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flor san roman

~ Adventures and Abstractions

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Category Archives: Theatrical

A Truthful Fiction

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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dramaturgy, observations, SOSE, theatre

Do you remember how you first got online, when you first “hung out” on the Internet?

Not just sent an email or double checked a piece of info via text message.  When you actually parked it in front of a computer and had whole conversations with someone who you likely had never met in the flesh.  Was it over IRC?  AOL chat room?  Telnet?  Or… did you MUD?  Did you MOO?

If You Can Get to Buffalo, now playing at Son of Semele Ensemble, takes a wild and fun look back into those days of invented reality and the sweetness, as well as the danger, of a space with no rules.

Assuming you’re not one of those millennials who reached puberty around the same time that Myspace or Facebook came online, and you remember sending pings, checking whois, and developing the ability to read a rapidly scrolling screen as half a dozen people “talked” at the same time, then you really know what made the virtual world…”real.”  Even though we had text _only_, no images whatsoever, we connected over what people had to say for themselves, strange, hilarious, kind, self-serving, depressive, excitable, sly, cruel, sweet or some combination of all these, it was all we had to go on.  They could claim to be a 20 year old female college student, or they could be 35 year old male programmer etc… a. you could only take their word for it (and their server location…but that could be spoofed too) and b. asking a/s/l (age/sex/location) was nigh boring when the conversation was formatted around given subjects – a band, a political position or, in the case of MUDs and MOOs, a shared reality created whole cloth from the consensus of the people participating on the given channel.

Forgive me if this sounds curmudgeonly, but back then we could name ourselves anything that struck our fancy and create a backstory and reality that not only ignored facts but disregarded rules of biology and laws of physics.  These days social networking sites (read: Facebook) demand real names and even punish people with names that sound fictional.  The social networks of this day are built around the idea that you will only share your real self and your real experiences – with everyone, not merely with a self-selected group of strangers who share a variation of your brand of weird.

When did we lose the chance to create the world we wanted, no matter how mad or self-serving or frivolous?  Who took it away?  Was it when business people decided to build a platform they could monetize?  Was it when the jerks showed up and exploited holes in the consensus for their own jollies?  Was it fussbuckets who made fun of nerds who were enjoying themselves in a way that didn’t make sense?

Is there anything virtual left in the Internet as we know it today?  Is freedom only a byproduct of naivete?  Come party with us, we’ll explore LambdaMOO together.

If You Can Get to Buffalo closes April 12, 2015.

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Never Explain, Never Apologize

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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dramaturgy, SOSE, theatre

A woman tries to hide her anger from a man who could determine the fate of her family.  Another woman loves her husband perhaps too much, and takes his vices on, perhaps too deeply.  Another woman suffers under her cruel husband but fights herself to keep from showing her fear and pain.  Another woman travels the world while unknowingly carrying a desire so mighty she can’t see it or say it until some uncontrollable grace forces her to recognize it.

The world of SEX & GOD is entirely internal.  It is truer than true.

The narrative of the lives of four working class women of Glasgow, Scotland over the course of the 20th century works at  level beyond the first person.  They allow us to see through their eyes, but their words do not explain their circumstances.  Rather, the words illuminate the world, the material, the emotional and the spiritual.

From Sex & God at Son of Semele Ensemble

From Sex & God at Son of Semele Ensemble (l-r, Sarah Rosenberg, Melina Bielefelt, Hilletje Bashew)

It’s a world that’s rarely ever shown.  And when we’ve seen it, it has come by way of explanation, perhaps an apology for why women may seem so mercurial, mysterious, etc.  But not here, not this time, not under Linda McLean’s pen.

More than one audience member has left the show confused as to the order of events and the specific details.  And I know very well just how hard the work was to decide exactly what each woman was experiencing externally.  The only clues we have are the words that come from women under duress – or ecstasy – words spawned to fill in an immediacy that doesn’t have action or environment, cause or effect, only feeling.

As I said, it illuminates, it doesn’t explain.

The illumination is unrelenting.  It flows without slowing for any stragglers, and it certainly never entertains making an apology.

Think about the descriptions of stories of working class men, their broiling anger, the great stress they face to provide for their families, the abuses of power they suffer and the destructive escapes they undertake.  The women of these stories are unseen, or mysterious…  or called “strong” and never studied any closer than that.

Over and over what we’ve heard is that the woman’s experience is to be borne, preferably with quiet dignity and definitely without complaint.  A woman who accomplishes anything notable is admired because she rose above the challenges implicit in being a woman.  But when have the basic, grueling, violent challenges of the working class life been notable for women?

