Category Archives: Theatrical

Theatre, Why Me

05 Monday Nov 2012

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It’s not all about theatre for me – it all IS theatre. We live through moments together, approach and receive the same data sets from wildly different angles and take away wildly different narratives and therefore different conclusions. But it’s that moment, that heartbeat where everyone in the room experiences the same moment, that’s what I live for.

That flashpoint is unparalleled by any other experience. It’s dangerous and mysterious and its possibilities are infinite. That is the point when an audience can become a mob, an idea can become inflamed into a movement, when there is communion. Everyone is in it, everyone shares that moment right when it happens. Forget thinking or even feeling the same thing. That’s not what I mean; that moment is beyond thought and feeling. It is electric and immediate and breathtaking.

I look for this moment, live for it as I said, to the degree that it just defines me. Maybe I’m addicted to it. If so I have been since I was 15 or so. And the time between hits can be years. Ever since I came upon describing this feeling as communion back in high school it’s felt like I didn’t choose to go into theatre, but it picked me. Was it when I saw Phantom of the Opera and the whole audience jumped and reacted as one? Was it when I performed a monologue and instead of polite applause at the end the class gave me a nearly audible shocked silence?

It’s just something I have to do. Something I have to have. I don’t get along very well without this practice in my life. I learned that the hard way. It’s like, theatre drove me insane and now it’s the only way I know how to cope. (Somehow that sounds even crazier.)

It’s completely fun to realize that an audience has fully committed to the ride. Sometimes its obvious like when they are laughing or gasp softly. But sometimes I realize that most people are holding their breaths just waiting for the next moment. It’s also fascinating to watch an audience hit a flashpoint where everyone has a reaction, but they are very different reactions. It’s a matter for psychology, culture, linguistics, etc that the audience members bring in, but the best theatre cuts through all of that. It may be apocryphal but I recall a story of Hamlet bring performed in English in Moscow, Russia. According to the story, while the audience largely didn’t speak English they held on in rapt attention to the schemes and emotional arcs that run through it.

It’s as basic as not wasting the time (and admission cost) the audience has given up for the performance, and as profound as a sacred meeting between hearts. The audience agrees to give me their attention and I agree to take their attention and build something out of it. The energy I give out on stage is taken by the audience and returned in their reactions. I take that return and use it to fuel the show I put on. Well, ideally. The performer has to kick butt regardless of if there is an audience and how much they’re really into what goes on onstage.

I wonder why I have to do this. Why it matters to me so much. I wonder why I am given to seeing everything this way. To borrow from Tom Stoppard, it does feel like I have the opposite approach from regular people who don’t see everything through the scope of theatre.

Brutality Theatre and Discomforting Arts

21 Thursday Jun 2012

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The killing is the worst part, and the best part. It’s the worst, because it doesn’t feel right. …And the fact that it makes you feel awkward, uncomfortable, like something’s not right – that’s the best part. —Siobhan Keogh, “Eyes on The Last of Us”

In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually committed. —Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double

Trevor was contemplating her next project. She didn’t know what form it would take Nor how much time Nor even what material She only knew It was to be brutal.   —Sheila Callaghan, Roadkill Confidential

There are moments written into ROADKILL CONFIDENTIAL as well as some we’ve extrapolated in our production at Son of Semele that push the audience to a precipice, and which way any member goes from there is entirely up to the member herself.  A person might be outraged or entranced, she might be heartbroken or she might be giddy.  There’s just no way to know until one of those moments arrives.  I have to admit, it’s an odd feeling to sense that the unity of the audience has been smashed and every individual has to decide whether to laugh or grind her teeth on her own.

Antonin Artaud’s essays were assembled into the book The Theatre and Its Double in 1938, an age which he found catastrophic as well as without suitable theatre.  Of course, he couldn’t see the future and therefore didn’t know World War 2 was imminent, however he was entitled to his disgust at the state of contemporary theatre.  In fact, he wrote, “it is no wonder the elite abandon it and the great public looks to the movies, the music hall or the circus for violent satisfactions, whose intentions do not deceive them.”

At least a part of the goal of Theatre of Cruelty is to get audiences to a state of visceral relating to the harshness of life/reality depicted on stage.  The other side of that coin is to goose the theatre practitioners just as much as the audience so the urgency and truth remain vibrant and expression avoids becoming cliche.

So why refer to THE LAST of US, a video game that will be coming out next year?  Here’s the story: My friends are largely either theatre/performing arts geeks or comic book/gamer geeks, with some crossover here and there.  Thus, even as I was up to my eyeballs with putting up ROADKILL, my Twitter and facebook feeds were awash in announcements from E3.  LAST of US, from articles I’ve seen seems to have wowed quite a lot of people with groundbreaking insight into survival scenarios where the player’s primary antagonists are other perfectly ordinary humans just as desperate to survive.

