The Little Gifts

04 Saturday May 2013

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A year later and it still doesn’t seem right that I won’t see John’s smile again. I can look at pictures and see his beautiful face, but I won’t see it move with the light in his eyes or the truth of his intention. It’ll be an empty memory of color and shape but not the feeling.

When John gave a smile, he gave it. It was the real deal, it was a gift and it was just for you.

John was in my extended tribe. That just means I didn’t know him nearly so well as my friends who saw to it that I would know him. But that smile… that smile made it ok. It was true and real as a material thing, as a conversation deep into the night. It told me he saw me, didn’t just skim past me and back to his good friends. It was a gift he made on the spot and it was just for me.

He didn’t do things half way, that’s for sure. He was a born daredevil, from all I’ve heard. But he knew his business. If setting up electrical rigging for a lighting system in a rainstorm didn’t get him, what possibly could? That he would die in a motorcycle accident surprised everyone. All his friends assumed by this point he was more or less immortal.

All Burning Man tales are extraordinary, and of course John managed to go over and above. Literally. He would typically sky dive into camp. In the buff. Of course, I’ve heard of many other stories of his Burn exploits, the elevator in the desert is my favorite. But the sky diving one is the first I heard and it’s the one he told me the way you might recount where you prefer to park your car when you go to the mall.

It’s funny, and fantastic, how someone just passing through my periphery, a friend of a friend, can stop me cold like that. Really, I usually have to meet someone a couple of times before I can really notice them (I try not to be a jerk about these things, I’m just socially myopic), but John had a way of being unavoidable.

Thank God. Thank you, God, for not letting me miss meeting John Pedone.

John Pedone 1971-2012

John Pedone 1971-2012

Days in Between

25 Thursday Apr 2013

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Yesterday at the gym I got annoyed, I mean really pissed while working out on the cardio machine. Not all that far in I developed stomach cramps and generally felt crappy about pushing myself and sweating and carrying on doing the basics that theoretically will carry me to my goal of fitness and weight loss. I hit a point where the pain and distance to my goal caught up with my attitude and dragged it down into the dumps. It’s just frustrating to think all the effort and discomfort will really only have minimal effect – and only if I keep subjecting myself to it.

Slogging away on the machines at the gym I can just imagine the parallels between working out and working on my career as a voice actor. It’s easy enough to intellectually grasp that it’s going to take a lot of work for me to become a VO success; I’ve accepted that it’s going to take years. But it’s when I’m sweating and hurting and getting progressively irritated that I have real appreciation of just how long that is. (Well, ok VO work doesn’t usually hurt, though sweat is occasional, the pain tends to be more emotional.)

Anyone who’s ever tried acting – for any medium – knows it’s tough enough just to get cast, let alone make some money. It feels like there is a ton of rejection, but in fact it’s the deafening silence that can end up really soul-crushing. Some days I just have to ask myself if I secretly love punishing myself, a la Sisyphus, by pushing a metaphorical boulder up an unforgiving mountain.

There are days, though, when I can sense forward movement. When something heartening comes by and it doesn’t seem entirely hopeless. It’s when the workout doesn’t hurt all that much, and finishing the weight lift reps leaves me feeling stronger than before I started. It’s also when I see my name printed on a program for performing in a screenplay showcase or when I hand someone my brand new business card. It’s definitely in every compliment I get.

Off days, whether I’m making mistakes or I just can’t fight off self-doubt, are sure to come. Some days my body and my mind will gang up against my resolve and convince me to back off. But that’s part of the process of getting somewhere, I’m convinced. There’s the squishy way out – be nice to myself, take it easy and come back again later – which includes forgiving myself for taking the easy way. *shrug* I guess if it works, then that’s fine. But I’m trying to accomplish something and I don’t intend to make “trying” a way of life. I’m gonna do it.

So… there’s no conclusion to this. I go to the gym with the intention of getting fit; I pursue voice acting with the purpose of making it my career. That was my opening thesis and the long hard slog of days that don’t seem to get anywhere are as much a part of the work as the occasional successes.

Yesterday, on that &#$*!@% cardio machine I eased up and pushed through the whole program. I went through my stretches, carefully pushing back on the nausea and finally headed home. The shower afterwards felt heaven-sent.

Waiting

30 Saturday Mar 2013

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I suck at waiting. I get restless and I have a hard time really getting into any task meant to fill out the time. It’s absurd – normally, I’m ridiculously good at wasting time, but when it comes to time that just needs to pass I spend it in low grade agitation.

But I am waiting for something that I know will happen. Like waiting for the sunrise. Like waiting for a show to start. It’s going to happen. Just give it the proper amount of time.