There is a consistent elegance to SEX & GOD that is not forced or sought, even while a woman is beaten or raped, or when economic instability puts her in a crucible or when war touches her life, and there is grievance aplenty even when solace is taken in religious communion, addiction is indulged, education is sought or exotic experience displaces heartbreak.

The experience of this play can be agitating and troubling.  It is not easy to digest, but when should the truth of any person’s life be soothing?

Separated by a Common Language

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by Flor in context-ual, Theatrical

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art, communication, dramaturgy, SOSE, theatre, travel

She says something to me and her face looks kind.  She’s trying to help me – us – though we didn’t seek it.  But I don’t quite understand and without realizing it I just smile and nod and back up a bit.  A companion is with me and he has the same cognitive disconnect.  She looks between us, polite smile fading, and says (perfectly clearly) in her lilting brogue, “do you not speak English?”

For that brief moment when I cannot speak English I feel keenly my alien-ness, the solid fact that we are lost in a foreign country.  But then other companions step up and assure her that we do speak English and she explains how to get back to the Water of Leith Shore.

Up to that point everything about being in the UK that was different was delightful – money with the queen on it, cars driving on the left side of the road, the legal drinking age, bobbies, haggis, lifts, knapsacks and hundreds – if not thousands – of years of human history under our feet.  For days we let ourselves think we were walking through a funny looking glass where things worked only slightly differently from what we were used to.

Now, no one will ever accuse me of looking Scottish (although my dad would be highly amused), but as a kid in Southern California I did go to the Highland Games and other Scottish cultural festivals in the area.  For heaven’s sake, when I was in high school we put on the Lerner & Lowe musical BRIGADOON.  My dad has a certain appreciation for the Scottish character and he used to tell me stories about the “Ladies from Hades,” Scottish regiments marching boldly into battle, bagpipes wailing.  Many of my classmates, neighbors and fellow church parishioners could have been taken for being of Scottish descent.

And so it was when I happened to tour the UK and ended up in a bank lobby trying to make sense of a bus map while it rained outside.

I’m now safely home in Southern California and hunting down tidbits of life in 20th century Scotland.  Overwhelmingly this is over the Internet because the questions I have don’t work in the vertical direction that books typically do, but at cross sections, threading different facts together to understand how religious, economic and social factors would affect a particular character in a time and place.  It’s difficult and at times incredibly frustrating because history tries to leave Scotland in the 19th century and insists that modern American history is all that I need to know about the 20th century.  Any other place should simply be considered as a variant to America….

Even as my research went along for the first chunk of considering the play I didn’t realize that that assumption was in the back of my mind.  I can separate out the much older history as a fascinating story of a people from long ago – Robert the Bruce and the Declaration of Arbroath – from modern life.  If an event is well in the past it belongs to people quite unlike me.  But the life that happens now, to people who look like my friends and who speak a language that (despite occasional difficulties) I speak as well, must therefore be somewhat similar to mine.  When that assumption proves unfounded and I can only take the facts as they present themselves, without orienting them relative to facts about myself and my world, it’s then that I feel I am really learning something new.

It’s the same feeling that I get when I really listen, very, very carefully to men talk about themselves.  But it’s only when they’re being as honest and vulnerable as they rarely get.  We understand machismo, we understand self-reliance…we’ve seen it every second of every day.  It’s as intrinsic to thinking “man” as it is to think “fellow wearing a plaid skirt” when we think “Scot.”  But when I finally have the insight to what might be under the bravado the point of view is disorienting to me, and therefore fascinating.

But it requires listening, really, really listening.  It takes removing every ounce of my own ego, every expectation that I might have to in order to hear what someone else is truly saying about his or her experiences, and not merely hear how their life might vary from mine.  I do love exploring people’s lives in other times and places.  I have a continual hunger to learn how other people do what they do, why and where they end up.  But I let myself think I know that we have enough in common; when that commonality is taken from me receiving a foreign culture and point of view is no longer reflexive assumption but an active observation.

It’s not a variation from the American lifestyle that today a child in Scotland has approximately the same chance of being born to an unwed mother as to a married one.  American births are only at a quarter unwed-to-wed mothers.  Maybe in another generation that will become 50%, but who knows really.  Scottish women aren’t living a variant of American priorities, they are making their own choices in their own society in a time known as “now.”

Linda McLean‘s play Sex & God is entirely concerned with women living their lives over the course of the 20th century in Glasgow, Scotland.  The details of their life and times are intrinsic and barely worth the mention as they proceed through their experiences…and yet it’s those prosaic details that make their lives so different from what I know.  We know the proud, strong Scotsmen, we know the tartans and bagpipes, we may know the factories and mines, the economic difficulties… but we don’t necessarily know how the women lived.  How it affected how they loved and what work they did, we don’t know their internal lives, their thoughts, their spirituality, their motivations.