It’s striking to me, a non video gamer (purely out of protection for my time, I burned entire years on LARPing and some table top gaming – I’m sure if I picked up a video game I wouldn’t see the sun for weeks), that there are articles like the one I quoted above in PC World that speak from a point of view well over the spectacle of violence in the medium.  Of course, articles like those are written to the gaming enthusiast who’s pretty well inured to incidental thrills of destroying all opponents for points.  This new take on needing to kill in order to survive and the truth of what taking a life might be like is so startling to Keogh it’s almost exciting.

It tells the truth.

Or it seems to.   I wouldn’t know and likely neither would Keogh and her reviewing compatriots.  The point being, the act of playing the game itself may just alter the gamer.  THE LAST OF US promises an emotionally complex journey, one where the player will have decide for herself how to handle ethically questionable situations in an environment where the usual system of societal consequences has fallen away.

Back to ROADKILL: set aside for a moment that one of the characters is a 14 year old boy who expresses himself best through the extraordinarily violent dance/fight moves of his video games, and look at the relationship it has with violence.  Instead of imagining a world post-civilization, ROADKILL is utterly contemporary to us, where the most likely tragedies that could befall the characters would be a car accident or perhaps a virulent infection contracted through contact with an adorable woodland creature.

Instead of exposing us to invented tragedy, ROADKILL reminds us of the horrors currently in progress in other parts of the world through the obsessive news consumption of the central character, Trevor.

Early 21st century in upstate New York is about as far as an American can go to get away from war and strife and critical shortages and still participate in society.  In American terms, the region is synonymous with a comfortable, unchallenging lifestyle.  Thus, even hinting at the possibility of intentionally messing up this lifestyle would scare the powers that be.  The answer to the unasked question is to send in an agent to assert security and mastery over the frightening situation.  This conceit lets us elide the issue of how or why we are entitled to safety at the first sign of a potential threat.

So let’s go back to the 14 year old with the violence issues.  He doesn’t play the games that ask hard ethical questions but the ones that give him the option of eating the hearts of his vanquished foes.  And for some reason his step-mom (Trevor) won’t let him play them in the house.  Even given the gruesome nature of his mother’s death when he was six, we tend to assume teenage boys will be into expressions of violence and pastimes that exploit these, and even if we haven’t any proximity to teenage boys, Bowling for Columbine will connect the dots for us.  So we accept that he’s going to seek violent outlets and just about imagine we can  understand how his childhood trauma would lead him to it.  And finally we agree with the choice to keep the violence and casual horror of his games away from  him.

So. Randy, the boy, can’t play his excruciatingly violent video games but Trevor, his step-mom, can create a work of art that by its nature may threaten the health and well-being of the community.  To put Trevor’s work on a par with a real world event, remember Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes into a TED audience?  His Foundation said the mosquitoes weren’t infected with malaria, but his own comment at the time was “not only poor people should experience this.”  It’s a little more challenging when an adult wants to scare us.  They might have a point.  (Is it enough to have a point?  Ah, good question.)

Even if we do live in a relatively comfortable first world, where maybe we have to perform some financial legerdemain to pay the cable bill but we won’t know what it’s like to go hungry or protect our stores of food from the neighbors, there’s still going to be that hinge, that regard, that relationship with the concept of a lack of societal structure.

If we choose to keep up with the news we have the privilege of knowing about the parts of the world that struggle in abject misery, with no security apparata worthy of the name.

If we wish to simulate a test of our mettle, we can walk through an immersive experience, told with as much verisimilitude as game designers can invoke. (“…guns, ammunition and other resources are rare. Enemies will flee for cover and warn one another if they see Joel brandish a pistol. They’ll also charge when they hear the click of an empty chamber. Health is finite–it doesn’t regenerate” –Jared Newman, “The Last of Us E3 Preview: Violence for a Reason”)

If we want to express to our community the potential for everything going wrong we have but to flex some creative muscle, blur the lines between safety and civilization and the wilds beyond and let the chips fall where they may.

Whether it’s a naturalistic story about getting from point A to point B or a surrealistic hodge podge of a situation developing in intensity until the stage can’t take anymore and erupts into epic rubbernecking, that axis point is there.  That is the spot on which we turn from having been people who kept a coolly detached, intellectual understanding of the relative ease of our lives and become people who have had to choose a reaction on the fly without a society to praise or condemn our actions.

