Nomad Theater – Origins and Potential For Producing a Better Public Education

Compilation and opinion
By Lucy Maness Warner
December 23, 2016

I noticed on this morning’s local news that we have a new theater downtown on Adams St called The Five and Dime. The report spoke of it as a “nomad theater,” which is a new term to me. I did find several others on the Net, though, so it isn’t a new idea. In the article, it seems to mean merely a theater group without a permanent home, however there is some fascinating stuff on the Net about “nomad” theater as a philosophy. Nomadism is a popular view going back to Leibnitz and Nietzsche. In my one philosophy course I read a little of Leibnitz and no Nietzsche whatsoever, but I do usually find the writing of philosophers, judges and lawyers interesting because of the way their thought patterns run.

The “nomad theater” in Boulder Colorado and that in Surrey, England both have a long history of presenting the experience of live drama to the greater masses rather than those who can afford the $40.00 to $140.00 tickets in many “legitimate” theatres. We did have access to good drama at UNC-CH, of course; and in Washington DC several “little theaters” which were more affordable. I did spend $50 or so to see Cats and Dustin Hoffman himself as the lead in a production of Death of a Salesman, which I have always loved. I’m so glad to find this new cultural enrichment in Jacksonville, and especially so close to my neighborhood. Jacksonville does have enough citizens to warrant more live theater productions, so hopefully this “5 and Dime” will succeed. We also have a popular dinner theater, which usually has popular musicals rather than Shakespeare or any other more serious form. It, too, is expensive, so I haven’t been to see anything there.

If this new source of live drama is going to be what used to be called “experimental theater,” that will be even better. Without digging deeply into rather abstruse philosophical discussions, I do enjoy art which stirs up my curiosity and stimulates new impressions, feelings and thoughts, like modern poetry. In my view the best art is “evocative” rather than static and didactic. This is the kind of thing that is available in college towns at a fairly affordable price, and many of those downtown buildings here are older than those which were destroyed in “the Great Fire,” of 1901, so they are beautiful to me. I don’t go down there near the river at night alone, but perhaps I can find someone to go with me.



www.facebook.com/The5andDime/

The Five and Dime, a Theater Company

Mission

The 5 & Dime tells stories that engage, inspire, entertain, and challenge audiences, nurturing a rich artistic culture in Jacksonville’s Urban Core.


Details

Sooo excited about our new permanent home!

We could use LOTS of hands on Tuesday January 3rd at 10:30am at the Warehouse. Please help us move out of the warehouse and into our new permanent home. We could definitely use as many people as possible. The more hands the faster it goes.

Pizza and beverages provided!!!



http://www.nomadtheatre.com/

Welcome to the Nomad Theatre

Here you will find all the latest information on upcoming productions, auditions and reviews from the Nomad Theatre, Surrey. Contact our dedicated team here in East Horsley using the Contact Us page for more information.

Tickets are available online using Ticket Source. You can also book by phone 01483 284747 and leave a message on the answerphone, a member of the team will call you back or you can call in to the theatre on Saturdays 10-12.30. You can pay by cash, cheque or credit card.

You will find the Nomad Theatre behind the shops in Bishopsmead Parade, East Horsley, KT24 6RT. Look for our swinging sign and drive under the archway between the White Footed Goose and the Post Office. See the map for parking.

Nomad Theatre puts on a wide range of shows from Shakespeare, drama, comedy, musicals to panto. We have a thriving Youth Theatre with classes on Saturdays and Thursdays and their own summer show and studio plays. www.nomesyouththeatre.co.uk Contact the tutors at nomes@nomadtheatre.com for information about joining.

Prompt Corner lunches are held every third Wednesday, enjoy a two course meal and listen to local speakers talk on an endless range of subjects. Contact Mary Brooks if interested lyncombe@btinternet.com

Play in a Week is a very special annual event in July. It is a week long fully inclusive project which enables actors with learning and/or physical disabilities to enjoy the magic and benefits of taking part in theatre. See more

If you wish to join us or have any query then leave a message on the answerphone 01483 284717 or email info@nomadtheatre.com. The Chairman will respond to emails.