I wonder how they waited. They were following an obligation. Give it a few days, make sure no graverobbers came by. Sometimes, in some places there was a kind of a wake to make sure the person they thought was dead wasn’t just sleeping one off. But crucifixion, stabbing, the whipping and the crowning with thorns… No. He wasn’t going to be coming out of his grave. So it was just duty. Tradition.

I mean, maybe someone was thinking resurrection…but I don’t think the guards were. Mary definitely wasn’t when she went to anoint the body, and you couldn’t find a more loyal, faithful, dedicated person among the apostles.

We’re supposed to keep hopeful. And it helps that while they thought they were just filling out the last sad paragraph of a strange story, we know that there’s another chapter and then more besides. There’s a twist to the story so we don’t feel as bereft as people who just lost their friend normally would.

But we still have to wait. And while we wait we’re not supposed to let doubt and general crankiness get in the way of hope. Doubt creeps in though, drifts in under the door, presses in on the shadows. It’s not like I wonder if the sun will rise again, I know it will. But… just…what difference does it make? What does it matter if I wait or not?

The world brings in no shortage of assaults on the idea of waiting, of witnessing. The bigger world tends to find the observances that keep a person from having fun as dumb, if not oppressive. And well, yeah, they are, but the point is there is a time when oppressing the self, making oneself be quiet and restraining one’s impulses – just for a little while – can be very useful, very focusing. But those who have no use for this stillness sometimes like to give voice to their disdain. I know, I’ve chosen to “friend” them on facebook.

And now there’s another dimension to the patience I have to ask of myself. Because I wasn’t already fidgeting enough.

Are we there yet?

How ’bout now?

My Voice Acting Guides

19 Tuesday Mar 2013

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I am a voice actor. I don’t actually make any money at this yet, but the fact remains if you ask after my professed career I’m going to answer with voice over: cartoons, commercials, book narration, and documentaries.

The funny thing is, over the past year or so mentioning this has prompted several people to exclaim that it sounds like fun and how does one become a professional voice actor? Ah, well see the part where I don’t get paid? When I figure out how to change that I’ll be happy to tell anyone and everyone.

In the meantime, what I can share is the resources I’ve found that have helped me a bunch to get a handle on the industry as well as sharpen my game.

In the first place I should say that in order to be a voice actor I have to set aside all of my other approaches to performance and stagecraft and think of myself as an actor. I have spent a lot of time not doing that. Not just because I’ve spent the last few years stage managing and the occasional dramaturgical turn, but spending the large majority of my 20s not even doing any theatre. However, before that I got a BA in Theatre from USC. Because for the longest time while growing up and pushing my way into adulthood I knew that performing was where it was for me.

Not everyone gets into voice acting with an acting background, but most do. Frankly, I tend to think of voice actors as actors with a focus on voice over. It’s the same with actors who focus on on-screen performance in their professional careers. Studying for these first requires class time in an empty space, working with plays. Counting up all of my schooling, I put in something like 10 years doing that. And I wish I could have gotten a whole, whole lot more.

Anyway, since coming around to look at voice acting I’ve found a few teachers and other resources that have been immeasurably helpful.

Probably first and foremost has been Crispin Freeman’s classes, each of which I’ve taken at least twice. And I may take them some more. Maybe. }:> And I really can’t say enough good things about his podcast, Voice Acting Mastery. All very insightful and, at least for me, coming from a point of view that I can get with.

Crispin has broad background in voice so he can speak to a variety of VO projects, but his classes and podcast are focused on animation, in particular dubbing for anime and video games. Very simply, it’s because these areas are where his fanbase is and his classes are typically made up of fans of his who have an interest in voice acting. (The in-person classes are capped at eight people so the Venn diagram of fans and VO hopefuls only has to be so big.) This is just to say that you don’t have to be an anime fan to get a lot of mileage out of the class, but you might find yourself adrift in language that sort of sounds like English but doesn’t quite seem like it.

Check out the podcast, poke around the various topics and listen in to the interviews. That should reveal a lot about Crispin’s outlook and whether or not his teaching insight could help you as it has helped me.

Everyone else comes in…somewhere after. These are in no particular order.

I’ve started taking some coaching sessions with Juan Carlos Bagnell or Some Audio Guy in the last year. Juan has quite the take-no-prisoners approach to voice acting. Given he is a casting director and audio wiz, soft spots for flawed performances would cost him dearly so keeping that out of his booth is a matter of survival. However, he is also really – really – good at guiding the unwary noob actor to something that a pro should produce. For myself, I don’t relish getting beat up just because my work isn’t up to snuff, but I go back because I get better every time. That’s all there is to it.

Like people are talking to me now, demanding info on how to become a pro voice actor, I once talked to friends who made the mistake of mentioning somewhere near me that they were taking a look at voice acting. And from them I heard about David H Lawrence (XVII), his classes and insights. His blog and newsletter contain all sorts of tidbits of info all up and down the mechanical parts of voice over, from gear to financial considerations to industry details that can be very confusing.