Its through experiences of such art that we learn a little bit more about who we really are.

Beasts

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

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The terrible things we do to animals, the terrible things we do to ourselves and each other. ROADKILL CONFIDENTIAL is the second play at Son of Semele Ensemble with a central theme of dead animals that I’ve worked on. Of course, years before I heard of SOSE, they put on the mother of all animal metaphors – ANIMAL FARM. 

Unlike in Sheila Callaghan’s ROADKILL where animals are (at least at first) killed on accident, in SLAUGHTER CITY (by Naomi Wallace) the animal would be put to death intentionally. But each time humans are the agents of death. Where in ROADKILL the destruction flows out of the need to go faster, reach greater glory, in SLAUGHTER CITY death was the last stop of exploitation and degradation that flowed down from management to senior workers to junior employees to the animals.

But each time animals suffer because we need to get from point A to point B. Whether it’s moving in a fast, heavy vehicle which could cause an even bigger mess if a poorly calculated swerve was taken at the wrong moment, or because our common and most socially accepted diet calls for steady consumption of meat. I suppose our society immediately tries to find the ethics of it – is it necessary, that is, what is reasonable when it comes to the consideration of other creatures while pursuing our own interests? But it doesn’t matter – animals still receive the end of our agency, whether it is dismemberment or mercy.

The way that things are, though, is what these plays see. In a rural area, especially where the roads are dark and windy, we tend to assume there’s little to be done but accept that people will have to run down small critters as they go into town. Just like we tend to assume there is little we can do about the poor people in disaster areas and war zones who must live chaotic and short lives. And we figure our hamburgers and hot dogs have to come from somewhere but we’ve been told not to look too closely into it because the process is really pretty gnarly. Just like we avoid looking into the realities of factory working conditions and present day labor exploitation.

We may ask ourselves how much we should really invest in caring about our fellow man – after all if getting broken up by women mass raped in the Congo doesn’t help them one bit is there a real point to empathy? Quitting eating meat won’t slow the thousands of animals that are slaughtered every year and it definitely won’t engender safer and better paying working conditions for slaughterhouse employees; realistically, it’ll just weird out everyone around you.

It’s the divide over the extent of our agency. We can drive slowly enough so Thumper can make it across the road safely. And we can find sources of iron and protein elsewhere. But we can’t make such a direct impact to people suffering due to the institutionalized methods of preserving the status quo. Conflicts in foreign lands will develop to protect financial interests of those who live much closer to us, and power plays will develop in the workplace that push people in every direction (physical, sexual, financial). The pursuit of one goal will have all of these unintended consequences. But solving the consequences (while trying to avoid creating more negative fallout) requires a huge battery of tasks by an enormous number of people armed with such comprehensive knowledge that can’t practically exist.

It almost makes a person want to dedicate herself to never leaving the house and switching to an all grass diet. But then how will the earthworms hide from the birds?! And we go around again.

Funny Thing Happened while Creating Roadkill

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

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A shooting in Seattle. Call the ASM. A shooting in Toronto. Plot the props. A massacre in  Syria. Follow up on call times, ask the costumer to work on the bandana, type up to-do list for the director’s assistant, establish task list for my assistant, notes to myself on colored pencils, blacks to wear for performances, driving schedule, when to eat and what will be available, tape my book so pages stop falling out, pay the car insurance–wait, wait, middle brother’s birthday is on Thursday.  Crud.

I’ve gotten so busy doing a play about becoming distressed over the state of the world that I can’t pay attention to the world.  It’s such an irony that it actually gets hard to say anything about it.

We’re coming down to the wire so I barely get to leave the theater.  When I do I’m desperate to decompress and so dunking my head in the days’ atrocities is just not on the agenda.  But when should I? Is it when I’m most stressed that I might identify best with people who are literally under siege?  Is empathy a worthy goal for a person?

It’s telling that the idea that it’s ok to dissociate, to not have to carry the tragedies of others is voiced by one of the most tedious characters in the play.  She’s daffy and uncomplicated – however, her view is most merciful to an individual.  Or, rather,   she says what most people would say: that it’s ok to shut out terrible news and shrug off the stress and anxiety other people have to suffer.  Ultimately, we tell ourselves, we have no responsibility to bear the pain, particularly when it serves no useful purpose.  It’s good to be aware of what goes on in the world, but we don’t have to cry just because someone else in the world is crying.  We say.

Maybe it’s just me; I don’t want to identify with that sort of giving up and tuning out.  But the effects of anxiety are very real.  I lose sleep, my appetite gets messed up, I get more gray hairs and more acne, my perspective gets skewered, my temper is shot… I do have my spates of avoiding the news – in between my usual setting of being very tuned in.

