creating a/broad June 28, 2014

This Shit Is Just Starting
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

This tour isn’t over. It isn’t even half over. The halfway mark—I calculated it last week, in a brief but productive fit of homesickness—is July 1, and that’s just for my time in the UK. When I get back to Montreal, I will have a week of rest, and then it’s back on the road for another three months.

And then I’m planning more shows for April and May, and contemplating the merits of developing some fan base in the UK and expanding into northern Europe and…

… this shit is just starting.

creating a/broad, June 21, 2014

Baby Fringe 
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

By the time you read this I will be done with my two shows in Ludlow, a town of 10,500 in the heart of Shropshire, England. The landscape is ruffle-soft-green, rolling with moss-covered walls and crumbling castles, and the predominantly senior-citizen daytrippers all look slightly stunned by all the history. The accepted cure for this seems to be having a quick sit-down on the benches in the town square and eating ice cream, but since the afflicted are sitting in full sun and surrounded by more history, I think this is only a holding strategy. They threw the Fringe launch party at a Thai restaurant and bar whose sign out front says Thai Chang and has done for nine years, but everyone calls the place The Globe, because it was probably the Globe for at least 300 years before that.

This is not the sort of place where I would have thought that I would ever be presenting Phone Whore, EVER, but Anita, the director of the Ludlow Fringe, saw the show—quite by accident—last year in Edinburgh and invited me to perform because she wanted to bring in 'more edgy works' by female performers. I go where I’m invited, generally, so here I am, a three-and-a-half hour train ride northwest of London, at the tiniest little baby Fringe I have ever seen.

creating a/broad, June 14, 2014

This is Home Theatre
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

From where I sit, I can see everyone’s eyes in the room. Someone left their half-drunk drink on my coffee table, very close to my prop file box. I hope I don’t knock it over. The Gay guy over in the corner is tapping away at his smart phone; I doubt very much he is live-tweeting this event. I think he got dragged along on this by his very keen friend, who is watching me intently and nodding at certain points. I’m going to avoid looking at the iPhone user again until after Call 2—the homoerotic locker-room gang bang—and then I want to check back in and see how he likes them butt-seks apples. Until then I don’t want to know. The furthest away someone is from me is about 12 feet, and that is too damn close to show any signs of discomfiture.

This is home theatre, and it is hard. So. Fucking. Hard. For everyone! It’s hard for the audience because in a tightly packed room with 12 or 25 people in it, many of whom are your friends, you can’t really walk out—hooray for peer pressure—and I can totally see you. I can make direct eye contact with you. And it’s hard for me, because I have to be 130 percent on, all the time. They can see if I’m fudging with jam coverage on the mouldy faux toast, they can see if I let my performance face drop. They can totally see me.

Eeeep.

creating a/broad, May 31, 2014

Keeping up Appearances
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

I went to a promo appearance on Tuesday here in London, at the venue where I am going to be performing Phone Whore next Tuesday. It was an open mic night at a well-known queer bar. I got there early for the sign-up, hardly anyone was there, but I was still nervous walking in. Every time I do a promo appearance like this, I worry about the same thing: Do people feel attracted to me? 

I don’t mean, do they want to jump my bones. I mean, are they drawn to me? Do they like the way I look? Do I feel approachable, if they have questions or if they want to get a card? Is it clear, hopefully from the host’s intro or at least from my own intro, why I am even there? Will they like me?

It’s like the worst parts of a networking event and a talent audition and moving to a new high school, all rolled up into one dimly lit room with no tech and lots of booze.

It’s a bit agonizing, in other words, and not much in my control at all. But I can’t not do these things, when I come to a new town. I can’t just hide out in my billet all the time, as much as I want to, and hope that word of mouth will keep going on its own. I can’t expect individual producers or venue managers to have done everything possible to get the word out about my show. No. If I am only making income from box office, then I need to be hauling ass the whole way, in all the ways I can think of. Sometimes that’s Sidewalk Smut (damn I wish the England summer would clear up). And sometimes that’s just spending the money for tube fare and going down to a historic queer bar to rock that mic in whatever way possible.

creating a/broad, May 24, 2014

Can I stay flexible?
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

Over here I have caught myself, with embarrassing frequency, describing the Canadian Fringe circuit, with the intent of favourably contrasting it to the ways in which UK Fringes are run. This is called 'making an invidious comparison' and, I decided early on in my stay here, doing this is no way to endear myself to my producers or the local populace—it makes me sound like a whiney little baby—so I’m trying to keep from doing it.

