Coming full chalk circle

Greetings, Minnesota theater community! It's great to be able to blog at you (to you? with you? near you?). Thanks to Alan Berks for putting together this issue on the intersection of film and theater and to Matthew Foster of the Minnesota Fringe Festival for hooking us up. For me, working with MinnesotaPlaylist is somewhat of a homecoming.

As a college sophomore, entranced by the writing of Sam Shepherd and Tom Stoppard, and an enthusiastic member of the set crew for Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, I switched my major from visual art to theater, which led me on a fourteen-year journey ending when I quit my full-time gig as co-director of Galumph Interactive Theater to pursue political organizing work.

A year ago I returned to the arts as Membership & Marketing Director at IFP Minnesota Center for Media Arts, a membership organization for filmmakers, screenwriters, and photographers. As I learn more about our local film community, and the huge changes going on in the film industry generally, I have been struck by the similarity of the position of the independent filmmaker and theater artist, and the huge potential of the economy of social networking for all independent storytellers who desire minimal interference from corporations and maximum connection to their audiences.

When Chris Griffith and I decided, as college seniors who met on an arts semester in Chicago, to start our own theater company, the producing approach that inspired me was not from the world of theater, but from indie rock. As a teenager living in Wisconsin I had been fascinated with the Minneapolis music scene. I kept track of what cities the bands I heard on college radio were from, so I could get a sense of what was happening in places like Boston or Athens, Georgia. I knew the names of the artist-run record labels and loved independent record stores when I could get to them. Here were artists who were doing exactly what they wanted to do, with no LA record label controlling them, and they were socially connected to their audience. I was dimly aware of how little money was involved in that level of art-making, but that didn't matter as much as the freedom.

There's an indie rock spirit in regional theater and indie filmmaking. There is a reason we have not gone to Broadway or Hollywood. And there are some of the same tactics. The emerging social media tactics for all kinds of storytelling artists are certainly similar. Also, with the emergence of cross-platform storytelling, in which a story may play out through television, the internet, live performance, comic book, graffiti, conventions, games, etc., the lines between art forms may fade, or artistic companies may become collaborative teams of artists from several disciplines.

Since I've been away from theater for seven years and am new in the film scene, I'm counting on readers to augment my offerings with more informed opinion. I'd love to get a conversation going between the Twin Cities theater and filmmaking community going, and I'll be asking questions to get it going. Our creativity and ability to collaborate are our strengths, and I'm sure that there are some incredible personal and conceptual connections just waiting to happen.

As a sample of what I'll be blogging about, check out the blog of Ted Hope, the legendary indie film producer and ideologue behind Truly Free Film.