Should we all be as radical as the journalists who risk life and limb to be on the front lines of hot zones?  Is anything short of a Doctors Without Borders fieldworker morally lazy?

Or if we sit back in our relatively comfy lives and conserve our energy, maybe we can give more of ourselves to the those around us, prioritize our tribes of friends and family and give love and attention to those we actually interact with on a daily basis.  In contrast to the character who advocated shutting out bad news, the character who sought it out was just about cruel to those around her.  Perhaps not intentionally, but in the end there are few other words that capture what the other characters suffer due to being in proximity to her.

Note: the above was begun last week.  Haha, I didn’t have time to finish the post.  So I’m catching up now, a couple of days after opening the play.

The play is about far more than looking for the “right” reaction to the pain suffered by strangers.  But it was interesting to me to realize that the last couple of weeks have had me so busy that I really have no idea what’s going on in the news.  Odd for someone who identifies as an information junkie.  And who, as such, has occasionally lost patience with people who put no effort into keeping up with news outside their immediate spheres, believing if they can’t do anything about it they shouldn’t even be troubled by it.

Well…does being driven by the news to a heightened level of anxiety mean the same thing as being a compassionate person?  Does our reaction to a broken animal by the side of the road tell us everything about our humanity and connectedness?  What do I get out of reading every single news article that comes my way, the entire New York Times, sometimes, or a full two hour block of NPR?  What does the world get out of me consuming all that news, besides one more disillusioned liberal?

There are no answers, just doing.  Creating, expressing.  At Son of Semele we’ve opened ROADKILL CONFIDENTIAL.  It’s a crazy show; it’s demanded a lot of us at every level.  I did some dramaturgy for it in the early days (April-ish) and have been the stage manager throughout.

In order for me to work on output I have to pause the input.  I may or may not owe the universe an explanation for why I’ve taken my eye off the ball, but that’s what I’m going with.

ROADKILL runs through June and the first weekend of July.

Art and the Truth

04 Friday May 2012

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The only thing more annoying and insulting than being lied to is watching someone believe in their own false witness.  It’s hurtful when it’s a personal matter and induces cynicism when it’s done in a broader arena such as the political or artistic fields.

It’s a subject that’s been kicking around in my head for a couple months, ironically spurred by watching Mike Daisey talk about the Stop Kony project on the MSNBC show Up With Chris – less than a week before he was outed for his own project’s dishonest shortcomings.  (I had actually never heard of Daisey before, having somehow missed the now-infamous This American Life episode.) Both “Stop Kony” and Daisey’s “Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” have been shown to play fast and loose with the facts, and in “Jobs” many facts were manufactured wholesale.  But my issue is with emotional honesty (and manipulation) over hard facts.

It’s a little hard to articulate how we know when an artist is lying to him/herself.  But we do know it, even if we can’t point to hard facts the deceiver is denying.  There is something of the matter of gut feeling – knowing deep inside when someone is being dishonest and vice versa when someone is sincere.  We listen for emotional honesty as much as factual accuracy, but the acuity for detecting former cannot be accessed through a rational process.  It’s the difference between being honest and telling the truth.  One can be dishonest and still not perjure oneself.

When dishonesty is in straightforward speech we can sort of hear it as negative honesty – the inversion of truth.  We hear it because of what isn’t said, what was danced around.  Sometimes we notice the scaffolding of an ad hoc narrative that’s being constructed to support this version of events.  Maybe we take note of certain points in the testimony that appear to make the speaker uncomfortable and discern that the discomfort stems from avoiding the truth of the matter.  But again, how do we know?  Uh… we just know.  Practice maybe?  Cultivating skepticism?  Being burned before?

Like with learning to tell when someone is misrepresenting facts, figuring out when it’s happening requires being versed in the subject at hand, having been around the block once or twice and, perhaps, having a grasp on what it means to pass along falsehoods.  Maybe we know when kids are lying because we remember being 8 and desperate to get out of trouble.  Maybe we know when a politician is skirting an issue because taking sides on tendentious subjects is not a move that wins more votes than it costs.  Maybe we dismiss artistic endeavors as precious or maudlin because deep inside we know when an artist is pulling his punches.

Jason Russell, creator of the Kony2012 video, isn’t exactly an artist but an activist employing art to cultivate support for his cause.  But Mike Daisey is an artist whose last project had a bit of an activist agenda to it.  There is nothing wrong with either, so long as due respect is paid to the audience and we aren’t insulted with exaggerations and fabrications.

