 If you enjoy watching Common Ground Online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this two-segment episode, Bemidji graduate Jeremiah Lindh returns home to direct his experimental crowd-sourced farce 21st century play. Then Bob Gatz of Cushing's Obligato violin and guitar shop re-hairs a treasured violin bow. Please take this time to turn all phones to their utmost loudest and most obnoxious volumes and vibrations. I have permission as a narrator to explain why we're all here. Some as paying customers, others as willing listeners. There's always a balance as well when you try to do a project as to the rewards that you get and what is capable and what people are interested in. Behold the thesis. 21st century theater is dead. Dead like disco. My name is Jeremiah Lindh and I am the director, producer and playwright of 21st century play. But to imagine a time so far in the future that our time is as relevant to them as the past is to we here in the present. Presence! 21st century play really began after I finished taking a playwriting class at the college I was attending. And within the class I had to write a short piece that fit within the conventions of Aristotelian Method, which is to say it had to be a drama or a tragedy or a comedy or a melodrama that fit within the formula of plot or typical climax, and just a lot of the structure that goes into writing a successful play. And after I got done writing it, I wanted to write something that broke all of those conventions. I wanted something that challenged the audience. I wanted something that broke the rules. And so I started writing a piece about a theater teacher in the far future. I'm very passionate about theater. It's something that it's a lifetime pursuit for me, but it's a very difficult time to be a theater artist, especially outside of a major metropolitan area. And so I wanted to sort of expose that from the hindsight of the future where theater has failed to make it. It was a long time in writing. Oftentimes I'll write something and just walk away from it and call it good. And this time I wrote it and I solicited feedback and I will admit that a lot of the feedback was discouraging. One of the fellow classmates from my playwriting class referred to the piece as virtually unreadable from the first draft. I took that criticism and I tried to create a stronger piece out of it. And so it was over a year of trying to just edit and revise and polish it to the point where I felt comfortable enough that I could produce it. One advantage of being a playwright knowing that you're going to be producing something without a lot of money is being able to not write a bunch of things that would cost a lot of money. And so that was to my advantage. And I really tried to utilize that and create a sort of minimalist and absurd piece. And as it happened by the time I had finished it, I was coming towards the end of my year of trying to get Kickstarter funding. Luckily I was fortunate enough to be able to get the funding that I required to produce it. Because even if you can only just write your name, English is an art. And that makes you an artist. Not a good one perhaps. Twenty-first century play centers around Dr. Leroy Brown Jenkins who teaches theater history in the far future. The play begins in 2095 right at the end of the 21st century. And at that point theater has turned entirely academic. There are no live performances anymore. It's just something that's taught like archeology. I'm leaving you for a robot Leroy and I'm taking the robot doll with me. It's sort of my germinal idea for the entire thing. Something I took away from out of the hat was creating a piece based entirely on one line. And the one line that I wanted was, I'm leaving you for the robot. And that idea sort of took it in and I just had to evolve it and try to create a piece sort of around it and in tandem to it. And so the conflict very early on for Leroy is then what would normally just be him monologuing for his first opening lecture class is instead incredibly complicated by the fact that he's being abandoned by his wife. Something that just destroys his life and yet he has to be able to plow through. Everything in the future is online education and so that's sort of part of inviting the audience in. It was, you know, you're all part of the class and you're all stuck here. Okay, play this part and then you die and then generally you're either burned or they put you in the space pyramid. Yeah, the first act focuses primarily on Leroy Jenkins just getting through his lecture, just trying desperately to get through his opening lecture while also trying to maintain his dignity and trying to show his students why this is important to him. I'm sorry, I haven't seen other people in a long time. We're all going to die. The second act occurs on Mars and one of the conventions of utopian future society is that we've defeated death. And so although Leroy has committed suicide a number of times he's been unsuccessful because they keep just bringing him back and so he ends up retiring to Mars in order to be able to mine in solitude at which point his former wife and man bought a derby and again ruined his day. Oh, what is that? It is my very little knife. It's so tiny. Yet so sharp. It could be called like Leroy Jenkins, very bad, no good several centuries because it falls into deconstructionist theater quite a bit in terms of just seeing Leroy suffer. And then the final act takes place on Venus and by the time we've arrived on Venus sort of the wheels have come off the bus, the internal plot has sort of disintegrated and at that point we're just trying to be able to create something that the audience isn't going to be angry at us for and it really