Three days of peace, love and music. And crafts. And art. Days 1 and 2.

12/16

The day begins with an explosion of activity. Ted and Judith and the crafts people are hustling about getting ready for the festival to open. DJ Dan has been hired to work security. Amanda and Teddy are working on a big brown paper sign that says Music and Crafts today. Deacon James is sweeping the steps. Jason and Danielle are in serious negotiation for the ongoing presence of Occupy Wall Street here at West-Park. I call Micah and invite him down.  And Tracy has arrived to go to coffee and talk about strategy for the anti-sweat shop campaign. Meanwhile, discussions with Con Ed continue and there seems to be some kind of breakthrough. They will come Monday, work on the lines, run a pressure test. If all goes well, the heat can come on. 

Berik and Leila

Micah arrives, I introduce him to Jason and they head off together. Nick is feverishly at work trying to finish his installation piece and Leila and Berik are finishing their exhibit in the chapel. The doors to the festival swing open and I show Tracy around. The Christmas lights are sparkling and the music ready to begin. 

Brandon stops by to say hello, checks out the festival. Amazed. 

Mandola Joe

Amanda and Aaron

Amanda and Piano Dan

The music begns with violinist/fiddler Katy Rowell followed by Mandola Joe and his Buskers group. Amanda plays a set accomoanied by Aaron Rito on guitar, who also does his own set. And then Piano Dan.

Jeremy and Bob

Late in the afternoon, RL is not able to perform so Amanda asks me to step in and I set my nerves aside and do a short set. DJ Dan and Teddy and Marc the sound guy seem surprised that this is me, too. Piano Dan arrives for his set. When Jeremy arrives,we go to the Chapel to rehearse. He does his set, asks me to do some harmonies on a couple of his,  and then we do two together: Early on one Christmas Morn, originally recorded by the Cottontop Mountain Sanctified Singers, Frankie (Half-Pint) Jaxon, lead singer, and Go tell It on the Mountain, in the style of the Swan Silvertone Singers (by way of Bruce Cockburn.)

And now its time for the art shows to open. Andrea and Dan and Nate arrive. Micah has gone off to Occupy. The singers are ending, artists arriving. Nick Etre has emptied the session room and installed two portable radios under the floor playing the Beach Boys’ Let’s Go Away on loop until the batteries die. This is part of his Wear Your Love Like Heaven installation with surprises in unexpected places, again in dialogue with the building. Oh and Yeah featured sculpture, painting and print by Peggy Chiang, Maude Kasperzak, Joanna Kopczyk, Margo Malter and Bettina Yung.

Teddy and Sarah

I go off for dinner with Andrea and Nate. Then come back to close up. The Mc Alpin gallery is filled with young artists and friends. I share some wine, conversation and then its time for Sarah and I to lock up. We’re almost ready to leave when I hear noise upstairs. We go up to find some occupiers in the attic, the old Boy Scout room. When I see a ladder, I have to climb it, one says. Well no, not exactly. 

So we clear the building. Go outside. All the doorways are filled with sleepers. And to make it perfect, George is there in the south doorway, looking over all. Welcome back, George, I say, good to see you. 

Judith

12/17

Exhausted but another day begins. Mandola Joe opens the day followed by Jeremy. I sit in with some harmonies again, then run off to a play, Hand to God, with the family where I’m surprised to find two Woodshed friends, Kaitlin Binnie, the wardrobe supervisor and the playwright, Robert Askins. 

Neil

Piano Dan and Cindy

RL rocks

When I get back, Neil Howard is doing a set. Judith is concerned that the moody music will hurt sales. Uh...anyways, Piano Dan arrives with his vocalist Cindy Thrall. She’s energetic and lands somewhere between Nashville, lounge, and kick ass wedding singer. My son Dan and his friends are all in the balcony listening. RL arrives, ready to perform. Asks the audience to stay. 

He straps on the guitar and launches into his own Christmas song, Who’s That Fat Man?, complete with Elvis shake and swagger,  which if I had it recorded would go right on my play list. And then does his reading of Red Ryder and the Fat Woman, a wonderful story of a long ago Christmas, his grandmother Mabel and a BB gun. How life goes on, you use what you have. What he came back to  read at the end of the Festival clean up last year. You might say that was the beginning.Pastor K’s family has stayed and is glad they did. Dan and his friends glad they stayed, too.  