But it’s really haaaaarrrrrrd!

Because, except for Edinburgh, the venues at these Fringes usually offer artists short runs of shows—I mean, like, one show, maybe as many as four, WHOA—over three weeks or a month of the festival, so there is not built-in proximity to foster community among the artists. And the Fringes, as a whole, are not as strongly invested in bringing potential audiences together at things like, say, a public-access beer tent. And these Fringes are happening in places where there’s really not a whole lot of street action, again, except for Edinburgh, so… 

creating a/broad, May 3, 2014

Hang Out With Me While I Pack
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

Hi, thanks, no, I’m fine, everything’s good, I just have to pack up, you don’t mind if I keep working, do you? Great.

No, my plane’s not until Sunday night, but I have to drop the Deerinator off at summer camp on Saturday afternoon, at a friend’s house two hours outside of Montreal, so I actually only have 24 hours to do it. Seriously, it’s summer camp. Last year I left my car for six weeks at a friend’s house in Hamilton and a mouse took up residence. Four months? We could be looking at a whole encampment of badgers, or whatever the hell else rummages around in the woods out there. Bears, maybe. Moose. Do the Eastern Townships have moose? So I can’t leave food stuff in my car, and although my friend said he’d drive the car around a few times a month, I’m a little scared that where he wants me to park it will actually swallow the Deerinator whole in a gaping maw of spring mud. I don’t have any other options, though. Got to put it somewhere for the summer. 

Oh, god, a whole summer without my car, what the fuck. The thought strikes almost as much terror in my heart and dread in my stomach as the idea of talking to British immigration officials again. It’s just my American ear, I’m sure, but they always sound so disapproving.

Gotta work fast today, I’m even hoping to catch a friend’s burlesque show tonight, Acme Burlesque doing a James Bond-themed evening. It’d be nice to have a night off, let’s see if I can make that happen. I’m just crossing my fingers I get no more calls on my last day on the lines. The wankers interrupt my packing flow. It’s not their fault. I have to have a last day at some point. 

It’s not my last last day, forever out of phone work. I mean, it might be. Maybe I’ll just, you know, blow up out there, hit the big time. But that’s the Edinburgh madness talking, that’s not going to happen, probably not, not right now. I don’t think that’s fatalistic or self-sabotage, just good preparation. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. I’m planning to be back on the lines in four months, that’s what I’m telling the callers, at any rate. Between now and then, no more calls to me, boys. Y’all can get off with someone else’s help.

creating a/broad, April 26, 2014

Asking For Favors

by Cameryn Moore

@camerynmoore

“How do you do it? How do you put a tour together? Do you have a manager?”

I’m not sure that anyone would be asking me that sort of thing if I were a Young Thing, still in my 20s, just starting out in my performing/tour career, but I think, at my age, people do expect that I have sorted things out enough for someone else to be managing the business part of show business.

But no. I am handling my own stuff. Except for the extremely rare invitation from someone who stumbled across my work and decided it was exactly the thing they needed for their sex week/conference/performance festival—this has happened exactly once for me in the last four years, hi, Ludlow Fringe, I’m looking forward to seeing you in mid-June!—except for that exceptionally rare event, I chase this down by myself. I chase everything down by myself. 

Maybe you’ve seen this, if you’re a friend of mine on Facebook. I do it all the fucking time. I make myself sick sometimes, how much I have to chase everything down:

“Do you know any daring presenters or venues in North Carolina, DC, or Baltimore?”

“Hey, everyone, my Brighton housing fell through, GAH. I need two weeks of free housing there, starting a week and a half from now. I have references?”

“I have three weeks between Ludlow and Buxton fringes, and am looking to do a show in Liverpool, or Manchester. Know anyone there?”

“Looking for a BYOV venue in Winnipeg, anyone got any leads?”

This, constantly.

CONSTANTLY.

creating a/broad, April 19, 2014

Private Previews
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

Earlier this week, my producer here in Peterborough, Ontario, told me that pretty much the only dedicated theatre reviewer in these parts—certainly the only one who wouldn’t feel compelled to burn my press release and then burn their own fingers off after having touched it—was asking about the possibility of doing a dress rehearsal the day before I opened and letting them in to see it, so we could get a review out early in the three-day run. I was… hesitant.