creates that interplay of what is the audience expecting from this and what are we trying to deliver to the audience at this point in the game because we've made all of our reticent points probably already so how are we going to finish this? And we end up tiny-timming the end. We tiny-tim it. But it's all a lie because there are no ghosts or angels. Stop! Whatever! We're doing this! The broad reason for writing any piece is to try to communicate a message and with 21st century play I think the most important thing for me was to try to communicate that if theater is to survive then we have to be willing to help it survive and there are people all over the world but in particular in Bemidji who really strive on a daily basis to try to keep theater as an essential component for our community and they need our support I think is the most important thing. I don't think we ever want to be in a future where we look back and see that we allowed theater to die as a relevant means of cultural expression. Okay! Okay! Cut it! Cut it! Cut it! As opposed to the piece being a dire prediction really what I wrote it as was a call to arms. It's saying if you value theater if you think it is important then you need to help support it in whatever way that is to be able to bring people together around a story I think is such a valuable and important thing to let it die because of a lack of support. Ah! The end! Everybody go home and take your pants off. No refunds. Hello my name is Bob Gatz and I have a luthier shop in central Minnesota. We're going to rehare a violin bow in my shop today. We're going to cut the amount of hair that I need for a violin bow. By this time I've rehared so many bows that I just kind of have a feel for how many hairs to put in a violin bow. Now we're going to widen them out a little bit so they won't slip out of the knot we're going to be tying. And now we're going to put a little beeswax on the string so we can control it a little better. We're going to take apart the frog of the violin bow. I'm going to take out the old plug. We have turned over the ends of the hair. Now this is my particular method of reharing bows. There are several methods and this is the one I learned years ago. Like I said about since 1979 I think that was the first thing I tried to do is rehare my own violin bow. I need three hands to tie these knots or I use my mall to tie the knot. Once I went to the dentist and he was working on a chipped tooth and I said you got to flatten that tooth a little bit because I needed to rehare violin bows. And he said figure something else out don't use your teeth and I said there's no other way to do it. So he did. Now we're going to turn the rest of the hairs under. This string that I use for tying the violin bow hair is a very strong upholstery string or a linen thread or anything like that that won't break when I tie a tight knot. Part of the reason I got into repairing instruments is that I have always enjoyed repairing anything rather than throwing it away. I have been in bands, played music in different orchestras and choruses since I was a kid and couldn't find anybody to rehare my bow around here. There weren't music programs at the time. So the repairing of instruments has just been kind of an automatic interest because I do enjoy the challenge of each individual instrument. Every instrument, the problem that it has is unique and so I have to try to figure out how I'm going to repair it or if I need a special jig to repair this instrument or a special tool. And so I've accumulated drawers and tons full of jigs and tools and I really enjoy taking an instrument that I find in whatever condition it's in. Going through it and doing everything that I think it needs to have done to it and make it play again. Now we've like prepared the inside of the frog to receive the new hair. I've got this little pocket cleaned out. Now I take a piece of wood. This happens to be willow that I recycled from an old piano, probably over a hundred year old piano. It's a piece of that greenish colored willow, dry and that's what I use to make the plugs. Now I take this wide chisel that I bought years ago at a junk store for about $2. It's a Eric Antonberg from Eskilstuna, Sweden chisel and it was used to open paint cans and things like that. Well, I've reconditioned it and it is some of the best steel that I've ever found in a chisel. And that's what I use to re-hair the bowl. Some people use knives, some people use small chisels, but I have gotten used to this thing so I can chop myself some piece of white wood. Now I start roughing this in and what I'm trying to do is trying to match the shape, the angles, the angle of the pockets slants in on both sides and slants like this on both ends. So I'm going to try to reproduce that same and they're all different. Every bow is different. Now I take the underside of this plug and I carve out a little bit of wood on both sides. And this is going to make a space for the knot to go into and then I take a file and smooth this out and run and I round this edge here so that when I'm pushing it in, when I'm pushing it in with the hair, it's going to just kind of, it's not going to be a sharp edge, it'll be a rounded edge there. Now we're going to heat up a mixture of violin, rosin and a little bit of beeswax to kind of a glue that isn't really a glue, it comes out of the, cleans up easier out of the pocket. So I put the plug in to the mixture because I think it's going to be absorbed into the wood fibers and make it less susceptible to humidity so that, like in this weather, in the winter time it's not going to dry out and pop out and I also impregnate the end of the bow hair with the same substance. Substant put the hair in