His workshops are absolutely loaded information and are actually presented as a lecture with whatever visuals David can think up to further explain his point. These mechanical aspects are so easy to miss when you’re used to focusing on artistry and acting that it’s essential to have a resource like this. Over and over he has presented information that anticipated a question before I had even thought of it. For me, the down side is a lot of his workshops are repeated by request and so the ones I haven’t gotten to catch get harder and harder to get to as they get requested less and less. Also, and this is really a minor point when it comes to recommending, David’s artistic aesthetic and mine don’t mesh very well. It’s minor especially in David’s case because friends of mine have gotten a LOT out of his direction and on-mic instruction that they’re making money in this crazy VO world. So if money talks, then, hey, listen to them and get thee to a VO2gogo workshop. And even if you have cold feet about being directed by David, the on-mic portion of the class is actually separate from the lecture and admission is priced differently if you’re only auditing (listening) or also participating (going on mic). These days David has bunch of other offerings too, like video classes.

A really fun complement to Crispin’s classes has been the Adventures in Voice Acting workshops and workouts, led by Tony Oliver at one of the Bang Zoom! studios. A workshop is a day long class that goes back and forth between a sort of a lecture and booth time. The information and experience relates heavily to anime dubbing and video game voicing, hence complementing (for me) the lessons from Crispin’s classes. Tony has extensive voice acting credits himself, but he’s also put in a hell of a lot of time in the director’s seat. This has put in him at the perfect position to move a production through the breakneck pace necessary to meet logistical needs and still coax out terrific performances from actors.

If I may, he’s also a dear. Now, I don’t actually know him outside of these classes and workouts (no lecturing, just go-go-go! in the studio) and I don’t mean to say that the other teachers I list here aren’t supportive and warm – quite the opposite or I expect they wouldn’t have taken up teaching! But Tony has surprised me more than once with a hug and a couple of words of praise. An actor who goes around looking for support and praise is just setting herself up to be horribly, horribly disappointed, that’s simply a fact. But still, having Rick Hunter tell you you’ve got some game goes a hell of a long way toward keeping your spirits up!

Over and over I heard that the chops honed by improv would be called into service while in the booth. For that I looked for an improv class and Crispin recommended his teacher, Melanie Chartoff. I actually wrote an blog entry a while ago on my experience in just one class session. It was inspired by having to face exactly those factors that had kept me away from improv for a very long time. A lot about its demands scare the crap out of me. But it’s for that reason that taking the classes was so necessary for me; avoiding weaknesses and fears never helped anyone grow and I’m deeply indebted to Melanie for giving me the tools to handle situations that once would have left me frozen and lost inside my own head.

Melanie runs a regular improv class with games for a group to play in a given space. She also has an occasional on-mic class where we work one at a time on a piece of text to bring out the most heart in it. This has been incredibly instrumental in learning to suss out the emotions of a piece or as Melanie put it, to fall in love with every word.

Other than asking friends who they were studying with I also took to the Internet to hunt down classes. Web searches for coaching etc was pretty overwhelming but I was also poking around at various voice actors’ Web sites and Wikipedia entries. One of my college professors pointed me toward Lynnanne Zager, who was teaching at Kalmenson & Kalmenson. I also found that Steve Staley taught there, which pretty much settled me up for taking a class there. The funny thing is, I didn’t ever get a class with Lynnanne, though I did get to meet her once and we had a nice little chat in the hallway at K&K. Instead I ended up taking their commercial voice acting classes I & II and animation with Melique Berger.

It’s two different things to talk about the K&K curriculum and Melique. The Kalmenson’s are very particular about how they think things ought to be and their instructors are there to make sure their method is implemented without fail. Their method does help to break down a piece of copy very quickly and leads folks new to commercial VO to make decisions quickly and commit to them fully. I think this is the only place I’ve taken classes where it wasn’t assumed that I walked in with at least a minimal appreciation of acting. That is, the K&K method really is a technique that they teach, much like Meisner or Adler technique, that is supposed to open up a performance to truthful expression. It …does and doesn’t help. Again, I can’t argue with numbers and plenty of their alumni have gotten paying work. And in fact, there’s an aspect the helps me the most when I’m tired and distracted that puts my head back where it’s supposed to be. And since it was developed specifically for dealing with commercial copy it helps a lot for those nuggets of advertising that are supposed to be subtle in drawing a listener’s attention but are as gentle as a chainsaw. Anyway, the VA I&II classes I definitely recommend. It’s a great way to learn how to handle material that is much trickier than it looks. Oh, I also took their Demo Prep class. That was where I got to study with Steve Staley. He cracks me up – he’s a total, total actor, and I wish I could take more classes or coaching or whatever with him. Or just get to sit in on a session while he’s in the booth. Jeez, his acting is so clear and amazing I learned more from watching him goof around with copy for a few minutes than I picked up in many hours of other classes.

