I've been scurrying from teaching and telemarketing to PTC these past few days, working as a literary assistant and general helper for the PTC@Play new works festival. We're about halfway through.
Being a "literary assistant" for this means basically being the stage directions reader for the readings you've been assigned to, as well as the person who picks up out of town artists, gets them their W9s and their checks, and generally helps out with whatever needs to get done, ushering, table lifting, etc. It's the kind of role I know well, especially having worked with Play Penn as an artistic intern a few summers ago and as an Arden Apprentice back in the 2009-2010 season.
Being able to be a literary assistant now is a huge gift. I can actually read stage directions with clarity and breath now. I have confidence I didn't have. I know what to worry about and what not to. I worked on Bruce Graham's reading of Stello & Lou, the opening for the festival, and I just had a blast. It was easy! Since when is anything in the theatre easy??! But Bruce really had done all the work.
I don't think we knew quite how special the reading would be until we were up there in front of the audience. The actors of course turned up the juice. And the first joke gets thrown, and boom! The audience just erupts in laughter. ERUPTS. And that energy just kept perpetuating itself.
It was like the play and the audience were on a first date, and everything was just CRACKLING. It was hot, it was easy, it was fast, it was incredibly fun. What a great night.
It's one of those plays that's just a coupla guys and a lady talkin', but you can't help but be drawn into their rich emotional worlds hidden just beneath the acerbic one-liners and South Philly parables. You laugh and cry, each almost as easily. I certainly did up there on stage.
It was damned fun to read, and all I was doing was helping along. Stage directions are just there to help the audience imagine the visual action. They're there to make the process easy, and there to keep the energy afloat in between dialogue.
And you could FEEL that energy rushing back and forth between actors & audience, easily, again and again, the build up to the next joke, the next observation, the next argument in someone's logic, and then there'd be the release, the laugh, the sigh, the knowing snicker. It was incredible to be up there, sitting right beside these actors as they do their thing, and to feel so acutely the audience responding. And I'd just cut in every now and then to help the story along.
It felt good to feel so good about something like this, actually. Because I think this play and this audience knew what mattered. It was all about connections, between the characters, between us.
In a way, it became a great way for me to have a brief audience of myself. Seeing how far I'd come since I first started assisting in staged readings, etc. Seeing my confidence and ease, my focus on what I feel matters, it was a nice date with myself, too.
I'm glad I get to be along for the ride.
More on more with regards to this soon, I'm sure.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Decisions, decisions (1/?)
Why do we decide to do the things we do?
How do we arrive at those decisions?
God do I agonize over that all the time.
As a director (and artist, really), decisions are kind of everything. From the moment you commit yourself to a project, you're making countless decisions. Who to work with. How to frame the production. What you care about. What you can afford to care about. What you can't afford not to.
Sometimes these decisions aren't really decisions. Like, not actively. You don't debate back and forth between separate & distinct options and come to a rational conclusion about which option is best. A lot of a production, or a life, really, can feel inevitable. There wasn't a choice between apples and oranges. There were only, always pears. I feel that way about love, too. A lot of times you say yes before you even know why. And always you are forced to defend decisions you never even knew you made.
I've been thinking a bit about making firm decisions as a culturally-masculine trait. It's at least something that I feel expected of as a man. Being a Decider. Being confident in my decisions. Sticking by what you do, not wallowing in possibilities, being firm and strong and, well, decisive.
Hiding in there is the notion that I have to make rational decisions, too. Men & emotions aren't really supposed to coexist, in this Culture of Masculinity World, except in the case of anger and frustration as a natural result of testing a man. So feeling bad about decisions, being unsure, feeling lost, feeling afraid, these don't really mesh with an understanding of men as mountains. Mountains don't feel. They stand.
Now the work I like to do can function quite against making decisions this way, sort of unilaterally, in a top-down hierarchical fashion. Knowing in advance sort of defeats the purpose of experimental theatre -- then where's the experiment? Even the most traditional play I start by trying to locate the places where I don't know how to solve the problems it presents. Decide as I may in advance, it's really the process of doing the thing that unlocks what these potentially infinite moments are.
Certainly setting framework and limits on creativity fosters clarity, fosters specificity, and can foster quite a lot of creative growth. You have to kill the notion of ALL ideas to find which of THE ideas your piece is actually working with.
The actual has to kill the potential. Sad, I know, but true.
So, to kill a few potentials.
I am moving to New York City this summer.
It's a decision I made over several months, not knowing what would happen with grad school, not knowing what will happen with the other opportunities I've applied for, nor really knowing if I was ready to go when I decided.
I made the decision as emotionally and intuitively as I did rationally. The woman I love is moving there, and I want to be closer than a 2 hour 2 train ($33 roundtrip) ride away. I want to start building my life with her. We both want that.
And I think there's a lot of stigma and cynicism against that? Like, it's sort of a role reversal, in a way, for a man to move for a woman & her career. I mean, it's not to say I'm not also moving for my career, which is at such an indeterminate state at the moment it really could go anywhere.
So, I'm moving because of that state of indeterminacy.
I'm moving for the new jungle gym.
I am moving to be challenged by the sheer size and scale of New York.
I'm moving to be challenged by the competitiveness,
the cutthroatness, the danger, the madness, the stress.
I'm moving for the opportunity and moving for the change.
I'm moving for the move, in a way.
Which I think is okay.
Which isn't to say I'll be leaving Philly behind.
Cue that half-measured indeterminacy.
I'll still be back.
Particularly for opportunities that keep pushing me forward.
I think that's okay, too.
In all ways, I'd prefer to define my own limits.
I recognize fully that I've very little control over a lot of things.
So, rather than jump to the anger and frustration mode when I am being tested,
I'd like to sit
In this state of not-knowing
And feel along the walls for what I can.
I'm going to write a lot more about decision-making and masculinity and moving and art and everything, but I definitely want to put something up on this blog as it's been far too long since I last decided to post. If there's a firmness to my decision-making I want to bring out for the future, it's in getting out from under my covers and keeping writing.
A daily decision-making challenge.
How do we arrive at those decisions?
God do I agonize over that all the time.
As a director (and artist, really), decisions are kind of everything. From the moment you commit yourself to a project, you're making countless decisions. Who to work with. How to frame the production. What you care about. What you can afford to care about. What you can't afford not to.
Sometimes these decisions aren't really decisions. Like, not actively. You don't debate back and forth between separate & distinct options and come to a rational conclusion about which option is best. A lot of a production, or a life, really, can feel inevitable. There wasn't a choice between apples and oranges. There were only, always pears. I feel that way about love, too. A lot of times you say yes before you even know why. And always you are forced to defend decisions you never even knew you made.
I've been thinking a bit about making firm decisions as a culturally-masculine trait. It's at least something that I feel expected of as a man. Being a Decider. Being confident in my decisions. Sticking by what you do, not wallowing in possibilities, being firm and strong and, well, decisive.
Hiding in there is the notion that I have to make rational decisions, too. Men & emotions aren't really supposed to coexist, in this Culture of Masculinity World, except in the case of anger and frustration as a natural result of testing a man. So feeling bad about decisions, being unsure, feeling lost, feeling afraid, these don't really mesh with an understanding of men as mountains. Mountains don't feel. They stand.
Now the work I like to do can function quite against making decisions this way, sort of unilaterally, in a top-down hierarchical fashion. Knowing in advance sort of defeats the purpose of experimental theatre -- then where's the experiment? Even the most traditional play I start by trying to locate the places where I don't know how to solve the problems it presents. Decide as I may in advance, it's really the process of doing the thing that unlocks what these potentially infinite moments are.
Certainly setting framework and limits on creativity fosters clarity, fosters specificity, and can foster quite a lot of creative growth. You have to kill the notion of ALL ideas to find which of THE ideas your piece is actually working with.
The actual has to kill the potential. Sad, I know, but true.
So, to kill a few potentials.
I am moving to New York City this summer.
It's a decision I made over several months, not knowing what would happen with grad school, not knowing what will happen with the other opportunities I've applied for, nor really knowing if I was ready to go when I decided.
I made the decision as emotionally and intuitively as I did rationally. The woman I love is moving there, and I want to be closer than a 2 hour 2 train ($33 roundtrip) ride away. I want to start building my life with her. We both want that.
And I think there's a lot of stigma and cynicism against that? Like, it's sort of a role reversal, in a way, for a man to move for a woman & her career. I mean, it's not to say I'm not also moving for my career, which is at such an indeterminate state at the moment it really could go anywhere.
So, I'm moving because of that state of indeterminacy.
I'm moving for the new jungle gym.
I am moving to be challenged by the sheer size and scale of New York.
I'm moving to be challenged by the competitiveness,
the cutthroatness, the danger, the madness, the stress.
I'm moving for the opportunity and moving for the change.
I'm moving for the move, in a way.
Which I think is okay.
Which isn't to say I'll be leaving Philly behind.
Cue that half-measured indeterminacy.
I'll still be back.
Particularly for opportunities that keep pushing me forward.
I think that's okay, too.
In all ways, I'd prefer to define my own limits.
I recognize fully that I've very little control over a lot of things.
So, rather than jump to the anger and frustration mode when I am being tested,
I'd like to sit
In this state of not-knowing
And feel along the walls for what I can.
I'm going to write a lot more about decision-making and masculinity and moving and art and everything, but I definitely want to put something up on this blog as it's been far too long since I last decided to post. If there's a firmness to my decision-making I want to bring out for the future, it's in getting out from under my covers and keeping writing.
A daily decision-making challenge.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
I'll follow you (2/2)
So I taught class again today, which I usually post all kinds of positive shit about on Facebook because I'm so enthralled after class with how well these kids are taking to all the stuff I love: Viewpoints, Shakespearean text, improvisational skills, etc. Some of these kids are really mature enough to handle the stuff in Winter's Tale, which is exciting. I feel like I hit a bit of a wall today, though. My education director said that week 5 is a tricky one, especially with these kids. I'll take her word for it.
What I love about this class though is that even when it's not great, it's still pretty good. After warmups we focused on spatial relationships, getting them to awaken to being aware of an audience while they improvise and consider what was interesting to look at on stage. They took to that really well, though lost a lot of it when we switched to actually improvising things.
I always start this class with at least 20 minutes just playing catch in a circle. It's a good focus warm up, and as they've gotten better at it we've added more balls. Totally stole this from my undergrad advanced acting prof -- I'm sure others have done the same thing.