first, add the plug quickly before it dries. If everything's right, this should slide right down in there, which it did. We push a little firm pressure so that it, while the rosin and the beeswax is setting up, now I'm going to take this chisel, this old dentist tool and I clean up anything that might have come out and I made the plug wider than what it needed to be to fit in so now I can trim this plug off, cutting towards the hair, so if I slip I'm going to be taking the hair out. So now we're going to clean up the pocket afterwards with the old dentist chisel here, great steel in those things and cutting towards the hair you have to just stop before you get to it. Clean that out, clean it up and that's what it's going to, I'll show you what that looks like. That's what it's going to look like in there and this keeps the hair from pulling out. Now the other thing I do that some people do, some people don't is I will take the end of the string that had the beeswax on it and I tie a couple knots here just to keep this together while I put the frog back together it's going to keep the hair from getting under the bow slide. This is a bow slide, this will slide in on top of the hair. Okay and I put my initial here just for the heck of it I put the date so I'll do 7.16 so if I re-hair this bow again I can tell the people when I re-haired it or I can see if I re-haired it. Now we have the hair coming out of the feral and we've got a space here that we have to make a wedge out of the same material we're going to take and we're going to fit that same distance there and we'll take and distribute the hair evenly across the feral. If you get too much hair on one side or the other it will pull more on one side than the other which will warp the bow eventually over time. Now that's done, I was re-hairing a pretty expensive bow once for this friend of mine with a gold mounted bow. He was watching me re-hair it nervous because it was his baby you know and I started pounding like this and he let out a little scream and ran out the door you know turned out just fine. So now I score the spreader wedge with my knife I take and I cut down cut that off keep doing that keep scoring it getting close here get down to a point where I can just bend that over off it comes take a little bit of glue right on there wipe it off right away and what that does is it is absorbed into the pores of the spreader wedge and keeps it from being affected by the humidity also. So now we're going to place the frog with the hair on the bow stick. I will put this all the way to the front tighten it up. I have a certain amount of turns now when this starts adjusting. So now we're going to turn this around and now we start going to comb the hair. Got a fine tooth comb so now we're going to just get any snags or short hairs out of the hair just begin with here and so now we're going to make the plug for this end. So now we've got the plug fit it's slightly larger I've got a space here to allow for the hair. I'm going to take that back out and carve out the underside of the plug again. All right now I've got a cup of room temperature water and now we're going to wet the hair slightly. Now we're going to comb it out. So this is the most vital point here we're going to cut the hair at the right length for a humid summer day. That's that. Clamp this down again I'm holding this between my thumb and finger very important to keep that flat. Now what I usually do here is I'll do the flame again to blunt the ends of the hair. So now this is another part that's by feel. What I'm trying to do here now is take this width and reduce it down to the smallest width that I can. What I do that is I'll pull and let up pressure on my left hand, pull with the right hand straight and then I will push pinch the end here and I let up with my left hand slightly just letting the hair slide over towards itself. Not too far so it crosses over but just slightly to the point to where I can feel the hair sliding together without crossing over. So now I've got a point that I can tie a knot around. Three times around, I go again, one more time, okay. I reach in, get a string out. Now here's where I need the flat spot on that tooth to tie this knot. Cut off the excess thread, give it one more little, those ends off. Okay, now still I'm holding with this hand keeping the hair from going over itself. I pinch here, pull and pinch, turn this over like this, holding it still. Flip this over. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to pregnate this plug with the beeswax. End of the hair, insert the hair, the plug, push down now with the pressure on the plug. That's that, we clean this up. I can take my big chisel and cut it off. Now we put the hair together. Put the frog, a little bit of beeswax and a petroleum vaseline that I've mixed together to use as a lubricant down here on the bow screw. And then we tighten it up for the first time. And then we comb it out. Once in a while there's a hair that wasn't quite long enough to get in the knot. And we kind of line them up again here, there's one right there. Take that, cut it off. And that's it. The bow's right here. Let it dry and keep an eye on it so it doesn't get too tight while it's drying and looks good. And then we're going to sit and hang it up and keep an eye on it so it doesn't get too tight while it's drying. But that'll dry out and be able to play the violin. Thanks for watching. Join us again on Common Ground. If you have an idea for a Common Ground piece that pertains to North Central Minnesota, email us at legacy at lptv.org or call us at 218-333-3014. To view any episode of Common Ground online, visit us at lptv.org. Episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008.