Now, Melique cracks me up, but it’s intentional on her part. }:> When I first showed up to VO1 I was fighting off a zillion nerves – the same that go nuts anywhere I’m somewhere new. I’m pretty sure she keyed into this pretty fast, she reads most people in about three seconds flat. And I have to say, if there is one antidote to nerves it’s laughing my butt off. Melique made it easy to get along and get right down to brass tacks. It doesn’t take much for voice acting to become nerve racking, getting flustered and loss of confidence are continuous threats. They are most directly combated with experience, a distinct irony for a voice acting greenhorn. So I loved getting to work with Melique because I forgot to be nervous and remembered to kick my game into gear.

I think that’s it for teachers. But I want to make sure I give props to a book & Web site, Voice Over Voice Actor, by Yuri Lowenthal and Tara Platt. The background info, the tips and suggestions are all super useful and it’s written at a really fun and easy pace. (I’ve tried reading a few other VO texts and they’re typically dry as heck.) Just check the blurbs – some of the biggest names in VO are recommending this book, so don’t just take my word for it. There’s also a CD Yuri and Tara developed to lead vocal warm ups and exercises which has also been very helpful to me.

The last item on my list of resources for keeping my drive and chops up is the most enduring: keeping up with classmates and friends in theatre and voice acting spheres. It’s terrific getting to watch my friends’ careers take off. I’m not gonna lie, envy is a real thing, but it’s so easy to turn it into admiration when we have something in common and it feels like someone from my tribe is doing well. When I hear a friend in a voice over spot or see someone I know in a commercial I love getting to post on their facebook or send them a tweet congratulating them. When I can remember working with them it’s really inspiring to me and I mean every word of praise I get to pass on to them. When I get tired or get a bit turned around after spending a lot of time working on something that isn’t voice over, it’s usually catching up with these people that gets me back on the path I’ve set out for myself.

I don’t know how I’ll get there or where there is, but I know I have great company.

Viewpoints: Turning Accident into Incident into Intent

21 Thursday Feb 2013

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If Suzuki technique forces the actor to pare away all the noise and bullshit in her mind and her soul so that only her power and presence are left behind, then Viewpoints may just be for revealing by adding dimensions of stagecraft to a performance that can then only exist in that time and that place. Just don’t hold me to that.

I first really started learning Suzuki & Viewpoints with SITI members as teachers in September 2011. I wrote about it in the Suzuki article I linked above. I’d done a little bit of Viewpoints with my guys at Son of Semele but without knowing anything of the structure and use. After that training a year and half ago I understood a bit more, but was also a lot more baffled. I’m now taking more training with Anthony Byrnes and of course I can’t let go of (over)thinking its implications.

To work on Viewpoints is still to walk in a lot of mystery, as far as I’m concerned. But I’m coming to understand some of the point. To everything that is material – tangible, quantifiable – there are characteristics that are just what they are. There is nothing for a wooden chair but that it’s made out of wood. That is its accident. In Aristotelian terms that’s just how it is, and it’s not good or bad. It really only matters if you can or can’t sit in it. But the discipline of stagecraft asks that there be no accidents.

So…never mind the wooden chair and consider the empty stage. Whether it’s a tiny black box with severe sight lines, a high tech Broadway theatre, or better yet an atrium in an office lobby that wasn’t built for theatrical exercises. These places have characteristics accidental to them, possibly even unique to them. These characteristics could go ignored. Or, with discernment, they could be brought into the show and be as much a part of the performance as the words in the script or costuming. The reality and immediacy of the space could be as alive and valuable as the particular characteristics of any of the characters.

Viewpoints seems to let us work on finding the relationships inherent on the stage that we might not notice otherwise – the shapes, the architecture, for example. And we can bring intention to performance when we likewise take in the existence and movement of our fellows in the ensemble. (And make no mistake, Viewpoints was developed for and directly serves ensemble work to an extraordinary degree.) When we make the negative space between actors matter, when we call attention to gestures and then repeat them, we take movement from incidental blocking to intentional expression.

Now my favorite, at the risk of overdosing on this viewpoint, is kinesthetics. Within the scope of Viewpoints it’s one of the most dramatic elements of stagecraft, and for my purposes it’s the most human. All told this makes it the most interesting, most essential to everything that I love about theatre. It is action and reaction, intended for calling attention to a moment, an occurrence that transfers energy and dynamism from the thing that happened (the cue) to the actor. It’s an approach that doesn’t allow the moment to become tired and boring as the actor merely waits for her cue. A kinesthetic response should incite the next words or action.