It’s important to note this matter of truth in the realm of artistry, because even we who create and invent as a matter of expression have to do so honestly.  Otherwise we are no better than the boy who cried wolf.  Not only will we fail to get attention when we get our message right, we will have insulted our potential audience thoroughly.  And frankly, at base, we will have failed to do right by our chosen art.

Daisey could have had a powerful presentation simply based on the true facts.  Likewise, Russell could have plucked many a heartstring without inducing indigestion had he not conflated certain circumstances and obfuscated others.

The point of doing right by our art, creative integrity, is as profound as it is intangible.  No one but the artist is really going to know where she dodged a difficult moment by softening the blow of her own expression.  On the inverse, when an artist creates narrative shortcuts because the “real” story is complicated and telling it would be a belabored process the audience may understand the necessary affect is still in place, however they are likely to feel alienated and unwilling to trust their own emotions.

I think it’s why sometimes genre art, especially in literature, gets a blanket bad rap.  All the trappings of genre are supposed to expose further insight to the human condition, give or take, but they can also trap and occlude it with dressing and tropes that prioritize unreality.  Rayguns and spaceships can turn a perfectly decent study of isolation and paranoia into a chest thumping, tall man fantasy.  Lace bodices and antiquated property laws both open the chance for a story about the difficulty of trusting love in an era of conflicting interests or it can become an overwrought tale where the cad gives up his roguish ways for the virtuous maid.  The second versions tend to yield more gut pleasure but anyone looking for the truth knows – in that same “gut” place – that it’s just not so.

In activist art as with genre stories, the emotional truth of a piece can get lost  when human complexity is ignored.  This is not to say the audience won’t feel anything.  Even emotional falsehoods can be told with great affect, driving immense interest on the part of the audience.  But, as with the story of the Boy who Cried Wolf, altogether too soon the audience will learn not to trust their emotions when they know a deeper story is afoot and that there is an agent purposefully keeping it from them.  And altogether too often distrust of one episode breeds distrust of any ensuing efforts both by the same artist and other artists working in the same genre.

Some other time I’ll have to write an entry on Art and Untruth.  Because it’s not like it doesn’t sell.

Committing Dramaturg-ery

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

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“Dramaturg” is a noun, it’s a position, the office in charge of dramaturgy.  But how do you articulate the job of a dramaturg; what is the verb form?  Dramaturging?  Do the dramaturgy?  Dramaturgical efforts?

“I’m the dramaturg” seems to do the least violence to the language, so I stick with it, even if it tastes of the insipid, uninspired motions people assume I go through when I say I spend my days in libraries and researching things online for fun and profit.  It seems to me people do think it’s terribly boring and that I must hate all the effort it takes to research a subject, read up on a writer, study the material referenced in a given work.  Not even remotely.  I love plowing through information and digging up whatever exists as a first hand source and taking a look at other creative works that touch on the same themes….

A quick scan of online definitions of the work of the dramaturg leaves me a little cold.  Adaptations of plays…yes, sometimes.  Curating contextual information (or even writing it myself) to go into programs, yeah that happens too.  But what I’ve done the most and that I’m repeatedly asked to do is look stuff up.  Suss out esoteric information regarding this occurrence or that event, answering hypothetical questions with real world information.  What is the process volunteer rescue units in mountainous areas go through to train for evacuating injured persons from the wilderness?  How do cognitive behavior therapists approach autism patients?  What is the neuroscience of memory and memory loss?  How do the Berbers of northern Algeria bury their dead and think on them afterword?

I don’t get to do it very often, but I really love getting to dig into theatrical forms and philosophies.  This is because the task that I serve is to support the director’s concept by fleshing as much of the context of the play as possible.  There are always elements and approaches to the material that aren’t entirely obvious in the text, especially if it comes to us from another part of the world, and from another era.  It’s kind of adapting, but more like, it’s bringing in the information that will bring the play and the director’s vision to something like a unified state where both are the stronger for it.  And so looking at who was influencing whom when the playwright took quill in hand sheds light on the dynamics of the sort of theatre he was originally anticipating.

Also, I suppose I should admit, while I’m a general nerd and love learning pretty much all I can about anything it wasn’t an accident that my degree is in theatre.  It’s the subject I love best.  That’s all.

Everything may and likely will go into dramaturgy.  Shapes and forms of the things that people do reach me from such a variety of directions that I wouldn’t dare think that any particular subject or bit of arcana could never be put on stage.  Not necessarily for the task as dramaturg, but just in a conversation with a director a while ago I recalled a photography spread from the 90s that shared themes with a play we’re about start working on.  I’ve cited plots from comic books, themes from anime, rock songs, religious rituals, sports superstitions, and American communist rhetoric.  Oh, and Monty Python, but that’s not really a stretch if you think about it.

