Update: So... what's up with West Park? This blog?

1/16/17

Pastor Robert Brashear

Update

The West Park Press began seven years ago as a way to track the daily progress of the project of bringing an (essentially) abandoned building and exiled congregation back to life. For at least five years we tracked the daily ins and outs of a classic urban ministry and an ever shifting cast of characters. From Occupy Wall Street to performances of music and theater of awesome creativity and beauty (cf. Woodshed Theatre Collective, Noche Flamenca....) to the struggles of a small community and all the crazy and wonderful people who came up the steps and into the church.  Over the last year or so, we’ve gone more weekly and focused on theological reflections. It has been the story of one church…one building…as seen through the eyes of one pastor.

Close readers may have noticed another shift. On March 1st, I officially retired from West Park as pastor and my 22 years of ministry there were celebrated on March 23rd. I continue to lead Bible Study on Monday nights and continue to advise the program committee of the Center at West Park, a center that grew out of my vision. (And the inspiration and work of Amanda…and Katherine who brought Mim and Ted and Asya….and so many others…). And of course continue to play at the Open Mic. 

We are now in a new place. The building has, for all intents and purposes, been saved from threatened demolition. Over half a million dollars of internal repairs, mainly of water damage, have been accomplished. No longer do we have the feeling of being somewhere between Berlin and Brooklyn, or even Havana. That is both an accomplishment and also an occasion for some sadness because as the renewal continues some of the funkiness and openness goes away. The more there is to protect, the more important money becomes. And voices of caution grow louder. There is still much to be done on the exterior and that still requires the active  involvement of the community. An ownership of its preservation as an integral part of the community’s cultural heritage as a collective responsibility is necessary. 

The Center at West Park is now up and running. It exists to inspire the transformation of the individual and society through arts and culture, social action, intergenerational education and spiritual exploration. Community preservation of the building is also part of its mission. And the center has an Executive and Artistic Director, Zach Tomlinson, whose wedding I will be doing next week,. Zach was ataracted by my vision. He’s marrying Sarah Zapiler (who authored the all time most read post on this blog). And who created and curated our 100th anniversary celebration and taught us to Dream.Real. Hard.  The Center is in good hands.

The congregation of West Park is still seeking its future. It does intend to be small but fierce. In light of the current reality of old mainline denominations,  it also seeks to find a sense of stability and sustainability independent of a professional pastor. It desires to be a community that would covenant to:

1. Be there for each other. Especially when it hits the fan.
2. Engage in disciplined study together.
3. Worship together, without regard to where or when but with regard to real sharing of one with another.
4. Act together for justice.   

The ideas are right. Making them real will be the challenge.

I come to this time with a sense of accomplishment. But also regret at what hasn’t happened. The missed opportunities, lost chances. Some don’t return. The times I  failed to follow my inner voice and listened instead to experts. 

As for me, I will  continue to explore the world of urban ministry, especially along the intersection of beauty and justice and ethics and esthetics with a special commitment to exploring creation as resistance.  Based in New York City but other places as well. I will continue to tell the West Park story but other stories as well.  Therefore the name will inevitably, sooner than later, change. Keep watching the space for more updates. And there will be forwarding in the meantime. 

This has been an intriguing venture. Sometimes our readership has reached over 19000 a month. We’ve had readers from around the world, with large numbers from France and Russia and China, but many other countries as well.  I have always wondered who you are and why you check in. As I move forward, I would sincerely appreciate hearing from you about what drew you to this site, what has kept you coming and what would ket you reading in the future. I would lobe for this  to be an ongojng conversation.

Over the next few weeks, I will do several articles wrapping up my “official” West Park time and also continuing some other explorations we have already begun.  I look forward to your being with us on the journey.

Break the Walls

6/6

The Wall

So what can I do? is a question artists often ask themselves related to the difficult social issues of our time. Especially with a seemingly intractable issue like the Israel-Palestine conflict, or more appropriately, the struggle of the Palestinian people for justice. Last night at the Lark Theatre Center in New York, the Break the Wall Theatre Project provided one valuable answer to that question. 

Inspired by the controversy around Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Jewish_Children), and Churchill’s making the play available for free for performance by anyone (you can read the whole text here: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/feb/26/caryl-churchill-seven-jewish-children-play-gaza), Ismail Khalidi and David Zellnik have conceived and produced their own project, Break the Wall.

Conceptually, BTW refers both to the wall of separation built by Israel but also the fourth wall between stage and audience. BTW  intends to break through these walls. 

