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.