comes along.

Art

Ian Thal said...

Alan-

I had an exciting experience in Junior year when the professors in my department one semester decided to assign journal writing for all of our classes-- in which we were expected to come to class with hand written reflections on the readings before we even begin discussion. In some ways it demanded a greater intellectual engagement that was often lacking when I moved on to graduate school.