Practivist of the Week - E. Amato

Practivist of the Week - E. Amato

[Editor's note: E. Amato would like you to know that she is the editor of Zestyverse in the interests of full disclosure!]

How old are you, if you don't mind?



What is the main focus of your practivism at this time and how does that manifest? 

The main focus of my practivism at this time is creating live performance events that promote diversity, sustainability, and connection. After over a decade of promoting and producing events, I have begun to percolate a formula that allows maximum connection with the audience and sustainability for artists, audience, organizers and community. As a promoter and producer, I have always made sure there is parity on my stages between genders, orientation, age, ability, ethnicity, etc. In my time promoting, I have seen this parity decrease elsewhere. The lack of women on festival stages this past season has been well-documented, for example. My practivism is refocused on this issue for my own events, as I find it has renewed importance.

In 2013, I did an event called Secret Door featuring poets and musicians. It was in a tiny space that we designed specifically for the event. The evening took on a life of its own - the barrier between artist and audience erased itself and collaborations formed. This model has wider applications and can be partnered with community needs to develop audiences, spaces and creative relationships in ways that are financially sustainable. In order to learn and experiment more, I've accepted a place in the MFA, Creative Producing program at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. In order to get there, I still need financial support, so I've begun a crowd fund to help.

What route did you take to get here?

The longest possible one! I began as a performer, who decided to direct. I've always written. I went into film production, which gave me a huge amount of down time between jobs as well as a strong sense of things being far too big and taking far too long. The combination of these led me - indirectly, of course - to get on stage and read some of my poems. I loved the immediacy and the audience being right in front of me instead of in a a darkened movie theatre 24 months from now. This led to a B-career as a performance poet. With the organizational skills I had from production and my voice as a poet, many encouraged me to start my own venue. My unpredictable work schedule made me start with one-off events that I knew I could actually attend! This led to hosting,then a monthly venue, and the Fringe Festival, Edinburgh, among other things. Now I had three full-time careers! I did this for about ten years. Then I fell. My body did not bounce back - my resilience was worn out. I had a vision of what I wanted to build, but I did not have the strength, focus, or resources. It was frustrating and even debilitating in its own right. Getting back on my feet was a lot of work - I'm not sure I'm even all the way there, yet.

But there was also inner work to do - did I still have the commitment to the vision I had before everything went so wrong? I knew that in order to achieve this goal of the MFA and building a creative entrepreneurship I need more than one  hundred percent commitment. I felt sparks, but I knew sparks weren't enough. I continued to self care and meditate, stretch and strengthen. 

Eventually a flashpoint showed up - that place where I had to commit or choose another path. I knew that this was not a dream I could let go. I embraced with the strength that I had, but I knew I'd need to create community support around me to fully enable this vision. 

This is a great way to start this journey, as I feel sustainable arts require community involvement and collective choice-making. The entertainment industry's practices lag far behind where we actually are in 2015. In order to move them into the world we are living in, we have to move away from a hierarchical and pedagogical model of taste and presentation and towards one that will engage people viscerally. People need strong engagement now to counter the large amounts of time we spend partially engaged through our devices or altogether disengaged. 


I hope I've answered the questions! i'm so used to being the one asking! If you're a Zesty fan, a fan of any of my work or just stopping by and like the sound of all this, you can support by donating, sharing or just sending great energy! Thank you!

The Amanda Palmer Factor

By now you've no doubt heard about, if not seen, Amanda Palmer's TED Talk.  (She gives good TED Talk - you should see it if you haven't.  It's a nice little performance art piece in and of itself.)

And now, to add to that, we have the Veronica Mars $2 million dollar campaign - now having raised almost $4 million!

The blogosphere, the creative community and even Hollywood is buzzing about all this.

So.  What does it all mean?

It means that I sometimes can't get to sleep for thinking about the awful intersection of being a full-time creative and self promotion, self involvement, and possibly, over-ridingly, vanity.

It means that I have an urgent need to write this blog so that I can get more sleep and get back to what I need to do - self promoting my new book and funding a show I'm producing for The Brighton Fringe.

Yup.

And let me tell you, it's mighty hard to want to do any of that when the poster children for all this are up in your face raising more money than they need for projects that would have been funded by the industries they represent so that their fans can pay not once, but twice, for the privilege of their creativity.  (Yes - you can give to the Veronica Mars crowd funding campaign AND pay for your ticket to see the movie when it maybe comes out in 2015.)

That sounded sooo Hater.  I'm not hating...them...I liked Veronica Mars.  And I've got nothing against Amanda Palmer.  It's the whole concept of using social media as a commercial for individual ego that gives me a kind of low-lying, daily Sartrean nausea.

If Amanda Palmer thinks she crowd-surfed and trusted her audience, well, pretty sure I'd be dead without my community.  Certainly I'd never have stayed in a surprising squat - a green oasis half a block from a tube station - slept in a hostel, barbecued with 2 houses of South African ex-pats or been Batgirl on a canal boat. Sure - bad things have happened, too.  Some really bad things.  But the truth is, trusting in that way - being honest about what you're asking for and what you can and cannot give in return - has led to experiences and insights I never could have had any other way.  It has made me a person who carries the experiences of others in a heartfelt way.  It has given me a confidence in the power of my art and words to create deeper feeling - to connect others more deeply to themselves.  That kind of trust creates love.  It's also the place where art emerges consistently and the elusive inspiration is a fact of daily living.

I'd like to think that if one of the people who've put Amanda Palmer up while she was on tour tweeted her that they needed a place to crash, she'd oblige.  But I have a needling inside me that says there's a secret equation underneath all of this, and that's not part of it.

No one owns crowd funding.  It's an open source medium.  Like the internet, which started as a way to connect people to information and information to people, then quickly became a gateway for the delivery of pornography, or Craig's List which started as a way to buy, sell, recycle, and re-use resources and is now, well, a place where you really don't want to be, in rather short order, crowd funding has been redefined as a way to make celebrities more famous and make them seem vulnerable, which makes us like them more, which makes them more famous.

What we are seeing in this moment is a shift in the public perception of crowd funding - away from community, from shared values and things that promote global progress and toward yet another (yawn) area of the exploration of entertainment, fame, and fans.  There's no reason that these projects need crowd funding. These artists want validation to be sure, and that elusive idea of control.  (The fact that the 2 biggest stars of this new show are women is probably not coincidental.  Routinely marginalized by the entertainment industry, female-driven projects often get 2nd tier treatment - even when you're an established recording and performance artist, or a TV star.  Flexing a little muscle, defining your footprint - these have to be important to both Palmer and Bell.  Everybody puts Baby in a corner until she breaks out and takes stage.)

When crowd funding began, it embodied the idea of having your six-degrees community lift you up to do something positive and rewarding for everyone within your reach.  What it is now, not even five years later, is a way to measure your fan base, increase project exposure and bolster your vanity.  It's no longer crowd funding; it's fan funding.

I'm not sure if I'm resentful of this shift, though I know a lot of artists are.  It's a little sad and a little disappointing. What worries me is that a technology that was developed in order to circumvent a type of greed has fallen prey to exactly that type of greed.

We can't reclaim what never belonged to us.  Open source is just that - available to all; adaptable to current needs.  What we can do is build another sandbox.  And then another.  And another.

(So, this turned out to be two blogs - stay tuned for part 2...)