One of my new favorite discoveries is the dramaturg column at Bitter-Lemons.com.  In that article he gives a playful look at instances of theatricality that blow right past most people.

The more specific we are in the theatre the more like we are to match the semiotics deep within the minds of our audience.  And specificity is aided by knowing what the hell you’re talking about.  We strive for that as a measure of telling the truth.

It doesn’t do any good to put on a show that is wholly alienating because it wasn’t adapted to anything the audience will actually relate to, much in the same way it wouldn’t do much good to put on a play entirely in Russian for an audience of English speakers.  In the first place, the people working on the play have to understand the material they’re working with – and understand as a unit, as led by the director.  And in the second, if the audience does not resonate with the show in some way (typically by empathizing with the characters, though with the surreal plays we do at SOSE we’re often focused elsewhere) then we’re just wasting everyone’s time.

A lady turning into an almond, crows stealing an old woman’s shoe, a child of conflagration igniting a slaughterhouse…  evocative, sure.  But we’re not in it just to paint one picture.  The more we have on hand to express the nature of the pituitary gland, memory loss and the exploitation of labor, the more we can tell a story that might not be forgotten five minutes after final bows.  Like seeing a tree that reminds you of a song, or driving down a highway and remembering a conversation, I work to support the task of all storytelling that brings unconnected, even absurd practices and ideas together inside the same thought.  But what do you call that?

Theatre Nerd Powers Activate! form of: Dramaturg!

20 Friday Jan 2012

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I really should go to sleep.  But there’s just one more article I could squeeze in….  And instead I’m writing a blog post.  In my defense I’m tired as hell and that makes me a bit loopy and prone to dumb jokes (on myself).  I am aware this is not the best time to write anything respectable.  But…

I don’t quite know how this week got quite so out of whack.  It just sort of happened.  At first I just had one voice class on Wednesday and another two on Sunday.  For my own purposes I was going to refresh my memory on the Japanese I studied last semester since 204 starts next week.  But then along came the workshop on Jean Genet’s The Screens that my company, Son of Semele Ensemble will be starting this coming weekend and, as I’m a member in the capacity of dramaturg, I need to find out absolutely everything I can about the play, its themes, its artistic style, its history, the history of its playwright, the facts that inspired it, the culture it came out of… and on and on.  And this is in addition to reading it, of course.  The Screens is nearly 200 pages long.

It’s work I love doing, don’t get me wrong.  It just kind of showed up and instantly became my top priority.  I could grouse about not knowing I’d have to do this earlier, but now I’ve spent the week neck deep in research about Algerian culture, the French-Algerian war, Berber mysticism and Islamic rituals.  And in my breaks I go and read lighter material on Theatre of Cruelty, absurdism, surrealism, Derrida, Artaud, Sartre, and of course any detail I can find on Genet’s life and his own thoughts and theories.

Fuck, I love this stuff.

I love feeding my brain.  I love filling in the gaps of my knowledge.  And I love working it all into a performance.  It’s the only reason I could give for still being awake at five AM nearly every day in a week.

When Improv Attacks

12 Saturday Nov 2011

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A recent improv class reminded me why I actively avoided performing it ever since my first encounter in junior high.  Every thing about improv puts me in a situation that is terrifying to me: I can’t control the performance, I can’t control the trajectory of the scene, I can’t even control who I am.  That same class, however, reaffirmed for me why I’ve chosen to tackle this fear and furthermore let me know that I am getting better at picking up from work that left me in a bad place, if only a little bit at a time.

The less I know about what’s going on at any given time, the more likely it is that I’ll hold still and be quiet until I get a kind of lay of the land.  This isn’t self-imposed silence.  I can’t stress that enough; I’m quiet, not because I feel shushed, but because I lack anything to say for myself until I understand how I want to present myself.  I make that delineation because I want to be specific that I identify as introverted, not shy.

Improv forces me to run counter to my natural programming by demanding an immediate and creative response.  I can’t just sit back and intellectually take in what’s going on I have to be a live wire in the midst of the situation.  Moreover, I’m there as a character that would be there, not as me.  This is both extra work and a saving grace.  It shouldn’t be as hard as it is to avoid taking personally what my scene partners say to me, but it can be.  But if I can come up with a character fast enough it’s like the other players take a swing at me but hit the shield that is my character’s facade.  The characters in my head are generally slicker than me and can coolly deflect a roundhouse without breaking a sweat.

