|
Time past and eventually I was in the kindergarten x-mas show, cast as the keeper of the third inn to turn down Mary & Joseph. It involved donning a robe and beard which was my first
experience with theater, costumes and makeup. I had already spent time reciting lines from the household copy of Shakespeare's complete works so I wasn't worried about my one line of dialog. I had no concept of character or motivation and so satisfied myself that I had been able to respond to my cue. And there was much rejoicing.
By the time I was in early grade school my oldest brother had discovered theater as a field he preferred to direct his engineering degree towards. I benefitted by seeing shows from an audience view and from backstage and was sold. It was much later that I was able to articulate the appeal of theater but even then at the start I was struck by the harmony and exhilaration of collaboration and how much more rewarding it was than the popular alternatives.
The summer of 1973, before high school, my brother allowed me to be his lighting assistant for a production of the musical "Oliver", produced by the local civic light opera company and staged at Plummer Auditorium. I got involved at the start of technical rehearsals when every department finally gets together in order to integrate the many piece that have all been developed separately. It was awesome and compelling to experience as a participant the effect of a whole greater than the sum of its parts coalescing towards a common goal. It inspired a sense of unity and simultaneously a sense of distinctive contribution. I had to do it again.
The next play that summer was the musical "Desert Song" staged at the college theater next door. For that production I started as shop assistant during the build and stage grip for the run which allowed me to see the set and prop design and fabrication process for pieces I'd later be dragging around a dark stage, wearing stage blacks aiming for spike marks before the music ended and the light came up. It was more than awesome the second time, having the production process demystified and to still feel the rush. It was a career. It was a career fundamentally unlike the popular alternatives.
I moved into the theater department of FUHS as soon as possible and was rewarded by Mr Peters recognizing my blazing enthusiasm and putting me to work. With my credits from the summer I was inducted into the International Thespian Society at the first opportunity my freshman year. With few exceptions, as I recall, I was further blessed that the students, for the most part, were, for the most part, also appreciative of the opportunities the performing arts departments offered and over my four years more than a dozen productions were staged that we were all rightly proud of.
After high school I worked for a year at Muckenthaler Cultural Center , first as a security guard and then an exhibit installer until I enrolled in the college as a music major, studying theory and composition and minoring in Philosophy. That continued until I decided to move to San Francisco.
Around my 22nd birthday, I moved to San Francisco from Fullerton, an Orange County suburb next to Disneyland USA; itself a once proud keeper of American Myth. In the summertime, as kids, we watched the colorful nightly fireworks from the roof of our house. The SoCal smog eventually got so thick that they all looked orange. After a while we stopped looking.
I had an unusually familiar knowledge of Disneyland, for a non-employee, so once the dazzle wore off and I began studying the methods, and once I had friends there who would walk me in just to have lunch, I became enthralled with understanding the astonishing effect of fully emersive theater on the public. It's a power to reckon with, says I, and powerful people know it.
It was apparent to me that I lacked not the patience but the time to apprentice the skills to get the credentials to be taken seriously at Disney so I directed my efforts to stage craft and guerilla marketing and their equally astonishing effects on the public.
After considering the options I chose SF to master my craft because it met two big requirements for an adult community I'd want to grow into, neither of which Fullerton could provide; I could make a living in contemporary theater & not be forced to commute in order to earn my bread or work with my real community.
It also met a third less important requirement. The graffiti here was smart and funny, unlike the territorial tagging in SoCal.
Though I didn't know it before I got there, I also happened into town at the start of the 2nd wave of the notorious SF punk scene. The spirit of D.I.Y. was in the air like spray paint, no matter what art or craft was on stage and it provided an exciting environment of cross fertilization among the many renegade performing arts in town.
In the day, it was possible to live by bouncing around the many theaters that were, then, producing original work in the bay area, making friends, networking, the whole toot.
I have performed so many stage-craft jobs that even I find it doubtful I could have performed half of them
well but I was consistently praised for my contribution and recommended by peers as our careers took us into more exotic places including international festivals in Stuttgart, West Germany, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Wroclaw, Poland and White
Plains, NY and showcases at the War Memorial Theater & Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco, the Lincoln Center in New York, NY and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. On off nights we were more likely found working in alleys, bars, basements, beaches, libraries, lofts, clubs, cults, sidewalks, storefronts and so on.
Between 1981 and 1988, through hard work and the support of the community I often lived with, I became part of the technical or design staff for, among others, the following theatrical companies, presenting in excess of 150 productions (as in 150 productions times X = all the nightly performances, which is well into the thousands of individual performances, yo.);
- One Act Theater (deceased)
- Magic Theatre (surviving under new management once again)
- Eureka Theater (now a rental space under new management)
- Lorraine Hansberry Theater (only theater surviving with original management)
- The Julian Theater (deceased)
- Soon 3 (fate unknown)
- George Coates Performance Works (fate unknown)
- Group 6 (fate unknown)
- Theater Artaud (under new management)
- American Inroads (deceased)
- Marines Memorial Theater (under new management)
- Theater On the Square (under new management)
- Encore Theater (under new management)
- 450 Geary (affiliated with A.C.T.)
