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.