Continue reading »]]> I generally stay away from super summer block buster movies. I’m more of a romantic comedy/indie/drama girl myself. When, I got free passes to the Pacific Science Center IMAX, I couldn’t pass up the chance to see  TRANSFORMERS: Dark Side the Moon.

I mean come on…it was a free movie. (Also, to be fair, I had already seen the other movie playing… )

So, there I was on a tuesday…. in the middle of the day. Pop corn and nachos in hand, drink carried by my good friend David.

We got our 3-D glasses and I was prepared to be bored out of my mind… but you know what… I wasn’t. I simply enjoyed the film for what it was. A summer block buster, where the effects were pretty damn cool and the dialogue was a little cheesy…

Once it was over though…I got to thinking… you know there were only 2… yeah 2 female characters…

The first was played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley:

So here we have our Heroine? Nah.. I mean she looks flawless throughout the movie..running away from gigantic car-robots in her perfectly white outfit (which doesn’t seem to get dirty..I mean how does that happen?!) and her stilettos..which don’t ever break…after falling out of buildings..anyway..you get the picture. She’s the perfect damsel in distress. Beautiful, seemingly smart..I mean, when we have a flash back to how she and the main guy met..she was working as a white house intern or something…OHHH and did I mention she has a great accent. Well, she does…

Then we have female role #2 played by the ever so talented Frances Mcdormand:

Who from the beginning just seems like a very unhappy person. She’s this top government employee, who in order to keep her power has to treat everyone like crap…she’s constantly wearing unflattering pant suits and has her hair in a scrunchie pony tail…This is not an unattractive lady my friends. Quite the opposite actually.  Why, oh why did the director feel the need to make her look unattractive and give her dialogue that constantly made her seem like a…a..well, like a  bitch?

SO… there are the two options we have in this movie… beautiful damsel in distress…or bitchy plain boss. Doesn’t seem like very many choices, does it… and this is what we are constantly given in film.. Did the director and producers think that the audience wasn’t capable of handling anything else? And, why weren’t there any other female characters in this film? Good or bad. There were no female transformers either…. My hope is that we can broaden our horizons. Create full female characters, just like we create male characters…after all hero’s come in all shapes and sizes. Male and Female. They are all around us.

Maybe they don’t fight evil transformers, but they are out there. Just take a closer look.

Continue reading »]]> When Matt asked me to be an artist at quiet Speaks, my blood pressure went up and I started sweating. Thank goodness, i was wearing deodorant.

I hadn’t been on stage in over 6 months.

What if I didn’t know how to act anymore. What if I threw up. What if?  I told him to let me think about it. And I did. I thought. …. and thought…. and thought some more. THEN I thought…well if he doesn’t ask about it again…well, I wont say anything and everything will be ok.

Then he asked about it again.

This time my non-neurotic self blurted out “You know… yeah. I will!”

Oh, shit.

What had I done!? I had just agreed to be a part of an artist show case for a company that I LOVE. That I want to be in a committed relationship with.  AND I had no clue what I would perform. Matt, of course got that Matt smile..like he knew that I would say yes.. he just needed to give me some time. He said ” Great, just let me know what you want to do, and how long it will be. You can do monologues if you want. Or, if you have something that you’ve written you can do that too. Whatever you want to do.”

and that was it. WAIT?! No rules? No time constraint?

If you know anything about me. You now know that my brain was doing flip flops. Where would I even begin.

ok. Sandra. Think. Think. The season this year is on Gender. ok. You’re a woman. You can talk about being a woman.

umm…what? What does that even mean.

I was now asking myself the very question that we as a group are asking those around us. “What does gender mean to you?”

Let me tell you, the question is not an easy one.  Then the big task began..what will I get up there and say. I toyed with some ideas. Maybe something about me.. nope way too personal. Maybe something about my mom.. no too personal..maybe something about my relationship with my dad..no too personal..

Do you see a trend here…?

I knew that I wanted to delve into something..but what. Finally I knew that I just had to get over it. Anything that I chose was going to be personal. Because after all, I was going to choose something that was important to me.  I remembered a piece by Eve Ensler that I had read several years earlier, called “THE GOOD BODY”. I went to SPL and checked it out. I re-read it and I was crying by the end of it. I’d found it. I’d found what was so important that I needed to say. It was about me really. It was about how I feel about myself, about body image. About self worth, About me.  I chose 4 monologues from it.