For box office requests and questions please only leave a message at 01483 284747. As parking is limited at the theatre please phone box office if you need to reserve a disabled parking space.



http://www.nomadplayhouse.org/history/

History

In 1951, a volunteer group of thespians incorporated in Boulder County for “the promotion and advancement of legitimate drama for enjoyment by the general public.” With the idea of traveling to other Colorado communities, they dubbed themselves “Nomads” and invested in a circus tent, which they set up on borrowed land “just a little off Broadway” in the northern part of town. In over 50 years of activity, the Nomads never actually performed at any other location. The first season, a critical and popular success, was hampered by rainfall, windstorms and excessive heat. A more permanent structure was clearly in order, and the people of Boulder rallied to provide the necessary means to build the Nomad Playhouse.

The Nomads’ exemplary community spirit was apparent in every aspect of the project: founding members William and Winnie Hutson (then owners of the Boulderado Hotel) offered a long-term lease and an interest-free loan that was later waived; Baudie Moschetti (then owner of the corner liquor store) offered free use of the land, which he later gave the Nomads; board member Ralph Peters contributed technical equipment and expertise and much more; and prominent local architect James Hunter (responsible for many civic buildings like the Boulder library and medical center and a pioneer in the use of solar energy) was commissioned. Due to the low cost and simplicity of construction, a design reminiscent of the Quonset Hut, the half-cylindrical, metal-sided structure developed by the Navy for quick deployment during WWII, was chosen. Groundbreaking took place in August 1952. Some lumber and sheeting was salvaged from an abandoned mine, and footlights, scenery, flats and curtains were constructed by members of the group. Seats for the audience were borrowed from a nearby mortuary.

Over the years, additions, repairs and changes to the building occurred (like repainting the original chartreuse exterior to brown), but the Nomads’ vision and passion for high-quality community theatre remained constant. Each season offered a range of beloved standards and avant-garde work. No actor or director was ever paid; in fact, members (a group that expanded from the original 30 to over 500) paid nominal dues and volunteered their time and talents on and off stage. Some Nomads went on to achieve broader recognition, such as Larry Linville (M*A*S*H’s Dr. Frank Burns) and Joan van Ark (Knots Landing’s Valene Ewing and Tony-award-nominated Broadway actress).

In 1994, the aging building, which did not meet current life/safety codes, was closed by the fire marshal. In order to meet the costs of updates, the Nomads sold two thirds of their 1.44 acre parcel for development as co-housing and launched an aggressive funding campaign in the hope to “keep the playhouse going for a couple more generations.” The following year, the site was granted individual designation as a landmark on the basis of the historical significance of its association with the Nomad Players, Boulder's longest running theatre group, as well as its architectural significance. A decade later, due to various reasons including financial difficulties and a decline in volunteerism, the Nomads disbanded and the playhouse went dark.

Tara Performing Arts High School’s students had always been “nomadic,” moving into borrowed and rented spaces (including the Nomad) for their rehearsals and productions. In 2006, Unicomm Productions, LLC (owned in part by John Kelly, faithful Tara supporter) bought the historic playhouse, intending both to hold the theatre until the school was in a position to buy it and to support the longstanding tradition of community theatre on the site. Now Tara has taken over management of the playhouse and is raising funds for its purchase and rehabilitation. Click here to learn more about the Nomad Purchase Project!

Welcome to the Nomad Playhouse

The Nomad Playhouse is a historic theatre in North Boulder where artists and audiences have come together to explore ideas through art for over 50 years. We are committed to revitalizing the Nomad’s legacy of community engagement through high-caliber cultural offerings. As part Tara Performing Arts High School’s ambitious vision for the Nomad as a vibrant center for the arts, we curate an eclectic assortment of film, music, dance and the dramatic arts.

Rent the Nomad for your next event! Click here for more information.



