If you’ve been following along, we’ve been posting on a series of seven short videos wherein we discuss our creative process and the lessons we learned along the way during our twenty years producing The Rites of Eleusis. In this video Melissa talks about the idea of “Found Objects Art”, which applies in ways that might surprise you!
Seven Lessons – Lesson Six, The Rite of Jupiter: Found Objects Art
In other news, yesterday we rolled out some updates to our Past Projects page. Check it out, and drop us a comment to let us know what you think.
During this week we are hoping to hear back from two more Film Festivals about whether or not The Rite of Saturn will be featured. We’ll let you know as soon as we do!
Once we have more information for virtual attendance at the Madrid International Film Festival, we will be posting it here as well!
Thanks again to everyone who has been watching The Rites of Eleusis, and sharing the videos with their friends. The outpouring of support has been moving, and we are so grateful to everyone who helped to make this work a reality!
If you follow me on Facebook, you have probably seen me wax philosophic on the subject of art and criticism. If you have managed to miss those musings (or if you have wisely chosen to wait until I have collected them in one place and removed a bit of the ranting) that is the subject of today’s blog post.
Let me start by saying that there was a time, when we were first starting out, that I reacted very poorly to honest criticism. I was anxious about the work we were doing. When people I respected came to me to say they found aspects of our work wanting, or with suggestions about how we might improve, I was defensive. When they described our work as an embarrassment to Thelema, I was hurt and angry.
That is often the case with art. No sooner have we begun to create something than people will come forward and try to help us make it better. And often as not, it is truly intended as an offer of assistance. In the early stages, when we are still finding our voices, and getting out feet under ourselves, I suspect there is an absence of awareness on the part of those “helpers” of just how fragile that process can be.
As an aside, my first bit of practical advice here is to be mindful of this fragile state when talking with your cast and crew. For the majority of performers, theater is the realm of amateurs, people who are literally creating for the love of the project or process. Correction and redirection is always most effective when delivered with tact, kindness, and even better when coupled with enthusiasm. Rather than criticize how someone is performing, simply framing the desired change as an inspired new approach can work very well, provided you are not given to sarcasm.
That said, the topic I am covering today is criticism of your creative work, and how to handle it.
The Power of Art
All criticism is a reaction to your art. Simply sitting with that is powerful. Any reaction to the art you have created is a result of your efforts. It abides as a living example of how your creative process has made some impact on the world. Therefore, any criticism is a measure of your success as an artist.
I will remind myself of this before diving into any review of our work.
From there, I find it is best to categorize (or critique) the criticism. You would be surprised how satisfying this process is, once you get the hang of it.
I like to start by placing the criticism that I have received over the years into four broad categories.
Bullshit
Friends
Fans
Professionals
Gardening 101
Let’s start with Bullshit. If you put your art on the internet, you are going to see a great deal of this category, although it is not limited to online forums. While there is an adage: “Don’t read the comments”, if you have comments enabled (and there are very good reasons for doing so in terms of outreach and engagement) someone will have to read and police those comments. Sometimes it will be something simple and vulgar, easily deleted or ignored. Other times it will be a long and hateful screed… yet strangely, also easily deleted or ignored. I do give the longer screeds points for effort.
While many would argue that these type of remarks have no practical value at all, I would say they will damn sure toughen you as an artist. Not that I think these hateful types are trying to help, but succeeding despite vulgar or unhinged detractors can be deeply satisfying.
I have literally had someone refer to one of my projects as a “piece of shit” to my face, in front of a room full of people. It was awkward. Also, it was entirely useless. The hallmark of bullshit criticism, be it long or short, vulgar, or oh, so polite, is that it is 100% useless as criticism.
There is nothing practical I can learn or apply from a critique that refers to my project as fecal matter, or suggests that Aleister Crowley would not approve, or demands that Ancient Egyptians have been mischaracterized and maligned by my work. So I refer to this type of criticism as bullshit, a substance whose only practical application is fertilizer. When I am feeling like a need a reason to soldier on, spiting these bastards can be reason enough.
People who love to help
This next category is for your friends, your family, and the people who know how you could be so much more successful, if only you would follow their advice.
First, let me say that after dealing with the previous category a few times, you will love to hear from these people. Even if they are disappointed in everything about your project, if they go to the trouble to say something intended to be useful, reflecting the actual content of what you did, it is such a breath of fresh air! And bonus points if they can do so without referring to bodily functions!
This category of criticism can be weighed according to it’s merit. Which as an artist is a blessing! Honest feedback can be difficult to garner, difficult to deliver, and difficult to hear. So the effort going into this communication should not be understated, and it is best to accept it graciously.