I never do press previews. I’ve never even thought about it. I mean, why would I? If I’m self-producing, an extra night of a theatre space just means spending more rent, for an audience that isn’t paying. My shows rarely run for longer than one weekend, so the press doesn’t usually feel strongly about getting people out. And anyway, I’m small potatoes and I say “cock” a lot. The media, especially in smaller cities and towns, aren’t exactly stepping up and grabbing hold of this particular hot spud. 

On the Fringes? There’s no time for a preview. There are eight other companies teching in your space right up to the first show on opening night. Critics come when they come, and you can only send out your press releases and story ideas and hope they come early in your run and write fast and well and really understand the deeper symbolic meaning of your blocking and somehow manage to convey that to their readers, but really you’ll be happy with four stars and/or a decent pull quote.

So, these have been my assumptions and operating procedures around critics and previews. This is why I hesitated. 

creating a/broad, April 12, 2014

My Own Personal Vera
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

I ranted about this a few months ago, but I didn’t know there was a name for it. 

Vera. 

Specifically Vera Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, who not only did all the wifely things that a good stay-at-home wife did in the mid-20th century—all the housekeeping and feeding and general domestic upkeep—but she was her husband’s  assistant in a very prolific career that apparently everyone knew he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish without her.

I read with interest the recent article in The Atlantic about this arrangement. The author interviewed writers of all genders about whether they had a “Vera”. Nobody wanted to own that term, but everyone seemed to know what it meant, and if you put aside the word and just looked at the function(s), the verdict was pretty solid: a few rare writers had them, but most either hired Vera proxies, or wished they could.

The most interesting part to me was how the piece started, not with Vera or Vladimir at all, but with Lorrie Moore, a justifiably famous writer, some of whose critics got a little snarky about her most recent, highly anticipated collection of short stories. An underlying sentiment among these assholes  critics was that they were expecting a lot more for having to wait 16 years for this book. Why haven’t you gotten more done in that time?

Ugh.

And, fuck that.

And, boy howdy do I know how that feels.

creating a/broad, March 29, 2014

The Ethics of Crowd-Funding
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

There aren’t many things that I remember solidly from my M.S. in Arts Administration, mostly because it was all about fairly to very large-scale institutions, planning multi-million-dollar approaches to target eight years ahead, using tactics such as offshore bank accounts… you see what I mean, though. The air was a little too thin up there, and I was working in a scrappy little community theatre. I needed to devote whatever brain cells I had left to legitimate challenges facing me right now, or maybe tomorrow. 

I could have used resources that were more to my scale, in other words. I need those kinds of resources more than ever, now that I’ve pretty much committed to the wild frontier of self-produced solo performing, so my interest was thoroughly piqued when a ethical guide to crowd-funding came across my feed. 

creating a/broad, March 22, 2014

Feeling Bad
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

Sorry, can you come back later? This is a bad time to talk. Or write. This is a bad time for me to do anything, really, with anyone. 

I don’t mean I’m busy, although I am, but I don’t want to fetishize that as some amazing thing. It’s a natural outcome of being ambitious and broke and also an intensely procrastinating sort of personality and having shitty boundaries, and did I mention broke? This is just a bad time. If you hang out anywhere near me, you’re going to get an earful. It feels stupid, the sort of overdramatic, underwritten angst that thrives in dimly lit open mics and bars near theatres everywhere, but my editor wants the life of an itinerant artist and this is where it’s at this week, kids. I’m feeling bad, gutter-curdlingly bad.

creating a/broad, March 15, 2014

I've Got a Lot Invested in My Press Release
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

If you’re following along with my DIY, self-produced-touring artist journey, then you know that last week I was working the sponsor pitch letter hard for this year’s tour. I have already received one positive response before I even began my follow-up calls, so that is a good start in what proves every year to be a pretty gruelling process.

I’m actually starting this process a little later this year than I should, so all hands on deck and hooray for pre-sleep panic rituals, but it’s okay, you know why? I've got so many other things to do as well there will always be one more thing to stress out about, so I can relax and enjoy this feeling of endless abundance of to-do's. This past week I have added press releases to the heap.

WHOMP.

creating a/broad, March 8, 2014

Subtext of My Sponsor Pitch
by Cameryn Moore
@CamerynMoore

I have sponsors. Sometimes. Some years I have more than others; last year I had one. But every year the process is the same: send out letters, follow up umpteen times, get money or not, send thank-you letters and programs, wash, rinse, repeat. The letters, oh, they’re actually masterful cover-ups for my deep-down insecurities about whether the work I do is really worth it. I submit the following to you for consideration. (Subtext and inner thoughts are formatted like this.)