So it is that my mind is turned again to this far away land that has people much like you and me living their daily lives.  And so it is I feel like I’m relearning how to speak English.

Sex & God plays with Lamentations of the Pelvis for an evening of theatre called WOMAN PARTS.  Opens at Son of Semele Ensemble on Saturday 26 April, running Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and some Mondays.

Staged Truths

18 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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acting, rehearsal, theatre

I have to spend a lot of time as a stage manager as little more than a glorified time keeper.  That’s during rehearsal.  My work is really before and after rehearsal – and I do what it takes to make performances go.

Luckily, my reward for sitting still for four hours at a time, six days a week, is a little bit of cash and a front row seat to watching talented actors give performances that only the director otherwise gets to see.  And I don’t have to sweat having an opinion.  I just get to sit back and watch.

I get to observe humans twisting themselves into emotional pretzels to find out what they’re trying to bring to light.  I see the successes and failures and the amazing, illuminating truths in between.

Actors do this emotional heavy lifting, over and over, on a scale unlike any other.  I find the work fascinating, as much to observe as to do myself.

Obviously, I’m someone who is capable of watching something over and over again.  I know people who insist they find that impossible.  I only find it unpleasant when the show itself is not to my taste.  But when the show is good I can watch it repeatedly until the cows come home.  Or the run finally ends, whichever comes first.

There’s a lot to stage managing that’s a bear, and I’ve dealt with actors who are a handful.  But I’m glad whenever I realize I get to watch an artist I like go to work.  Not many other jobs like this that I can think of.

Thanks, talented actors, for bringing it.

The Thing as It’s Become: CIVILIZATION

13 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by Flor in Background, context-ual, Theatrical

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art, dramaturgy, existentialism, observations, theatre

At Son of Semele Ensemble we’ve just put the play CIVILIZATION by Jason Grote into production.  The thing it’s pretty much entirely about is my life and yours too. (Also, I was the dramaturg.)

Through the last few entries I’ve been leading to a point of trying to explain the sensation of balancing my life on the toes of one foot.  My safe ground has fallen away until now there’s just a patch under me where I can be without feeling like I’m imposing on other people.  I feel hemmed in, compromised and stressed out.

And there’s nothing really special about me.  All around me, every where I go, people are getting squeezed in much the same way.  I don’t have to work hard to find people stressed out by bills, unable to get ahead in their careers, unable to find full time work, unable to get to a point where they can take a full, unencumbered breath and stand on two feet like a fully realized human being.

Even as a society we look around and easily people who have it worse than we do.  We’re not in a war zone, we’re not living in the midst of toxic material (actually, we created that toxic material, most of the time), our strife is nothing like slavery or institutionalized sexual exploitation or a lack of access to education or mass censorship.  We can learn whatever we want, say whatever we want, say yes or say no to sex whenever we want and in theory merit is the only thing that lands or limits employment – not race or creed or gender….

And yet.  And yet… and yet it’s so fucking hard.  how?  Why?  What the hell happened that got all this chaos going, and not in the ordered way of society that we were told we’d get back when we were in school?

We ask those questions and self-appointed authorities try to step in and explain it all.  They promise pathways out.  They claim they’ll teach us how to anticipate things that could go wrong.  Or tell us who or what is to blame.  (We really like that last one.)

But in actuality the questions are rhetorical.  It doesn’t matter how we got here, or it doesn’t matter that much.  Because asking that question betrays the longing for things to “go back to normal.”  And that is never going to happen.

What the thing is, the thing IS.  More importantly, the course of events aren’t going to slow down and wishing they would go in reverse is so ridiculous it’s almost insane.

KAREN: Do you ever feel like you’re made for something different than everyone else.

DAVID: Everyone feels that way.  That’s why life is so disappointing.

But when we’re upset – okay, when I’m upset – childish reactions are to be expected.  I pout and blame others and ask unhelpful questions like “WHYYYY??” and complain about life being unfair.

Our civilization seems to be made of supposed adults running around not at all sure how things got to be like this and holding on to the deep seated feeling that it’s not supposed to be this hard.

CIVILIZATION is a terrific look at life this very minute, on the last patch of ground we feel we can own.  We’re all losing our balance in real time.  Our civilization is falling apart and the only good thing about it is that we’re now allowed to make up whatever the heck we want about what is next.

Viewpoints: Turning Accident into Incident into Intent

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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acting, communion, theatre, viewpoints

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

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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acting

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

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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art, dramaturgy, me, SOSE, theatre

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. }:>

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

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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art, dramaturgy, faith, performing, theatre

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

Posted by Flor in Theatrical

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communion, me, theatre

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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