NOMADISM as a concept / MONAD as a concept

For a highly philosophical discussion of this, or rather these two concepts, go to Deleuze. To cut to the chase, go to the following. This book includes a philosophical discussion between characters in the story. The “Monad” is an old concept from Grecian philosophy, and the less scholarly speaker fails to understand the word and calls it Nomads.

PETRA KUPPERS – see below -- This background information on Nomadic thinking and theater is an understandable description of the idea of nomadism. How the term “monad” became “nomad,” is explained in The Neighbors: A Story of Every-day Life. Read the relevant passage for yourself at the website “books.google.com/books” below. It is very clever, humorous writing describing the class-based social life of the sort of 19th Century landed gentry of which Jane Austen also wrote. Austen herself was from a professional rather than gentrified home, her father being a lawyer, and she spoofed the gentry often and fairly maliciously in some cases, while creating her main characters as highly decent, logical, feeling, flawed, well-read and thoroughly normal people. Maybe I’ll try to find a copy of The Neighbors to read at a later time.



The Neighbors

https://books.google.com/books?id=JzkPAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA16&dq=MONADS+V+NOMADS&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjy9s-Mz4rRAhULrFQKHbM3BlAQ6AEIMDAC#v=onepage&q=MONADS%20V%20NOMADS&f=false

The Neighbours: A Story of Every-day Life
By Fredrika Bremer
Harper & Brothers, 1844 - Sweden - 127 pages


On Deleuze himself, who was a highly theoretical thinker and apparently well-known in PhD level philosophical circles, he is quoted on various issues in the arts of the mid twentieth century. He delves deeply into Nietzsche’s concept of “nomad thoughts.” That is more or less what these days we call "Thinking outside the Box." In fact, this may be the origin of the term. I have clipped out the most applicable and clearcut discussion from Petra Kuppers “Space Rules: Techno-Nomad Theater.” It sounds like the sort of thing which our high school drama teacher presented to us for our class play written by Eugene Ionesco.

For daily fare, it is not to my tastes, because it reminds me of Ulysses, by James Joyce. I twice sat down with that book in a sincere desire to educate myself a little further, but put it down both times. It’s the tangled, undirected thoughts of a middle-aged man as he remembered his very explicitly stated sexual passions with the woman of his life. It may have been considered a "dirty book" at the time that it was written, but I can tell that it is much more than that. I can only read so much of that kind of material, and those two first pages at least didn’t have so much as a comma, semicolon or a period in it. At least I didn't find any. That may be “great literature,” but I have no patience with it. I MUCH prefer a good straightforward story with well-written characters with whom I can empathize. Fancy technical innovations often simply annoy me, especially if it interferes with understanding. It's too much like Jaberwocky. That, of course, does have considerable beauty. I'm much more patient with inscrutable poetry than with the kind of prose. Another modern technique that annoys the heck out of me is using the present tense in order to make the book sound like those individuals who say the modern equipment of "I sez or I go." Use all the tenses, please!!

Dear old Thomas Wolfe, our North Carolina hero, is another such writer. I must say of his, however, that it is so evocative and beautifully stated that I savored the words before I, unfortunately, put that one down, also. Cold Mountain by Frazier is one that I tried three times and succeeded in finishing it only after I watched the great movie with a bevy of the best of the modern actors, including that young hunk Jude Law. The story is really a very good one, and the kind of wandering through life on a quest for love and completion which is portrayed in it, is so much like my life that it was healing to watch and read it.

The article below on the “Techno-Nomad Theater,” is very interesting to me, however I found no direct link anywhere between “Nomad Theater” and Nomadism, an equally interesting philosophical concept. Again, maybe I missed it while trying to do the complex tap dancing routine through the words in order to find some logical, direct meaning that I can hold onto. The modern use of the term, which is apparently a popular thing again right now, of a theater without a home, “theater in the round,” etc. Like the Boulder, CO theater, it is one which presents drama in very informal and simple terms. It’s like Shaker furniture. It has no frills or mandatory forms including any complicated staging, props, etc. It does make one think in terms of essences rather than forms. As a friend of mine said once, "We're human beings, not human doings!" Of Nomad theaters which I found mentioned on the Net, the Surrey, England example precedes the one in Colorado, going back into the 1930’s.