What makes this different from any other staging techniques is that, even though they will be developed over the course of rehearsal, they will be brought in to each performance and given as much regard as any other facet of the show. That’s not to say that other techniques aren’t present, but rather that they ask the actor to invoke something private which remains shut away from the audience. The actor may cross the stage and, per the Stanislavsky system, remember walking in her grandmother’s house when she was a child. Viewpoints, however, doesn’t shut out the reality of the space in which the actor performs. It pulls out the play from the story written whenever it was to the present, the true now.

My very favorite thing about theatre, the reason that it’s my chosen art form (I’m pretty sure I’ve written this before, but I’ll say and write it again eventually) is communion. It’s sharing a moment, an experience in a perfect union of time and space, even if our points of view are wildly divergent. And what Viewpoints has led me to understand is that as powerful as an ancient play that has stood the test of time can be, it’s made truly vibrant and breathtaking when it is revealed in the time and space that I am in. It also helps ensembles crack open expressionistic and other challenging works, allowing us to deliberately invoke semiotics to tell the truth from another angle. Alternatively, Viewpoints offers a lot of tools for developing a piece from scratch.

This is a neat video I found of a basic exercise. The music was improvised, the movement would have been as well though the actors were probably given a vocabulary of movement they were allowed to make. The actors alternatively drive attention to the space between them, their tempo, gestures and repetition, and of course a surfeit of kinesthetic responses. (Sorry the quality of the video isn’t very good, there isn’t very much that I could find that so clearly illustrates what I’m talking about.) (BTW I noticed the Suzuki video was taken down so I’ll be adding something else that I found to the comments in that entry.)

Naturally, there’s a heck of a lot more to the subject. I’m sure I’ll ramble on more about it later.

On Balloons and Emotional Cores

08 Friday Feb 2013

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The funny thing about acting is that it’s a sort of regression.  The task it demands of a performer is to go the opposite direction of maturing, cultivating temperance and perspective. Children act out, have tantrums, spaz out, take up space, don’t mind their volume and have no care for how their words or actions are received because the only objective they have is to express themselves.  When we grew up we were taught to control our tempers, to think of others before ourselves (I hope!), and to be aware of the impact of our words and actions.

It’s like, we could take up this much room, make this much noise, the degree to which we were a force to be reckoned with, all of it was pulled back.

Imagine a balloon inside a large glass bulb.  Deflated, the balloon doesn’t take much space, but it also doesn’t have a shape.  When we’re beat down in life and can’t find something to say for ourselves, we’re that balloon.  Hopefully, we don’t spend much time deflated. Most of the time, it seems to me, we have a good bit of air, a good bit of shape to ourselves, we have a personality, and like a kid with a balloon we have fun out in the world.  But the balloon isn’t at maximum.  There is still room between the latex and the glass bulb.

The thing is, in regular, every day life, that’s enough.  People look at us, glass bulbs with a balloon inflated to three-quarters, maybe four-fifths, and they like our sense of self.  We’re fun.  We’re funny.  It’s enough.

However, on stage, it’s just not.  That remaining space becomes a liability.  It’s depressing, it’s vacuum.  Something is missing and our audience doesn’t know what.  They just see a shortcoming between the glass and the latex and it makes them feel let down.  (OK, they don’t see it, this is just a metaphor.  But they do feel shorted.  Trust me on that.)

The task of the actor is to reinflate until his body of expression (the balloon) matches the full extent of his possibility (the glass bulb).  To go back to that child-like state where self-expression isn’t the primary thing, it’s the only thing.

It’s a task for the heart, for the emotional center of an actor, because it sure as heck doesn’t come out of the mind.  And for those of us who’ve spent decades suppressing our hearts, our emotions so that they wouldn’t get the better of us, this is a bitch of a task.

Son of Semele Ensemble

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Ever since 2008 when I hopped aboard the production of MELANCHOLY PLAY at Son of Semele as stage manager I’ve felt like I was on a hell of a trip. Not trip to anywhere, except maybe deeper inside of myself, but the kind of trip where you tumble and dance and laugh and everything is weird and right and challenging and aggravating and hair raising and madcrazypsychowhereyouneedtobe.

I’ve been associated with the company since then, off and on, though mostly on since 2010 when I became a member. A few years ago I wouldn’t have known to say that this wacky kind of experimentalist theatre is what I want to do…though it would have been in the back of my mind and the dark corners of my heart ever since I saw those pictures of a Robert Wilson production in an artsy theatre book when I was in high school – though these embers would heat up again in 2006 when I got to see The Black Rider at the Ahmanson. At that time I wasn’t doing any theatre, just working a day job that was slowly killing me.