OK. Cut to June 25th.  I had the performance butterflies in my stomach. Would I be good enough? What if the humor in these pieces didn’t read? Everyone else there was reading pieces that they had written themselves…. did i cop out and go the easy route? Should I have written something myself…but then I thought..even if I had written something..I would have gone up there and read it as the character “Sandra”. Not…the real me. The real me has doubts and is sometimes shy. The real me is scared, and excited and angry, and happy, and searching for herself still.

See, I realized..I’m an actor. And once I stepped up on that stage..there is only character. Real character, but character non the less.I’m an entertainer.

It’s what I do. It’s what I love. It’s where I belong.

The night went off without a hitch. Everyone who performed was amazing.  And let me tell you…being on stage is the most  incredible high. I tend to forget it, in between shows. The most amazing part of it…is that although I didnt want to be personal…the pieces I chose were the closest to me I could ever have picked.

Funny the way it turned out. I didn’t want to be personal..and in the end I bared a lot of my soul on that stage whether the audience knows it or not.

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And Now For Something Completely Different!

The Washington State Arts Alliance, Arts Advocacy Meeting 5/27/11

I’ll start by saying…there were mimosas: SB 5834 passed with a 62/34 vote at 9:34pm on Wednesday. What a juicy win for us after all the re-writing, foot-dragging, and appeasement-searching. 10% budget cuts rather than 47%. Alright!

WSAA credits the public efforts. Our legislators received over 600 advocacy e-mails urging them to preserve 4Culture and funding for arts and heritage throughout Washington.

Here is what I took away from the meeting:

The endowment is secure for the next 7 years, 42 million bones.

Currently, 50% of current lodging taxes go towards the arts. 32.5% of future lodging taxes, roughly 10-12 million $, will go towards the arts with an estimated increase of 1 million a year. Miraculously, there is no sunset date on this one—so let’s defend it, claws out!

Perhaps we should adjust our feeeelllings about tourism, as it literally feeds the arts. The Tourist Office, at the state level, has been totally eliminated—terrible layoffs. Tourism is the whitebread sibling to the arts, so let’s stay informed and rally for those in the field when possible… if not for the sake of our own self-preservation. If tourism takes a hit, we will see the repercussions of it soon after. Think Band-Aids without Neosporin.

Washington State Arts Commission, which remains as an independent agency, is going to delay their grant programs for 6 months. They will only be giving out project grants, aka no grants for general arts group function and development.

This year, most of WSAC’s money will be coming out of the General Fund and less from the Washington State Heritage Center Account. This is less sustainable.

The Department of Arts and the Department of Neighborhoods may be combined to save $, weird. Let’s try to prevent this.

Send Thank you e-mails to our legislators! And when e-mailing requests or grievances, use Kris Tucker’s “Thank You Sandwich Model,” haha: incase angrryy meatt with happy light wonderbread.

Thanks WSAA–

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Lissa Bak and Conner Neddersen in "The Other Woman" - a part of 'quiet Acts.'

I can’t tell you how excited I am that we are about to open quiet Acts, our evening of one-act plays, in less than a week.  It’s really exciting to see all of the work of our artistic team and our actors come together.  It’s been exciting to see how our playwright for Prey, Laura Goodwin, has really been able to adapt and develop her script over these last weeks of rehearsal.  I’m so impressed by the staging and vision that our director for both productions, Loryn Hatten, has brought to each and every rehearsal.  And our cast is really fantastic, finding brilliant moments and incredible nuances in each of the scripts.

I do hope you’ll join us on June 1, 2, and 3 at the Youngstown Cultural Center for The Other Woman, by Casey Kelly and Prey, by Laura Goodwin – both a part of our evening of one-act plays – quiet Acts!

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From Rae Armantrout’s Reading:

Last Sunday, Pulitzer prize-winner Rae Armantrout gave a reading at Open Books: The Poetry Emporium (Poets, a spending limit might be in order. This is our casino, minus gold LAMÉ and cocktails).