Some of it will be useful. And some won’t. Decide which is which on your own time, and act accordingly. Do not inform these critics if their criticism will be useful, and be certain to thank them for their feedback.
People who love your art
This is probably the favorite category of feedback an artist can receive. Praise. Adoration. Somebody bought a t-shirt. It is the best feeling.
And often, it is also much like the first category, in so far as it is not really that useful to development as an artist. If you ignore all the voices excepting those that sing your praises, it is like a diet of pure candy! Super sweet, but not nourishing.
Fans are the people who have reached to your art with appreciation, and even love. Something about what you created appeals to them. As long as you are creating something that you also love, this is a win-win, and it can make you feel like there are exactly that many people who understand your vision, and adhere to your view of the subject. But that is not really true. You will never hear from everyone who was touched by your work, and people will like or dislike what you create for their own reasons, and those will seldom align directly with yours.
Art is often a matter of taste, and not everyone who likes your art will agree with you about what it means, or why it is good. Let them enjoy it for their own reasons. There is no reasons to correct a fan, unless they are grossly misrepresenting you. Whenever possible, be gracious.
Gatekeepers
The Rite of Sol promotional write up from The Seattle Weekly, 2012
The last category is the most useful. An honest review from a professional writer.
Here is where a great deal of learning can happen. Here is the impartial voice that has an opinion about your creation, and is willing to provide feedback about what does and doesn’t work well, and why. (The friends category might also contain this type of information, but categorically it may not be reliably neutral.)
Any review will still be subject to a critics own tastes and proclivities, and that is all to the good. Any critics regular audience will likely have similar tastes and proclivities, and employ the criticism provided to ascertain if your art suits their collective taste.
You will seldom find professional or semi-professional critics being vulgar, or giving vague feedback. They have or are building a reputation, and that reputation is constructed around delivering an accurate assessment of your work to their audience, in order to set their readers expectation about the content of your art.
The net result of this is feedback that is both clear and objective, and that cites particular areas that worked well, and areas that could be improved, often with clear suggestions of how that might be achieved.
Of course, there are a few professionals who have built a career out of being cruel or witty at the expense of the artists they review. Happily, as an artist, you can usually spot these and dump them into the bullshit category, and move on.
Something that somebody said
A final takeaway, if I can offer one, is to restate what I said above. Criticism is a reaction to your art. It is something resulting from your work. And it is no more or less than that. Something somebody said after exploring your creation. And you can learn from it if it is useful. Or ignore it if it is not.
And the person who decides if it is useful is you. Always you.
That is your power as a creator. When you use your passion to create, all those reacting voices are the echos of your voice, shouting your truth to the Universe.
[Editor’s Note: Marcos Duran is a Seattle area artist and musician who has been gracious enough to work with us at Eleusyve Production starting in 2007 with The Rite of Venus. At our request today’s post is the story of how he developed one of our most interesting set pieces, the altar/hellbroth from The Rite of Saturn. Seeing as it features so prominently in the our first look video posted last Monday, it is fun to shed a little light on how it was done. In addition to props and set building, Marcos also appeared on stage for The Rite of Sol, and has regularly been integral to the entire production process, from attending planning meetings and adding his voice to the soundtrack, to providing playback for rehearsals, to being stage hand and musical instrument wrangler throughout the theatrical runs.]
Lighting the Hellbroth
Fire is expensive. You wouldn’t think to look at the stuff you can make fire with, nor how easy it is to set one, but fire is terribly expensive… at least if you’re trying to put it on a stage inside a building where more than two people are going to witness it. So.. ok.. Maybe not the fire itself. But the insurance you need for most venues to cover open flame on a stage is much more than a self-funded amateur theater company is going to have on hand. So… you have to improvise.
I’m Marcos Duran, prop-master for Eleusyve productions, and having participated in nearly all of the Eleusyve renditions of the Rites of Eleusis, I’ve come to learn a little something about fake fire. Over the years, we’ve employed various tricks and methods to approximate fire or flame like things. Even incense, which is still open flame, cannot be used, so we’ve managed our old favorite standby: dry ice and boiling water. We’ve used colored lights. But for our production of The Rite of Saturn, fire was going to play a center role in a lot of scenes and we needed to come up with something more interesting.
Fake fire in the theater world where there needs to be visible flame generally only takes a couple of forms. The first is fan-blown dyed silks that are lit from below. With the proper weight of silk fabric and the right colors of dyes and lights, this effect is actually pretty decent. The silks wave and ripple in the fans and make for a pretty good prop. The only problem is that fans make noise, and when you’re recording your audio live from the stage, any extraneous sounds, especially if they would mask dialog or singing in any way, are right out.
