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Sun Mar 15, 2009 at 17:11:59 PM EST
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| I don't know whether this is relevant to anyone, but found the article interesting...and I WAS thinking of Knucklehead in particular, but the info seems, to me at least, too good to just bury in a comment.
Hence this diary.
A life spent in the wings of theaters has made Janet D. Clancy an authority on the mechanics of illusion. She has rigged sets, wired lights and runthe technical end of circuses, ballets, plays, art projects.
It has also made her a witness to mass squander, long after the audiences have left.
Tons of perfectly good materials, worth millions of dollars - fabrics, wood, ropes - are just heaved into Dumpsters at the end of shows and events.
It is staggering: during Fashion Week in Bryant Park, about 75 shows are staged. Runways and sets are built, usually covered in great bolts of fabric or hundreds of yards of Plexiglas and plywood. The shows last about 20 minutes, and everything - in pristine condition - is thrown out so that the next designer can start fresh.
"I just got sick of the waste," Ms. Clancy said. "We can make it rain indoors. We can hold a circus underwater. We've got to do something about it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03... |
| Youffraita :: For all the artists out there |
| So she recycles the materials to artists who can use it.
Please, read the whole story, and check out the Times's photo of her draped in yards of thrown-out fabric.
And then...and this is really my point...let's think about how we can use the resources that people like Ms. Clancy are trying to rescue: how can we create a sort of infrastructure to take the rescued materials and give them to unknown artists; or small-town theaters?
This probably goes over the line of the fair use doctrine, but:
Reusing materials has a long, honorable history among people who are not afraid to climb into Dumpsters. Ms. Clancy recalls that when she moved to New York more than 20 years ago and was working on a low-budget film in a loft on Van Dam Street, her group would barter set materials for food from a neighbor, the director David Cronenberg. She regularly scavenged the Dumpsters outside television studios in Midtown. "I found the set for a bathroom, and I called - 'You know that scene in the kitchen? Do you think we could have it in a bathroom?' "
After Fashion Week this year, she wound up with a roll of pink spangly vinyl that had been the runway for a Barbie show. "I still have it," Ms. Clancy said. "I'm hoping to find someone who does fetish clothing." |
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