Cars, stars and parsing art (looking back on 1/25)

Saturday morning was going to be great; my drive across LA to the Santa Monica Beach House offers light traffic and a good parking spot. But my old Mustang had other plans; an unscheduled stop at the auto mechanic for an emergency repair.

 

I arrived late for my public office hours, shared this weekend with Star Tourz, a truck-based solo art exhibit with public questionnaires. Corrine Siegel parked her art vehicle at the Community Beach House and set up her display.

 

My Artist in Residence efforts, were outdoors on Saturday. I was sitting under a canopy with a table and sign, paired with Star Tourz. The weather was beautiful and the crowds were milling on the beach especially outside the café.  This helped my public office hours a bit; some of her visitors would speak to me.  The young woman gyrating with a hula hoop attracted some attention outside the van, as did the moving lift on the art truck.

 

But the Artist in Residence is a quieter form. The individuals who engaged me actively sought me out; the Austrian artists in residence from the MAK Center/Schindler House, and the 2013 Beach House Writer in Residence, coming in from Antelope Valley to meet this year’s creative. 

 

Form impacts function, when art and site are faceted. When we parse,dividing a sentence, artwork, or experience into parts, we identify their relations to each other sometimes with a loss of meaning. According to E. M. Forster, our human impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the coda of his 1910 novel Howard’s End: "Only connect.”

-Helen Lessick

Sun, sea and o wasps!

My public office hours on Monday coincided with a private event at the Beach House. OWASP held lectures, panels and a lunch. They're not Vespa owners - the Open Web Application Security Project is an advocacy group for open-source web application security. These folks from around the world bring community and communal values to the web.

Thanks to the open layout of the Beach House, and my AIR public office hours, an OWASP board member and former chief of security for Mozilla came up and introduced himself during a break.  He was fascinating, talking about their global efforts, net neutrality and the need for better OWASP graphics. The web is also a public place in need of placemaking.

The best public spaces bring us together with individual and families we don't know we have. 

-Helen Lessick

Epiphany at the Beach

Greetings Santa Monickers, and all the ships at sea.
It is an epiphany here at the Marion Davies Beach House on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. Epiphany, January 6 in my father's Russian Orthodox religion, is the accepted date the Wise Men found the Christ child, guided by that star. Also known as Twelfth Night, it is the day we realize how special it is to be where we are. We look up and see what made us come to this place.

Over the next ten weeks I will be working on essays about public art and place making; public, arts and places. Exploring the amenities of the Annenberg Beach house and my offices in the Marion Davies residence.

What can creatives do to make a site a place? Does public art help or hinder that effort?  Does beach culture inform culture at the beach? Does politics, intellect and adult themes have a place in public, or should every public place be for children?   And who decides?

Preparing!

Jan. 5 - Preparing for my first day as the Writer in Residence at the Annenberg Community Beach House. For the next ten weeks I'll be cogitating on placemaking, community and art, so I biked to Mulholland Fountain for inspiration. One hundred years since the California Aquaduct opened, the fountain has its third remodel. It is a place, but one few people use, even though it is a beautiful site on a sunny Sunday, an open slope next to a dense housing complex in Los Feliz with new public art and landscaping.  How do we attract a community to a place?

-Helen

The Annenberg Community Beach House is pleased to present Helen Lessick, our 2014 Writer in Residence. She'll be starting her tenure on January 6 and working from the Marion Davies Guest House through March 17. Helen will be holding public office hours every Monday and Saturday from 11am-1pm onsite. If you are an artist or arts administrator you may find her extensive experience in the fields of public art, grantseeking and arts engagement to be of great interest! She will be welcoming questions from the public both here and in person. 

Please follow this blog - she'll be posting updates and information here; you can also call the Beach House at 310-458-4904 for up to the minute updates. 

Reservations for her public events will be available at annenbergbeachhouse.com/beachculture on a rolling basis starting in late December.

Helen Lessick is a conceptual artist, author, and public art consultant who is spending her time as the 2014 Writer in Residence finishing a project called a "Field Guide to Time," writing three essays on art in the public sphere, and leading two discussion groups about art and community as well as a proposal writing workshop for artists. Born and raised near Philadelphia, Helen headed west for her education. She travels widely to write, research, make art in public, participate in the founding of artist-run organizations and work in nonprofit and municipal cultural programs. Her practice is based in Los Angeles. More info at lessick.net

HYPERBOLE:bard - Interview with Derek Petropolis

Derek Petropolis

The talented Derek Petropolis is currently appearing in Rogue Artists Ensemble's HYPERBOLE:bard. As he's gearing up for another week of bard at the Annenberg Community Beach House, he took a minute to talk about his first experience with Rogue Artists Ensemble:

Rogue Artists Ensemble: How did you get involved in creating HYPERBOLE: bard?  Have you worked on other Rogue HYPERBOLE shows before? 

