Special Episode - SallyPAL Update and Public Domain with Will Inman

Hi Friend, Welcome to a special 2018 Christmas Eve Episode of Sally’s Performing Arts Lab Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about my upcoming guests now that 2019 is right around the corner. I’m your SallyPAL podcast host, Sally Adams. I talk to people about creating original work for a live audience. Send an email anytime to Sally@sallypal.com.

Although I’ve been away from podcasting for a few months, I am still out here supporting new works wherever I see the opportunity. As 2018 draws to a close I wanted to share some thoughts before I kick into twice a month podcast uploads again. After producing over 50 episodes of SallyPAL, I took a break from podcasting. It was only supposed to last a month to make time for some other projects. But I got out of the habit of regularly editing and posting and after a few more weeks I was almost embarrassed to start again. It’s like that feeling you get when you forget to send a baby gift and then 2 years later you figure it’s probably too late to send that onesie you were maybe going to buy. But enough about me and my nieces… There are some things on the horizon that are really too exciting to ignore and I want to share them with my Sally PALS! So let me start by letting you know about the guests I have coming up in the next few months:

1. Upcoming Guests
   1. Chris O’Rourke is a playwright, director, drama coach and critic with a Masters in Modern Drama. Chris was National Theatre Critic for com until July 2016 when Examiner.com ceased. During that time he extensively reviewed in Ireland and abroad. Chris is artistic director of Everything is Liminal and Unknown Theatre which specializes in originating works with young people from high risk backgrounds. 
   2. Peyton Storz performs with the groundbreaking comedy Splatter Theater in Chicago. Peyton graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a BA in Comedy Writing and Performance, and has trained at The Annoyance Theater and The Second City in Chicago. She hails from my hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
   3. Amber Harrington teaches theatre at Edison Magnet School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With nearly 18 years of experience she has been named Teacher of the Year, won countless awards with her students, and has created programs for her theatre kids that are imitated throughout the state. Her student playwriting program is the first of its kind in Oklahoma and has produced two national award-wining playwrights. Amber is also a Folger Shakespeare Teaching Artist.
   4. Reed Mathis is making fresh music in The Bay Area. Reed tours with his own band and works as a studio musician blending his love of classical music (Beethoven in particular) with his spectacular bass-playing skills. Reed is a former member of Tea Leaf Green. He’s also played bass with Grateful Dead members Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann. He has also played with the Steve Kimock Band, and was a founding member of Tulsa progressive jazz band Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
   5. Stick close because I also have an interview promised with J.D. McPherson as soon as his touring schedule lets up. 

2. Big news in public domain works and what it means for creatives: If you’re not sure exactly what the term public domain means, according to Google’s online dictionary, “public domain is the state of belonging or being available to the public as a whole, and therefore not subject to copyright.” This is a pretty big deal for creatives in general. But especially for arts teachers. Many of you may remember being admonished by your choir teacher or your drama director to get rid of your photocopies after a performance because the works were copyrighted and you did not have permission to keep those copies. In just a few days that will no longer be true for works published in 1923. Works published in 1922 and before have been available for 20 years. I know this because in 2013 I wrote a musical for my students that borrowed songs from 1922 and earlier including the well-known, “Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Home”.

A recent article in the Smithsonian magazine highlights a lot of the things that are important to artists regarding works in the public domain. According to the article on January 1, 2019, “all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain.”

Because of a weird discrepancy with the law, it’s been 20 years since there’s been any mass release of work into the public domain. The last time it happened was 1998 and Google didn’t even incorporate as a company until September of that year. That means the explosive growth of digital art hasn’t legally included variations on work from this period in part because works published in 1923 haven’t been in the public domain. Some of the work has been available, of course, without alteration, through publishers and for a price.

1998 was the year that public domain releases stopped because the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act added 20 years to the wait time for published works to enter the public domain. The bill was named for Congressman Bono posthumously although he did put his signature on the legislation. It’s complicated, just like copyright law so I’ve included some deep dive links for anyone who needs more. And don’t get me started on global copyright. It’s a hot mess.

