Creative Creativity: Inspiration and Tools for Creativity

Vaudeville Slang

Here's a great list of vaudeville slang I found. They misspelled vaudeville in the title of the page, so it's probably just takenfrom somewhere else. Still, I love a peek into the vocabulary of any specific art form. A lot of these terms are in common usage now, but some are just a great look into the life of a working performer.

Here are a few:

Three-sheeting - Hanging around the theatre making it known that you are a performer in order to try and impress others. Grandstanding. Named after the 44" x 84" posters that were used in the lobby of the Vaudeville theatre to promote the show

Playing to the haircuts - Last on the bill. In other words, playing to the backs of the audience as they left the theatre.

The Gerry Society - The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Named for founder Elbridge T. Gerry. Originally founded to prevent the exploitation of child labour, the society was a thorn in the side of vaudevillians. The society declared performers must be over 16 to work in vaudeville. Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, Rose Marie and Milton Berle were only a few of the child performers who ran into trouble with the Gerry Society.

Also, I had hear the term "working blue" before, but I never knew where it came from...

Blue - Crude jokes or other material using graphic sexual or toilet references or profanity. The term comes from the days when Keith-Albee insisted that performers stick to strict standards of propriety and would send blue envelopes with cuts to performers. You obeyed them or quit. And if you quit, you got a black mark against your name in the head office and you didn't work on the circuit anymore.

Take the time to learn the slang used by people in the same artistic field you want to be in. It makes it easier to talk to other people interested in the same thing and helps you be taken seriously.

Learning the names for mistakes helps you avoid them.

Robert Wilson On Deciding What To Do Next

I watched the documentary Absolute Wilson last night. It follows the creative life of Robert Wilson the avant-garde stage director and writer. It ends with him talking about what to do next and I thought it was interesting enough to pass along:

Sometimes you say to yourself, what should I do next? And people advise you or you decide yourself what to do next. And quite often, you try to think of what is the right thing to do. But, quite often, you should think what is the wrong thing to do. And then do that.

Page Versus Stage: The Debate Continues

In the world of poetry, there is a large divide between written poetry and poetry intended for performance. Although there are a growing number of poets that see the value of both, performed or "slam" poetry continues to be seen as being of lesser value by many academics and traditional poets. The debate is often referred to as "page versus stage."

Poetry Foundation is featuring an excellent interview right now with someone that has mastered both, Susan Somers-Willett. Here she discusses what academic poetry might learn from slam poetry:

The academy can learn something crucial from slam: how to put butts in the seats. It’s ironic that, at the same time critics were debating “Can Poetry Matter?” and lamenting the death of poetry for the general reader, slams were starting to emerge across the nation. Slam found poetry’s so-called lost audience, and instead of instructing it to sit quietly, hushed and reverent in the presence of the author, it said to react to the poet—boo, hiss, applaud, give the poem a score of a 10 or a 2.7. Having an actively engaged audience helped the slam grow into what it is today—a series of national competitions that sell out large venues in major U.S. cities.

I think this is an excellent point. Just as there are many types of music, why can't there be different and equally valuable types of poetry. Classical music has a solid but limited audience, so does academic poetry. Slam poetry engages the audience, makes them feel passionate emotions and lets them know that their reaction to the poem is an important part of the poem. Slam not only puts butts in seats, it makes those butts think and feel. Slam is the rock super-group of the poetry world, capable of filling arenas.

If you have never been to a poetry slam, you should really try it out. Check for a venue close to you by clicking here.

Click here to read the article
Click here to listen to a podcast featuring slam discussion and one of Susan's poems.

Lost Art Form - Vaudeville!

Vaudeville! The Library of Congress has a great selection of available recordings, films and other information about that lost form of entertainment, the vaudeville stage. You can listen to The Arkansas Traveller, a comedy sketch that dates back to at least 1852! A Laughing Sketch, there were lots of these. It was basically a sketch where something happened and someone with an infectious laugh started laughing until everyone on stage and the whole crowd joined in on the mass hysteria. Or just enjoy a dramatic reading like this one.

They don't have video collection online, but if you find a title you like in their archive, search youtube, I found Animal Act With Baboon, Dog and Donkey.

There are also scanned scripts available. The featured script right now is The Lone Hand Four Aces (To be acted by a Troupe of Educated Dogs). Most of the scripts read as if they are transcribed from someone describing the stage act to someone else. Which they probably were. Scripts in English and Yiddish.

Perfect for research, inspiration and entertainment.

New Moleskin Story Board Notebook

I am addicted to notebooks. To me, it's hard to think of anything that represents the possibilities of a new project than a pristine, empty notebook. The best notebooks in the world are Moleskins.

They've come out with a great new notebook for story boarding. Perfect for cartoonists, directors or anyone involved in visual storytelling, they have four pre-drawn panels per page to fill with whatever you want. I had to hold myself back from buying one, they're so very pretty.

You can take a look at them here.