What I love about the exercise is it really activates all the skills you really need to be present in performance and in improvisation. You've got to have a soft focus, taking all your partners in, because one of them could send a ball your way any second. You've got to be loose, to accept balls and transfer their energy from the catch into your next throw. You've got to trust your other ensemble members, and release the ball maybe a second or two before you're really ready to. You've got to be ready for anything and work hard to make sure your partners succeed -- the goal is not to trick anyone or pelt the ball at someone's face. And these kids are taking well to it.
Once we went into improv mode, based on some monologues they wrote responding to Leontes' "Too hot, too hot" speech about jealousy, though, things got a lot tougher. I think it was hard for a lot of them to express what it truly felt to be jealous or angry. We got some interesting moments toward the end, and I started them on reading through the final scene, where Leontes is forgiven. Rereading the scene struck me with what may be the key word for the play, for me, which was a fun discovery, even if it was kinda just for me and not for the kids, who were focused more on just understanding what was being said.
So Leontes & co. are staring at the Hermione statue, (Hermione being Leontes' wife he orders to banish after he perceived her maybe cheating on him with his bro Polixenes, not Harry Potter's totally platonic ladyfriend badass witch, which causes her "death") and Paulina, Hermione's loyal friend, says she can make the totally-not-real statue move, on one proviso: Leontes will have to re-"awake his faith."
This struck me, maybe because I was in a Viewpointy mood and thinking about how important it is to trust everyone in the room to work together toward telling a story-in-becoming, that very much what Leontes does not have up until this statue test is faith, and in a way, asking him to believe Paulina has magic to reawaken his dead wife mirrors Shakespeare asking the audience to believe a) Leontes really did freak out that jealously to begin with & b) he believes this somehow-age-appropriately carved and almost-life-seeming statue is actually a statue, and not the living Hermione who'd been hiding out with Paulina for 16 years and is now finally being able to be reconciled to her husband and to meet her daughter, who Leontes had also cast out 16 years ago, thinking she was illegitimate.
Faith.
It's a hard word for us, nowadays, with its religious (and by religious I mean more political/church, not spiritual) connotations, and in a world that since 9/11 has seemed to be almost entirely out of control, at risk of ending at ANY MOMENT, so CLUTCH everything you love and HOLD ON; it's easy to see why our digitally-&-immediately-gratified-culture wouldn't put much stock in "faith," a word that has as antiquated a taste as "honour." I think a lot of us are afraid to be destroyed. We're afraid to be hurt. We're afraid. And having faith in someone else, especially those who you're vulnerable to, is an impossible task to achieve without getting hurt. Because people are people, and they fail.
I think it's a mistake when productions don't show us an actually flirty Hermione at the beginning, which feels like it totally belongs in the text. Hermione is not simply a victimized martyr, innocent as a wafting lily, who gets to come back at the end and forgive everyone. In fact, it's telling that in the statue scene, she focuses her energy on her child first when she "comes to life." I think she's a whole person, and whole people flirt, even if they aren't going to do anything about it. Maybe Hermione wanted to bone Polixenes, you know, maybe there was temptation there.
I think it's dangerous to put all the onus on Leontes & his perceptive skills, which really makes him seem to freak out FOR NO REASON, because it implies that if Hermione DID do any flirting, his reaction would be acceptable. And the only reason that his jealous rage is unacceptable is that she OBVIOUSLY didn't remotely approach doing anything wrong. If she did, it'd be fair game for him to ruin everyone's lives. His jealous rage is not acceptable, regardless of the circumstances. He seeks revenge, too, much like Hamlet & Richard III, but much more like Othello, he does it for reasons that don't add up.
There is no ocular proof, there is no surety. We do live a life of Viewpointsy vaguery and ambiguity. It makes for hard lessons in class, especially with kids who are just now understanding that people fail sometimes, and that's actually part of being human. But I don't think we are dumb, as a species, men or women. We perceive what we perceive.
In the case with Othello & Leontes, though, what they were perceiving was not the actions of a whore, but that of a woman being a living person, not a statue, not an anesthetized holy goddess floating above in her halo, but a woman living and carrying on her own conversations with men. Othello & Leontes freak out, they blame the women, not for actually cheating, but really for it just being a possibility, a potential hurt, a potential failure. They are not secure enough with themselves to know that what's transpiring is harmless. They not only do not have faith in their spouses, but, more to the point, they do not have faith in themselves.
I think you have to know you're worth being in a relationship with for that relationship to last. I'm just starting down that road myself, for the first time honestly, and I don't think I could've gotten to thinking like this without royally fucking up a lot about thinking about what it takes to love someone.
But at the end of the day, the only person living and breathing and making decisions and deciding to be with one person, one whole unique fallible person, is you, and you have to trust you're worth sticking with, just as you have to trust the person who's sticking with you to do the sticking.
Faith involves failure. In catch, there are always dropped balls. We misjudge the distances we need to send balls, we overshoot, we throw to people who aren't ready, we have weird sudden spasms and send our balls rocketing askew, out of anyone's reach. We fuck up.
But everyone breathing together, listening to each other, and not giving up when the balls occasionally land? There's a kind of holy focus there, and the more we all relax, the more catches are successful, the longer the dance of catch and release lasts, and that's where real creation can happen.
So basically I should just play catch with Othello & Leontes for a little while, and save Desdemona & Hermione a lot of trouble. If only I'd been around.
What I love about this class though is that even when it's not great, it's still pretty good. After warmups we focused on spatial relationships, getting them to awaken to being aware of an audience while they improvise and consider what was interesting to look at on stage. They took to that really well, though lost a lot of it when we switched to actually improvising things.
I always start this class with at least 20 minutes just playing catch in a circle. It's a good focus warm up, and as they've gotten better at it we've added more balls. Totally stole this from my undergrad advanced acting prof -- I'm sure others have done the same thing.
What I love about the exercise is it really activates all the skills you really need to be present in performance and in improvisation. You've got to have a soft focus, taking all your partners in, because one of them could send a ball your way any second. You've got to be loose, to accept balls and transfer their energy from the catch into your next throw. You've got to trust your other ensemble members, and release the ball maybe a second or two before you're really ready to. You've got to be ready for anything and work hard to make sure your partners succeed -- the goal is not to trick anyone or pelt the ball at someone's face. And these kids are taking well to it.
Once we went into improv mode, based on some monologues they wrote responding to Leontes' "Too hot, too hot" speech about jealousy, though, things got a lot tougher. I think it was hard for a lot of them to express what it truly felt to be jealous or angry. We got some interesting moments toward the end, and I started them on reading through the final scene, where Leontes is forgiven. Rereading the scene struck me with what may be the key word for the play, for me, which was a fun discovery, even if it was kinda just for me and not for the kids, who were focused more on just understanding what was being said.
So Leontes & co. are staring at the Hermione statue, (Hermione being Leontes' wife he orders to banish after he perceived her maybe cheating on him with his bro Polixenes, not Harry Potter's totally platonic ladyfriend badass witch, which causes her "death") and Paulina, Hermione's loyal friend, says she can make the totally-not-real statue move, on one proviso: Leontes will have to re-"awake his faith."
This struck me, maybe because I was in a Viewpointy mood and thinking about how important it is to trust everyone in the room to work together toward telling a story-in-becoming, that very much what Leontes does not have up until this statue test is faith, and in a way, asking him to believe Paulina has magic to reawaken his dead wife mirrors Shakespeare asking the audience to believe a) Leontes really did freak out that jealously to begin with & b) he believes this somehow-age-appropriately carved and almost-life-seeming statue is actually a statue, and not the living Hermione who'd been hiding out with Paulina for 16 years and is now finally being able to be reconciled to her husband and to meet her daughter, who Leontes had also cast out 16 years ago, thinking she was illegitimate.
Faith.
It's a hard word for us, nowadays, with its religious (and by religious I mean more political/church, not spiritual) connotations, and in a world that since 9/11 has seemed to be almost entirely out of control, at risk of ending at ANY MOMENT, so CLUTCH everything you love and HOLD ON; it's easy to see why our digitally-&-immediately-gratified-culture wouldn't put much stock in "faith," a word that has as antiquated a taste as "honour." I think a lot of us are afraid to be destroyed. We're afraid to be hurt. We're afraid. And having faith in someone else, especially those who you're vulnerable to, is an impossible task to achieve without getting hurt. Because people are people, and they fail.
I think it's a mistake when productions don't show us an actually flirty Hermione at the beginning, which feels like it totally belongs in the text. Hermione is not simply a victimized martyr, innocent as a wafting lily, who gets to come back at the end and forgive everyone. In fact, it's telling that in the statue scene, she focuses her energy on her child first when she "comes to life." I think she's a whole person, and whole people flirt, even if they aren't going to do anything about it. Maybe Hermione wanted to bone Polixenes, you know, maybe there was temptation there.
I think it's dangerous to put all the onus on Leontes & his perceptive skills, which really makes him seem to freak out FOR NO REASON, because it implies that if Hermione DID do any flirting, his reaction would be acceptable. And the only reason that his jealous rage is unacceptable is that she OBVIOUSLY didn't remotely approach doing anything wrong. If she did, it'd be fair game for him to ruin everyone's lives. His jealous rage is not acceptable, regardless of the circumstances. He seeks revenge, too, much like Hamlet & Richard III, but much more like Othello, he does it for reasons that don't add up.
There is no ocular proof, there is no surety. We do live a life of Viewpointsy vaguery and ambiguity. It makes for hard lessons in class, especially with kids who are just now understanding that people fail sometimes, and that's actually part of being human. But I don't think we are dumb, as a species, men or women. We perceive what we perceive.
In the case with Othello & Leontes, though, what they were perceiving was not the actions of a whore, but that of a woman being a living person, not a statue, not an anesthetized holy goddess floating above in her halo, but a woman living and carrying on her own conversations with men. Othello & Leontes freak out, they blame the women, not for actually cheating, but really for it just being a possibility, a potential hurt, a potential failure. They are not secure enough with themselves to know that what's transpiring is harmless. They not only do not have faith in their spouses, but, more to the point, they do not have faith in themselves.
I think you have to know you're worth being in a relationship with for that relationship to last. I'm just starting down that road myself, for the first time honestly, and I don't think I could've gotten to thinking like this without royally fucking up a lot about thinking about what it takes to love someone.
But at the end of the day, the only person living and breathing and making decisions and deciding to be with one person, one whole unique fallible person, is you, and you have to trust you're worth sticking with, just as you have to trust the person who's sticking with you to do the sticking.