- EYE-Con-O-Clast (on hiatus)
- Climate Theater (hiding in the shadows)
- Elbows Akimbo (deceased)
- Artist Television Access (under new management)
- Fifth Floor (back in action)
- The High Risk Group (on life support)
- Studio 4 @ 440 Potrero (deceased)
- Sunz of Alien Technology (in limbo)
- Subterranean Shakespeare (back in action)
Once I began designing theatrical sound and composing scores for dance in earnest, even the press took notice, though the most important notice was by a friend and colleague from the old days.
The single most defining person for the greatest many opportunities I enjoyed creatively and professionally is Pamela Winfrey. I met Pam in 1981 at Magic Theatre where she and her man Scott Gibbs worked as resident stage managers. I admired them greatly, professionally and personally. In 1984, Pam invited me and Nat Fast, a designer I often worked with, to produce an interactive sound installation for Theater Day at Exploratorium (the world renown museum of science, art and human perception), where she was, then, the volunteer coordinator, soon to be head of the Performing Artists In Residency Program.
Nat and I produced "Sound Experience", that in retrospect was a foreshadowing of immersive virtual reality, and a good time was had by one at a time every 5 minutes or so. That 'in' to the Exploratorium allowed me to be, among other things, a part of the video documentation team for the late Frank Oppenheimer performing exhibits on the floor of his museum. Eventually I started getting tech support jobs from one or another of the various arts and science programs within the museum which lead to a permanent position.
Between 1989 and 1996, I was Technical Director for McBean Theater at Exploratorium. In 7+ years, I provided presentation support to over 300 lecturers, teachers, physicists, performance artists, installation artists, film makers, videographers and musicians (including MacArthur Grant winners, Nobel Prize winners, Emmy winners, Grammy winners… well, those hardly compare but you get the idea) in the 172 seat McBean Theater, the 1000 seat Palace of Fine Arts Theater, the, then, hundreds
of thousands of people on the internet & the, then, average 6,000,000 annual visitors to the Exploratorium floor.
Besides working to present the discoveries of visiting guests, part of working at Exploratorium included my involvement in the development of exhibits. Most were related to the artists and scientists I worked directly with but through friendships with the staff, I worked on a much wider variety of creative and technical exhibits facilitating a wide variety of artistic interpretations of scientific principles and perceptual anomalies. Eventually I submitted
exhibit ideas of my own and in the early 1990s I was asked to teach informal classes for the public on the subjects of unusual MIDI input devices and sampling in the, then, fledgling field of computer music.
In addition to official activities, the resources and staff of the Exploratorium were used to produce stagecraft off-site. In spite of itself, the weird science ranch co-produce dance scores, sets, props, video backdrops, puppet shows,
street happenings, songs, music videos, stereoscopic animation and, peripherally, a short lived multimedia agitprop band, Sunz of Alien Teknowledgy. I estimate that in those 7+ years of official activities, in excess of 1,000,000 people saw or heard work I personally presented, including the number who heard work I engineered for the Exploratorium sponsored Speaking of Music series for KPFA. The numbers witnessing the unofficial activities are a humble fraction but they ultimately mean more to me.
Since leaving the Exploratorium in 1996, I've been reduced to working outside of my craft, though the occasional theatrical design still pops up from time to time. The meager HTML that I taught myself in 1994, so my band could have a cutting edge web site, turned into a bonifide revenue stream in 2000 when I became a contractor for the Charles Schwab corporation, just in time for the dot com bubble burst, which was well after it had displaced most of the independent arts community.
My non-disclosure clause prevents me from saying any more than that I was initially brought into the Corporate Communications department as a part-time code-monkey and became a preferred web designer and Flash developer. I believe I'm allowed to mention that this occurred as the company began a string of brutal restructurings. As more employees were let go and responsibilities thrown up in the air, I picked up the slack until jobs could be absorbed by others, until it happened again.
Peppered throughout the above were smaller achievements worth noting, many made with the aid of computers and not all related to theater.
- With Michael W. Dean alone, I've been involved in the production of two movies, three books, live appearances and music videos. Producing a documentary about one of his old bands is on my to do list.
- I have music at web sites that have given me an international audience. At besonic.com alone my work has made it onto the top 40 lists of 23 countries in 5 categories. In total, I have 150+ sound and music titles.
- I've written and donated a tutorial to the very generous 3d graphics online community demonstrating a very cool way to achieve a stereoscopic viewer in the human figure animation program Poser.
- S.F. Bay Guardian awarded me the 1999 "Best Of The Bay - Best Local Web Site About Trashy Underground Culture" for my Reality Check TV web site.
- S.F. Bay Guardian also awarded the 1997 "Goldie" for Outstanding Local Theater Company to Fifth Floor, of which I was a founding member.
- In 2001 I won the Dean Goodman Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theater "Sound, Music and Video Design" for Schrödinger's Girlfriend, staged at Magic Theatre and directed by Kenn Watt.
- S.E.I.U. 790A, the labor union at Exploratorium, of which I was a founding member. 1994
I've worked with a lot of collaborators that have brought me into new worlds of materials and practices that have enriched my own ways and means. The reason given to me for my ability to succeed in both the DIY scene and a corporate environment, in spite of the obvious culture clash, was that I knew how to play well with others. Indeed.
You're welcome!
-Michael Woody
|
