Light Cue 23

It has been a while since I have written anything here. Lots of posting but mostly other people’s words. The main reason for this has been a personal shift in how I spend my free time. While blogging has for several years now been my primary hobby, that has shifted in recent months. I have been relearning a skill/instrument that I gave up a number of years ago, the turntable.

Last weekend I played my first set in public. It was quite well received. A mix of ambient/minimal techno and classical. The electronic music I played was all composed to be freely distributed. Licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial distribution license, the music was made to be free.

The idea of truly free information, in my opinion the foundation to a truly free society, is slowly gaining ground. In music and software circles, the model of the mega-corporations are seen for the inherent failure they represent. The technology has evolved beyond the capacity for an institution to control its distribution. Fighting a war against consumers is a losing battle.

There are free software alternatives for every major commercial piece of software from word processing to image manipulation to web browsing to operating systems and more.

The group I was playing for has been producing all night music and dance events for over 12 years on an open source model. Planning procedures are maintained on a wiki, the entire organization is run by volunteers and everything from food, to music, to entrance to the event is given freely. Donations are asked for but in no way required.

In the theatre an open source model is still very much in its infancy. Charles Mee is one of, if not the first playwright to truly embrace open source ethics and aesthetics in his works.

As he says

Sometimes playwrights steal stories and conversations and dreams and intimate revelations from their friends and lovers and call this original.

And sometimes some of us write about our own innermost lives, believing that, then, we have written something truly original and unique. But, of course, the culture writes us first, and then we write our stories. When we look at a painting of the virgin and child by Botticelli, we recognize at once that it is a Renaissance painting—that is it a product of its time and place. We may not know or recognize at once that it was painted by Botticelli, but we do see that it is a Renaissance painting. We see that it has been derived from, and authored by, the culture that produced it.

And yet we recognize, too, that this painting of the virgin and child is not identical to one by Raphael or Ghirlandaio or Leonardo. So, clearly, while the culture creates much of Botticelli, it is also true that Botticelli creates the culture—that he took the culture into himself and transformed it in his own unique way.

And so, whether we mean to or not, the work we do is both received and created, both an adaptation and an original, at the same time. We re-make things as we go.

Another aspect of Free Theatre appears to be opening up as well. While many companies do pay-what-you-can nights, a theater in Ohio is trying that theory out for the whole run of its current production.

Available Light is opening Sheila Callaghan’s Dead City here in Columbus in about 2 weeks. This show is a really big deal for us. Aside from being a beautiful play that we’re all really excited about, it’s also our first show to receive significant public funding, it has the largest cast we’ve put on stage, and it’s in a space that’s costing us about 3 times what we usually pay. (Frequent readers of this blog will remember that I am very ambivalent about that particular fact.)

However, instead responding by playing it safe on other fronts to compensate for the big risks we’re taking, we’ve decided to try another big experiment. We’re making all tickets to all shows for everyone all the time “Pay What You Want”. That’s right, just like Radiohead,Trent Reznor, Saul Williams, Paste Magazine, and a small crop of restaurants.

Free culture is on the rise. It is being written into the very fabric of our larger culture. Much like free(read renewable) energy will replace finite resources like oil and coal, so too will free (read open) culture replace finite and “owned” culture.

its just a matter of time.

Tags: art, creative commons, culture, freedom, information, music, open source, theatre

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 11:01 and is filed under theatre, theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.