Faith involves failure. In catch, there are always dropped balls. We misjudge the distances we need to send balls, we overshoot, we throw to people who aren't ready, we have weird sudden spasms and send our balls rocketing askew, out of anyone's reach. We fuck up.
But everyone breathing together, listening to each other, and not giving up when the balls occasionally land? There's a kind of holy focus there, and the more we all relax, the more catches are successful, the longer the dance of catch and release lasts, and that's where real creation can happen.
So basically I should just play catch with Othello & Leontes for a little while, and save Desdemona & Hermione a lot of trouble. If only I'd been around.
You know when you know
It struck me, the moment in the heart of Manhattan where I was double-parking a gigantic Suburban and running into a Park Avenue building to collect luggage that had returned to the States from a touring experimental theatre production, that my iPhone had died and I was going to be without Google Maps for the whole drive back.
I'd been eying my battery life the whole way there, but for some reason I just refused to believe I would put myself in the position to have to drive through a labyrinthine, and heavily-trafficked, city without my magic map, my third eye, my godlike knowledge of what was to come.
I had quickly checked it upon parking the car to look at the route back, and about half-way through scrolling along the step-by-step list, my phone blacked out. And I was now entirely alone. I had a good three, three and a half hours with traffic, to go, and then another 45 mins of loading out and returning the rental car to go. All without the tool I daily rely on to get information to get me places.
At first, I was pretty freaked out. I beat myself up for forgetting my car charger at home, for not taking a detour to get it after picking up the rental, for not just sucking it up and buying a charger from a rest stop store along the way.
For some reason, though, after grabbing the luggage and making my way back through Manhattan, I kept having the hunch that I actually knew where to go. So I just kept following that hunch. All the way home.
The pre-smartphone me is scoffing right now, that this feels like a triumph, driving through Manhattan and home to Philadelphia without the use of a smartphone. It was sort of a self-reliance moment, trusting both that I knew the way and that if I got lost, I could find my way out of it. And even though there were a few close calls of missing turns or taking wrong exits, I managed to make my way sans smartphone. It felt even better than finally putting a piece of Ikea furniture together. And when I do that I feel like a god.
This past fall I went on a week-long road trip, driving from Philadelphia to New Haven, Providence, Boston, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, then back down to Philly. I used it as an opportunity to look at grad schools, visit family, and start seeking inspiration for this Hamlet project I've been harping on. I wanted this year to be about artistic growth and development, so I knew I wanted to take some significant time post-Fringe away from other responsibilities to just be with myself and do something. A roadtrip, an adventure, sounded right.
What I noticed about that roadtrip, which holds rich metaphoric weight in my mind, is that I actually tend to be pretty good at decision making on the go. I may get lost, I may have to make hard choices about where to go and what time to spend, but in general, I was pretty happy with the results of how I conducting myself. I got the most frustrated when I made little stupid mistakes, which were mostly the result of driving long stretches, pushing myself perhaps too far. I think I tried to take on too much on the trip. But I did get it all done.
And isn't it powerful, to feel decisive? To feel self-reliant, like you can tackle problems even when you don't have all the best tools at hand? You know when you know.
I guess maybe because a lot of my work (sales, education) sort of involves incredibly unknown quantities, like I never know if I'm going to make any sales, if I'm going to reach the kids I teach & have a successful class, there are always a ton of variables that don't quite have the same road map as well, a roadtrip might have.
But I've noticed I do better and feel more myself when I'm under pressure, when there's a challenge. Unknown quantities are apiled ahead, but I'm glad I'm moving. This year has transformed from the year of artistic growth to the year of huge life changes, and believe it or not, I think I'll find my way just fine.
I'd been eying my battery life the whole way there, but for some reason I just refused to believe I would put myself in the position to have to drive through a labyrinthine, and heavily-trafficked, city without my magic map, my third eye, my godlike knowledge of what was to come.
I had quickly checked it upon parking the car to look at the route back, and about half-way through scrolling along the step-by-step list, my phone blacked out. And I was now entirely alone. I had a good three, three and a half hours with traffic, to go, and then another 45 mins of loading out and returning the rental car to go. All without the tool I daily rely on to get information to get me places.
At first, I was pretty freaked out. I beat myself up for forgetting my car charger at home, for not taking a detour to get it after picking up the rental, for not just sucking it up and buying a charger from a rest stop store along the way.
For some reason, though, after grabbing the luggage and making my way back through Manhattan, I kept having the hunch that I actually knew where to go. So I just kept following that hunch. All the way home.
The pre-smartphone me is scoffing right now, that this feels like a triumph, driving through Manhattan and home to Philadelphia without the use of a smartphone. It was sort of a self-reliance moment, trusting both that I knew the way and that if I got lost, I could find my way out of it. And even though there were a few close calls of missing turns or taking wrong exits, I managed to make my way sans smartphone. It felt even better than finally putting a piece of Ikea furniture together. And when I do that I feel like a god.
This past fall I went on a week-long road trip, driving from Philadelphia to New Haven, Providence, Boston, Ottawa, Kitchener-Waterloo, then back down to Philly. I used it as an opportunity to look at grad schools, visit family, and start seeking inspiration for this Hamlet project I've been harping on. I wanted this year to be about artistic growth and development, so I knew I wanted to take some significant time post-Fringe away from other responsibilities to just be with myself and do something. A roadtrip, an adventure, sounded right.
What I noticed about that roadtrip, which holds rich metaphoric weight in my mind, is that I actually tend to be pretty good at decision making on the go. I may get lost, I may have to make hard choices about where to go and what time to spend, but in general, I was pretty happy with the results of how I conducting myself. I got the most frustrated when I made little stupid mistakes, which were mostly the result of driving long stretches, pushing myself perhaps too far. I think I tried to take on too much on the trip. But I did get it all done.
And isn't it powerful, to feel decisive? To feel self-reliant, like you can tackle problems even when you don't have all the best tools at hand? You know when you know.
I guess maybe because a lot of my work (sales, education) sort of involves incredibly unknown quantities, like I never know if I'm going to make any sales, if I'm going to reach the kids I teach & have a successful class, there are always a ton of variables that don't quite have the same road map as well, a roadtrip might have.
But I've noticed I do better and feel more myself when I'm under pressure, when there's a challenge. Unknown quantities are apiled ahead, but I'm glad I'm moving. This year has transformed from the year of artistic growth to the year of huge life changes, and believe it or not, I think I'll find my way just fine.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
a funny little moment
Quick one this evening.
Thought I was being brought in during my break at work today to get reprimanded,
The darkest part of my brain even thought fired.
Don't know how I got so skittish,
My mind jumped straight to the worst possible conclusion
to the scene answering the harrowing question
"can I see you for a minute on your break?"
There's that authority ghost again
Hamlet Sr. floating around
Revenge, he whispers.
Don't disappoint me.
Turns out she wanted advice in play producing
As a friend of hers was trying to get a play produced
Beyond a reading.
She had questions about corporate funding, the best kind of fundraising, etc. etc.
I was actually there as a friend, to give her advice.
It's such a strange transition
To be awaiting reprimand for
whatever, checking my phone during work,
Or not putting in enough evening hours
even though we agreed I needed a flexible schedule
And instead,
the Boss wasn't punishing me
But seeking council
On matters she didn't know as much as I did about.
I am sometimes surprised by how much I do know about this thing that I do.
It was a funny turn of confidence.
I left the evening feeling like an expert
In something I love
I'm glad to finally be back on doing more of it.
I don't know that this post is anything, but it struck me, and here it is.
Thought I was being brought in during my break at work today to get reprimanded,
The darkest part of my brain even thought fired.
Don't know how I got so skittish,
My mind jumped straight to the worst possible conclusion
to the scene answering the harrowing question
"can I see you for a minute on your break?"
There's that authority ghost again
Hamlet Sr. floating around
Revenge, he whispers.
Don't disappoint me.
Turns out she wanted advice in play producing
As a friend of hers was trying to get a play produced
Beyond a reading.
She had questions about corporate funding, the best kind of fundraising, etc. etc.
I was actually there as a friend, to give her advice.
It's such a strange transition
To be awaiting reprimand for
whatever, checking my phone during work,
Or not putting in enough evening hours
even though we agreed I needed a flexible schedule
And instead,
the Boss wasn't punishing me
But seeking council
On matters she didn't know as much as I did about.
I am sometimes surprised by how much I do know about this thing that I do.
It was a funny turn of confidence.
I left the evening feeling like an expert
In something I love
I'm glad to finally be back on doing more of it.
I don't know that this post is anything, but it struck me, and here it is.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Dick the Shit, Francis Underwood, Lena Dunham, & the man who killed Osama Bin Laden walk into a bar
Okay okay okay.
I've got some blog-catching up to, and I made some notes today during my boring hours at work that I want to thread together. They read:
Richard III, House of Cards, power & might...
Masculinity? Disfigurement? Lena Dunham
Ugly -- not-conventionally attractive......
Body -- I am not my body --> Othello/selfhate
Old World Warrior/Medieval Warrior --> Same as Hamlet Sr.
Obama/drone strikes
Shooter --> calling dad at parking lot
**Spoiler Alert** If you like going into shows with absolutely no prior information, I'm going to talk about Netflix's House of Cards. I've no intention of revealing sensitive information, but general stuff about the show & its structure. As of today I've only watched through episode 6, so I can't quite go all the way anyway. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
So Jess (my girlfriend, whose blog is also worth taking a look at, especially if you like reading) & I started watching House of Cards on Netflix (I'm intentionally italicizing this because it feels like I should, it's like a play, we italicize titles of plays, right? Still? Or is that just for college papers? I'm sorry, I'm still doing it) and it begins with a direct address from Kevin Spacey's deliciously manipulative Machiavellian House Whip character Francis Underwood. From the first minute, I was hooked, and felt so impelled after the first episode to keep watching I all but forced Jess to keep watching even though we were also very tired. She generously indulged in my appetite for Shakespearean machinations, and it certainly paid off.
Francis Underwood is a modern Richard III, and although he's not out for the presidency (AS OF YET), he is out for utter and complete control. He implicates his audience in his schemes, confides in and instructs us in the way things actually get done in Washington. He's brutal, he's ostensibly amoral, and unlike Dr. House or Don Draper or Walter White, he speaks right to us, and doesn't seem to give a fuck what we think. He is utterly seductive, incredibly powerful, hard-hearted and silver-tongued. He does what needs to be done. He is an uncompromising cynic, and tells people exactly what they need to hear.