It’s first stage, celebrated by the launch, invited a variety of playwrights to write short plays on the struggle. All the resulting plays will be made available in an online archive for any who would like to perform them. The goal is to gather 50 plays within a year.

The plays presented Monday night were illustrative of the values that drive the project. There were common threads that run through all the plays. Among these is  the importance of approaching the issue through interpersonal relationships. Each play  (with one exception, Yussef El Guindi’s the Monologuist), is essentially a painful conversation about the issue between people who care about each other. The plays suggest that it is in the intensity of these conversations, as opposed to dialectical debate, that some understanding might come. 

That of course, is another recurring theme. The ongoing struggle of Palestinians to even be heard, let alone understood, even by people who are emotionally involved with each other at one level or another flowed through the plays.

Perhaps most importantly, the plays demand that we give up a balanced view. That in a situation with such an overwhelming imbalance of power …military, economic and political….a balanced view is morally untenable. It is to the credit of these artists that this point is made through the art, not through didactic moralism. You understand by being drawn into the relationships. 

While all the plays are of comparable quality, I went because of a long relationship with playwright Stan Richardson (co-founder of the Representatives .. http://therepresentatives.org/). Several of Stan’s plays have been produced at West Park, including the recent Edinburgh Fringe festival bound production of Private Manning goes to Washington.) Stan’s contribution, the Montagues, uses his typical command of relational conversation and the connections and gaps between us ending in his two characters’ passionate plea for help. In other words, exactly where we are. And  he doesn’t tell us what help means. We’ve got to figure that out. 

(It was also good to see longtime West Park friend Lynne Marie Rosenberg in several plays. She was a key cast member of the Woodshed Collective’s ground breaking immersive production of the Tenant that helped reopen West Park. http://www.woodshedcollective.com/the-tenant/)

Thanks to BTW for this demonstration of what artists can do in the struggle for justice while staying true to their art. The plays are there to read…and perform…in the theatre, in homes, in church, in the street…

For information about Break the Wall...and scripts...go to http://www.breakthewallproject.org/

....and still embraced by grace....

7/24

Martin and I sit down for a long conversation. He has time for a breath before tonight’s  Antigona  performance. It’s been quite a few weeks. Now that the reviews are in, tickets are starting to fly. We think back to our first meeting 3 ½ years ago when he was first relocating from Spain. Looking for a home for his company. The ups and downs and times of being close to making it and when we thought the doors would close but we kept on anyways. We both remember Teddy (Mapes) and how he would have loved this. Martin more than anybody understood the vision of what this place was supposed to be. He tells me that Antigona is here because of that vision. We both take pride in the New York Times reference to downtown vibe. It’s been that way since Woodshed walked in here in 2011 (http://www.playbill.com/multimedia/video/a-walking-tour-of-the-tenants-haunted-apartment-building-223658?r=n ) But we're still just under the radar.  That was our first Times review… http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/theater/woodshed-collectives-tenant-at-west-park-presbyterian.html?_r=1 )

The question is of course, how do we keep the momentum going? To have the quality of event and programming that keeps the vision alive and fertile while still paying the bills? Explain how it’s the interaction of space, performer and artist here that produces what gets created here…And how difficult it is for me to explain sometimes how this is ministry, in the meta sense, and that this is not space rental but relationship and out of that relationship magic can happen that has intersection with spiritual and political realms. Which is what art does. Which is, in the end, sacred.

Martin paid me a compliment when he said that after meeting me, Carlos, who plays Oedipus, said El pastor Bob es Tiresias….el ve todo…I appreciate that.

We will see.

A special guest pianist for ETHEL is rehearsing in the sanctuary on the Beckstein before their performance tonight at the Met. Alex F is in the chapel preparing for her gig. Later Mr. Martin  arrives as out of thin air to tune the chapel pianos. Like the work crew arrived unannounced to repair the Mc Alpin Hall floor. So David and Dion are now telling me that there will be no open mic tonight because of the fumes from the glue. I print up signs for RL that say OPEN MIC CLOSED TONIGHT DUE TO CONSTRUCTION…..                                                                                                   

As I’m dealing with that, my guest for the night Junia, from the Brazilian consulate, arrives. We’ll have time for dinner and a chance to catch up before the performance. She goes back to the days before closing when my associate Regi was still here and we had an afternoon multicultural service, Enlace de gracia….(And she's a flutist who played in our Shakespeare Sonnets event which she hopes we can do agin next year.

There will be other guests, clergy friends, others from my writing group…

We still are embraced by grace…

And here's what the New Yorker said....

