CODA Symposium Evaluation

The CODA New Directions conference was hosted at Rhodes last Thursday and it was a very successful day. The CODA scholars gathered at 7:00 a.m. to prepare for the event that began at 9:00. I had the privilege of hearing several presentations as well as serving on a panel about the value of creative campuses. It was very nerve-racking to be placed in front of an audience of people desiring to learn how to cultivate creativity in and around Memphis. I certainly consider myself no authority on this topic, as were the other panelists, including the chairperson of the Arts Memphis organization, executive directors of the Memphis Symphony and Opera Memphis, and a professor from the Memphis College of Art. But I was willing to give it a chance.

Lauren Kennedy, the other senior CODA scholar, was also supposed to serve on this panel, but due to a family emergency she had to drive to Dallas that morning, leaving me as the only current college student for a panel discussion on "creative campuses." The discussion was facilitated by Dr. Steven Tepper, the assistant director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. His current work centers on the role creativity plays in the importance of the college experience, and how the creativity fostered by a college or university can impact the city of which it is a part.

Dr. Tepper had sent us a series of questions about this topic, the first of which dealt with "signs of cultural vitality" in your city and how colleges and universities can contribute to creating this vitality. The other members of the panels spoke eloquently, but seemed to speak from a more "political" approach than I was expecting. By "political" I mean they reacted like politicians in a debate, re-working the question posed to speak on what they wish to articulate. Many of the talks centered on how their organization is working to creative more cultural vitality in Memphis, but very rarely did they mention how an institution like Rhodes could help to create that. Nor did they provide much insight into Dr. Tepper's question about what they would like the cultural landscape of Memphis to look like in ten years.

Using what we've discussed in CODA and what I've witnessed in our trips to New York and San Francisco, I tried to articulate what I understand to be cultural vitality. In order for a city to have a thriving cultural landscape there must be a sense of "communal ownership." This must be "our" city. While Memphis has many bohemian districts that cultivate new arts and many established arts like the symphony and opera, what it lacks is this communal ownership of the city. The suburban sprawl has people living 40 miles from each other and calling themselves Memphians. Some Memphians avoid going "downtown" at all costs. A driving mentality of many citizens deals with three private questions: Am I safe? Are my children in a good school? and do I have a good job? If the answers to these three questions are "yes," then many people are satisfied.

So what can a college do to create a communal ownership of a city like Memphis? Through partnerships like those that the McCoy cultivates with Playhouse on the Square, through partnerships of the Rhodes Singers and the Memphis symphony, Idlewild Presbyterian Church, and other organizations. It's through CODA initiatives that bring artists to campus for talks and master classes. When you introduce passionate, intelligent, driven students into the world of cultural policy, they can bring about change. They will introduce new ideas that come from a college experience that encourages taking risks.

I believe that the symposium was a success, and I hope everyone learned as much about new methods of creating a culturally thriving city as I did.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...

So last week was the first experiment of the newly-formed Standing Room Only. We showed the film Curse of the Demon as a promotion and educational opportunity for students to gain some cultural knowledge into what exactly they're coming to see when they come to the Rocky Horror Show at Rhodes. Overall, we were pleased with the event.

Our first setback, however, came from the weather. There is always a danger of trying to host something outside, which we wished to do. We had reserved the Rhodes ampitheatre for the film, but right at 7:20, a giant deluge of rain soaked the campus. Luckily, we had decided literally minutes before this to move the event into our backup location, one of the lecture halls of the Biology building. I must praise the members of Standing Room Only for their amazing flexibility in this time. I've seen genuine freak-outs when events don't operate according to plan. This team, however, moved quickly, swiftly, and created a successful event out of probable chaos.

Thanks to Robert Shreve, the president of the Alpha Tao Omega Fraternity and various word-of-mouth advertising (and facebook invites and posters), we had an audience of around 40 people. About 15 of these individuals were somehow connected to the Rocky Horror Show, and the other 25 were outside guests. With the terrible weather and the fact that it was the Thursday after Fall Break, we were very pleased with this. In the future, however, it would be better when organizing these events to pick a different day. Two days after a student holiday makes it difficult to drum up an audience.

Chris Davis, the director of Rocky, gave a 10 to 15 minute presentation about the "mind candy" that is the Rocky Horror Show and how its inspiration came partly from the B-Movies of Hollywood, particularly those of the horror and science fiction varieties. You can watch a short part of his talk by clicking on the Youtube link.He made clear the reference to different elements of these films that can be seen in Curse of the Demon that Rocky tends to mock in various ways.

Overall the first event went well. My only concern was the result of an oversight on my part. When telling the cast about this movie night, I never expressly mentioned the overall purpose of these kind of events. The whole purpose of this experiment is to make the theatre at Rhodes more accessible to new potential audience members. And we succeeded in attracting these kinds of members. In order for an event like this be work correctly, though, those in attendance must feel comfortable, they must relax, they must be able to receive what the cast/artist/musician has prepared.

The "theatre kids" were certainly comfortable among their peers, but their rather boisterous laughter and the sharing of inside jokes or the reciting of lines from the show at various moments in the movie made the "non theatre kids" uncomfortable. And I fault myself for this. I never made it clear to those of the inner circle of theatre supporters that we must intentionally create a comfortable environment for these kinds of endeavors.

This being said, the evening was a huge success, and I am very pleased with how everything turned out. Now for the final promotions before opening night on Halloween!!

Homemade Theatre Podcast

For anyone interested, professor Dave Mason of the Theatre Department at Rhodes has, with the help of students, created a podcast that you can listen to. The content is made up of radio sketch comedy pieces interspersed with music from garageband.com (it is legal). In future "episodes," weekly arts updates, interviews with artists and directors, and other interest things will be posted. If you use itunes, do a search for "homemade podcast" and look for the image featured in this article. Otherwise go to the website: http://yavanika.org/homemadetheatre and you can access the episodes from there. More interest and input is welcome, so contact me if you are a Rhodes-affiliated person and wish to participate in this.

Science Fiction Night

Standing Room Only is the name of the new organization that I have created to help the McCoy Theatre at Rhodes College promote and educate students in theatre at Rhodes. The first show of this season is the Rocky Horror Show, which most likely will not be difficult to promote. You cannot, however, take this for granted. Most students my age have not attended the midnight showings of the film nor know every single call line. They didn't live through the early science fiction and horror movies that Rocky Horror pokes fun of. This was the starting place for our team with this show.

To educate and promote, therefore, we're hosting a movie night in the ampitheatre of the college on Thursday, October 18 at 7:30. The director of our production, Chris Davis, will speak about our production and its relation to these early horror and science fiction films, and then we're going to show "Curse of the Demon," one of the songs referenced in the opening number of Rocky Horror, "Science Fiction/Double Feature" (Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes and passing them used lots of skill).

We're having free popcorn and inviting all of campus to attend. This event functions to educate our audience on the context in which the original production was created and to help them better understand what the Rhodes production is doing when referencing the terrible horror films of our generation.

Working with Rhodes Activities Board, we will be promoting the evening through e-mail, posters, and facebook fliers. We have also scheduled meetings with the presidents of the various Greek organizations on campus to gain their support. As I was told at a recent CODA meeting, if you can make members of your target audience feel like they have something at stake in the project, you are more likely to create something that will be more widely supported. By requesting the support of these organizations, we have the opportunity to bring students into the theatre who previously have been uninvolved.