• German Language Assistant Internship
• The Portal Project

Three New Companies Come to work with Us

This summer, we had a group of independent artists visit PushPush from Buenos Aires, Reykjavik, Tel Aviv and Berlin to work on a new production called, Action, about religion in the 21st Century. This visit helped us understand more about our exchange program and common issues we all face in making exchange produce positive effects.

The most immediate result of the May visit, was the creation of a new project, entitled, Lucky's Run Out, a comedy about vanity and control in the performing arts.

Some say vanity is the driving force in the arts. Vanity about how important we are, and thus, how much control we have. It seems that all of us in the arts share this problem, but is it possible to find better reasons for creating art?

The very support for our projects depends on over-promoting our image. We brag of the successes and ignore more honest discussions. We make judgements about other artists in order to look better in comparison. With less and less funding, it seems that a major focus has to be on beating out the competition. Can we change this paradigm?

At first this seems like we are talking about American show biz. Starsearch, Who Wants to Be a Star, and those Hollywood taboids constantly raising and lowering star power through vanity, but the truth is that we find it equally prevalent in every level of the arts. Taking a nationalistic view seems to vastly oversimplify the situation. As times are hard, the competition for funding is even more important for our survival.

Over the next few months, we hope to explore the issue of vanity and control in our everyday relationships. Can we develop new ways of working that provide better motivators? Can we move past petty judgments and really work together? Is exchange possible? Is America's "Yes We Can" spirit, and new era of openess a real possibility?

In July we travel to Europe and across America to meet, discuss and plan for our the start of our 14th season and to look at new partnerships and to continue to build on ones we've already begun.

We hope that where ever you live, you can find ways to get involved and make good things happen.

The Portal Theater Project

Atlanta’s 7 Stages and PushPush Theater are working together to help deepen international cultural exchange opportunities between Atlanta and other parts of the world. This initiative, called the Portal Project, has several aims, namely to generate an affordable, recurring and reciprocal exchange of artists, ideas, scripts, and productions that cross cultural boundaries. One main objective is to build upon current relations toward the establishment a permanent Portal Theater – a primarily American-language theater that provides an international base for reciprocal exchange between international and American artists and groups between established venues. The Portal Project will also include artists working in film, music and interdisciplinary projects. For our purposes, Berlin, Germany will be the central location, chiefly because much of our existing exchange work and international partners (now over 100 constituents and growing!) are based there. Berlin is also the best choice for a Portal Project because there is a tremendous interest in this city for activities that feature American style English. However, we also find this to be the best city for outlying exchanges that are developing now in Amsterdam, Prague, Paris, Belgrade, Israel, Poland, Ukraine, and other points to the east. In addition, through the many contacts our respective theatres have made through the years, we plan to invite theatre artists from other countries who are also working in English to present their work within the Portal Project. In this way, we will encourage interaction among artists from other European countries, and from Africa and South America as well. Currently our theatres have solid relationships with artists in Serbia, South Africa, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland and elsewhere.

The Portal Project from the PushPush side:
In this year, PushPush will undergo a major strategy shift in how we approach our mission to help grow Atlanta’s cultural life.

Our mission is to provide Atlanta artists with support, space, time and connections that will help them better serve our community and reach out beyond our borders. A major part of this mission is to retain growing artists here in Atlanta by providing opportunities that collaborate with bigger cultural centers and to draw new artists into working relationships with our own professional artists.

We are increasingly aware that the old models of supporting local arts and artists need to be re-examined. We see in these changing times, a real opportunity for Atlanta to better define its strengths and to take giant leaps forward as a cultural center.

Perhaps the biggest changes affecting us daily, involve advances in technology. One way to see these advances is to view them as competition. New technology offers a drastically increased menu of arts and entertainment options. And new technology provides our patrons with new ways to connect to each other and to their community. Our audience has only been emailing, texting, and using the current means of community forming such as Facebook, Myspace and others for less than a decade. These practices are creating a whole new means of sharing experience, reacting to events and even participation in cultural offerings. This is changing our audience.

I’m sure that when Guttenberg first began printing, there were those who saw the printing press as the ruin of books.