7/22

All week long, Geoffrey has been sitting out front in a  sombrero and African skirt with a cup, shaking it as people pass by. He doesn’t usually do that. But then he doesn’t normally wear a sombrero either. The two sisters are camping out on the steps every day until the doors open for Antigona. I went with Pat and Steve B to play a show at a youth hostel in Queens. Got back in time for the last half of Antigona and to meet my son Nate and his friend. Nate is amazed at how the show has grown since he saw them at the Joyce. This is something else, for sure.

Last night, Elise recalled Woodshed’s The Tenant at West-Park (.http://west-parkpress.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Tenant) And Carman recalled the residency of Bread and Puppet theatre.(http://west-parkpress.blogspot.com/2013/11/paper-mache-religion.html )There have been some amazing things here at West-Park. I loved what the New York Times said about a downtown vibe. We’ve had that for years. Maybe now it will be seen by more….

Here is what the New Yorker had to say:




CREDITILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN

The grand scale of Greek tragedy suits the passionate flamenco of Soledad Barrio.
For many years, Spaniards have been agitating for the mass graves left over from the Spanish Civil War to be opened up and DNA tests done, in the hope that people who disappeared during those years—the poet Federico García Lorca is only the most famous case—might be identified and properly buried. In 2008, Baltasar Garzón, one of the country’s most prominent investigating magistrates, ordered the exhumations. A month later, the case was removed from Garzón’s jurisdiction, with some saying that, whatever the crimes involved, they were covered by an amnesty passed in 1977. Two years later, Garzón was suspended from judicial activity in Spain—a great victory for the country’s right wing.
“I read that in the paper,” Martín Santangelo, the artistic director of New York’s Noche Flamenca, says, “and I thought, It’s ‘Antigone’—demagogues not just killing people but leaving them in the dirt, dishonoring them.” And that, he says, was the genesis of his “Antigona,” a flamenco version of Sophocles’ play, which opens at the West Park Presbyterian Church on July 21, and will play through August 8. It has eight dancers (a hip-hop specialist as well as flamencos), four musicians, and song lyrics adapted from Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of “Antigone.” In the role of Creon, the king of Thebes, is the singer Manuel Gago, suitably self-important, in big black boots. Creon’s niece Antigone, whom he tries to prevent from burying her brother Polyneices, because Polyneices warred against him, is played by New York’s greatest flamenco dancer—indeed, one of the city’s greatest theatre artists—Soledad Barrio. Barrio is also Santangelo’s wife. He built Noche Flamenca around her.
Greek tragedy and flamenco, it turns out, are well matched, both dealing with grief and defiance on an unashamedly grand scale. And flamenco, with its music and dance, supplies the ritual element that we are told was essential to Greek tragedy but which is often absent from modern productions of it. Never, until I saw Santangelo’s ensemble, their heels stamping, their arms cutting through the air, had I seen a chorus whose physical force could support the fate-heavy songs that Sophocles wrote for his plays. As for Barrio, though she spoke rarely, dancing seemed better than words: no rhetoric, no explanations, but just passion, majesty, absorption. At the end, Antigone, sealed up in a cave by Creon—she did manage to bury her brother—performs a long, nearly demented solo, as she tries to muster the courage to hang herself. She succeeds. Then her fiancé, Creon’s son, finds her and kills himself over her body. His mother, Creon’s wife, enters and, drawing a knife, tops off the pile. “There is no happiness where there is no wisdom,” the blind prophet Tiresias says. Poor Creon falls to the floor. ♦

Sam and Ryan wrestled. And won. (Cymbeline....)

8/30

Back to the church in time for the second night of Ryan and Sam’s Cymbeline. As their show opens in the chapel, I can see what they’ve learned from Dzieci. There’s bottles of wine, cold cuts, cheese and fruit. A banjo and a mandolin playing Appalachian music. Sam telling everyone this is a story about his family. And soon enough, the stage set, the play begins.

This is one of Shakespeare’s stranger plays. And that strangeness increases as they lead us from the chapel up to Mc Alpin and ultimately to the 3^rd floor gym.

There’s a place in this play where Shakespeare’s text completely jumps the rails and I didn’t realize it until I got home, but what they did completely got that. When all of a sudden Jupiter appears with lightning bolts and a seriously wtf moment, they launch into a vaudeville song and dance. Which turns out to be exactly right.