We started watching House of Cards maybe a day or two after the announcement was made that Richard III's bones were found under a parking lot in Leicester (happy circumstance for Netflix, I'm sure), and I was fortunate enough to read a bunch of excellent articles that talked about the discrepancies between Richard III of Shakespeare's plays and the historical figure. Mainly that he was nothing like Dick the Shit, and that most of what Shakespeare was responding to were the slurs and lies politicians told at the time to keep people on their side. The War of the Roses was an ugly affair, and casting Richard III in the worst light did the most good, for a play seeking favour, and for an audience seeking to forget what had actually went down. Plays then, like plays now, relied a lot on patronage, in this case royal. No one was going to make the crown look bad.
What uncovering Dick's bones did do, however, is affirm him as a warrior. I mean he was out on that battlefield, there are gashes in his bones to prove it. He got hit in the skull with a halberd for Christ's sake -- the dude definitely could've cried "a kingdom for [his] horse!" because he was down and out. One article I read, which I can't find now but I'll try to in the coming days, talked a lot about how Richard III represented the end of an era of medieval kings, who basically killed everyone in their way in order to gain power. Francis Underwood, in this way, is entirely unlike Richard III; he's not killing anyone literally, just gaining power over everyone by whatever means necessary. Richard III died in battle; modern leaders don't do that anymore.
(Incidentally, I'll note that Hamlet Sr. is a similarly medieval warrior; he also fought valiantly in battle against Fortinbras Sr. and was only vainquished by the same kind of modern deceit that medieval times considered evil, insidious, unmanly, perverse -- beneath what was true, noble, honourable. Hamlet Jr. in caught in the middle of this transition, between a medieval notion of what it means to be a man [REVENGE THIS FOUL AND MOST UNNATURAL MURTHER] and his resistance to that)
Today I also read about the shooter who brought down Osama Bin Laden in the SEAL Team 6 raid, and how now that he's out of the Navy he's had absolutely no support. Definitely worth the long read. There's been a lot in the media about drones recently and President Obama's powers in defining what an acceptable target for those drones are. And here's this story about a modern warrior who has been trained, at its heart, in a bit of a medieval way. I mean he's a killing machine, and that's what he was sent to do. Drones didn't take down bin Laden, though they could have. They didn't think they were coming back from this mission. They thought they were going to get blown up. But they hoped to kill the leader of al Quaeda first.
There's a sort of testosterone that is kicked up inside me when I read about this or envision the mission. It came up during Zero Dark Thirty, which Jess & I also saw recently. I don't consider myself a warrior or war-type person at all. I don't do a lot of physical things, I'm not all about guns or killing or military in any way. I'm a died-in-the-wool Canadian, all about peace and passivity. I am very much against American aggression in the Middle East, for whatever reason. Taking down dictators is something I'm not sure we should do, at least not unilaterally. I also wonder about our place in "bringing liberty" to others. I question whether our understanding of liberty works in a culture that's not our own. I also question if "liberty" is something we can ever give to others. It seems like, with the Arab Spring, etc., the people whose rights are in question need to fight for them themselves.
All that being said, there was something heart-pounding and raw and emotional about the depiction in the film of killing Osama bin Laden. Again, he's "the Bad Guy," I get how on some level killing him ends a decade of the open wound of 9/11. I teared up when they said "for God and country." I felt flush with the success of finally beating an elusive enemy that had caused so much suffering of people I cared about, or of a country I cared about. Something about that victory felt incredibly primal, I remember feeling the same way when Obama announced it had happened.
Suddenly I'm thinking again about warriors, and the model of medieval warriors, of men who fight other men face to face. The big debate about drones is that they remove human beings from the killing so far, in the name of keeping soldiers out of harm's way, that they actually can allow for a lot of collateral damage, and some horrible things have already happened at the hand of a man and leader who I otherwise respect and admire. I mean, I don't want to be a liberal-minded person who ignores the fact that President Obama has unilaterally taken/allowed this drone program to continue to kill innocent people, and it is still able to be trained on anyone considered an "imminent" threat. I mean there are problems with that, problems that Richard III, an altogether insidious, deliciously vengeful and manipulative man, had no chance to deal with. Richard III did send assassins to kill Clarence. I don't imagine he'd think twice about sending drones to defeat Lancasters.
But Obama would not ride into the field on horseback and fight hand to hand against his enemy.
And, keep in mind, Richard III, according to his bones, had some INTENSE scoliosis. This dude was, indeed, deformed, though probably not to the extent that Shakespeare dramatizes. Richard III was not a stud muffin warrior, he was not sexy without his shirt on surfing on vacation in Hawaii. Elizabethans reviled those with physical deformities, it was assumed it betrayed a moral deformity as well.
And here's where Lena Dunham comes in, because I think we do that as a society still, too. But instead of an actual deformity like scoliosis, I think we demonize anything in popular culture that is not traditionally or commodifiably beautiful. The most recent episode of Girls, sorry, again **SPOILER ALERT if you're behind on Girls**, deals directly with this pervading sense we have of the inappropriateness of regular looking women hooking up with conventionally/Hollywood-ly attractive men. This Jezebel post talks about this very well. Somehow Lena Dunham, because she is the show's writer/director/star, is completely deluded in thinking this could ever happen in reality. Women with body fat or small breasts or who express desire openly are not only IMPOSSIBLE to be with hot, successful, rich older men, but they SHOULD NOT BE INFLICTED ON THE GENERAL VIEWING PUBLIC. Lena Dunham transgresses everything by being disfigured, somehow, from the standard woman seen on our screens.
I sincerely hope Lena Dunham does not internalize the hate the world presents to her, and becomes a mass-murdering Machiavellian monster like Dick the Shit (you certainly wonder what's motivating Francis Underwood, for it feels a bit more personal than Iago's "just wanting to watch the world burn" brand of destructive manipulations), but it stands to reason that if you're treated one way for your body being ugly and disgusting, but feel you have a better, even perfect soul locked in that cage, that you just need to set free through deeds and grasps of power (see Descartes' mind/body split and many other things I've talked about/will talk about in relation to Othello and my piece Othello, Desdemona, & Iago Walk Into A Bar).
Interestingly enough, though, what's so maddening about Dunham and her character on Girls is that we only get the performance this character makes for her friends and to herself about who she is. She is never authentic. Jury's still out for me as to whether we ever see Richard being authentic, but he does directly engage with his audience, which Dunham & her Girls alter ego never does. Incidentally, neither does Louis C.K.'s fictionalized self, another "grotesquified" man, though never reacted to with quite the same vigor over landing in the bed of a beautiful woman.
Where am I going with all this? I wonder how violence and rage, which is so prevalent in Richard III as a response to the kind of hate that comes from "wrongs" that are un-owned, the kind of vengeance that pervades Richard III & Hamlet, could be anything but inevitable in a medieval world. And if we're still, even in the midst of drone strikes and remote wars, sending man in against man in the name of defeating evil, what ultimately do we say to men? If you kill the bad guy, the killing is okay. If you talk directly to us about what you're doing, if you operate from a position of authority, if you sell us the position you're taking, you make it okay. And you do it because the world has told you that's the only way to gain power. You are ugly, deformed, disgusting, without it. And who have you learned that from?
It strikes me that before the Shooter on SEAL Team 6 went on the mission to Abbottahbad, which he was certain he'd die in, he called his dad. Not his wife, not his kids. His dad.
There's a lot going on here, a lot of associating, but here it is.
I've got some blog-catching up to, and I made some notes today during my boring hours at work that I want to thread together. They read:
Richard III, House of Cards, power & might...
Masculinity? Disfigurement? Lena Dunham
Ugly -- not-conventionally attractive......
Body -- I am not my body --> Othello/selfhate
Old World Warrior/Medieval Warrior --> Same as Hamlet Sr.
Obama/drone strikes
Shooter --> calling dad at parking lot
**Spoiler Alert** If you like going into shows with absolutely no prior information, I'm going to talk about Netflix's House of Cards. I've no intention of revealing sensitive information, but general stuff about the show & its structure. As of today I've only watched through episode 6, so I can't quite go all the way anyway. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
So Jess (my girlfriend, whose blog is also worth taking a look at, especially if you like reading) & I started watching House of Cards on Netflix (I'm intentionally italicizing this because it feels like I should, it's like a play, we italicize titles of plays, right? Still? Or is that just for college papers? I'm sorry, I'm still doing it) and it begins with a direct address from Kevin Spacey's deliciously manipulative Machiavellian House Whip character Francis Underwood. From the first minute, I was hooked, and felt so impelled after the first episode to keep watching I all but forced Jess to keep watching even though we were also very tired. She generously indulged in my appetite for Shakespearean machinations, and it certainly paid off.
Francis Underwood is a modern Richard III, and although he's not out for the presidency (AS OF YET), he is out for utter and complete control. He implicates his audience in his schemes, confides in and instructs us in the way things actually get done in Washington. He's brutal, he's ostensibly amoral, and unlike Dr. House or Don Draper or Walter White, he speaks right to us, and doesn't seem to give a fuck what we think. He is utterly seductive, incredibly powerful, hard-hearted and silver-tongued. He does what needs to be done. He is an uncompromising cynic, and tells people exactly what they need to hear.
We started watching House of Cards maybe a day or two after the announcement was made that Richard III's bones were found under a parking lot in Leicester (happy circumstance for Netflix, I'm sure), and I was fortunate enough to read a bunch of excellent articles that talked about the discrepancies between Richard III of Shakespeare's plays and the historical figure. Mainly that he was nothing like Dick the Shit, and that most of what Shakespeare was responding to were the slurs and lies politicians told at the time to keep people on their side. The War of the Roses was an ugly affair, and casting Richard III in the worst light did the most good, for a play seeking favour, and for an audience seeking to forget what had actually went down. Plays then, like plays now, relied a lot on patronage, in this case royal. No one was going to make the crown look bad.
What uncovering Dick's bones did do, however, is affirm him as a warrior. I mean he was out on that battlefield, there are gashes in his bones to prove it. He got hit in the skull with a halberd for Christ's sake -- the dude definitely could've cried "a kingdom for [his] horse!" because he was down and out. One article I read, which I can't find now but I'll try to in the coming days, talked a lot about how Richard III represented the end of an era of medieval kings, who basically killed everyone in their way in order to gain power. Francis Underwood, in this way, is entirely unlike Richard III; he's not killing anyone literally, just gaining power over everyone by whatever means necessary. Richard III died in battle; modern leaders don't do that anymore.
