Monday, February 7, 2011

The Theaatah

I’ve been going to the theater lately. One of the nice things about living in Los Angeles is that there’s no shortage of plays going on at any time. Since I don’t have a background in the performing arts, I thought I’d better go check some out if I intend on putting on SOS live later this year.

The two shows I went to this weekend were very different – one was at a children’s theater in North Hollywood and the other was at a performance art space in Echo Park.

The first show I went to this weekend was delightful. It was a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk by the Storybook theater. I’D never been to a children’s theater before, it was PACKED! The show was short - 30mins 1st half, 10 min intermission, 20 min 2nd half. I sat in the back and took notes. I was hesitant to go because my number 2 had an obligation come up that day and I thought I might seem like a creep by myself. No one cared, or even noticed really. The kid’s were SO into the show. There must have been 150+ kids all totally engaged for the whole hour. It was definitely geared towards a younger audience (3-9), but they had all these great and simple ways for the audience to participate. Really good stuff, I took a ton of notes. I’m glad I went to go see it (creep or not).

The second show I went to was sort of a performance-meets-science-research personalized art show…thing. I’m kind of at a loss to explain was it was exactly. It’s an installation put on at Machine Project described as puppets and art meets science. “Puppets meets science! That’s what I want to do!” I said. So I signed up and went for my personalized performance to see what it was all about. It was definitely a unique experience. The best way I can think to explain it was is to say it was flavored more to the social science spectrum than the science-science spectrum. I can’t tell you about what happens in the personalized art performance, but you can sign up and go see it for yourself HERE. It's neat. Go try it. 

In summation: I believe in both cases that this was time well spent. I also realized I have a lot more work to do.

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