Digging around, I stumbled on a different technique that I also found out has commercial backing. It turns out that when you blow a diffuse water vapor mist through a set of appropriate colored lights, the reflection of that light through the mist and as it tapers off into the air make an impressive demonstration of believable flames. A great source for fine water vapor is an ultrasonic humidifier, and they generate the volume of mist needed without any noticeable sound. This technique is used commercially for no-fire fireplace inserts as well as large fire-like effects indoors for casinos and other large installations.
Here is an example of the effect:
I found a video of a prop guy building out a version of this kind of fake fire, and I decided to work with his techniques to build our own fire altar.
I picked up a test humidifier, and with a combination of tubing and some LED christmas lights, I was able to see the effect on a very small scale, so I knew if we could ramp it up, we might have something.
Here is what that test looked like:
The YouTube video included plumbing out two separate humidifiers to create enough mist to make a decent size faux fire, so I picked up another humidifier and some PVC piping and fittings along with a chunk of flexible marine tubing. The builder in the video used theater lighting cans to light the mist, and I didn’t have those available to me at the time of testing, but I picked up some strip LED lighting to attempt to build a lighting rig. Once I was able to collect mist from two humidifiers set at their highest level, I was able to get enough pressure to create the flow we needed.
To diffuse the mist, I took a straight length of piping, just like in the video, and drilled holes at short intervals along one line. This worked ok for a short time, but it was apparent that there were going to be some challenges. Water vapor would condense at the holes in the pipe, and over time due to the water surface tension, a droplet would form and completely block the hole. I tried a few techniques to see if I could find a way to lower the surface tension so this would stop, but what ultimately happened was that I created larger openings that took the form of slots instead of holes. This allowed the vapor to escape and it allowed the condensation to collect in a way that did not impact the pressure of the vapor. Another issue that came up was the fact that the diffuser tube was just too narrow to allow the vapor to spread well, so instead, larger diameter tubing and fittings were arranged and the slots were once again cut into the tube. This combination allowed us to get a fairly large and directed cloud of mist.
Lighting this cloud became a different challenge. The LED strip lights were definitely not bright enough. The light needed to be bright enough to reach high into the vapor cloud, so I began searching for alternatives. I stuck with LED mostly for safety. The cooler temperatures ensured that we wouldn’t have to get creative with cooling or other heat-related considerations when deciding on how to color the lights or how to enclose this assembly. I found two 3-light spotlight style lighting fixtures such that you would use in a living space to highlight a wall or a piece of art, and configured them with 600 lumen LED spot lights. I put one fixture on each side of the diffuser tube, inverted and angled so that the light would hit the wall of mist from underneath and at a focal point of about 2 feet above the deck. One of the advantages of focusing the lights this way was to also provide stage lighting on actors who were performing around the fire altar. As they approached the fire altar, they would glow and light up as though from the light of a real fire. It was a neat effect!
Lighting color became an important piece. If you use the wrong color gels, the effect does not look like natural fire. I did experiment for the sake of “science” with some alternatives, and it is possible to do some really interesting effects that are fire-like but very definitely not natural.
Here is what it looks like with red gels. A nifty effect, but definitely not natural!
The original reference YouTube video suggested that a mix of yellow and orange gels work best and that red is not advised. In my case, I discovered that the color temperature of my LED spot lights was cold enough that the yellow gels didn’t offer much to the effect, so I went strictly with an orange colored gel that I ended up doubling to increase the color saturation.
Rigging the gels was one of the most fiddly parts of the rig because I did not have a good pre-built solution. I ended up building a wire framework to hold the gels over the bulbs. It is the one piece of the puzzle that I will eventually rebuild if I bring out this prop again.
We ended up housing all of the equipment inside one of the base units from our old, well-painted friends, the obelisks. These are the sames obelisks that have enjoyed a role in nearly all of the Eleusyve Rites of Eleusis productions. The base offered plenty of room for all the equipment and gave us a structure for our fire altar. One of the face panels of the base was removed to allow access to the equipment, and a deck was made to cover the top except for about a 4 inch wide slot that ran the length of the middle from where the mist would escape. The mist rose and the lighting seemed to be working, but we needed a little extra force on the mist, so a small personal fan was installed beneath the diffuser tube to blow the mist up and out. This addition made the difference! It didn’t add appreciable noise, and in testing we were able to get some impressive flame-like effects. All of this was routed into a power strip inside the obelisk, and an extension was run to our lighting relays so that the effect could be controlled from the board.