Amanda asks me to come on one more time. This time, she joins in with harmonies, which feels good. And playing is gettng easier, more comfortable, all the time. 

A good end to a good day.Time to join my Occupying boys. 

The New York Times writes about Woodshed

The New York Times' Woodshed article...

No Space Too Dilapidated for a Show

Guy Calaf for The New York Times

Top, Evan Enderle and Teddy Bergman rehearsing “The Tenant.” More Photos »

By ALEXIS SOLOSKI

Published: August 3, 2011

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FOR about three years the West-Park Presbyterian Church, at the corner of 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, sat abandoned as architects, congregants and preservationists squabbled over a plan to build condominiums above the rosy, Romanesque Revival structure. When landmark designation last year quashed development plans, worshipers returned to a building much in need of repairs. In the parish house that abuts the chapel, paint peels, damp patches spread, and musty odors rise from the basement.

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Slide Show

‘The Tenant’

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Guy Calaf for The New York Times

From left, Teddy Bergman, Stephen Squibb, Emily Fishbaine, Jocelyn Kuritsky and Carl Faber of the Woodshed Collective. More Photos »

Yet for the Woodshed Collective — an ambitious New York theater company with a commitment to low-budget, site-specific productions (past locations have included an empty swimming pool and a ship) — West-Park’s dilapidated state has been the answer to a prayer. Walking through a meeting room in the church, Gabriel Hainer Evansohn, one of the collective’s three artistic directors, ran his hand along a rip in the wall that revealed layers of faded paint. “Recreating this would be so expensive and difficult,” he said. “Actually it would be impossible.”

On Wednesday the company will begin previews of “The Tenant,” a theatrical installation that uses West-Park as the setting. It is based on a 1964 novella by Roland Topor, later adapted by Roman Polanski into a 1976 movie that flopped. Teddy Bergman, another of the collective’s artistic directors, described the source material as “French, alienated, midcentury, Left Bank moodiness.”

The story involves a Polish man, Trelkovsky, who takes over a Paris apartment — “two gloomy rooms, with no kitchen” — that had been occupied by a woman who committed suicide. As the grim building and irascible neighbors press in on him, Trelkovsky experiences a crisis of identity: He begins to dress as the dead woman and then replicates her fatal plunge.

Woodshed will use all five floors of the parish house as well as the church chapel to recreate and expand on the events in the novella. The collective has gathered six playwrights — including emerging writers like Bekah Brunstetter and Tommy Smith — to draft a script for the inhabitants of each of the fictional building’s apartments. Duncan Sheik, who won two Tony Awards for his work on the musical “Spring Awakening,” is providing the music for the production, which opens on Aug. 24 and runs through Sept. 17.

With so much sinister action and so many stairs, the show is not for the faint of heart or weak of quadriceps. Audiences can follow one set of characters throughout an evening, or hopscotch from floor to floor, somewhat in the manner of the current Punchdrunk hit “Sleep No More.” But unlike Punchdrunk, whose top ticket price can run to $95 or more, Woodshed presents its annual project free. Though, just as at a church service, a collection plate is passed after each performance.

The opportunity to perform at the church arose when the Rev. Dr. Robert L. Brashear, West-Park’s pastor, donated use of the space to the collective. It was part of a commitment to reinvent the church as a community center “for social and spiritual renewal,” Mr. Brashear said.

Woodshed originated when Mr. Bergman, Mr. Evansohn and the collective’s third artistic director, Stephen Squibb, met through drama classes at Vassar. Their initial idea was to form a troupe that would take an innovative approach to classic plays. After graduating in 2005 they decided to focus on site-specific performance. In 2008 they presented Caridad Svich’s “Twelve Ophelias” in a drained swimming pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and in 2009 they staged an adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Confidence-Man” aboard the Lilac, a decommissioned Coast Guard vessel moored in the Hudson.

Creating site-specific theater poses challenges: securing spaces, making them safe for audiences, adapting sound and lighting equipment to fit untraditional environments. Anne Hamburger, the founder and artistic director of En-Garde Arts, the site-specific group that during the 1980s and ’90s performed in New York on piers, in parks, at an abandoned nursing home and on the streets of the meatpacking district, recalled: “It’s very complex in terms of logistics and production management. You can’t fight a site. If you try, it will win.”

Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of Performance Space 122 in the East Village, which presented “Hotel Savoy” at the Goethe-Institut last year, said of site-specific work: “The predictability is much less. It’s great in terms of the excitement you feel about the piece, but it becomes a much more unwieldy beast.”

The Woodshedders have experienced that firsthand. Poor acoustics marred “Twelve Ophelias,” and uncooperative weather rained out several performances of “The Confidence Man.” In preparing “The Tenant” the crew spent two weeks just clearing away debris. But for these young men, who discussed their hopes for the show on the church’s crumbling patio, the difficulties are mitigated by the opportunities that nontraditional spaces offer.

The structure of the West-Park parish house has determined various creative decisions, influencing both script and staging. West-Park “is a character in the show, it’s a collaborator, it gets a seat at the table,” Mr. Squibb said. “As we’ve gotten to know it, it’s had different opinions of things. We wanted to use the bell tower, but it decided we didn’t get to, because it was overrun with pigeons.”

The building’s seat at the table is one of about 90 chairs, for the cast, crew, writers and designers, all of whom work free. “The Tenant,” which has a budget of under $100,000, according to the artistic directors, is Woodshed’s most ambitious undertaking: eight separate plays that must unfurl with meticulous timing as they intersect with one another. Sheaves of spreadsheets have been printed, and technical rehearsals were estimated to last three weeks. The prospect is enough to make most theater artists head for the nearest black box and stage some comforting Chekhov one-acts.

Still, Woodshed’s Web site describes its mission, in part, as creating “a genuine sense of wonder” by providing theatrical playgrounds through which audiences can wander freely, selecting their own experiences as they move from scene to scene, something a black box cannot offer.

Mr. Squibb said he was baffled as to why more theater companies don’t pursue the site-specific route. “There are so many incredible spaces in New York,” he said, “a boat on the Hudson, a giant Robert Moses pool, a church building that’s been empty for three years. And you want me to rent a theater and build a bunch of stuff and then throw it out afterward? It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 4, 2011

An earlier version of a caption in this article reversed the names of Jocelyn Kuritsky and Emily Fishbaine of the Woodshed Collective.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 7, 2011, on page AR4 of the New York edition with the headline: No Space Too Dilapidated for a Show.

Creativity is resistance

7/15

Jane and I meet at Starbucks (adjunct office 2 or 3). We like the sense of a growing shared ministry in the neighborhood.  Talk about the service she and I and Jeremy could create for Wednesday nights.

Back at the office, just a short break before heading to talk to a couple about a wedding. Then, back again, way too much to do in way too little time. Press blurbs, contracts, church growth strategy, Sunday service....


Deacon James walks in. How's he doing? Better than yesterday. Another day at the hospital. More chemo. Says he needs a senior legal specialist. Why? After 50 years, a medical DNA test for his son revealed that he is not the father, biologically speaking. 50 years made him the real father. A shock to his sense of reality. Doesn't change love, but there are Social Security implications. Who can help? Tough question. Legal Aid came up short. Maybe WSSFSH can help? See you Sunday, he says, and is gone. 

An issue. Leila has come in. She and Berik filled the walls of Mc Alpin Hall with art from their New York Realists group, to add beauty during our concert series. Hoping for an exrtended run, a real opening, etc. Now Woodshed has converted the space into a work shop. The hall will soon be converted into a Parisian cafe and courtyard.  Lack of communication re. expectations, needs, etc. Not good. Will have to work this out.

I go to look for Stephen. He’s in the backyard. A young woman from the Times is interviewing he and Teddy. Stephen introduces us. She asks me why the church would want a secular theatre group to take over so much space, for so long a time. I talk about how we were closed. The beauty of the counterintuitivity of urban homesteading in your own home, raw urban space in a gentrified neighborhhood. The vision of the Center, reintroducing the space to the community, the city. It’s four sectors of intersecting activity: arts and culture, intergenerational education, social change and spirituality. How the church always worked to live at the intersection of beauty and justice, ethics and esthetics. 

She says she doesn’t see much social content. Teddy speaks of wonder, bringing awe back to a deadened culture. The spirituality of that task. Stephen of the interaction between audience and physical space, what this building is ontologically, a church. And I speak of 9-11, my experience of the power of negation, destruction, death, non-being. And my realization that creativity, participating in the ongoing work of creation, of re-creation is an act of resistance against those powers. 

Back upstairs, Leila has been joined by Hope. We talk about where communications broke down, what we we need to do better. We can work this out.  Enough for today.