Page4 STOREFRpNT ACTORS' THEATRE,,6 S.W. Third, Portland, OR 97204, 503/224-4001. The Storefront formed in 1970 as a radical response to the shootings at Kent State. At that time the company involved about 10 people doing mostly guerilla the'ater. Within a week of its first performances the group had grown to 25 people, which is about how many people now make up the core. Storefront draws on a larger community of over 50 supporters who participate to varying degrees in each performance. Besides creating and performing their regular theater, the Storefront offers a touring children's theater which last ye~u performed to 120 schools, and programs which involve senior citizens and emotionally and physically disabled people in the theater's process. The Storefront celebrates its 10th anniversary this spring by mov- ~,i':COLLECli'JEll ·RUM RAIN, as you may or may not know, is put together each month by a collective. Some of us have been in coller;~ives before and others of us have not. We are all fairly new to this one. 1n examining our goals together we decided to look at other collectives to determine our similarities and our dif- • ferences. We chose the "creative" collectives below _because we also wanted to explore ways in which artists are resisting the "dependency tendency" which locks them in competitive struggles for '.'mainstream" ·recognition. One thing we found early in our interviews is that there are no two identical ways of being a collective. Each of the collectives we met with (in some cases we spoke to only one member, more in the others) has its own style, its own personality, its own • way of interacting. We narrowed this interaction down to a few areas that seemed to be key to each of the collectives, then let the collectives speak for themselves. -CC & JS -on forming a collective S.T. A group ofus got together who wanted to explore theater in alternative terms .. . not only the political structure of the theater i"tself but the lifestyles of the people who were involved at the time. We're constantly defining it ourselves. We're sometimes at a loss for words to figure out the nature of the beast. There are collective aspects of Storefront ... the way we run, the way we interact.with each other, but that doesn't say it all by any means. A~C. At the first meeting I talked about working in isolation and , my desire to be in community-to be in touch with people. I had a fantasy about film study. I had a fantasy about sharing my work •both flnished and works-in-progress. I was looking for and wanting to give support and feedback. There were\ at the outset, group projects. That was a real rush for everyone. The idea that people could possibly work on their own projects and be part of a collective project as well. It changed, people drifted away or got over the first r_ush and found that animation was work-tons of hours and commitment that they wen;n't willing to make. Little by little, people lost interest, expected that high energy to be there all the time, expecteci other people to be providing that high energy. There was a kind of stimulus-response s1tuation. There were a certain a111ount of people who were high energy and , stimulating and then there were people in the group who came to respond an'd be fed. I think the people who were giving out got a little tired of doing it, and the people who came to receive were a little disillusioned when they weren't encountering that super-high energy all the time.
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