Next week, though, you’ll have total and free access to things like Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which, although written in 1922, was not published until 1923. The laws for these earlier works is different from works in the digital age. Nowadays, a work has a copyright as soon as it’s created. I’m not kidding when I say this stuff is ridiculously complicated. I’ll include a link to a great Brad Templeton website on copyright, plagiarism, and some other topics you might find interesting.

Other things entering the public domain? Well, how about the unforgettable pop hit, “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” or the songs “Who’s Sorry Now?” and the flapper hit, “The Charleston”. The film debuts of Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Fay Wray will be available for general public use. There won’t be any Disney fare available until 2024. At the time the law changed, Mickey Mouse’s film debut, Steamboat Willie, would have been public domain in 2004. But the Disney Corporation lobbied to retain the rights to its creations over two decades into the next century. They didn’t have to lobby all that hard as both the House and Senate had corporate-leaning Republican majorities and President Clinton wasn’t looking to make public domain law a part of his platform. The 1998 law gave Steamboat Willie an extra 20 years before he would steer into un-copyrighted waters.

What’s really exciting now is that digital collections like Internet Archive, Google Books and HathiTrust will be storing seminal works from the early days of American Modernism. D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolfe, Claude McKay, Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Louis Armstrong, Gertrude Stein, and so many others. Members of the Harlem Renaissance, the DaDaist school, and the Algonquin Roundtable all feature prominently in 1923. This new surge of old works in the digital age allows for current creatives to freely play with the works of important artists of the era bridging WWI and the Great Depression.

Works entering the public domain can be altered indiscriminately. You could even claim p.d. work as your own, but that’s not art, that’s plagiarism. As artists we are always standing on the shoulders of giants. Give attribution whenever you can. And do your homework. Look at the context for works that you use. Collaborating with ghosts expands our artistic horizons. It’s an exciting way to learn from our predecessors. Teachers will be free to share these works with their students and scholars can print important poems and essays many of us have never read. It’s only one year, but I think you’ll find that 1923 was a very good year, indeed.

3. SallyPAL Shoppe opening – Stay on the lookout for the SallyPAL Shoppe. I’ll have t-shirts, coffee mugs, all the usual fun high-quality performing arts kitsch at decent prices. If you don’t see anything in the store yet, stay tuned!

      You’ve heard from my son Will Inman before and he’s back to talk about the new release of 1923 published works into the public domain, plagiarism, sharing your work, educational theatre, and some other cool stuff. Will’s plays have been produced in theaters from Texas to New York. He is currently a Cadence Pipeline New Works Fellow with Cadence Theatre in Richmond, Virginia. He’s been a featured student playwright with the VSA Kennedy Center plays, been performed with Tulsa SummerStage and Fringe festivals, Writopia Labs Comedy Playwriting Festival Houston University, Rogers State University, a portion of his play, The Lesbian Exhibit,  was performed at Torrent Theatre in New York City, and last year he won the inaugural Edward Albee Playwriting Award by Theresa Rebeck for his play Winners.

Concise Advice from the Interview - 5 bits of advice about using public domain work:

5. DO give attribution when you use someone else’s work. It’s not a requirement, but it’s important to recognize the work of other artists, especially if it inspires you.
6. Develop a sense of context for the work you are modifying. Find out something about the history and culture of the originating artists to give depth to your work
7. Dig around in the available digital archives and learn more about public domain works. It’s creative, it’s fun and it’s educational!
8. Learn more about copyright law. As an artist, it’s up to you to know the difference between plagiarism and responsible evolution of artistic work.
9. Don’t just crib work, use the public domain to inspire all new original works of theatre, music, and dance.

Check out the blog, SallyPAL.com, for articles and podcast episodes. You, too, can be a SallyPAL. Thank you for following, sharing, subscribing, reviewing, joining, & thank you for listening.

If you’re downloading and listening on your drive to work, or commenting and reviewing like my sister does, let me know you’re out there. Storytelling through performance is the most important thing we do as a culture. That’s why I encourage you to share your stories because you’re the only one with your particular point of view. And SallyPAL is here with resources, encouragement, and a growing community of storytellers. All the stories ever expressed once lived only in someone’s imagination… Now… Go Pretend!