**********

Your customers want good sex. I help get people there, through thought-provoking live theatre that sparks conversations wherever I go. (My shows freak people out a little everywhere.)

I'm an award-winning performer/playwright with four sex-positive shows under my belt. 
(I still feel weird about calling myself 'award-winning', but it is factually true, so this is a big fuck-you to my own JerkBrain.) After four years touring these shows around North America and the U.K. I am taking my show Phone Whore back across the pond and doing four Fringe festivals in four months, including Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (I AM SCARED SHITLESS.) In September I return to the U.S. to tour through the beginning of December. (I have no idea which venues and cities I’ll be in yet, don’t ask.) I'm asking you to help make this year of trans-Atlantic touring (ooooh, trans-Atlantic, GOIN’ BIG) be a successful one, and join me as a sponsor. (Please give me money.)

creating a/broad, March 1, 2014

Creature Comforts
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

I have escaped the Mile-End meat locker, that overpriced, underheated Montreal sublet with a terrible, passive-aggressive roomie. Two months ago I was sure I would end up spending the most miserable winter of my adult existence there. Now I am out, and writing this missive from the freedom and comfort of a friend’s house on L’ile Perrot, a suburban town located 30 minutes’ drive outside of Montreal. I’m house-sitting while my friend is away at clown school until the end of March—I love that I can count both professional and aspiring clowns among my friends—and I think/hope he can swing it for April. 

Rent-free, my friends. That’s one of the most salient points in the arrangement. Because the location has little to recommend it to inveterate city-dwellers such as myself. This is firmly the suburbs. No buses or metros connect from Montréal to here; you have to take the commuter rail or have someone pick you up from a bus stop on the next island over. A café finder app has thus far revealed that the closest seven cafés to my current location are, in fact, Tim Horton’s, but I am willing to consider my removal from boho central a bargain price for not having to see my breath fog in the frigid bathroom. 

creating a/broad, February 22, 2014

Home Theatre
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

If everything goes the way I hope with fundraising for my UK tour this summer, I will be doing four Fringes: Brighton, Ludlow, Buxton, and Edinburgh. Though the UK style of Fringes—open access, or all Bring Your Own Venue, in CAFF-speak—is still challenging for me, there is a deeper way in which it is very familiar. This is theatre-based theatre. These shows are happening in spaces where performance space and audience seating and a box office and a tech booth all mean roughly the same thing, no matter which theatre space they are happening in. One stage may be roomier than another, or the box office may be off site, or audience seating may be on risers and/or in the round and/or occasionally blocked by pillars, but this is all happening in a space designed or specifically converted for performance.

Even with all that Fringing, though, I still have a lot of open space in my UK schedule, and not enough money or enough contacts among independent venues to fill those in with standard bookings. Particularly for London, where I simply cannot hack rentals on my own right now, but still have about a month to fill. I’m going to be dragging out the Smut Stand as often as I can, but I’m also going for it this year: I’m going to register for the Home Theatre Festival. It’s the best bargain running. It’s TOTALLY FREE.

creating a/broad, February 15, 2014

Cut Loose
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

A few weeks ago I received two pieces of bad news in the course of 24 hours. First, my fiscal sponsor for the past four years informed me that their one-person, quarter-time staff could no longer handle the load that my near-constant fundraising efforts were bringing them, and suggested that I start looking for a new sponsor as of August of this year. (They also told me that I needed to get my financial reporting practices in line with theirs tout suite!). Secondly, the liaison for my promotional sponsor and co-producer of last year’s UK tour told me that he was leaving the organization and that no one remaining there had the energy or interest in maintaining the relationship for a subsequent year; furthermore, the organization was turning its attention to more political lobbying and advocacy around sex workers’ rights in the UK, and therefore had fewer resources available for cultural outreach.

All of this is inarguable and unassailable. I couldn’t beg either of those organizations to take me back, no matter how much I wanted to. I heard their answers as calmly as I could, and then proceeded to have a mildly existential panic attack. Where would my further productions of a really challenging show related to sex work get support, if not from explicitly sex-worker-focused organizations? What the fuck was I doing with my life, anyway? (Yeah, that question is never far from my thoughts at such moments.)

creating a/broad, February 8, 2014

Sharing the Springboard
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

I read with some interest TJ’s piece last week about the death of Fringe touring, but I wasn’t particularly disturbed. Yes, of course, the Fringe touring market is getting oversaturated. That is old news. 

