So no one comes to our meetings. It’s ok, we get stuff done. However we do not have the appropriate press structure to access a community. People who are sports fans like to watch sports, they don’t necessarily like other fans. In fact they may actively dislike fans of other teams. Perhaps if we increase our specificity, like U of L, or U of L women’s basketball fans people would feel more responsibility to their community to show up? But then too specific makes the fans harder to find?
Our group is having a problem trying to build a community and write about the community at the same time. We have not found/made/borrowed any meta-structure of sports fans. It is not fun to host parties when no one shows up. However that is the nature of this community and we are acting within it. It’s also a hobby that people do in their leisure time and a meeting, even a community one, sounds like work.
I am not bemoaning my time wasted by their absence though. We got a lot of work done. We are working on an adaptation of Frogs and Dante’s Inferno. There is something nice about working with Classical Theatre in this context. Classical Theatre is from a time when stages were more similar to sports arenas, where the chorus was made up of soldiers, and the plots were epic. That theatre seems more similar to sports than our current version with character shoes, makeup kits and knee pads.
Also the conventions of Classical Theatre give us a framework and structure to act upon. We are really combining many structures, classical theatre, the innings of a baseball game, the television airing structure, the rules of sports, etc. We are operating in a world with so many rules, it is as if we are playing a sport.
Interesting thought. Maybe if we'd advertised like "We don't know what we're doing, come help us or we'll get it wrong!", we might have gotten some people? Then again, they might have reacted like "Pshaw, theatre? That's not important! Who cares what they do?" Seems like that's the general consensus, since even theatre students I got confirms from failed to show up.
ReplyDeleteStill, I think we got some good stuff from our first meeting, and the time we spent working after our meeting fell through really helped jumpstart our work on this play.
Even though it would have been nice to have more than one meeting with the community we're writing about, at least something good came out of their lack of enthusiasm.
I can totally relate to your frustration about people not showing up to our meetings. Honestly, being the sensitive person that I am, I take it personal for some reason. I feel like people don’t want to come to our meetings because we are theatre kids, writing a theatre piece and no one really cares about that, or us. No one really wants to support us, not even other theatre kids, they don’t show up either! That’s crazy to me, and kind of sad. But maybe it is just our lack of advertising, and people didn’t really know about it, and I am taking it too hear a little too much. But still, it is kind of sad. But we will prevail by writing an awesome show, and proving ourselves.
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