(Incidentally, I'll note that Hamlet Sr. is a similarly medieval warrior; he also fought valiantly in battle against Fortinbras Sr. and was only vainquished by the same kind of modern deceit that medieval times considered evil, insidious, unmanly, perverse -- beneath what was true, noble, honourable. Hamlet Jr. in caught in the middle of this transition, between a medieval notion of what it means to be a man [REVENGE THIS FOUL AND MOST UNNATURAL MURTHER] and his resistance to that)
Today I also read about the shooter who brought down Osama Bin Laden in the SEAL Team 6 raid, and how now that he's out of the Navy he's had absolutely no support. Definitely worth the long read. There's been a lot in the media about drones recently and President Obama's powers in defining what an acceptable target for those drones are. And here's this story about a modern warrior who has been trained, at its heart, in a bit of a medieval way. I mean he's a killing machine, and that's what he was sent to do. Drones didn't take down bin Laden, though they could have. They didn't think they were coming back from this mission. They thought they were going to get blown up. But they hoped to kill the leader of al Quaeda first.
There's a sort of testosterone that is kicked up inside me when I read about this or envision the mission. It came up during Zero Dark Thirty, which Jess & I also saw recently. I don't consider myself a warrior or war-type person at all. I don't do a lot of physical things, I'm not all about guns or killing or military in any way. I'm a died-in-the-wool Canadian, all about peace and passivity. I am very much against American aggression in the Middle East, for whatever reason. Taking down dictators is something I'm not sure we should do, at least not unilaterally. I also wonder about our place in "bringing liberty" to others. I question whether our understanding of liberty works in a culture that's not our own. I also question if "liberty" is something we can ever give to others. It seems like, with the Arab Spring, etc., the people whose rights are in question need to fight for them themselves.
All that being said, there was something heart-pounding and raw and emotional about the depiction in the film of killing Osama bin Laden. Again, he's "the Bad Guy," I get how on some level killing him ends a decade of the open wound of 9/11. I teared up when they said "for God and country." I felt flush with the success of finally beating an elusive enemy that had caused so much suffering of people I cared about, or of a country I cared about. Something about that victory felt incredibly primal, I remember feeling the same way when Obama announced it had happened.
Suddenly I'm thinking again about warriors, and the model of medieval warriors, of men who fight other men face to face. The big debate about drones is that they remove human beings from the killing so far, in the name of keeping soldiers out of harm's way, that they actually can allow for a lot of collateral damage, and some horrible things have already happened at the hand of a man and leader who I otherwise respect and admire. I mean, I don't want to be a liberal-minded person who ignores the fact that President Obama has unilaterally taken/allowed this drone program to continue to kill innocent people, and it is still able to be trained on anyone considered an "imminent" threat. I mean there are problems with that, problems that Richard III, an altogether insidious, deliciously vengeful and manipulative man, had no chance to deal with. Richard III did send assassins to kill Clarence. I don't imagine he'd think twice about sending drones to defeat Lancasters.
But Obama would not ride into the field on horseback and fight hand to hand against his enemy.
And, keep in mind, Richard III, according to his bones, had some INTENSE scoliosis. This dude was, indeed, deformed, though probably not to the extent that Shakespeare dramatizes. Richard III was not a stud muffin warrior, he was not sexy without his shirt on surfing on vacation in Hawaii. Elizabethans reviled those with physical deformities, it was assumed it betrayed a moral deformity as well.
And here's where Lena Dunham comes in, because I think we do that as a society still, too. But instead of an actual deformity like scoliosis, I think we demonize anything in popular culture that is not traditionally or commodifiably beautiful. The most recent episode of Girls, sorry, again **SPOILER ALERT if you're behind on Girls**, deals directly with this pervading sense we have of the inappropriateness of regular looking women hooking up with conventionally/Hollywood-ly attractive men. This Jezebel post talks about this very well. Somehow Lena Dunham, because she is the show's writer/director/star, is completely deluded in thinking this could ever happen in reality. Women with body fat or small breasts or who express desire openly are not only IMPOSSIBLE to be with hot, successful, rich older men, but they SHOULD NOT BE INFLICTED ON THE GENERAL VIEWING PUBLIC. Lena Dunham transgresses everything by being disfigured, somehow, from the standard woman seen on our screens.
I sincerely hope Lena Dunham does not internalize the hate the world presents to her, and becomes a mass-murdering Machiavellian monster like Dick the Shit (you certainly wonder what's motivating Francis Underwood, for it feels a bit more personal than Iago's "just wanting to watch the world burn" brand of destructive manipulations), but it stands to reason that if you're treated one way for your body being ugly and disgusting, but feel you have a better, even perfect soul locked in that cage, that you just need to set free through deeds and grasps of power (see Descartes' mind/body split and many other things I've talked about/will talk about in relation to Othello and my piece Othello, Desdemona, & Iago Walk Into A Bar).
Interestingly enough, though, what's so maddening about Dunham and her character on Girls is that we only get the performance this character makes for her friends and to herself about who she is. She is never authentic. Jury's still out for me as to whether we ever see Richard being authentic, but he does directly engage with his audience, which Dunham & her Girls alter ego never does. Incidentally, neither does Louis C.K.'s fictionalized self, another "grotesquified" man, though never reacted to with quite the same vigor over landing in the bed of a beautiful woman.
Where am I going with all this? I wonder how violence and rage, which is so prevalent in Richard III as a response to the kind of hate that comes from "wrongs" that are un-owned, the kind of vengeance that pervades Richard III & Hamlet, could be anything but inevitable in a medieval world. And if we're still, even in the midst of drone strikes and remote wars, sending man in against man in the name of defeating evil, what ultimately do we say to men? If you kill the bad guy, the killing is okay. If you talk directly to us about what you're doing, if you operate from a position of authority, if you sell us the position you're taking, you make it okay. And you do it because the world has told you that's the only way to gain power. You are ugly, deformed, disgusting, without it. And who have you learned that from?
It strikes me that before the Shooter on SEAL Team 6 went on the mission to Abbottahbad, which he was certain he'd die in, he called his dad. Not his wife, not his kids. His dad.
There's a lot going on here, a lot of associating, but here it is.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Hanging with Hamlet's ghost
A daily writing project indeed.
I feel it pertinent to point out that I absolutely hate disappointing people. And not that anyone's religiously following my blog or that I didn't clearly say on day one that any days I'd miss I'd just have to make up. But I'm like four or five posts behind, and I hate feeling like I'm not living up to the spirit of the thing I've made for myself in order to GIVE ME more spirit.
I guess I shouldn't be so hard on myself. Things do happen.
It brings up what I want to noodle about briefly and relatively vaguely for this post, though, which is what I wrestle with when I wrestle with disappointment.
Overachievers hate to disappoint authority figures, yes?
I mean I'll be honest.
I hate letting my parents down.
I cringe at even the slightest bit of trouble I get into with bosses, even when it's well deserved,
I try very hard to always be seen positively,
To be respected,
To be approved for the work I do.
It's very difficult to conceive of a world for me, at times, where messing up wouldn't be emotionally akin to running over a favourite pet on the street.
I punish myself severely so no one else has to.
In that way there's a little bit of the ghost of Hamlet hanging around. Hamlet's dad appears to him, whether in psychosis or paranormal event or whatever, and implores him to revenge his FOUL AND MOST UNNATURAL MURTHER!!!
And Hamlet spends the rest of the play shivering in the horrific shade of disappointing him.
Sins of the father, problems for the son. Men, in particular, feel that pressure in relation to their dads. The ones who predominantly teach them what it means to be a man. Can't disappoint them.
"To disappoint," I am reminded, comes from a French word, désappointer, which means to remove from office or appointment. Getting fired, actually.
And maybe it's the fact that I grew up in a French immersion school, but disappointing my parents has carried the same intensely hot, nauseous shame that flushes through my gums and down my throat and into my heart when I've gotten fired.
I've noticed I freak out pretty intensely when I feel like I've disappointed any authority figure. I did it a number of times this weekend accidentally, and seeing myself react the same way each time made me think about what's going on behind that. I must have a lot of authority ghosts floating around.
I think I've conceived of this top grad school I was rejected from as another form of an authority ghost. A high and lofty entity, whose opinion I feel I should respect and look up to, asking me to do or be in a certain way I cannot reconcile with myself, with my own behaviour.
There's an inevitable terror I feel about disappointing these entities because in some way I know I will. But I don't think that's as "woe is me I'm awful" a statement as it sounds.
It sort of gets at the whole problem with wrapping your self-worth up in pleasing others, whether they're authority figures or audiences or what. You're inevitably going to fail. You are different from your father, your boss, and ultimately, although you can make quite a concerted effort of doing everything FOR others, you ultimately have to act for yourself. You're the only one who'll do it. And you are going to do something, inevitably, that doesn't sit well with others, because it's not about them.
Maybe I am merely a victim of a very Puritan cultural upbringing, but I have to make a concerted effort to remember that it's okay to need what I need, and to put myself first.
I think it's easy to expect the worst of ourselves, that when we put ourselves first we're going to do so out of balance, we're going to become selfish, and really we should deny what we feel for the good of our betters, who really get it, who really understand, because we feel like we really can't. We'll kill our dad's murderer not because killing is definitely the answer, but because it's asked of us, and if we say no we disappoint the one thing that gives us value.
Hey, let's not do that, shall we? Let's value ourselves. And not just because other people tell us to.
I feel it pertinent to point out that I absolutely hate disappointing people. And not that anyone's religiously following my blog or that I didn't clearly say on day one that any days I'd miss I'd just have to make up. But I'm like four or five posts behind, and I hate feeling like I'm not living up to the spirit of the thing I've made for myself in order to GIVE ME more spirit.
I guess I shouldn't be so hard on myself. Things do happen.
It brings up what I want to noodle about briefly and relatively vaguely for this post, though, which is what I wrestle with when I wrestle with disappointment.
Overachievers hate to disappoint authority figures, yes?
I mean I'll be honest.
I hate letting my parents down.
I cringe at even the slightest bit of trouble I get into with bosses, even when it's well deserved,
I try very hard to always be seen positively,
To be respected,
To be approved for the work I do.
It's very difficult to conceive of a world for me, at times, where messing up wouldn't be emotionally akin to running over a favourite pet on the street.