My first year of touring, in 2010, I heard other artists talking about it already, in a way that made clear this was an ongoing discussion that didn’t seem to have a resolution. Back then I was so new that I flushed when I heard people talking about their problems assembling a tour, like I felt personally responsible, like I had stolen their hard-won crusts of bread right out of their mouths. How dare I, a newcomer, win a spot in the CAFF touring lottery? When the conversation took that turn, I usually sat a little lower in my chair. I had been feeling lucky, before the tour. Out there I had moments of something like guilt.

Ah, but in 2011 I caught myself saying the same things about that fucking lottery. A few times, and then I checked myself. I can’t knock it, now that I’ve gotten my launch from it. From the standpoint of a relatively new artist with some controversial works, the lottery system was the only thing that made it possible for me to launch in the first place. It’s the fairest system—aside from the fees—and advocating its dismantling feels like using a springboard and then not wanting anyone else to use it. 

creating a/broad, February 1, 2014

What does - and doesn't - happen

by Cameryn Moore

@CamerynMoore

So, I did the 24-Hour Plays last week, and with a week behind me, a week’s worth of introspection and consideration, I can honestly tell you two things:

I am so glad I did it.

I will not do it again. At least not that way.

After the big all-nighter of writing—from 10pm to 4am, with frequent breaks—I had a roughly 12-minute script. It was okay. Maybe a bit clichéd in spots, and I won’t say it was any kind of Pulitzer Prize-winning material, but it was decent. Another writer helped me read through my script to check the time, and afterward he said, don’t get too attached to the words. I took his words to heart, or at least, I thought I did. This other writer was more experienced with the 24-Hour Play model the way it was done at Theatre Ste-Catherine, and I was well aware that the performers and director only had nine hours to work. But I did get attached. First mistake.

My piece was a drama, which was a conscious decision on my part. I had figured that there would already be a lot of comedic components to the evening of plays, and I thought mine would be the leaven, something a little more serious. The team of performers I had drawn for my piece had solid credentials in comedy and improv work, but I think I figured that if I acknowledged publicly that I was working outside my own comfort zone, by doing something for more than one person, then the director and performers would be eager to work outside their boxes too, and therefore I could write a dramatic text and expect to see it performed as such. But that didn’t happen.

creating a/broad, January 25, 2014

The first 12 hours of a 24-hour play

Thursday night to Friday morning, January 23-24, Theatre Ste Catherine, Montreal

by Cameryn Moore

@camerynmoore

I agreed to it to give myself a jolt, to get out of the box, to fucking jump the rails of my own creative track. I’m not saying anything about the final product, but the process was fucking amazing…

8pm
The main room at Theatre Ste. Catherine has filled up, with directors, performers, and writers. There are over 30 people involved in this event, and I’m a little embarrassed to say I only know a handful by face and name. I need to get out more. Lots of people drinking already. Thank god I’m not a beer drinker, or I’d be tempted, too. I’m definitely nervous. I took the precautionary step last night of staying up until 5:30am, and napped this afternoon right before coming down to the theatre, just so my circadian would be sufficiently shifted later and I wouldn’t crap out too early. Nonetheless, I’m playing it safe and pouring the first coffee of the night.

creating a/broad, January 18, 2014

What Can I Give?
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

There was a time, in the late ‘90s, when I drove quite frequently from my home in Santa Rosa, CA, to various editing gigs (I know) and copyediting classes (I KNOW, all right?) in San Francisco, about an hour’s drive south. “Quite frequently” = at least once a week, sometimes twice? I wasn’t rolling in the dough, but I guess I was doing well enough. Had to be, in order to pay for all that gas, plus the $3 toll for south-bound traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Every time I crossed the bridge, I paid with a five-dollar bill and received two one-dollar bills in change. 

After the bridge, my route took me down Van Ness Ave, which had a spacious median strip, lots of room for shrubs and homeless people, who would use the time when cars were stopped at the red lights to ask for money. I don’t remember when I started doing it, but I would keep those two dollars in toll-booth change out, and I gave them to the first two people who asked. Didn’t matter who they were or what they looked like, I just made eye contact and gave them a brief smile and handed the dollar bill to them and drove on. Some days no one was out, so I got to keep the money. Other days I burned through my grubby little mite in the first two intersections. If I’m remembering correctly, I think I was dabbling in paganism or some kind of conscious-universe karma experiment at the time.