If I don’t get that character together and up fast enough I’m stuck taking the swing that is an avalanche of information coming at me full force.  And that’s the trouble.  I don’t think of myself as cool enough to tangle with situations I don’t understand. And when those situations include other people blatantly ignoring social norms – becoming threatening, getting too close or too loud – it’s hard as fuck to ignore my instinctual responses.  If I’m not ready for the madness that improv can summon I can easily end up stuck between a really hard rock and the worst place for me.  My mind completely shuts down leaving only a tiny handful of options – all of which would end the scene if I acted on them, and possibly lead to me exiting the class.

Come up with a creative response? No.  Not when it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into tears or running off stage.  Or hitting someone.  Bottom line, I can’t figure out how to go on with the scene.  All of my instincts (ALL of them) want me to get out and a tantrum would be as effective as locking myself in the bathroom.  I have zero mental space left for a response that has me actually take part in, let alone propel, the scene.

So I give all that as background on what, for me, is the worst case scenario: completely shutting down.  As much as acting is an art, it’s also work.  If I am to be an actor, shutting down presents a negation of everything I’m trying to do artistically and professionally.  So that added anxiety bonus gets tossed on top.

Now, it hardly it ever happens.  I can handle most situations on stage (or on a mic) just fine as far as my basic instincts are concerned.  I don’t even get much in the way of stage fright – some minimal nerves, maybe.  But when it does happen it puts me into a recursive loop of frustration and anxiety (full disclosure, this happens a lot more offstage than on) and it’s tough as hell to break free from it.

Improv to the rescue!  Well, sort of.  Maybe it’s more like the freedom of improv to the rescue.  Probably the last thing I think about when performing is entertaining and getting people to laugh.  Every once in a blue moon I’ll come up with a quip that I know will make people giggle, but I have many more priorities ahead of comedy.  (Here’s a theory: part of my difficulty stems from others having different goals.  Eh, if so that part is a small one.)  But improv gives me the room to create based on any reaction so long as the scene keeps growing, even if that is the feeling of irritation.

So, at this recent class I had to make through a scene that I couldn’t get into.  I was hemmed in and swiftly shutting down.  At the end I took my seat and contemplated leaving the class.  But I didn’t.  I put together a couple of ideas for upcoming scenes and worked through them even though they were still a bit of a mess.  I can’t pinpoint when but I did get to another scene where the anger I was feeling at myself and the situation in front of me gave me an inkling of where to go next.  In improv that’s a watershed.  It lets me progress from a posture of taking in information to one where I’m leaning forward, putting my thoughts and feelings out into the creation.  That’s when the lights turn on.  Not all of them, just enough to start picking my way and finding other light switches as I go.  That’s when improv is  ridiculously fun.  That’s when I remember I’m acting, a creator, a being in possession of worlds and words that had never come together quite in such a way before.

That’s how I know improv can help me get to where I need to go.

Acting and Theatre: When Plan C is Really Plan A but Better

06 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Theatrical, Voice Over

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It’s only when friends remark that I light up when talking about acting or theatre, or when someone notes that I’ve seemed a lot happier and more energetic over the last few months than I did for many years previous that I notice that, in general, I am a lot happier these days.

It’s stunning how obvious it should have been. I didn’t get a degree in theatre thinking it would make me rich; I didn’t even think I could make it a full time job. I did it because it was the only thing I really, really wanted to keep on studying. I wanted to keep on doing theatre, investigating, practicing it, creating it. I enjoyed acting (but detested, and detest, memorizing lines); I enjoyed researching the history and critical theory of theatre; I enjoyed creating in a space, in a time, with people that would all come together only the once and never again be exactly the same. I figured I was good at it and could give something to the discipline.

I forgot all that for a while. Somehow, in the ordinary way that tends to happen, I wrapped up college in a damn hurry to find reliable pay – and the more elusive it was the more the view of my future became tunnel vision with a paycheck as my goal. Eventually I did find a full time salaried gig and set about trying to become an adult. It worked, maybe too well. Of course, I meant to try to get back to theatre somehow, but my attempts were desultory and I didn’t get anywhere (largely due to not knowing where to start with nothing but a degree going for me). In the meantime I worked the dayjob and I became like so many working stiffs: content to pursue a paycheck as evidence of my worth, saving up vacation days for travel, budgeting for little luxuries, contributing to charities when disaster struck, bestowing Christmas presents on family and friends…. And living with a mild depression that I assumed was just part and parcel of life.

