by dave brown | Feb 10, 2016 | featured post
I’m Dave Brown. Welcome to the second blog from The PaperBoats Platform. The PaperBoats is an international partnership platform for performance makers interested in pioneering new ways of connecting and creating. If you missed my first blog, please check it out before you read this one. Where to Begin? It’s a question often asked by performance-makers. I’d known for three years that I would leave Patch Theatre Company at the end of 2015. By December 2014, I had conceived all the performance work I needed to complete before I left the company. 2015 was about doing the work and handing over. Suddenly, I found that I was alert to the need to sniff out my next project. Alert is right! Alarm is probably more accurate!! It came over me in a wave of panic! WHAT’S NEXT! “In 2016 I don’t have a project!!!” I love my creative life so much I couldn’t conceive of not having one. I’m one of those people who needs a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning! It comes from a deep yearning. I simply love being led into creative activity fed by insatiable curiosity and the pleasure of collaboration. Is this a familiar feeling? The Seed: I had been speaking with Dr. Brant Pope and Megan Alrutz from the University of Texas in Austin and Nat Miller from ZACH Theatre in Austin about doing a project. Their interest stemmed from them wanting to engage their artists in theatre-making processes for early childhood audiences. Over my 20 years at Patch, I’d developed my own philosophy and practice of theatre-making. Like most artists, I’ve been so busy “doing it” that I’d not pulled the ideas together in a comprehensive way. It would be fun, I thought, to conceive...
by dave brown | Nov 12, 2015 | overview
Hello. My name is Dave Brown and I’m a performance-maker with an insane curiosity for how we as humans function as “creators”. What is this drive that leads us to make meaning? How does it work? As a theatre thinker and tinker, I offer a digest of provocations and insights designed to incite and inspire like-minded enthusiasts of creative practice. My playground will be the seven principles of performance-making. Two stonecutters were engaged in a similar activity. Asked what they were doing, one answered, “I’m squaring up this block of stone.” The other replied, “I’m building a cathedral!” Clearly what counts is not so much what work a person does … but what we perceive we’re doing it for. Willis Harman, Global Mind Change, 1988, p144 I’ve spent the last 20 years as Artistic Director of Patch Theatre Company creating professional theatre for 4-8 year olds. I can’t remember ever having taken a sick day. Surely I did! The point is, I’ve been incredibly privileged to “work” at something that is inherently joyful, challenging, absorbing and worthwhile! I loved every minute of it!! The ideas and experience that I accumulated across my time at Patch Theatre has led me to my new venture called The PaperBoats, which I describe as an international partnership platform for theatre-makers, that investigates and pioneers new ways of connecting and creating. photo: patch theatre production – emily loves to bounce As part of this venture, I have designed seven principles of performance-making which I’ve cobbled together across the years. I am using these “principals” to pioneer new ways of performance-making. I believe we’re on the cusp of some trail-blazing possibilities in the way we “collaborate to create”, prompted by new technologies and...
by dave brown | Nov 5, 2015 | Uncategorized
We shall never cease from exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive at the beginning and know the place for the first time. T.S. Elliot All performance-making projects have a starting point. I call it the “germinal idea.” It’s the animating idea that activates artful investigation. It’s represents the beginning of the journey. The launching of a paperboat! Warning Alert!!! The germinal idea is not a framework established to exert control; rather it is an invitation to open out and see what possibilities, experiences, ideas and happy accidents come from the seed. We know the seed looks nothing like the plant it gives rise to and so the performance that results from a germinal idea rarely looks much like its beginnings. The idea itself is not nearly as important as the content it generates. A question. If the Big Bang was the beginning of time what went before it? Yes - even though the germinal idea is the beginning that prompts investigation, there is a process involved in getting to the germinal idea to prompt those beginnings. So where does the germinal idea come from? If you’re going to make a performance, you have to convince others to be part of it - funders, partners, collaborators, makers, administrators, producers. There needs to be some kind of vision or dream … some kind of intent. More often than not, the divining of the germinal idea is the responsibility of a key person in the creative process. You could turn up on the day, with a bunch of artistic associates and collectively start from scratch on a...