For whatever reason I don’t tend to enjoy the straightforward as much as the byzantine in art; even though perfectly straightforward narratives can and have brought a lot of satisfaction. I just… respond better to the surreal, the abstract, the absurd and the expressionistic. To me, they don’t hide the point or make it deliberately abstruse, but bring everything out that they are trying to say without simplifying a single thing or leaving out awkward details.

When I found a theatre company willing to go there and not flinch at the difficulties of these complicated thoughts and feelings, I knew I’d found a special place.

Our artistic director Matt McCray has more than earned his status as a visionary, whether directing Wallace Shawn’s DESIGNATED MOURNER or getting quite the hat tip from LA Weekly’s Stephen Leigh Morris. Matt has made sure that SOSE makes some of the most excellent and riskiest theatre in LA. And somehow finds the time to make rather remarkable theatre elsewhere too!

Even though I’m a dramaturg at SOSE the bulk of my time and effort has been as a stage manager. I’ve put in my time on four productions now (more than any other stage manager who has worked at SOSE, which is a figure I think is both cool and …idunno…not cool.) I’ve had to fill and then drain a moat, load shredded paper into a snow carriage, hang fake meat, hang real dead animals, set and reset and set some more material over dirt skins that regularly scratched the skin from my knuckles, prep food that will end up all over the stage and then clean up after and on and on… to say nothing of making sure actors have everything they need to carry out the director’s wishes. It’s ridiculously fun, if time intensive.

And when I have gotten to do some dramaturgy as an official part of a production (because I’m likely to do some unofficial dramaturgy work no matter what), it’s let me take on an aspect of ownership in a project that I otherwise haven’t known. Certainly, I take some pride in stage managing. But it doesn’t always feel like my show so much. But when I share what I’ve discovered, organize a bunch of information and present it in a way that serves and bolster’s the director’s vision and when I can take that information out into the wild, I really dig into the play we’re doing and it comes alive for me. I see all the connections and I participate in them.

I love that SOSE has always gotten prominent attention – in 2004 the company was profiled in American Theatre magazine! We’re so tiny for any theatre scale, everything we do is on the shortest of shoestring budgets, our space is teeny and our patronage is…well, let’s call it intimate. But SOSE doesn’t screw around. We make good damned theatre that we can always be proud of.

…Of course, even if our budgets are shoestring in scope we still need to raise that shoestring, er, funds somehow. It’s tough – at least for me, most of my family and friends just aren’t into theatre and don’t have the spare cash to support my theatre. But I have to ask: won’t you support great theatre in Los Angeles? We accept any help at any level, from physical labor to monetary donations. All I can promise is it will go to a mighty cause. }:>

Inadvertently Becoming

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Preamble: Today is the Catholic feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Perhaps because of a conference, “Ecclesia in America” taking place in Rome and it ending today there is more chatter about it than usual (though it’s eclipsed by the Pope beginning to tweet, which is itself overwhelmed by the noise over 12/12/12). Doesn’t matter, it would be on my calendar anyway, as it has been my whole life.

As Marian devotion has received more attention there has been a lot of disapproval, many calling if idolatry and replacing the word “worship” with the word “devotion.” And that’s how I learned not everyone practices the same way, even when they profess the same faith. At home we’ve prayed the rosary every night except in very strange and usually stressful situations. Marian devotion is profound in the Mexican Catholic tradition, and in particular devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe has been strong enough to lead a war for independence and later a revolution. So deeply ingrained is that specific image of the Holy Mother that when Pope John Paul II visited Mexico he greeted them as “Guadalupanos,” a moniker that some of us still carry out in the greater world because it transcends geography and society.

Marian devotion, in my world, over and within my lifetime has blurred in definition with the shape and scope of pagan traditions, particularly of a general goddess worship. And my sense for the doctrines of the Church has led me to a syncretic position with the Buddhist path.

I can’t tell you how difficult it is to write this out because because I just find it hard to write about spirituality and religion in general. I don’t have a straightforward view and have a tendency to resist developing one. Furthermore, I must admit I feel cowed by prevailing notions of what belief should be. No matter what, straightforward is encouraged so you can carry around one label and not be confusing. I should pick a side, so to speak.

But I don’t think relying on reason excludes my need for God, I don’t think prayers of supplication or intercession foil willworking (though my will is weakest since I use it least), I don’t think magic takes the place of hewing to the 8-fold path, nor does adjusting my approach to the desires in life affect the basic chemistry when it comes to cooking. It’s all horribly relativistic, I know, a disaster of moods and varying ways of talking to something that only talks back by circumstance.

This isn’t the entry I meant to write. I imagine that’s not particularly shocking. For some reason it’s easier to delineate by negatives.