Derek Petropolis: Well, I'm pretty new to LA and stumbled onto Rogue by chance.  I am a graduate of Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington and generally prefer theatre to film.  I was basically perusing for theatre auditions and came across the HYBERBOLE listing.  It stood out because it was a mask audition (something I have always been quite passionate about.), and I immediately knew that I wanted to be a part of the show.  I have taken classes in mask work but have never had an opportunity to be in a mask and movement based show, so it is quite exciting to be a part of HYPERBOLE!   I have never worked with the Rogues before, but after this experience I can say that I would definitely want to work for this company again.  They are all very close knit, but that didn't stop them to inviting me into their family with open arms.  They are friendly, daring, and talented group.

RAE: What was the process like in developing the piece?  How did it challenge (or not challenge) you as an actor?

DP: I feel like the process for this piece was very unique.  When I came into the process, they had already basically made the show.  They knew which scenes they wanted and had a basic layout for each one.  However, that's not to say that every scene hasn't changed dramatically since we started rehearsals.  In each rehearsal we were encouraged to play around in each scene and just kind of see where the masks take us.  If it went with what had already been established, great.  If it went in a weird and funky new direction, great.  We would play in each mask form and see how it informed the circumstances of each scene.  It was both a total blast, and completely frustrating.

RAE: What is your favorite story or character in the show and why? 

Derek performing in HYPERBOLE:bard

DP: I LOVE the Apothecary character.  The mask is hilarious, but also kind of mysterious and devious.  It really lends itself to being a character to steal the show.  Not to mention all the possibility for all the prop comedy!     I think Taylor has been doing a wonderful job with the character and has really brought it to life.  I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to take that mask out for a spin...     

RAE: What is it like working at the Annenberg Beach House?

DP: The beach house is an amazing venue for this piece.  For a movement and mask show, I don't think we could have asked for a better space.  The house provides us with lots of different levels, entrances and exits, and provides us with lots of different ways to stage things.  At first it was a bit of challenge to use the space, but I think that made us work harder and come up with a better product.  It is still a challenge everyday to use the space with masks, but that's part of the challenge and fun of the show!

RAE: Why do you think audiences should come see the show?

DP: I think this is an awesome show for everyone to come out and see.  There is truly something for Shakespeare newbies and buffs alike.  The show is easily accessible to audiences of all ages. Its a delicious cake of physical comedy topped of with the tasty icing of wit.  Now the show is a cake.  Who doesn't like cake?

Words, Words, Words

by Julia Garcia-Combs

HYPERBOLE:bard at Annenberg Community Beach House

Movement coach & Part of the Development Team of Rogue Artists Ensemble's HYPERBOLE:bard

In the philosophies of Art and Aesthetics, Theater is considered a subcategory of Literature. Edward Hopper said, “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” Theater isn’t literature, because it isn’t meant to be read. What makes the theater so exciting as an art form is it’s incorporation of all forms. Theatre is visual, auditory, visceral, experiential, moving and changing. It is the closest artistic approximation to the experience of life itself: as soon as something beautiful has happened, it just as quickly disappears.

Imagine for a moment what it must have been like to go see the latest Shakespeare play. What relationships will we watch unfold? What decisions will they have to make? Will we connect to the character’s desire for love or power? Do we want what they want? Do we feel what they feel?

My favorite hyperbole, “O, I could weep my spirit from mine eyes!” (Julius Caesar), expresses a universally understood emotion; we all know what it’s like to feel betrayed by someone we love and weep our spirit from our eyes. We all know what it is like to ask, “To be or not to be - that is the question;” as artists we make it our pursuit to question the meaning of life.

But today, to the larger majority, it is just poetry. Beautiful poetry. But it’s literature. (Or it’s boring theater.) Why? In Peter Ackroyd’s Introduction to The Complete Works he states:

In recent years it has become all the more necessary to read William Shakespeare. We live in a visual, rather than an oral culture. Shakespeare’s first audiences were used to the long sermon, as well as the ‘mighty line’... The audiences of the twenty-first century are ill-equipped to listen to Shakespeare's plays... They cannot follow the dialogue, even if they can more or less comprehend the plot. Half the significance is lost to them. 

We must ask: what is this significance that is lost? It is not the plot, but the imagery - the associations of words that create meaning through memories, thoughts, opinions, emotions and beliefs. We must connect with the significance of Shakespeare's plays to our own, visual, real-time culture.

William Shakespeare used his gift with words as a tool in seeking to communicate, to express the full depths of his imagination to his audience. The key to unlocking the significance of Shakespeare's work today is not in speaking the language, but in asking, “What does the language do?” What did it do to the audiences of the day (where it was essentially pop-culture)? What does it do to those of us today who connect to it?

It is an outward expression of the internal experience. It makes us feel and imagine experiences outside of ourselves. It is this act of creating an outward experience to express internal forces. “It is as if we are gazing upon the spectacle of language in the act of expressing itself,” (Ackroyd). The challenge of HYPERBOLE: bard is to communicate a piece of Shakespeare’s imagination to our modern day, visual audience through a visceral theatrical experience.

HYPERBOLE:bard continues at the Annenberg Community Beach House July 17 - 19!