Here are my Half-Truths and Take Aways from the reading:

Know your reading voice: what you want to sound like, what you actually sound like, what your audience expects you to sound like.

Rae Armantrout’s poetry is sexy, spacious, and littered with fantastic references to the modern consumer. She lets her poems breathe in lots of white with luxurious line breaks. Additionally, she never explains her choices on the page—a talent or a blessing, I’m still not certain. So I expected her performance to certainly be equal parts whimsy, equal parts knife juggling.

Not quite the case: her reading voice was less nymph and more hobbit. The work lost its sexy. Bummertown.

If I had it my way, my reading voice would have the confidence of chainsaws. Every word would be a spondee. I could make trees cry and sap their pants. In reality, I might be able to lullaby a stack of stationary. That’s why I use a tape recorder while practicing—much advised!

If you plan on hashing through a huge body of work, pithy anecdotes will sustain audience engagement. Come up with a few succinct fall-back sentences in order to introduce, transition and justify why you are reading certain pieces alongside others.

Rae has mastered this: everything she said was quirky, slant, and in reference to a personal experience. Nonetheless, I think her reading would have been better if she had shared less.

Volume distracts from the larger ideas. As mentioned before, Rae’s pop references normally sit with adequate space on the page, think billboards few and far between along the country side (Humor me, romantic fantasy). At the reading, these images existed in a clusterf*** city, painfully wedged in between other signage. Aloud, those well-chosen line breaks didn’t receive their well-deserved time.

Communicate your opinions as truths. Biases don’t read well.

Let your ending lines hang for a moment so that the audiences can ‘pleasuregrunt’—what a social phenomenon!

Science makes People, with a capital “P,” less emotional of a topic in poetry. Bulky language will always be the ugly step child to this idea.

Continue reading »]]> Welcome to the first installment of quiet‘s “GET TO KNOW” feature.  We want you to get to know the actors and crew of our up coming productions. We asked each person 5 questions and I’ll be posting their responses until the opening of the show.

First up is AMANDA WOODARD, she is playing “Breane” in PREY

Amanda Woodard

Amanda Woodard grew up in Spokane, Washington. She studied Theatre Arts at Western Washington University in Bellingham and just recently moved to Seattle. Some of her favorite roles include Mother in How I Learned To Drive, and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet. She also really loves devised theatre and has been a part of some really unique collaborative theatre events such as The Other End and The F Word–which both explored gender in different ways.  She is so very excited to be a part of this very brave play

1.What’s playing on your mp3 player/in your cd player right now?

Lady Gaga is almost always playing in my CD player–and in my head!

2.What does “femininity” mean to you?

Femininity, in short, means, to me, embracing inner strength, intuition, creativity, compassion, and communication.

3.What’s your dream role (or what show would you most like to work on if you are not an actor)?

Creating theatre that is current, thought provoking, biting, and earth changing.

4.Tell us about a time art has inspired you?

Art inspires me, really, all the time. When I see very honest art, personal art, art that is very brave, art that makes me uncomfortable, art that has spectacle, and art that gets to the core of humanity, I am inspired.

5.Describe yourself in 3 words. GO!

Fierce, fun, and fabulous!

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From Eric Baus “Tuned Droves”

NEW RULE: for every day off, one book. This way those uncelebrated library tommmeesss, neatly stacked to be forgotten, might actually go back into public circulation. The process of return date, renewal, return date, renewal, spanning the last few months is just shameful—

I strictly read to be a better writer, terrible?  My critical eye is always on for what to steal, try out, and avoid. Can’t help it, I want to “solve” what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes pithy jing-jangles and anecdotes pop into my head when reading. Equal parts ridicule and respect, they mushroom into little mantras that I use in my own writing.

While reading Eric Baus’s “Tuned Droves,” on the burke gilman in between the Fremont and Aurora bridges –check it, total sweet spot: two benches, a bronze pope, houseboats, loons, people who work strange hours– a bird pooped square on page 61. He was so high that my sunning neighbors and I couldn’t even see the speck of him. “What are the odds!” one gent said, which I didn’t really understand, because I thought “Pretty good.”

In conclusion, hysterical confirmation to blog about the collection.

Here are my take aways and half-truths.