But what do I believe in and how has it made me into me? ah… well. I believe in her brown skin. And I believe in toasting cheese on bread. I believe in the stars of 500 years ago and I believe in evolution. I believe in feeding the hungry and protecting the weak. I believe in going to see the doctor regularly and I believe a community of faith is good for me. I believe that being pushy about faith has hurt a lot of people and that hurt has come back around and hurt me. I believe in wearing a scarf when it’s chilly. I believe I prefer turkey chili to beef and New England clam chowder to New York (though I’ll add cheese to both). I believe I should be gentle with others even when they haven’t been so with me. I believe in magic and put my faith in science. Um… and a bunch other things. I think God is reading this as I write, including the stuff I’ve deleted. And I believe He knows the words in my heart that I don’t want to admit to just yet.

*shrug* I believe in grace.

There’s so much more I could say on the matter, but it would take another lifetime to adequately express it all. I think I’ll leave this hash of a blog post the way it is.

Mysteries, or, The Things We Don’t Know that We Know

30 Friday Nov 2012

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I don’t even know why I’m trying to write about something that is specifically outside of the realm of what I can talk about. If I don’t know it, how in the world can I write about it?

A better question might be, why open this post for writing at a quarter to 5AM?

I’m in between clowning workshops, having taken one and looking at two more this weekend. And last week I participated in a Butoh workshop, though it was largely meditation and then free form movement set to live music. There’s no one way to do Butoh, I’m assured, so I just let myself go with the only rule being “don’t be perfect.” And as for the clowning… well it was rather a lot like improv but far more freeing in several ways…because in many ways there were more restrictions on what I could do when out in front of everyone.

No great epiphanies – yet – but the returning thought that these are so much easier and solid to perform when I don’t think. Just go on stage with a couple of ideas to rub together and find all the space between the parameters set out by the instructor and… lo and behold I’m performing.

Maybe I’m thinking about it tonight because I got to see Matt Maguire’s Wild Man in Rome. It was thrilling, of course, that’s the central thing. But I sat front row center and watched Maguire work. When you’re that close to performers you really can see them work, fight, push, discover, ride, live their show. And I kept thinking (quite possible prompted by his references to commedia dell’arte) that there’s a lot of clowning that is deep inside this work. But the thing is – and this is why clowning _is_not_ improv – the piece was wordy, a tour of sites of Rome taken at a breakneck speed as The Wild Man races away from Il Diavolo. There were SO MANY WORDS, so many sites to see, so many experiences I couldn’t track them all; but of course Maguire had to. And even as the Wild Man careened through Rome, Maguire had to hold on tight to his performance.

I once wrote about Butoh:

Rather than muscle tension, butoh calls for nerve tension of a living moment. This moment should be created by shattering the higher mind of language. Maro Akaji said, “the thought is that the body gets support and help from…something which is impossible to find with language. The body consequently gets support from something that lives inside of it.”

When I sort out exactly what that means, I’ll come back and tell you all about it. For now, I take it to mean finding a way to get your body to do something without knowing the words for it. Contrast knowing the words (fifth position, plie, jete, fifth position) with there not really being words for each movement (break away from defenders, fake pass, twist, 3-point throw, nothing but net). Of course, when dancers perform they aren’t thinking “plie, jete” they’re simply performing. And basketball players don’t get to high level execution without hours upon hours of training and correction. But performing physical actions don’t need words. You don’t verbally order your arm to lift to pull a book from a shelf. You can’t tell me you know how you do it…but you know how to do it.

I personally can’t think of the word “mysteries” without thinking of the sacred mysteries from the Catholic faith. I grew up praying the rosary with my family and at home it’s still prayed every night. They’re the moments important to the Scriptures – the angel Gabriel announcing that Mary will bear the Son of God, the birth of Jesus, the scourging at the pillar and then His crucifixion, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit descending upon the apostles, etc. And then there’s the new fangled Luminous mysteries, taken from the life of Jesus, like his baptism. They’re not all when something spectacular happens like the resurrection, but they all have to do with the idea of encountering God or God’s plan. For example the Visitation is when pregnant Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth who is pregnant with a boy who will become John the Baptist. When Mary and Elizabeth meet the children in their respective wombs leap and they understand the children know each other. There is also the Coronation of Mary, a scene that happens entirely in Heaven where Mary, mother of Jesus, assumes the position of Queen of Heaven.

Obviously all of these refer to stories that require faith. And that’s rather the point. There’s nothing that can measure the objective truth of these claims that can be devised by waking, living intellect. There’s no speaking about these things happening in the same way we can talk about the distance to the moon or manipulating a radio frequency. But from what I’ve gleaned of the Catholic faith, it’s all about living in mystery, the confidence of knowing things that can’t be solidly explained with words but must be lived if we are to express ourselves truthfully.

