DESEOS DESNUDOS
Cambell bobbed and smiled and snoozed in a blue Snuggly strung across her mother's shoulder as Robin McKee told about a nationwide career in freelance directing and production, the birth and growth of the Carmel Performing Arts Festival and her lifelong commitment to promoting new work in the theatre. "I'm an army brat and that meant a lot of travel and a lot of liking the center of attention, so I had a good grounding in theatre almost from the start. At U.C. Irvine, I did a Bachelor's Degree in Theatre, and before I even graduated I was directing Masters Thesis plays - all of that after taking a grand total of one directing class! By the time I left Irvine, I knew I liked directing and that it seemed to come easy to me."
Robin went from there to London to study directing with the British Theatre Association and then to do an apprenticeship with the British National Theatre on London's South Bank. Back again in the U.S., after completing an MA in Drama and Acting, she became a director for the Sacramento Experimental Theatre. "That was the beginning of my love of play development," Robin explained, "and it led eventually to being asked to become assistant director for the Mark Taper Forum's New Works Festival in Los Angeles, then to a full-time job as an assistant director and associate producer at the Taper. That's where I really learned what is involved in new play development - how you rework and rehash a script, get into sync with the writer's real intentions, round up a company of actors to try it out, present it, get feedback, rehash, rewrite."
An attempt at using this lifelong interest as the basis for a PhD at U.C.L.A. taught Robin "I'm definitely a DO-er not a theorizer. . . When some important abstract dramatic principle was being discussed and I kept asking, 'Yes, but how do you apply that to an actual performance situation?', people in the seminar room looked at me as if I'd just turned purple. I began to ask myself if I really wanted to jump through another set of fire wheels set up by some academic institution. I'd been through that before - twice; now the thing I wanted most was to work with real writers and real actors and real theatre technicians on real projects. So I never finished that PhD. After leaving the Taper I did freelance directing and a lot of acting, both at the same time. Wonderful training - but really too much! I found myself acting nights in a long-running musical and spending all day directing shows. I decided to take a year off acting to see if I'd miss it - and I didn't. My real love was directing and new play development. You unearth the real organic nature of a script - not so much the 'message' - more discover what the playwright really wants to achieve. . . I think I'm good at helping playwrights write the best play they possibly can - by asking questions, not trying to impose some pre-packaged structure of my own. I do Shakespeare, musicals, contemporary classics - anything that seems really worth bringing to an audience in the theatre."
Robin thinks her strengths as a director stem from her having learned to understand many facets of the world at large when she was growing up in an army family. "It meant meeting a lot of people and seeing a lot of different ways of life," she explained. "I think I am able to take a play out of the narrow world of theatre production into places where people really live and relate to each other in a non-theatrical context."
Founding the Carmel Performing Arts Festival really grew out of Robin's marriage to Bob Walker. They met in Los Angeles, though Bob was living in Sausalito at the time. "We flew to see each other and it was usually in Carmel, where Bob had a jewelry business he needed to deal with on weekends." Five months' whirlwind courtship - and then in 1992, Bob was offered a position in Monterey. Robin, with plenty of work going for her in Los Angeles, nevertheless moved north with her husband. "My mantra was, 'I can always move back ... I can always move back.' I thought pulling up stakes in L.A. was career suicide. I found out how wrong I was when a whole raft of exciting new things opened up for me while I was here. From this base, I got invitations to direct all over the country - Colorado, Louisiana, you name it. Till Cambell came along, I regularly directed about four shows in a year in different parts of the United States. Now that she is a major part of my life, I'm cutting down to two away-from-home assignments a year. . . Not that she isn't a good traveler. She's coming along with me this coming weekend to San Francisco. She's already proved that she loves looking around and taking everything in."
Carmel Performing Arts Festival began in 1994 under the different format of a theatre-only celebration and the different title of Carmel Contemporary Theatre Festival. "I wrote grant applications, the Cultural Council gave some help, and I signed up individuals and groups I'd met and worked with in all my travels. We played for one week - each event doing two or three performances at the Cherry Center. The Contemporary Theatre Festival's second year (1996, but only because the date was changed from November to January) tripled its audience and added the Carmel Women's Club as a second performance site.”
There was growing pressure by the whole Carmel arts community for a full-scale performing arts festival. Robin was interviewed and agreed to take the non-profit she had created and broaden its scope to include music and dance as well as live theatre. She also began to feature local performance artists on an equal basis with out-of-town professional performers. Audience base, prestige, and number of venues have multiplied during the life of the festival.
This growth - and the birth Cambell Ruth Wilson - have made it necessary for Robin to share out areas that were once her sole responsibility. The Festival Board of Directors are even now meeting and holding retreats to refine and re-define goals and consider areas for future expansion and development. "I see some of our Festival youth programs becoming year-round programs," Robin explained. "And we are thinking of more work particularly appropriate to seniors - I mean apart from things like the present senior discounts on ticket prices. One thing that does seem to be lacking in the Carmel area are performances for children done by professionally trained adults. The possibility of children seeing their own age group perform excitingly and well is very important - and it's a major contribution of groups like Ariel and Dance Kids. But predominantly adult work in puppetry, or dance for children - and the kind of music and story-telling MaryLee Sunseri does - needs to be developed and expanded - and we think the festival can do that. But these decisions about our future are now more and more up to the Festival Board. I'm around, as Founder, to guide them and indicate where there are resources around the country, but I'm asking them to take a stronger and stronger role all the time."
Robin has also divided her old producer/director tasks into two departments, one of which is now headed by a new, full-time festival Associate Director, Hattie Catania. As Producing Artistic Director, Robin continues to focus on seeking out talent and selecting, planning and directing events - the gamut of responsibilities involved in creating a program and fitting it into a two-and-a-half week festival. As the new Producing Manager for C.P.A.F., Hattie is responsible for the practicalities of making it happen - venues, transportation, housing, the drawing up of contracts.
The Festival plays twenty area venues from October 11th through 27th. Of the 37 Festival events, Robin singles out three for special mention: Sovos, an a capella music group. . .Flying Foot Forum - a percussive dance group "like 'Stomp,' only more so" ... and Pagliacci's Fools - presenting live radio drama done in the 30s/40s style, but using contemporary scripts that will actually be recorded for future broadcast at the time of the local performances.
"We're now the largest performing arts festival in California. There are other important festivals here on the Coast and elsewhere throughout the country, but most of them focus on only one art form. Our broad cross-section makes us a bit more like the Edinburgh Festival. We're not just local or national - we're now known and receiving applications from foreign countries as close as Mexico and as far away as Russia."