I punish myself severely so no one else has to.
In that way there's a little bit of the ghost of Hamlet hanging around. Hamlet's dad appears to him, whether in psychosis or paranormal event or whatever, and implores him to revenge his FOUL AND MOST UNNATURAL MURTHER!!!
And Hamlet spends the rest of the play shivering in the horrific shade of disappointing him.
Sins of the father, problems for the son. Men, in particular, feel that pressure in relation to their dads. The ones who predominantly teach them what it means to be a man. Can't disappoint them.
"To disappoint," I am reminded, comes from a French word, désappointer, which means to remove from office or appointment. Getting fired, actually.
And maybe it's the fact that I grew up in a French immersion school, but disappointing my parents has carried the same intensely hot, nauseous shame that flushes through my gums and down my throat and into my heart when I've gotten fired.
I've noticed I freak out pretty intensely when I feel like I've disappointed any authority figure. I did it a number of times this weekend accidentally, and seeing myself react the same way each time made me think about what's going on behind that. I must have a lot of authority ghosts floating around.
I think I've conceived of this top grad school I was rejected from as another form of an authority ghost. A high and lofty entity, whose opinion I feel I should respect and look up to, asking me to do or be in a certain way I cannot reconcile with myself, with my own behaviour.
There's an inevitable terror I feel about disappointing these entities because in some way I know I will. But I don't think that's as "woe is me I'm awful" a statement as it sounds.
It sort of gets at the whole problem with wrapping your self-worth up in pleasing others, whether they're authority figures or audiences or what. You're inevitably going to fail. You are different from your father, your boss, and ultimately, although you can make quite a concerted effort of doing everything FOR others, you ultimately have to act for yourself. You're the only one who'll do it. And you are going to do something, inevitably, that doesn't sit well with others, because it's not about them.
Maybe I am merely a victim of a very Puritan cultural upbringing, but I have to make a concerted effort to remember that it's okay to need what I need, and to put myself first.
I think it's easy to expect the worst of ourselves, that when we put ourselves first we're going to do so out of balance, we're going to become selfish, and really we should deny what we feel for the good of our betters, who really get it, who really understand, because we feel like we really can't. We'll kill our dad's murderer not because killing is definitely the answer, but because it's asked of us, and if we say no we disappoint the one thing that gives us value.
Hey, let's not do that, shall we? Let's value ourselves. And not just because other people tell us to.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Project definition
I'm cheating, because I'm working on another application today, but I just wrote this to describe a project I'd like to work on in the coming years:
The project that I am currently investigating is a devised work centered around the question of what it means to be a man. As a young one, I feel that there is a a lot of stress in American culture to perform man-ness, that being a man involves acting and action, doing things, taking command, performing, physically, sexually, occupationally. Men get results. Men take matters into their own hands. Men dominate. Men lead. Men succeed. But with this economic crash and all the changes in our culture it has stimulated, men, maleness, and men's roles in society are changing. And I, as a decidedly less "masculine" man, find myself wondering, what about the ones who still aren't sure? What about men who don't know, who can't decide, who struggle with feelings and actually let them show? What about men who want to lead but don't want to dominate? What about men who are overwhelmed? Men who are lost and mad and scared and sad, are they still men? What about men who fail? Are they still men?
So I've started to interrogate this in relation to Hamlet, who culturally speaking represents both our key representation of Man, as well as in common parlance the Sissiest of Men, the Man who Could Not Make Up His Mind, the Man who Failed to Act Until Everything Was All Screwed Up. Hamlet, the man who goes crazy, or who pretends to be crazy but can't take advantage of his performance. The man who feels and thinks too much, who speaks too much. The man who cannot act.
I've also started to investigate my own clowning in relation to this, which echoes very nicely Hamlet's Yorick and other pressures of performing as a man. My clown is super slow, super low status, super sad, an emotional, pure, yearning young clown, seeking love from the audience but feeling overwhelmed and desperately lost in trying to get it. What if my clown is forced to perform, forced to try and be a "Man?" What if he has to speak the speech?
I'd like to throw other culturally Overthinkers into the mix, like David Foster Wallace, who's so self-aware he is self-aware about the futility of being self-aware, and speaks ad nauseum about it. I wonder if there's room too for James Joyce, who also folds investigations of Hamlet into his work. What if David Foster Wallace, Hamlet, and my clown were forced to play Hamlet in a play? Would they be able to do it? Would they be able to act?
I envision this piece with three actors, all men, who talk directly to the audience, and switch between different modes: Themselves speaking very vulnerably, self-aware, frank, honestly, about being young men growing up in this culture. At least one is not completely heterosexual. Then there's clown mode, where these clowns endure Manhood tests. Then there's Character mode, where we play these other figures, struggling in other language about performing, about taking a stand, about acting, about overcoming madness, about being men.
I get the sense that in a devised process this would be explored and explored and then winnowed down into a much more refined question and focus. There seems to me to be a sea of multitudinous ways to explore all kinds of things related to this question. My goal as director, co-writer/deviser, and perhaps one of the performers of this piece, would be both to question my own impulses to control & command, expose them actually in the piece (do we descend into a metatheatrical moment where I try to direct the other two actors on stage, and they defy me, and I fail? Could we set this up so it could happen for real?) as well as to focus on creating an experience in the audience of the spiraling state of self-questioning, self-doubt, self-investigation, and maybe self-exposure.
I'm in process of putting this piece into its early investigation stages. I'd love to push forward on it as it is refined and redefined for me.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Grasping
A blank stage.
Probably marley.
Black curtains behind, and masking both sides.
Two men enter, barefoot, in black shirts and black sweat pants.
One is holding a skull.
One is holding a yellow ball with a smiley face printed on it.
or, maybe,
One enters in an overlarge wool winter coat, snowpants, fuzzy socks, a shaggy winter cap, and a red clown nose. He carries a skull in one hand, a bunch of white flowers in the other.
The other man enters barefoot in a black shirt and sweat pants. He holds the yellow smiley ball.
SKULL holds out the skull to the audience.
SKULL
I got these for you.
SKULL realizes he's holding out the wrong prop.
SKULL
Oh! Uh... I mean... I got these for you.
He holds out the flowers.
SKULL
Is it okay that I did that?
SMILES steps downstage, holding the ball aloft.
SMILES
Alas, poor Yorick!
SKULL
My name's not Yorick...
SMILES
I knew him, Horatio.
SKULL
My name's not...
SMILES
A fellow of Infinite Jest, of most excellent fancy.
SKULL
Matteo, I'm not--
SMILES
He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.
SMILES hops onto SKULL's back. The flowers and skull drop to the ground. He rides SKULL around, with a little sad protestation.
SMILES (while riding)
And now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.
They fall to the ground.
SKULL
Please...
SMILES
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?!?!
SKULL is being whirled around by SMILES in an accusatory fury.
SKULL
I'm sorry.
(to everyone)
I'm sorry, everyone.
I didn't... I didn't know...
I killed it.
It was my fault.
I didn't know that.
SMILES
Aw man, it's cool.
Don't worry about it.
SKULL
Don't... worry...
SMILES
Everyone gets bummed out now and then.
SKULL
Really?
SMILES
Yeah, just stop fucking fueling that shit, bro.
SMILES begins to dribble the yellow ball. SKULL recollects the flowers.
SKULL
What?
SMILES
Stop letting yourself get in that fucking mindset.
You know.
Man up.
Take those depressed thoughts by their fucking balls
And yank that shit up.
SKULL
Yank.
SMILES
BE A MAN, man.
Get rid of that shit.
Get on top of those dark twisted feelings
and FUCK them into SUBMISSION.
SMILES is taking SKULL from behind, who's frozen in terror.
SMILES
YEEEHAWWWW!!!!! YEAHHH BABYYYYY!!!!
Fuck the pain away, bro.
He dismounts.
SMILES
Life is not about pain, my brotha.
Life is about
He makes a grasping motion with his fist.
He repeats this several times.
SKULL stares at the skull.
Probably marley.
Black curtains behind, and masking both sides.
Two men enter, barefoot, in black shirts and black sweat pants.
One is holding a skull.
One is holding a yellow ball with a smiley face printed on it.
or, maybe,
One enters in an overlarge wool winter coat, snowpants, fuzzy socks, a shaggy winter cap, and a red clown nose. He carries a skull in one hand, a bunch of white flowers in the other.
The other man enters barefoot in a black shirt and sweat pants. He holds the yellow smiley ball.
SKULL holds out the skull to the audience.
SKULL
I got these for you.
SKULL realizes he's holding out the wrong prop.
SKULL
Oh! Uh... I mean... I got these for you.
He holds out the flowers.
SKULL
Is it okay that I did that?
SMILES steps downstage, holding the ball aloft.
SMILES
Alas, poor Yorick!
SKULL
My name's not Yorick...
SMILES
I knew him, Horatio.
SKULL
My name's not...
SMILES
A fellow of Infinite Jest, of most excellent fancy.
SKULL
Matteo, I'm not--
SMILES
He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.
SMILES hops onto SKULL's back. The flowers and skull drop to the ground. He rides SKULL around, with a little sad protestation.
SMILES (while riding)
And now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.
They fall to the ground.
SKULL
Please...
SMILES
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?!?!
SKULL is being whirled around by SMILES in an accusatory fury.
SKULL
I'm sorry.
(to everyone)
I'm sorry, everyone.
I didn't... I didn't know...
I killed it.
It was my fault.
I didn't know that.
SMILES
Aw man, it's cool.
Don't worry about it.
SKULL
Don't... worry...
SMILES
Everyone gets bummed out now and then.
SKULL
Really?
SMILES
Yeah, just stop fucking fueling that shit, bro.
SMILES begins to dribble the yellow ball. SKULL recollects the flowers.
SKULL
What?
SMILES
Stop letting yourself get in that fucking mindset.
You know.
Man up.
Take those depressed thoughts by their fucking balls
And yank that shit up.
SKULL
Yank.
SMILES
BE A MAN, man.
Get rid of that shit.
Get on top of those dark twisted feelings
and FUCK them into SUBMISSION.
SMILES is taking SKULL from behind, who's frozen in terror.
SMILES
YEEEHAWWWW!!!!! YEAHHH BABYYYYY!!!!
Fuck the pain away, bro.
He dismounts.
SMILES
Life is not about pain, my brotha.
Life is about
He makes a grasping motion with his fist.