Our focus is to find ways to collaborate with new technologies:

1. to use the current changes to our advantage.
2. to take a responsible leadership in these new changes.

Our purpose:

1. to increase our options.
2. to combine our individual efforts.
3. to connect our community globally.

The Portal Project is a web of connectivity involving not only our own creative resources, but opening the doors to sharing our partners’ resources and the rarely tapped resource of our collective audience.

In 2007, as PushPush Theater completed our 10th year, we decided to open our theater to all of our 350 plus artists and make the theater that they called home a fully open-sourced operation. PushPush collaborated with 7 Stages and several other national and international theaters to create a system aimed at bringing about more exchange opportunities and mutual support.

The idea of the “portal” is that it can be accessed from either direction equally, allowing access to our venues and community while creating like opportunities for our own artists in other cities. We have long been aware how important it is to research and gain understanding from outside models if we are to climb past provincial practice. In 2008, we plan to more than double the number of artists and independent groups involved in this project. In the coming years, we will help provide an important resource for connecting Atlanta’s independent film, theater and music producers with the world on a daily basis.

With increased options available to our narrative artists, we are finding a rapidly growing connection between film and theater. We are bringing film makers back into the theater for richer periods of development, a more cost-efficient and daily use of their skills, and to have access to a rich history of story telling that our new film industry simply hasn’t amassed.

For our theater artists, new opportunities await them in connecting to the world of video and film that can bring their work to a much larger audience and new sources of support. Use of trans-media approaches allow new styles of storytelling and also allow new access to an audience that has little connection to the live theater.

Daily we find new opportunities to connect us to each other, making our efforts more focused and efficient. After years of development in trying to find new ways to increase responsibility in our own artists, PushPush has implemented a system of individual artistic planning. This artistic planning puts greater responsibility in the hands of individuals and allows them to have a voice in their own development, connect to a full menu of support options, and to make a greater impact with their artistic efforts.

These days, connecting globally is as easy as posting on the internet. Our individual artistic planning provides a means for these global postings to have a clear mission, measurable goals, and accountability. Organized planning with mission and measurability used to be the domain of larger companies who often churned through their greatest resource (their artists) with little to show for a working history. We found that most of our artists were not lasting in Atlanta for more than five years and almost no account was given for the time they did serve. The self-centered life of an actor was not only tolerated, it was almost encouraged, as this allowed institutions to be free of responsibility for their charge and to handle their artists and designers as free-lance temp workers. This system was at best, underachieving.

Connecting our individual artists with greater ease to a larger community allows us to not only increase our scope of influence, it allows us the ability to draw on the collective experiences of outside cultural centers and provide Atlanta with a whole host of new ideas and practices.

At PushPush, our purpose is to develop artists. To provide them with opportunities that will help them grow and command an ever increasing influence. We can’t imagine a better approach than to bring related artists and companies to our city to perform, lead workshops, and teach new methods. At the same time, we increasingly find that Atlanta has much to offer in exchange. We have underdeveloped, homegrown talent and product that has a much larger audience if we can only connect to it on a more regular basis.

Currently we have over a dozen events coming to Atlanta in 2008 involving hundreds of national and international connections. We will send artists to a variety of destinations to produce and/or present work and to return with new experiences, connections, and ideas to share within our community. A conservative estimate is that we will have around 15 artists from Europe and 35 national artists visit PushPush before the end of this year alone, with as many of our core artists traveling in exchange (see full list for exact names currently in the season).

Our newest project is a film series involving theater and film artists from PushPush and its Portal Theater partners. Titled, GRFX, this series tells the story of a publishing house focused on graphic novels and comic books. This series is about how the high and low arts relate and help each other as their young creative artists move into the 21st Century with new stories and new media. The principle people working in this film series are members of groups that produce theater, film, dance and music outside the series itself. It is our hope to connect hundreds of our Portal artists and the tens-of-thousands of audience members we touch yearly, in a new creative endeavor that is financially and creatively self-sustaining.

We fully believe that by the end of 2009 we will have an audience of over 400 thousand regular viewers visiting a web-site that allows participation and creative opportunities, but also connects and markets a growing network of live cultural arts groups.