Fully verb the s*** out of the nouns that normally do little. Push this to the step before personification, and then rightfully stop (When toasters starting laughing in poems, it’s corny).

Place yourself under a new body of rules; spatial, legal, logistical. Previous actions can have completely impossible results in a poem, “Because I have a neat nest and a phonetic head, Miss allows me to feed the bees” (p. 51, “The Continuous Corner,”). What!? Play with this.

Something can blatantly be or turn into something else without explanation. I often feel the pressure to justify such jumps, but how exciting when, “There is something simple about wood, being nothing but wires” (p.21, “This is a Film About Real Toy Trains”).

Nothing needs to be grouped for the sake of conserving the page, it is your page; “There is a man a man two women a boy and a boy.” Naturally, justify this taken space so as to keep the audience from pulling their teeth out (if their toothy grins are important to you).

Only children describe things with color as they were more recently blind to it.

I still don’t think a lake would want to watch a movie, but I guess I’ve never asked it.

In a poem you can have “two tongues” or perhaps even more.

Make what’s most familiar feel like a lie.

Thank you Eric Baus!

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The postcards from Barnstorm. Designed by Beth Hammer.

Last weekend, quiet partnered with two other non-profit arts organizations (The Heroes and Rainy Night Productions) to present Barnstorm: The Cabaret Re-Imagined.  Together, the three organizations transformed an empty storefront in Downtown Seattle into a bar, performance space, and art gallery.  Over three nights, hundreds of people came through for great food and drinks, thought-provoking performances, and dazzling displays of visual art.  It was an incredible weekend to witness.

From random acts of tango and a kabuki piece around the recent earthquake in Japan to a forest of trees made up of junk mail and an installation forcing participants to face their own fears of death, Barnstorm provided a wealth of opportunities for our audiences and artists to engage in dialogue about the things we see in the culture around us, as well as the ways we as artists can respond to those issues.

I really want to thank The Heroes and Rainy Night Productions for allowing us to collaborate with them on this project and I’d especially like to thank Matt and Roxy Hornbeck, quiet‘s Executive and Managing Directors, for taking the lead on this from quiet‘s end.  It was a fantastic project to take part in.

Continue reading »]]> With the music I listen to, with the movies I watch…

I try to find a connection in some way, shape, or form when it comes to writing something. Right now, I’ve started a couple writing projects via poetry. “The Pretty Women” & “War of the Roses”. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been feeling as though I was struggling with finding a theme. With the thought of Gender in mind, I though it would be simple to come up with something that pertained to men and women. But when I allowed myself to go a little deeper into it, I realized this is a pretty broad subject. So, since there is really two sides to everything, “The Pretty Women” series would represent the loving, beautiful, and fun times when speaking on the connection both genders share with one another.  ”War of the Roses” would express the complete opposite. With this series of poetry, I want to allow myself the opportunity the point out everything that’s wrong, or could be wrong, with Gender roles we deal with. Especially, on a communicative level.

But there are so many things you could tie into GEnDER. Again, communication between us because… there has to be communication amongst people. And whenever one person shares a space with another, no communication is not really an option. And there’s the side of intimacy we as men and women share with one another. Whether we be friends, lovers, souls mates, married… whatever label you choose to place on it. It exists on so many different levels regarding both Genders.

My Intimate/Gender Inspiration…..

When I first saw this cover to Kanye West’s recent pieCE of art, I seriously though it was coolest thing Ever. The picture spoke on a variety of thoughts. Without a doubt, GENDER. One way of viewing it… when you think about society and the machine of media, there is so much advertisement with sexual conduct being the main driving force of getting people’s attention. Yet, when we speak of sex in an openly and honest fashion, then society creates the perception of it being disgusting. Kind of hypocritical, but whatever.

If I were to write a separate series of poetry, using this cover art as my only means of inspiration. I wonder what I would come up with.

Interracial Change. Liberation. Happiness. Plastic. Status. Lies. Honesty. Flaunting. Jealousy. Stereotype. An actual Love.

Attraction – something that doesn’t  need to be considered some traditional thing. Different. Sexy.

Thickness – coming in more than just one package. hehehe

Nerd. Don’t necessarily need to be the bad guy in order to get the girl.

Where they wish to be.

Content.

What about you?