He repeats this several times.
SKULL stares at the skull.
Maybe
Maybe the telling of the story is what you need to do
The act of speaking, the act of exhale, the act of sending the signal out
Maybe the receiving of the story, the feeling with, the sympathizing, the crying for, the smiling after
Maybe that's not your job; maybe that's theirs
Those faceless ones, at who you deliberately do not stare
Whose weighted judgments, shadows though they are, gnaw and
Weigh, weigh you all the way down to your insecure little bones
Rattling in the raking of your own wind.
Maybe they're not the blizzards you think they are
Maybe the act of listening does something to a person
We so rarely do it fully these days, but even still, when we do, we open up
We unfurl our sails, we catch your wind and soar as you soar
Our brains light up as beacons along the way
We roll through the same fog, sifting
The same sand, hand in ever present hand,
Because we know the way is all too familiar.
Maybe we can't both breathe out and breathe in at the same time.
Maybe we shouldn't expect ourselves to.
The act of speaking, the act of exhale, the act of sending the signal out
Maybe the receiving of the story, the feeling with, the sympathizing, the crying for, the smiling after
Maybe that's not your job; maybe that's theirs
Those faceless ones, at who you deliberately do not stare
Whose weighted judgments, shadows though they are, gnaw and
Weigh, weigh you all the way down to your insecure little bones
Rattling in the raking of your own wind.
Maybe they're not the blizzards you think they are
Maybe the act of listening does something to a person
We so rarely do it fully these days, but even still, when we do, we open up
We unfurl our sails, we catch your wind and soar as you soar
Our brains light up as beacons along the way
We roll through the same fog, sifting
The same sand, hand in ever present hand,
Because we know the way is all too familiar.
Maybe we can't both breathe out and breathe in at the same time.
Maybe we shouldn't expect ourselves to.
Don't be the bunny
Already, the spectres of Life take away the time I'd like to spend on writing. Hi again.
This, of course, includes last minute obligations, getting sick, and choosing to spend more of my time with my girlfriend. All of which are very important, necessary things to happen in my Life. My Art, of course, takes a bit of a back seat.
Funny how I've been so used to saying the opposite.
But I'll write on Art/Life balance later. Tonight I'd like to talk about talking.
It always strikes me when I have less of an ability to talk, like when I'm sick, or when I'm forced be silent by a character I'm playing, like in an Emerging Artists-in-Residence piece I'm directing AND am acting in, that I usually talk a lot. In this piece I play a bunny, I wear a pink bunny suit, and I do a sad dance with a pink umbrella. And the most fun, actually, is that I'm SILENT, I just stare.
Oh how I relish it when my brain does not have to compute language.
I love it, I love talking, I mean I get paid to talk on the telephone, anyone who knows me knows I can go and go and go, and as a writer I obviously love crafting language, love hearing language, love feeling language come out of my mouth, but somehow, in the context of live performance, especially in front of people I don't know, I've discovered I'm strongest when I say the least.
Maybe because I'm more vulnerable that way? I reveal more, I can less try to control what people see? Not sure.
I'm sure it's a confidence thing, which I feel shifting beneath me every day. But I'm facing this period in my career where I really still don't want to totally define myself as one kind an artist. I love directing, I want to do it every day in my life. Getting to DIRECT the bunny scene, even little bits and pieces of it, my brain just goes into love-mode; I am doing what I should be doing on this earth. I felt the same way as the night progressed.
But the performer part of me loved getting to improvise a little dance in a bunny suit. And the writer/generator part of me, part in parcel with doing this blog, still wants to work. That part still wants to craft work that I can speak in front of people.
This is right after I had a conversation with my mentor and felt comfortable enough confessing I felt like I could put performing in my own work to rest.
And now I want to do it again. I AM A CHANGEABLE BEAST.
I think before, when I performed for Brat Productions back in November, I wanted to talk to get specific things out that had been locked inside me. A story about boyhood sexual abuse, a search for legitimacy as a man, a need to ACT (which in this case was to get naked), it was very much an Art As Therapy thing, which some folks look down upon.
In fact, in that same mentor conversation, I was told I should go to therapy to get therapy, to clear the way for my art to be about art. It opens up mindfulness a lot (I remember from when I was in therapy senior year of college) and allows you to see past issues of collaboration you blame yourself for, and issues that cloud your art-making decisions. I agree that therapy is always an incredible tool to open yourself up and grow as an artist and a person -- I fear the economics of it, even the sliding-scale options that are cheap and useful in Philly, might prevent me from going there. At least for right now.
But even with therapy, talking is still going to be a part of my life as an artist, and a lot of that talking naturally is about oneself. Talking in front of people. I was struck by how every one of our Emerging Artists for Plays & Players was doing work in an open, personal, vulnerable way, about themselves, mostly literally.
I'm damn proud of the work they're doing -- so what's my excuse for not talking myself?
I think there's a fear in all of us to think what we have to say isn't important to hear. Or that what we say is only for ourselves, only for indulgence, in seeking sympathy and recognition. I'd charge anyone to try and bring me a fictional play that wasn't trying to create a sense of understanding in the audience. It might not be directly autobiographical, but personal? Isn't that why we all do this? So we can use our own personal imaginations, to craft something out of nothing, to bloom in others' minds the seeds of our creation? Isn't talking directly to an audience about your experience just making a different kind of myth? Doesn't Hamlet yearn for your understanding? Don't you yearn for mine?
I think it's hard as a product of an overachieving/do-all-the-right-things-to-get-into-college upbringing for me to let go of the Right Way to be an artist, in Philly or anywhere. I'm in a huge transitional period in my life -- everything that drove me before is different now.
So I think when I said I didn't want to perform, I think what I really meant is that I was done performing that. I think there's plenty more for me to do and say, as well as there are plenty more things for me to direct and shape and lead as the outside eye.
I want to be the kind of artist who follows whatever impulse is truest. And mine isn't interested in being quiet or talking, but in doing each in its good time.
This, of course, includes last minute obligations, getting sick, and choosing to spend more of my time with my girlfriend. All of which are very important, necessary things to happen in my Life. My Art, of course, takes a bit of a back seat.
Funny how I've been so used to saying the opposite.
But I'll write on Art/Life balance later. Tonight I'd like to talk about talking.
It always strikes me when I have less of an ability to talk, like when I'm sick, or when I'm forced be silent by a character I'm playing, like in an Emerging Artists-in-Residence piece I'm directing AND am acting in, that I usually talk a lot. In this piece I play a bunny, I wear a pink bunny suit, and I do a sad dance with a pink umbrella. And the most fun, actually, is that I'm SILENT, I just stare.
Oh how I relish it when my brain does not have to compute language.
I love it, I love talking, I mean I get paid to talk on the telephone, anyone who knows me knows I can go and go and go, and as a writer I obviously love crafting language, love hearing language, love feeling language come out of my mouth, but somehow, in the context of live performance, especially in front of people I don't know, I've discovered I'm strongest when I say the least.
Maybe because I'm more vulnerable that way? I reveal more, I can less try to control what people see? Not sure.
I'm sure it's a confidence thing, which I feel shifting beneath me every day. But I'm facing this period in my career where I really still don't want to totally define myself as one kind an artist. I love directing, I want to do it every day in my life. Getting to DIRECT the bunny scene, even little bits and pieces of it, my brain just goes into love-mode; I am doing what I should be doing on this earth. I felt the same way as the night progressed.
But the performer part of me loved getting to improvise a little dance in a bunny suit. And the writer/generator part of me, part in parcel with doing this blog, still wants to work. That part still wants to craft work that I can speak in front of people.
This is right after I had a conversation with my mentor and felt comfortable enough confessing I felt like I could put performing in my own work to rest.
And now I want to do it again. I AM A CHANGEABLE BEAST.
I think before, when I performed for Brat Productions back in November, I wanted to talk to get specific things out that had been locked inside me. A story about boyhood sexual abuse, a search for legitimacy as a man, a need to ACT (which in this case was to get naked), it was very much an Art As Therapy thing, which some folks look down upon.
In fact, in that same mentor conversation, I was told I should go to therapy to get therapy, to clear the way for my art to be about art. It opens up mindfulness a lot (I remember from when I was in therapy senior year of college) and allows you to see past issues of collaboration you blame yourself for, and issues that cloud your art-making decisions. I agree that therapy is always an incredible tool to open yourself up and grow as an artist and a person -- I fear the economics of it, even the sliding-scale options that are cheap and useful in Philly, might prevent me from going there. At least for right now.
But even with therapy, talking is still going to be a part of my life as an artist, and a lot of that talking naturally is about oneself. Talking in front of people. I was struck by how every one of our Emerging Artists for Plays & Players was doing work in an open, personal, vulnerable way, about themselves, mostly literally.
I'm damn proud of the work they're doing -- so what's my excuse for not talking myself?
I think there's a fear in all of us to think what we have to say isn't important to hear. Or that what we say is only for ourselves, only for indulgence, in seeking sympathy and recognition. I'd charge anyone to try and bring me a fictional play that wasn't trying to create a sense of understanding in the audience. It might not be directly autobiographical, but personal? Isn't that why we all do this? So we can use our own personal imaginations, to craft something out of nothing, to bloom in others' minds the seeds of our creation? Isn't talking directly to an audience about your experience just making a different kind of myth? Doesn't Hamlet yearn for your understanding? Don't you yearn for mine?
I think it's hard as a product of an overachieving/do-all-the-right-things-to-get-into-college upbringing for me to let go of the Right Way to be an artist, in Philly or anywhere. I'm in a huge transitional period in my life -- everything that drove me before is different now.
So I think when I said I didn't want to perform, I think what I really meant is that I was done performing that. I think there's plenty more for me to do and say, as well as there are plenty more things for me to direct and shape and lead as the outside eye.
I want to be the kind of artist who follows whatever impulse is truest. And mine isn't interested in being quiet or talking, but in doing each in its good time.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
I'll follow you (1/2)
This morning I woke up from too-short a sleep after a long day of running around "assistant stage managing" Pig Iron's Hogs & Kisses Benefit. Which turned out great, was wildly fun, and in spite of the crazy stress that usually accompanies these things, coming in knowing nothing and problem solving all day was a welcome respite to boredom and insanity-inducing menial tasks.