Hearing things like “everyone hates their job” and having no reason to think that there was anything wrong with being gainfully employed, I didn’t second guess the continual dark clouds and bad mood that accompanied me more often than not. In retrospect, even the diagnosis of dysthemia had a way locking me in place, but that’s really only from one point of view. It has actually helped me to understand what is going on with me; why I passed so many days feeling emotionally submerged. Knowing the name of a problem goes a long way toward dealing with the problem. But now I have to explain to myself why the persistent bleakness isn’t quite so persistent these days.

I admit, that’s not really a problem. It’s good to know that when I’m busy and stressed anxiety kicks up and that can trip the darkness into central focus. It’s not that a situation is really that tough; it’s just my wiring over-reacting to difficult situations, trying to protect me from hard, scary things. My immune system does the same thing when I’m around cats.

But it’s been fascinating, hell, wonderful to find that the love I have for performing comes out even when I’m just sitting around talking about something I saw on stage or heard about theatre or experienced that in some way connects to that communion I was always wanted when I first fell for the theatre.

It’s a little funny, largely ironic, that friends who’ve known me for a while get taken by surprise by how much more energetic I am when I’m going on about a play or my theatre company or my latest forays into voice over. I didn’t notice the difference until it was pointed out; and friends didn’t know there could be a difference. I didn’t realize sleep would be more effective, that my mind would pay better attention or that I could give up caring about the myriad bullshit limitations in my way made of business appropriate clothing, business appropriate language, gym memberships, cash for happy hour, best practices, SLAs, PowerPoint, Excel, networking with Sales and touching base with managers and that it would make me feel like weights had come off my legs.

It’s the difference between unemployment and looking for another office job and unemployment but redirecting my career into voice over, while tackling various theatre projects and learning Japanese. I get stressed out (and thus anxious and thus a bit bleak) sometimes, but I also have something to look forward to.

Amanda Palmer likes to say “fuck plan B” by way of encouraging people to heed their calling. Basically, it involves not taking a day job to support one’s artistic habits, but to dive in and create without concern for pesky details like rent or health coverage. It’s a strategy so straightforward it risks being reckless and sloppy and plenty of folks, including friends of hers, have noted its short comings and unvoiced assumptions. Somehow you make your way…well, how? Parents pay for it? Or a spouse? Or you take on massive debt and potentially cripple yourself in financial, healthful, social and other dimensions? I could never have done it. When I graduated from college I was desperate for paying work, as I said, even if I could have just hung with my parents and let them pay my way while I figured what Step 2 was.

But while plan B helped me live on my own during the time I worked plan B, but it never worked out for me to get me anywhere else. Plan A had a critical problem in that I couldn’t figure out how to do shit without money. So this, then, must be plan C, a reiteration of plan A but with (hopefully) a better perspective and more carefully laid steps. An actual plan this time instead of a dream. A scheme to meet my responsibilities with skill and talent that make me happy to do the job.

This is how I consider voice acting – a means to an end. A little of column A and a little of column B. It’s made of the effort to make use of my theatre degree and the need to meet my responsibilities as an adult.

Yeah, I light up when I talk about theatre, about rehearsal, critical theory, dramaturgy, acting, staging, storytelling, all of it! It makes perfect sense when I admit it’s what I was supposed to be doing all along. And if I never* have to work in someone else’s cubicle farm to promote someone else’s products, where my pay is the sum total of my investment in that project, it’ll be too soon.

 

*Do I think I can turn down a handsomely rewarded temp office gig, should one show up? NO! I’m an adult, I have bills to pay. But dammit, it’s time to be clear about my goals.

Suzuki Style – Mad Stomping what Stomps

22 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by in Theatrical

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“Suzuki style is designed to fuck you up.” So said the Suzuki instructor Akiko Aizawa at the end of a training session. If I remember nothing else from training with SITI over a few weeks last September, I want to remember that. Of course, the ground was so fertile for laying ideas and observations, I hope I remember much more, but that comment beautifully sums up this technique I’ve only just learned.

 

I’ve been trying to articulate how the stances and movement of Suzuki force the actor’s body out into the open and demand such perfect focus that it leaves no where to hide. Our casual poses in everyday life let us hide behind our eyes, protect ourselves deep inside our hearts, to be at rest and think our way through every mundane situation. What I experienced in the training was being continually pushed out of my usual habits, especially dropping my head or my eyes, pulling up or rolling my shoulders forward and what I hope is just a Western habit of pushing out my butt when I move. When I let these habits slide I can nest in them and think about whatever I want in life: my bills, my chores, conversations I’ve had or want to have… When I have to correct them on the go and put myself through the Suzuki forms I don’t have time/energy – RAM – to think about anything but what I’m doing. Continue reading →