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Also from the New York Times...
ALLEJO GANTNER, the new artistic director of the avant-garde mecca P.S. 122 in the East Village...[blah blah blah snippage]... Here's what he is hoping to see during his tenure in New York.
• Cheaper tickets. I'm shocked by the prices in New York. How can people see things?
• Theater and performance that isn't stuck in a conversation with itself, referring only to other work and playing to audiences comprised solely of other theater makers. Sometime in the 80's I feel like theater lost its sense of being able to change the world, and I fear audiences now agree.
• I'd love to see how the economic "trickle effect" - from Broadway to the experimental scene - that I keep being told about really works, or indeed if it's there at all.
• We need performance and theater to stop copying TV and popular culture's pervasive mores, and start leading it.
• A foyer at P.S. 122 to escape from the First Avenue winter winds. [Ed. comment: YES!]
• Plays written for performance, not for reading. Too many plays are written today that prevent interpretation by a director or company - their intent is too literal, too predictable. They are written to be read, not performed. We need writers who question every idea of what a text can be, of how it can work with an audience, and who embrace the idea that an audience can leave a theater arguing about what the whole thing was about.
• Unpredictable and visceral ways of seeing theater grab onto the political fire that's in people of any persuasion's bellies at the moment. Too much theater is written about a problem but refuses to use the form itself as a tool. Dance that works with political ideas is far more interesting at the moment.
• I'd love to see a big cheesy Broadway show. I've never caught one.
• Cheaper tickets. I'm shocked by the prices in New York. How can people see things?
• Theater and performance that isn't stuck in a conversation with itself, referring only to other work and playing to audiences comprised solely of other theater makers. Sometime in the 80's I feel like theater lost its sense of being able to change the world, and I fear audiences now agree.
• I'd love to see how the economic "trickle effect" - from Broadway to the experimental scene - that I keep being told about really works, or indeed if it's there at all.
• We need performance and theater to stop copying TV and popular culture's pervasive mores, and start leading it.
• A foyer at P.S. 122 to escape from the First Avenue winter winds. [Ed. comment: YES!]
• Plays written for performance, not for reading. Too many plays are written today that prevent interpretation by a director or company - their intent is too literal, too predictable. They are written to be read, not performed. We need writers who question every idea of what a text can be, of how it can work with an audience, and who embrace the idea that an audience can leave a theater arguing about what the whole thing was about.
• Unpredictable and visceral ways of seeing theater grab onto the political fire that's in people of any persuasion's bellies at the moment. Too much theater is written about a problem but refuses to use the form itself as a tool. Dance that works with political ideas is far more interesting at the moment.
• I'd love to see a big cheesy Broadway show. I've never caught one.