100+ day

7/22

Today is the day it reaches 100+ degrees in New York City. The days of freezing in the church are long gone. 

Spend as much time as I can in Starbucks before showing up in the office. I’ve got a service to pull together, lots of phone calls to make. 

A young well muscled guy comes in. Turns out he’s a producer, without defining that. But he does work for Sleep No More, the immersive theatre group doing a kind of Macbeth in a derelict midtown hotel. Word of what Woodshed is doing is getting around. More and more people want to check out our space. Danielle leaves to give him a tour. 

When she gets back, she says, you’ve got to see this, it’s crazy. Meaning the work Woodshed is doing throughout the buidling.  And she’s right, like overnight, walls are going up. A Parisian apartment building is coming to life. She also suggests I look at their new website, what they say about themselves. She sees now how they connect:

Woodshed Collective creates installation theater presented free of charge to the public. The company realizes handcrafted, visceral worlds in diverse locations for our audience to explore, athleticizing their senses, emotions, and minds. Inspiring spectators to claim a presence that helps author the experience itself, our productions aim to create a genuine sense of wonder.

Offering free admission is essential to the company’s goals. It expands our audience beyond the traditional demographic that supports theater. It underlines the audiences’ role as active participants rather than as passive consumers. It ties us more closely to the local communities in which we perform. It helps us breathe life into an increasingly marginalized form of art.

We rely on the power of language, story, and image to bind groups of people, and break down the barriers of everyday life. The theatrical worlds we create incorporate and celebrate the transformative power of music, dance, and visual art. We reject the dominant understanding of theater as a static monologue in favor of a noisy, delirious, horrifying, and hilarious conversation. Our commitment to installation is a commitment to reinvigorating this essential art for a new generation.

http://www.woodshedcollective.com/

Getting very hot. Time to take Danielle to the office. Always see Amanda here. Today thinking that it was her idea for us to do 100 events in honor of our 100th year and pushed me to start counting.  And now Sarah’s marketing theme, 100+: events, artists, picks up the same theme, idea. Oh, and today, in NewYork City, it was 100+.