https://www.richardarthurolson.com/about daily 0.75 2021-08-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1627386860088-81UC3KVJ62UG7RZXCUES/new-about.jpg Contact https://www.richardarthurolson.com/contact daily 0.75 2021-08-06 https://www.richardarthurolson.com/work daily 1.0 2023-10-22 https://www.richardarthurolson.com/work/performing-projects monthly 0.5 2021-04-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1626090069998-9D9445J7PDNRVCN7AOLG/sacrifice.jpg Work - Performing - Being a comedian is probably my greatest natural talent… …. always making my classmates laugh with my spontaneous comments, starting in the Third Grade and continuing through college and graduate school. But people do not always pursue a career in what comes easiest, maybe because what they’re not so good at is more attractive to them. In retrospect, I might have become rich and famous as a talk show host, but it never even occurred to me to pursue such a career. Anyway, like most theater people, my first experiences in that medium were as an actor, beginning with “Our Town,” in which I played one of three baseball players, all with a single line. (One of the other two actors went on to win a Tony!) After that I never acted again in high school, but in college I had two small roles, in “Billy Budd” (Squeak) and in “Mister Roberts,” plus three summer gigs with the local church’s community players, including The Sewer Man in “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” a Monk in “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” and The Fireman in “The Bald Soprano.” I also sang one of the roles in “From Vassar from Love,” a musical I directed at that college (see Directing). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1626090260702-KQ2JJW3JVJ6S9CWXOGU3/handstand.jpeg Work - Performing At Yale, after acting in some scenes… …in our first year directing class, taught by Nikos Psacharopoulos, a lot of the directing students started casting me in various parts, (including A Corpse and The Tar Baby), culminating in the role of Trigorin in “The Seagull,” with members of the Yale Repertory Company. In the summer of 1967, I also played one of the parts in “Charley’s Aunt” (see Directing) and the lead in “Seven Loving Women” (see Writing) at theaters in Colorado. After not performing for several decades, someone suggested I try Fieldwork, a weekly group of people performing their works and getting feedback on them from one another. Most of their “pieces” (as they called them) were not plays with scripts but various forms of performance art, which I had only read about but never seen. The texts were often combined with movement and/or sounds and music. After a few meetings, one night I just got up and started talking off the top of my head — and people liked it! Then maybe a year later, I started to let the words transform into sounds and vice versa, sort of like I used to do as a child when imitating Spike Jones. Eventually I began also using movement in these improvs, which greatly expanded my awareness of space and influenced my directing in a very positive way. All this led me to perform in group shows in over forty venues. Finally, I teamed up with Jennifer Neff, a ballet dancer, to create and perform many short pieces for several years. https://www.richardarthurolson.com/work/directing-projects monthly 0.5 2021-05-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1626090191816-3PYCKO78MCY6TM2WQ1A7/%E2%80%9CFrom+Vassar+with+Love.%E2%80%9D Work - Directing - . Early Work: The first thing I ever directed was “From Vassar with Love,” a musical comedy by Virginia Kays that took place and was performed at Vassar College in 1965 (see photo). In 1966 I directed “The First One Hundred Years,” a musical celebrating the Centennial of the Noble & Greenough School, where I was teaching. In the summer of 1966 I directed Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano” at Harvard’s Experimental Theater in the Loeb Drama Center (where I later taught a theater workshop). The following summer I directed “Charley’s Aunt” at the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado. After graduating from Yale, I directed “Artemis,” by Jeffrey Pavek, at the Theater Company of Boston in 1969. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1625664789318-9GC8CWJ5KQESVXE2MDW1/in+elevator.jpeg Work - Directing - neXusArts: In 1999 my wife, Claudia Dumschat, and I incorporated neXus Arts, whose mission was to combine music in the classical tradition with dance, drama and poetry. I was the stage director and she the music director for various productions at the Church of the Transfiguration, where she is the Music Director. Among those productions were a staged version of Händel’s oratorio “Saul;” “Arise My Love” (with poetry and dance); Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore;” “Medieval but Modern;” a staged version of Distler’s 13 motets, “Totentanz;” and Britten’s “Company of Heaven,” with ballet, modern and Cunningham dancers. Other productions of neXus Arts in Manhattan included Rania Ajami’s multi-media extravaganza, “The Naughty Painter,” at Dick Shea’s Place; “The Vision of Perpetua”. (an opera by Victor Kioulaphides, (for which I co-wrote the libretto with Jeremy Black) at University Settlement; and Brian Schober’s opera, Dance of the Stones (for which I also wrote the libretto) at Theatre80 St. Marks. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1626090322287-QAGWTSHMY6825GKDSHM5/Metrosexual.JPG Work - Directing - Schwartz Concerts: In 2004, Mrs. Arnold Schwartz founded a concert series at the church in honor of her late husband, and this replaced neXus Arts as our source of funding. Among the first Schwartz productions was a fully staged and costumed version of Händel’s oratorio, “Athalia.” I also directed what became the annual production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s beloved opera for children, “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” Of special note were rare, fully-staged and costumed productions of the medieval “Play of Daniel” and Purcell’s baroque opera “Dido and Aeneas.” I also became something of a specialist in directing the operas of Benjamin Britten, including “Noye’s Fludde” and, over three years, his Trilogy for Church Performance: “Curlew River,” “The Burning Fiery Furnace” and “The Prodigal Son.” https://www.richardarthurolson.com/work/writing-projects monthly 0.5 2021-06-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1624479275115-HU03MMTF3H4WPR6N6FNW/IMG_0026.JPG Work - Writing - My first theatrical script… … was a libretto based on “The Scarlet Letter,” which I wrote at Princeton for James Dashow, who used it for his senior thesis. That summer, after graduating, I wrote my first play, “The Bookcase,” which then got me into the Yale Drama School the following year. It was basically realistic in terms of conversation, but also kind of science fiction surreal and absurd. The first reading of it was in my parents’ basement. I then wrote a number of one-acts, including “The Writer,” which I directed at the Exit Theater in New Haven, and “Drive-In,” a comedy about the ‘50s, which was my most “successful” (i.e. well-liked) at Yale. One summer I wrote “Seven Loving Women,” which was performed at the Aspen Theater Workshop, with me in the lead role. In my second year at the Drama School, I stopped writing naturalistic plays and began exploring new forms, trying to do for theater what was happening in music and the visual arts. In “The Sphinx,” based on the Oedipus legend, every character had a set of word modules, from which all their lines of dialogue were formed, but there was still a plot and characters. In “We Four,” though, which came next, there was no longer any plot but just characters named A,B, C and D. Finally, for my thesis play, I had out-patients from a psychiatric hospital write whatever they wanted on file cards, which were then scattered about the stage and read by dancers as they picked them up, accompanied by a flutist and bassoonist, who gradually took his instrument apart, down to the mouthpiece. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6074bdc5dd2e72237b150b26/1626470480547-CVJ9XFI0DGSMNSL9HP7O/unnamed.jpg Work - Writing - After graduation… …I worked intermittently on various plays, including “Colloquies,” which were lines, unassigned to any characters, for an ensemble of actors to improvise with. (In retrospect, I see it as actually a form of conversational poetry, not a play at all.) “Grasping” was a screenplay about my divorce, and “Mama’s Boy” a kind of autobiography, featuring a play-within-a-play-within-a-play. Thou Shalt Not Come has two separate plots that converge in the end, and To Die 4 takes place within the mind of a nursing home patient. I have also written several opera librettos, including “The Gilded Cage” (see above), “The Vision of Perpetua” and “Dance of the Stones,” all of which I also directed (see Directing). Over the years, too, I have written some poetry,, including “365: A Journey to the Present,” which consists of the poems I wrote every day for a year. Another set of poems, Signs of Myself, has one poem for each sign of the Zodiac. After that I wrote 40 Thoughts, each about a paragraph long, accompanied by selections from my photographs. This was followed by pieces even smaller in size: Life Sentences, which are 366 sentences ranging from the personal to the philosophical.. https://www.richardarthurolson.com/work/current-project monthly 0.5 2023-10-24