Creative Service and Consulting
by Michael McNulty
Amusemeants is…
A human centered approach to creative service providing meaningful guidance, imaginative interpretations and practical solutions to design, event and artistic production challenges.
Imagining
As humans, we imagine… and we do so much more than we often admit to ourselves. We imagine the gratuitous as well as the consequential, alone and in masses. We imagine as a means of coping with the condition of our awareness—of what is, of what is not, of what might be. Our awareness is so pervasive that we are aware of our awareness, engendering an insatiable obsession to control the subjects of that awareness. We are control freaks and that fundamentally imaginative condition is the kindling for ingenuity and destruction, greed and generosity, healing and violence, truth and duplicity. It sparks the curiosity to learn and the religious impulse to wonder, both forms of truth-seeking. This dynamic tension between truth and artifice is the liminal ground from which the imagination is stirred to make meaning out of the disparate elements of our experience. As much as any science or psychology, living life is an imaginative experience. The sooner we accept this condition, the sooner we can learn from it to become better humans!
About
Michael is a passionate advocate of inclusive, transformational experiences in pursuit of civic virtue, a committed tryer-on of others’ shoes for mile-walking, and a chaser of challenging perspectives, inspired recognitions, and good cheer.
Michael McNulty has worked in a wide variety of creative pursuits for more than 20 years and generally enjoys wrestling with questions about life and art while struggling to render some difference in both! With more than 100 productions to his credit, Michael has worked professionally as a director, designer (production, graphic, scenic & lighting) and actor. Michael has also served in a variety of creative consulting capacities including technical theater, puppetry, magic/fx, performance, event planning, team-building and training to clientele including Busch Gardens, FAO Schwartz, Harvard Business School, Jelly Belly Candy Company, Bay Banks, The City of Boston, Cooper Productions, The Rainforest Café (Baltimore), the Storm King Art Center, the Appalachian Center for the Arts, Thompson & Litton Architects, & VMDO Architects. Currently, Michael serves as the Executive Director of the Pro-Art Association, dedicated to making the Arts accessible to the people of central Appalachia. Previously, Michael chaired the Department of Visual and Performing Arts for the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, where he is Professor of Theater Arts.
Michael is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. He sits on the executive board of KMMA-CAITHS and formerly presided over the board of the Pro-Art Association. Michael directed one of Virginiana’s Regional Governor’s Schools in Theater Arts for 16 years. He holds an MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama and a BFA in acting from Emerson College.
Musings
“Theater is the place where philosophy and action disguise themselves as each other and dance with our beliefs; whispering lies in our ears, that we might hear the truth. “
“The arts remind us of our humility- that what we feel isn’t always based in truth and that what we think we know may be motivated more by desire than veracity.”
“One must strive to uncover with one’s collaborators a uniquely theatrical aesthetic, appropriate to each production, an aesthetic which will surprise and delight the audience. Performances must exceed some idyllic purism of “life-likeness” toward some greater truth that Picasso insisted art had to lie to realize. There must always be a reason that a performance is ephemeral and temporal, a reason that it must be experienced live, communally, in the moment, not recorded in illusive flickers projected on a screen.”