It was determined that working the benefit would conclude the indentured servitude I had entered with Pig Iron this past summer in order to work/study their Summer Session, where I learned neutral mask, clown work, and a whole hell of a lot about myself. It was an invaluable experience, but it also actually cost $1350, so I spent time before class cleaning, doing odd jobs for the space, and I then worked for free for Pig Iron's tech as need be for various things, mostly their tours of Zero Cost House, whose New York workshop last January I had happened to assistant direct. Long story short, it was good to keep up an orbital relationship with the piece whose beginnings I had witnessed, and getting up early to load in or load out trucks was, like the benefit, a welcome break from sitting at desks and dialing phone numbers.
ANYWAY. So late night. Lots of beer. Running around doing things. You get it.
I woke up early to get the earliest train out to Paoli, where I get picked up and taken to People's Light & Theatre Company to teach a Shakespeare workshop class with 4th & 5th graders.
Talk about another welcome break. Here I teach kids who are just starting to be able to explore true issues instead of just play fun games (even though I love fun games, too, don't get me wrong). So I've taught them Viewpoints, which is sort of a metric of language that allows actors to focus on specific things, like their tempo, their spatial relationships, their shape, while they improvise. It's a tool, really, I think; a crowbar into all kinds of abstract ideas, moving images, and weird and wonderful situations. I'm using it with them to eventually build a piece dealing with transformation, using The Winter's Tale as a sparking point.
This week we actually got to start improvising in that more artistic, abstract way, beyond the fun games of saying "yes, and" & learning to identify who you are, what your relationship is to each other, and where you are. We worked this week with jealousy and anger as "states" to explore improvisationally, and lots of striking stuff, for 4th and 5th graders, was coming out. I also had them memorize a short Puck monologue, so Puck became a kind of string-puller, with everyone repeating "I'll follow you, I'll lead you about a round..." pushing these characters searching for their memories, imploring they get out of each other's lives, pleading to be given what they want... Following each other, repeating and pleading in these self-tortured cycles became pretty clear expressions of jealousy for these kids. It was damned poetic.
And it reminded me of the power of trusting the space this kind of work allows for people to fall into.
I've been in a bit of an existential fog recently, mostly due to the realization that I likely wasn't going to get an interview for grad school, and I had to figure out what to do with my future. My sister Laura would emphatically assert this-- I am a Virgo, I need a plan.
And so when I don't have one, well, well then I don't have anything. I am adrift and askew, and usually spend my time stuffing content from the internet into my brain swaddled in my comforter, with the remnants of Wawa meals scattered around me. Dirty dishes piled everywhere. Trust me, I just cleaned my room, it is not a particularly pretty sight.
One of the main things I've been in a fog about, was this really deep questioning of what it is I want to do as an artist, and how, and why.
You know, easy questions.
Coming out of an incredibly helpful mentory life talk, which is what spurred me to apply to the Drama League and spend some time on Love's Labour's, there was this sense concluding between us that while I LOVE devised work and devised processes, I love already-written plays just as much. Especially classics (can't you tell?). In many ways I'm caught between loving two very different things that need very different things to exist.
And while I am a driven person who can lead a self-producing process, I don't love it. I want to work on the piece or the play, not raise the money on Kickstarter. I've felt a little artistically hamstrung by my go-it-aloneness, and unfortunately in Philly I haven't developed an actual company of people working together to help relieve some of that burden I place on myself. That model mostly serves devised work. Which basically means, I love the product & the process, but not the stuff it takes to make that happen.
All throughout the Pig Iron benefit, seeing this incredibly inventive company gather and celebrate all these intrepid, devised-process oriented artists, I couldn't help feeling a little like the child yearning to sit at the adult table. I was backstage, literally and emotionally, you know, I knew how it all worked, I could see all the cogs and wheels of the performers' brains whirring and spinning and fitting together into what the audience was experiencing. But I felt far away, tucked behind a sandbag, in the dark.
But then I got into the rehearsal room today, and with my kids I feel like we got cracking making art in the same vein, and I did get to be at the helm of it, and trusting that training and experience, I did not feel in the dark. I think I forget, a lot, that any kind of artistic work takes a lot of trust. Luckily these kids seem to trust me, and are willing to try these crazy things I'm getting them to do.
So I guess, to keep in that theme of following, I'm not tempted quite yet to give up one model for the other. Follow your bliss is something someone has said to me.
Follow your bliss.
More in a bit.
Friday, February 1, 2013
If at first you don't succeed
Hooboy.
Today's been one of those flurry of activity days that catch you off guard with their urgency.
I just finished a preliminary version of a production proposal I'm including in an application to a directing residency.
It's an amazing opportunity I heard about just in time -- the application is due tomorrow. So an artistic statement and two project statements later, I started labouring over Love's Labour's Lost, putting together a quick proposal of what I would like to do with a production of that play.
Good thing I was allowed to read the play today during telemarketing, because I'd never read it before. But when in doubt, especially in times of crisis, I always choose Shakespeare.
I was struck at first by how sassy and snarky the play is. It's really a lot faster and smarter than a lot of the early comedies, though at times it's very incoherent. But it was pretty easy to follow, until shit just got crazy at the end with another play-within-a-play a la Midsummer and then absolutely no one getting laid. Quite the let down of an ending.
Felt like a frat party to me, all the waving around to see who was the smartest and had the biggest dick in the room. The sorority girls acting all unimpressed, manipulating the boys into acting like fools. Everyone's just out to screw each other, and screw each other over. Everyone's quick to manipulate words to get around their meanings. Everyone's quick to lust. I didn't see much love.
Then the dudes dress up as fucking Russians (?) and try to impress the ladies, who are masked and switch identities. Immediately I googled "what did Muscovites mean to the English in the 1600s?" and found an article about Hermione's reference in The Winter's Tale to her Russian father, and how Russians were really just first starting to interact with the English around this time. They were of course associated with intense winters, and merciless tyrannical rulers like Ivan the Terrible, but also the English just thought they all were super manly. Like the men were respected for being hard, rough, strong men.
Hm hm hm.
So the Labour's boys dress up as uber-men (with big fake Russian beards) to impress the ladies, and they get TRICKED.
The ladies switch identities and hide behind masks (clearly Nacho Libre Mexican wrestling masks because my play is set in an outdoor patio/beer garden space of a Mexican restaurant bar & grill) and they will just NOT let UP no matter HOW HARD the guys try to GET SOME.
Feel familiar, ladies? These gents take all the abuse, and they just won't take no for an answer.
Good thing hipsters Holofernes (what the fuck is that name?) and Sir Nathaniel arrive on the scene, and create this disastrously unintelligible "play" about the "Nine Worthies" (whatever they are, had to look them up quickly) and clowns get involved and it all just goes crazy.
Berowne, or Biron, the main frat dude we're supposed to like, gets mad at Armado, a Spaniard (guitarist in my production), and they're about to fight when the Princess gets a text that her dad's dead.
Party foul.
The mood does get sombre, the poetry gets richer, and the insanity is disbanded.
Everyone goes home, with promises (naive though they may feel) to stay faithful for a year.
Uh huh.
Right.
What are we left to feel? Berowne comments on how THIS ISN'T HOW SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDIES WORK, DUDES. Where's my wedding? Where's my sex? This isn't satisfying!
I feel like we sort of see, in the negative space where the play goes "wrong" for a comedy, how empty that conclusion would have been. None of these people are really in love. None of this is really about anything but one-upping each other. Is any of this really "labour?" Was anything really "lost?"
I've been writing about it for a while, so I'll stop. But more soon.
Today's been one of those flurry of activity days that catch you off guard with their urgency.
I just finished a preliminary version of a production proposal I'm including in an application to a directing residency.
It's an amazing opportunity I heard about just in time -- the application is due tomorrow. So an artistic statement and two project statements later, I started labouring over Love's Labour's Lost, putting together a quick proposal of what I would like to do with a production of that play.
Good thing I was allowed to read the play today during telemarketing, because I'd never read it before. But when in doubt, especially in times of crisis, I always choose Shakespeare.
I was struck at first by how sassy and snarky the play is. It's really a lot faster and smarter than a lot of the early comedies, though at times it's very incoherent. But it was pretty easy to follow, until shit just got crazy at the end with another play-within-a-play a la Midsummer and then absolutely no one getting laid. Quite the let down of an ending.
Felt like a frat party to me, all the waving around to see who was the smartest and had the biggest dick in the room. The sorority girls acting all unimpressed, manipulating the boys into acting like fools. Everyone's just out to screw each other, and screw each other over. Everyone's quick to manipulate words to get around their meanings. Everyone's quick to lust. I didn't see much love.
Then the dudes dress up as fucking Russians (?) and try to impress the ladies, who are masked and switch identities. Immediately I googled "what did Muscovites mean to the English in the 1600s?" and found an article about Hermione's reference in The Winter's Tale to her Russian father, and how Russians were really just first starting to interact with the English around this time. They were of course associated with intense winters, and merciless tyrannical rulers like Ivan the Terrible, but also the English just thought they all were super manly. Like the men were respected for being hard, rough, strong men.
Hm hm hm.
So the Labour's boys dress up as uber-men (with big fake Russian beards) to impress the ladies, and they get TRICKED.
The ladies switch identities and hide behind masks (clearly Nacho Libre Mexican wrestling masks because my play is set in an outdoor patio/beer garden space of a Mexican restaurant bar & grill) and they will just NOT let UP no matter HOW HARD the guys try to GET SOME.
Feel familiar, ladies? These gents take all the abuse, and they just won't take no for an answer.
Good thing hipsters Holofernes (what the fuck is that name?) and Sir Nathaniel arrive on the scene, and create this disastrously unintelligible "play" about the "Nine Worthies" (whatever they are, had to look them up quickly) and clowns get involved and it all just goes crazy.
Berowne, or Biron, the main frat dude we're supposed to like, gets mad at Armado, a Spaniard (guitarist in my production), and they're about to fight when the Princess gets a text that her dad's dead.
Party foul.
The mood does get sombre, the poetry gets richer, and the insanity is disbanded.
Everyone goes home, with promises (naive though they may feel) to stay faithful for a year.
Uh huh.
Right.
What are we left to feel? Berowne comments on how THIS ISN'T HOW SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDIES WORK, DUDES. Where's my wedding? Where's my sex? This isn't satisfying!
I feel like we sort of see, in the negative space where the play goes "wrong" for a comedy, how empty that conclusion would have been. None of these people are really in love. None of this is really about anything but one-upping each other. Is any of this really "labour?" Was anything really "lost?"
I've been writing about it for a while, so I'll stop. But more soon.
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