Here is the initial test of the fully assembled rig:
The one consideration in the design that did get missed was the need for supply air venting for the fan. This problem wasn’t noticed until we were in the theater space, the unit installed, and the equipment hatch closed up. The fan had no source to pull in air and lost pressure, and as a result, the flames were not very high. I spent most of the production run battling this issue with various solutions including cutting holes into the floor of our set in order to provide the necessary venting. Thankfully, we figured it out in the end!
All in all, the piece had the desired effect, and we had amazing fire on stage! All this for around $100 plus the enclosure. It was relatively easy to build, and mostly easy to maintain. Adding it to the lighting relays, we were able to turn it on and off at will, and that added to the mystery of it.
Final look before installation in the theater:
This was a fun build, and it was extremely well received! I would highly recommend this as a great solution to bringing a larger fire to your stage production. It will keep your insurance agency and your pocketbooks at bay.
One of the little aphorisms I have said to myself over the years, just to keep myself going, is that “Faith can certainly move mountains, in so far as we employ our faith to move that mountain one rock at a time.” All art is magick. All creation falls into the mundane order of miracles we shape with our will, and build with our sinews. Inspiration and perspiration are closely interwoven.
With that in mind, picking up where we left off in our previous post, we will proceed to step three of our Doing Rites Right flow chart.
3. Have your planning meetings
This step is much as we covered in the first post in this series, but you will likely need to plan several meetings, covering specific areas. Don’t neglect any of the A,B,Cs we covered before: Artisit Vision, Budget, Casting, Dates, Effects and Fallout!
Come prepared with copies of the annotated script that you can share with your cast and crew; copies that they can scribble on and generally use to keep track of evolving landscape of your vision. Your meeting topic may include:
Stagecraft and Lighting – depending on whether you are using a theater, you may need a professional for this. Props – Don’t forget to give yourself time to make these before rehearsal, so your cast can work with them. Costumes – Depending on the theme, thrift stores can be a fantastic resource. Casting – As your production size increases, your cast size may too. You may need to plan for auditions, so be sure to give yourself some advance time to advertise.
The Rite of Mercury Set, 2010
Sets – These can be simple or complex. Anything you can do with theater cubes will make your life easier, but if you are like me, you will what to do something big. Give yourself a lot of time to figure out how to construct your vision. Start with a cardboard model. I built them out of pizza boxes with duct tape. Rehearsal Schedule – Plan the number of rehearsals based on the chart about, then add 2 for tech and dress rehearsal. It is best if you plan scene by scene, and give cast members the night off it they are not in the scenes being rehearsed that night. For our productions, music and choral rehearsals – This is a whole other aspect, and should be planned prior to the blocking rehearsals, so that the choir knows it’s parts before they start acting. For each of these you will need to plan who will be responsible for the task, what sort of time frame will be required, and what sort of budget you will need.
4. Readers-Theater/Rehearsal
With a more complex vision, you will require a more granular rehearsal. Each scene and poem will need to be broken down and run repeatedly.
You can still start with a readers-theater in an early rehearsal in order to familiarize the cast with the structure, and brainstorm ideas for interactions between the characters.
Given the spartan nature of the script notes, there will be a great many questions about what motivates these characters, and how you choose to answer these questions will shape your presentation. This process will go on throughout the rehearsal schedule.
As your performance date approaches, you may find yourself invoking a rule coined by Melissa during our runs: “Simplify, do not embellish.” Your vision may be rich and complex, and creating it is certainly part of the learning process, but it will not always translate to stage. At some point, you will have to let go of the vision a little bit in order to be ready for opening night. Don’t let this discourage you! It is part of the process.
Sol Crucified, The Rite of Sol, 2012
5. Presentation
Again, depending on scale, you may do a single performance, or many. By the time opening night rolls around, the work of the director should be done. Again, I strongly advise that once the show opens, there in no more tweaking. The cast will have an idea how the show should run, and changes at this point will simply cause confusion and undermine the performance.
Allow the magick to run it’s course.
6. Review and relax. At this stage in the game, we may be talking about theatrical reviews. Here I would urge you, don’t be too worried about it. As it turns out, criticism falls into two categories. Useful, and stupid. Seriously.
A useful critique from an eloquent and professional source will undoubtedly discuss areas where your presentation either succeeded of failed in the eyes of the critic. It will contain information on the impressions that the critic received during the staging, and some indication about whether they would recommend their readers attend. Even a negative review might be very helpful in shaping your future work.
A stupid review is usually provided by someone who is unpaid on the internet. It will contain expletives, insults, and no useful information. Disregard these. Don’t even read the whole thing. If it is a comment you have control over, delete it and move on.
And don’t forget to relax and enjoy your achievement! Laugh about the hard parts! Consider all you have learned! And above all:
Party in a construction site! The Rite of Saturn 2018, photo by David Parks
