1st Stage is proud to announce that it almost has a working toilet. This and other developments have enthralled all of our employees. As of now, our space (I think we need to start calling it "the theater") is on target for a September Grand Opening!
Here are some artsy stills of our dedicated construction team:
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Street Theater
Prankster/artist, Mark Jenkins, in Washington DC:
And Then in Barcelona:
Monday, July 21, 2008
Renderings
Nat Krause, who made us this model:
Has also put together a spectacular virtual model.
New videos are up. These are part of a series of status updates regarding our construction.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Only about 6,200 remaining!
Donations now seem to be running smoothly. You can pick square feet, buy them, and put your picture on them! Go on, mark some territory. Click the button at left. If, however, you have a slower Internet connection or an older computer, I would recommend using the simple donation option. Here you can specify the number of squares desired. We can randomly place your purchase or you can email us a location (go crazy counting coordinates: 42,123, or just tell us a general location: "center stage"... "the actor's shower stall"). Email to questions@1ststagespringhill.org Simple donation can also be reached through the button above.
Lauren Friedman is our brand new stage manager. She brought this important video to my attention. So, I thought I'd bring it to you.
And if that doesn't make you thirst for the warm theatrical embrace of Marxist Entertainments ... maybe these fine gentlemen will:
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Donations
Some of you have expressed a desire to make a donation to 1st Stage. Many of you have vainly clicked on the donation foot on the home page only to be disappointed with a plain text page that says: "Web donation will be available soon." To all of you, I'm sorry. Until we were sure of our time-table and location we refrained from taking the offerings of the generous masses.
All that changes this Friday.
Update: Thanks to some issues with paypal (that are now rapidly being resolved) the donation site may not be up till Saturday.
On Friday we will be unveiling our Theater by the Square Foot campaign. Clicking on the foot will take you to a very exciting web donation application that Alex Withrow and myself have poured all our tech know-how into (read: Alex's Tech know-how, and my exuberant strings of computer-confusion induced profanity).
So, if you'd like to make a donation or would like to see the progress of our fundraiser. Stop by the website this weekend!
In just about every artistic conversation we've had over the past year the word "immersive" has bubbled up from the collective depths of our networked right-hemispheres. Good art is (to my mind) an assault on the senses. The artist takes his inspiration (sensory stimulus real or imagined) and then finds a medium through which to pass that sensory stimulus into an audience. To immerse them.
That's why I'm most excited about how new technology can bring to the theater the kind of sensory bombardment we've come to expect from imax films, pixar animations, and big-screen TVs with home theater sound-systems.
I want to score our performances with images, as well as music. Using digital projection we will provide rich, vivid images that (without distracting from the action) put people deep into the world of the play.
Visually, this style artistic endeavor is already well represented by what might seem an unlikely source: HBO original series opening credit sequences. Each one prepares the viewer for the action to come with evocative colors, objects and scenes. They aren't explicitly storytelling ("A three hour tour..."), most aren't even literal; instead, they fill the audience, perhaps without their knowledge, with an heightened awareness of the world they are entering.
I've embedded a bunch of my favorites (episode after episode, I never get sick of seeing these):
First, of course, is...
Even more in this vein of immersion is...
More scenic...
More symbolic (with heart-starting music)...
With somewhat overzealous application of digital editing techniques...
And with a more seductive application of the same techniques...
The rich visual imagery and the emotionally charged musical scoring effectively and insidiously transport the viewer to a new setting, filled with all the details and emotional undercurrents necessary for impending drama.
All of them are beautiful, simple, and effective works of art in their own right. They inspire me constantly to bring a similar ethic to the stage.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
The Silver LCD Screen
As you may have noticed, we now have a jobs page (for employment opportunities) and a video page.
The video page will hold all of our video updates (only the most recent 4 stay on the home page). It will also have higher resolution versions of some of our clips. (Like the demolition video)
Note:If you are a content provider (TV station, news website, etc.) you can download these high res clips to use in video reports.
Video of us doing demolition is on the HOME PAGE! It was as fun as it looked (plus a whole lot of not-fun/pain).
Photo: Kelly Williams
Words, Words, Words
This is the "Wordle" for our first play, The Suicide. A Wordle is an image made on this site from any amount of text you provide. I provided the entire script (hence the majority of the wordle words being names). Thank you to my friend Kelly Williams for showing me this wonderful wordlefull thing!
You can also do it for a blog's xml feed. Here's Stages! We seem to be a real positive-thinking kind of place, and oh the number of dreams!
