Rob Newton

Creating, arranging, writing, dancing, wandering and questioning, always questioning, help me make sense of my life, of life in general. My earliest conscious memories have involved theater in some form or another. The play-acting that all children do became a way of life for me (sometimes to my detriment) very early on. The quote "art is what makes life more interesting than art" is my philosophy to a tee. The creative process for me (and, I believe, for everyone) is not an affectation, but the purest expression of what it means to be human. And because it is so innate, many times it is taken for granted and left unexamined, where it ends up producing oppressive and mind-numbing banalities that, ironically, lessen our ability to be creative beings. A generalized creative impulse can be a scary thing, it leads to mass culture, and mass culture is no culture at all. Whenever something has mass appeal, be it a politician, a pop song or a philosophical treatise, watch out, because it's an opiate and will work in direct opposition to critical thought. I started my professional life as an actor, and slowly developed into a writer and now, director. I have such awe and respect for this art form that I'm sometimes overwhelmed to the point of petrifaction, literally: I am unable to think or move, let alone create. As such, when I do summon the courage to make theater, I do it with an obsession that borders on the maniacal. And, I must admit, I am not always the easiest person to be around. My desire for perfection necessitates an obsessive attention to detail. I firmly believe that if any detail within the structure of the piece has not been thoroughly examined and executed, the piece itself cannot reach its fullest potential and its transformative power is thereby diminished. I believe theater to be the most transformative of all the arts and yet it so rarely is. Why? Because it's collaborative and it's alive, it breathes (and very often dies) and requires immense concentration, both from its creators and its observers. So many varying elements bring it to fruition, and each element must work in concert with the rest to their utmost capacity. Theater's rarified genius rarely reaches its potential, but when it does, it can literally change your life - it has mine. For any art form to thrive and progress (and for humanity in general, for that matter) critical thought and dialogue are essential. Painters, for instance, have traditionally been amazingly critical of one another's work, sometimes out of envy, but more often than not out of a desire to understand and master. We artists aren't so fragile as we think. This pretense of hurt is just that, a pretention, a furthering of the suffering artist cliché. A discussion of each other's work is a healthy (and essential) requirement to furthering the art form as a whole, and refining our individual pursuits. The point is to comment, affirmative or negative, because that starts a dialogue and allows the artist to reassess his work. I've been accused of being endlessly negative in my critical analyses of the art I encounter and am forever being accused of not liking anything. If that were truly the case, I would have stopped attending theater long ago. My critiques help me better understand the piece I've seen, they focus my attention is such a way that I sometimes end up altering my own approach to a similar (and difficult) element in my own work. Critique is yet another expression of my need to understand and process the complex and gorgeous beast we call art.