Maybe that’s also on my mind, again, because of The Wild Man. I kept thinking about how all those medieval and Renaissance artists depicted religious ecstasy – coming into contact with the divine – and how it established cultural semiotics for both what is sacred and what is profane. Art historians have broken it down far better than I ever will, but you and I still know it when we see it.

Maybe…

As for why I’m still writing at 530am. *shrug* Who knows.

Why Me, Revisted

12 Monday Nov 2012

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Sometimes I fucking hate doing theatre. Those times always come up as I’m in the process of getting a play together, and often present when getting a show to open is coming down to the wire. It’s just anxiety, exhaustion, etc. But I have to ask myself all over again why I have to do this.

I am absolutely perfectly suited for solitary work. My temperament is perfect for being a writer. I would have no one to rely on, no one to wait on before going and creating… There are rarely any instances where I have to sell myself before what I create…. And I do write, but it takes a considerable backseat to stagework and acting.

WHYYYY? As I’ve grown up I’ve mellowed out and learned to deal with people better. When I was in college I was far more misanthropic – and yet a theatre major. People quickly realized this and were completely baffled by my area of study. A friend once quipped, “oh it makes perfect sense, she wants to be a director.” And at the time it did. (I still like the idea of directing but I’ve never really pursued it. Some day, some day.)

So when I was 20 I was much more likely to say things like “I hate people.” I don’t hate them, sometimes I really love them. They’re fascinating, entertaining and often inspiring. But I still rarely feel among them. Of them. It’s just not usual that I’m in a crowd and I feel like I’m a member of the crowd, rather an outsider that suddenly and probably accidentally ended up in the middle of a party. I more typically feel like I’m watching the people around me interact and accept their attention to me as politeness.

Of course with close friends I feel more like belonging, so long as I don’t think about it. Thinking about stuff like that kills the feeling of closeness as there is no real rational explanation for why anyone would be friends with me, but they are and I accept it and thank God.

But back to theatre… it’s people, nonstop. It’s all about people. It’s essence is people. The interaction of people, people’s ideas modifying people’s ideas and exemplified, brought to life and otherwise expressed by yet more people, and all played out in the company of other people. It’s content is men, women and children, it’s metaphors are built out of human expression, even the non-human elements, to truly be theatre, have to reach back and relate to and incorporate the persons of the production.

While I’ve grown up (a little) and have learned how to keep my introversion from being other people’s problem (a long, hard lesson, I assure you), I have to keep in mind that I am introverted and that too many people and too much socializing is bad to me. It’s a like a kid hopped on sugar before dinner, they’re going to make a mess, it’s terrible for their health and they won’t sit still long enough to eat their vegetables.

When working on a show it means I’m tired of bloody well everybody on the planet and we haven’t even managed to open yet. So every time I do a show there comes a point where I have to just grit my teeth, breathe deep and accept all comers. And when I’m stage managing, *everyone* comes at me, typically all at once. There are very frequently moments when a good five or eight people want to talk to me and no they won’t wait their turn so I’m holding about five or eight different conversations, solving problems and reassuring actors and directors and designers and producers about what’s going to happen and how they shouldn’t worry….

That’s the job. And that’s ok. As long as it feels like they’re listening and working with me, it’s quite all right to be in chaotic situations like that, even though I much rather prefer calm and order.

It’s when I don’t feel like I’m being heard that I start to get very frustrated and the anxiety I was holding at bay finds a crack to get at me and break down my will to live (or at least not strangle some poor actor who had the misfortune of being the dozenth person to ask me for something when I’m on a smoke break)(yep I smoke, and yep I’ve tried to quit, only to come back because I’m doing theatre and I can’t figure out how else to cope).

And when I try to explain this to non-theatre folk I get attempts at understanding – well who wouldn’t get aggravated at being ignored? Who wouldn’t feel flustered when their attempts at organizing are tossed aside in favor of everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off? But they don’t get what the week leading up to opening is like. They don’t get that everyone working on the show – hardly just me – is under immense pressure and those folks view me as a resource to help them manage the chaos they’re facing. When I’m eyeball deep inside of Hell Week, I forget this, but when I’ve gotten the chance to catch my breath, I remember that and realize it is also part of the job and that makes it ok.

When I stage manage, I do my job and I like to think I do it well. Then I go home (or to my couch-away-from-home) and toss back some whiskey and some kind of calm returns to my world.

When I act, the freakout theatre causes is rather different. That all comes out of incredibly personal emotions and vulnerabilities to which no sane person would subject themselves. Compound that emotional nakedness with the stream of people and guh…

Whhyyy? Why do I have to do this? There’s a million other things I could do. Many of them far more respectable, even. But as another friend likes to point out, I do always find the hardest way to go about anything.

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