I leave thinking about all who have performed in these spaces. The Woodshed summer and fall with the Tenant. John Hudson and the Dark Lady Player’s museum theatre. The amazing show that had a cast of 30 and audience of 1 (at a time.) Jeremy M’s de/reconstruction  with Alivewire of the Crucible over 3 floors. Dzieci. And ReGroup’s Trilogy. And now Ryan and Sam’s Free Theatre. All those spirits remain.

And gentle spirits they were. Respectful. Appreciative. Enjoying RL’s attention and parental concern. And, seriously, no attitude. That says a  lot.

Sam and Ryan have much to feel good about. They tackled a tough play and at least wrestled it to a draw. They treated Shakespeare with the same respect they treated us. They drew full (and overflow) houses. And put on a damn fine show.

They made my day.

Russian Christmas: weighing on my mind

1/7

Russian Christmas.

Stephen and Teddy B of Woodshed are in.( http://west-parkpress.blogspot.com/search?q=the+new+york+times+writes+about+the+tenant) We need to plan to get their stuff out of storage. Empty the room. Settle some financial issues. Get our 1911 journal back from their installation. And they are looking for office space. Let’s see what we can work out. Would be great to have them back in the house. 

Jeremy and Priska are in. She’s got a show coming up in Switzerland and needs space to work. They cover every inch of the building, all the nooks and crannies, looking  for the right space. Finally, they decide that the room where Teddy M and Chris lived, (Chrisamodo’s place, per RL) is the right place. Sunlit. Just right. Let’s see what we can work out. Happy to see spaces being used. Filling up. Now for a business plan.

Mitchell is hard at work on plans for Noche’s next performances, in Connecticut. It’s comforting having them back in the house.

Nancy arrives. My dream apartment has fallen through. They found someone with a higher income. Even though we got there first. Hard to take. I already saw myself there. Enjoying morning coffee and the Times in the backyard. Not to be. Kept us waiting days. Been there before on that. Depressing. Now it’s an all out push to find an alternative. Real estate marathon. On another bitter cold day. Fingers freezing, even on a short walk. Thankful for my Midnight Run watch cap pulled down over my ears.

No sign of Joe and his woman all day. Or Rachel. Where is she? Weighing on my mind….

Well, maybe two and a half

12/5

The Center Board has gathered. It’s the last night of Hannukah. Asya  has brought chocolate gelt and poppers (like mini-pinatas) and Dunkin’ Donuts version of sufganiot, ie, jelly donuts…We’re looking for where the needed bridge money is going to come from….and we put our team together to meet next week with Friends from the neighboring condos and coops…Ted, Asya, Mim, Katherine, John…they’ve been there since the beginning…like oil that doesn’t burn out….

12/7

Anna comes in for a visit. With new candles. She brings light too.

Not enough time to do everything. Go see Cara at Roosevelt Hospital. Then hustle downtown for Woodshed’s winter showing, a preview of things  to come. Installations. Videos. And a performance. Get nostalgiac seeing videos from the Tenant. And seeing  reviews I hadn’t seen before, like from the New Yorker. But wait, in this installation, what do I see? The carefully written in exquisite cursive handwriting records of the first year of West-Park’s existence. Well, all right, that’s got to come back. That’s not hip art, it’s our history. The old school metal sign board letters, well, they can keep.

Wayne brought the gospel

Make it back for Open Mic. A new singer, Wayne, blows us away with his original gospel. When it’s my turn, I’m determined to follow Joe’s admonition to have 3 songs. I finish with the Lennon-Mc Cartney When I’m 64…(slightly rewritten in honor of my birthday…)

When I'm Sixty Four

When I get older losing my hair

Many years from now

Will you still be sending me a valentine

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?

If I'd been out till quarter to three…

I’m probably with RL…Joe….Pat…

Would you lock the door?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I'm sixty-four?

Oh….You're all older too

And if you say the word

I would stay with you

I could be handy, mending a fuse (shaking my head no way…)

When your lights have gone

You can knit a sweater by the fireside

Sunday mornings go for a ride

Doing the garden, digging the weeds

Who could ask for more?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I'm sixty-four?

In the summer we can rent a cottage on Hampton Bay

And take the Jitney there

We shall scrimp and save

Grandchildren on your knee

Whitney, Ashley, Madison, Colin, Dylan…..

& even Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line

Stating point of view

Indicate precisely what you mean to say

Yours sincerely, wasting away

Give me your answer, fill in a form

Yours  for evermore

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

                                                                 Hey….I’m 64!

Later at the Gate, I asked Joe if I had three songs.

Well, maybe two and a half, he says.