The other use of the term “Nomad theater” is described below by Petra Kuppers.



http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol04/petrakuppers.html

PETRA KUPPERS
Space Rules: Techno-Nomad Theatre

"Within the realm of nomadism, everything can provisionally be functioned into material towards a future whose shape and location isn't fixed yet - material towards something new. When Deleuze calls Nietzsche's aphorism nomad thoughts, he characterizes them as being 'in immediate relation with the outside, the exterior' (Deleuze, 1977: 144).

One of the problems of thinking nomadic thoughts in the theatre is the very bounded, boxed nature of conventional theatre. Nomadism is a playful mode of being in thought, and it is this quality that precludes a minimalist, formalist conception of an original theatre - the nomadic lies in extension rather than boundary. At the same time, the connection to the exterior, the embeddedness of nomad thought invites a re-visit of the theatre. In this re-visit, the theatre emerges as a space in which different times, conceptions of reality, and of the public and its spaces, of the human and the becoming-other meet and touch. Nomadic theatre: theatre in process, lacking direction (iii) . Nomadic theatre: a theatre of chance, of material, of wandering without aim (iv) . . . . .

In Untitled, audience members inhabit an empty theatre, full of the machinery enabling Western stage productions. At the opening of the house, spectators enter an auditorium fronting onto a stage. This stage is empty apart from a black curtain draped over its length, and a low-hanging lighting rig. The auditorium, in turn, is unusual, since a significant section of its tiers have been cut out, leaving a scar of open space surrounded by seats on the side and behind. The audience members entering soon find themselves out of space, and, after a brave decision by one, enter and laughingly colonize the gaping hole to sit on its floor, expectedly oriented towards the empty stage. . . . .

Following this initial game with the rules of theatrical space, and with group dynamics, the lights go down. An assaultive metallic sound booms, not from the stage, but from behind and above, from the technician's box. Decisions have to be made by audience members: where shall I orient myself towards, where is the scene/skene of this theatre? Is this location of the sound's origin a «technical» issue, should I suspend my attention to it in a theatrical make-believe, reading the noise as a naturalized part of whatever fantastic scene will open up before me?"



https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/

Gilles Deleuze
First published Fri May 23, 2008; substantive revision Mon Sep 24, 2012

"Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze also produced studies in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), and on the arts (a two- volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a work on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature.) Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991).

Deleuze is noteworthy for his rejection of the Heideggerian notion of the “end of metaphysics.” In an interview, he once offered this self-assessment: “I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician.... Bergson says that modern science hasn't found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.” [Villani 1999: 130.]) We should also point to the extent of his non-philosophical references (inter alia, differential calculus, thermodynamics, geology, molecular biology, population genetics, ethology, embryology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, economics, linguistics, and even esoteric thought); his colleague Jean-François Lyotard spoke of him as a “library of Babel.” Although it remains to be seen whether the 20th century will be “Deleuzean,” as his friend Michel Foucault once quipped, Deleuze's influence reaches beyond philosophy; his work is approvingly cited by, and his concepts put to use by, researchers in architecture, urban studies, geography, film studies, musicology, anthropology, gender studies, literary studies and other fields.

One of the barriers to Deleuze's being better read among mainstream philosophers is the difficulty of his writing style in his original works (as opposed to his historical works, which are often models of clarity and concision). Deleuze's prose can be highly allusive, as well as peppered with neologisms; to make matters even more complex, these terminological innovations shift from one work to the other. While claims of intentional obscurantism are not warranted, Deleuze did mean for his style to keep readers on their toes, or even to “force” them to rethink their philosophical assumptions. (We will discuss this notion of being “forced” to think below in 3.1.) As befits an encyclopedia entry, we will concentrate on the conceptual architecture of his thought, though readers should be aware that, perhaps more than with most philosophers, such a treatment of Deleuze's work removes much of the performative effect of reading the original."