A Bottom Line

23 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in Background

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Many years ago I went to a wine tasting and struck up a conversation with the representative of the wine maker.  I don’t remember how we got on the subject but he talked about how joyful he was with his job as a rep.  He said that previously he’d had a job that he didn’t much like and his love for wine was something reserved for off hours.  He told me that he came to the conclusion that he needed to put what he loved and how he made his money “on the same page.”

I remember that image.  A hypothetical ledger of “stuff that bring in money” and “stuff that makes me happy to get up in the morning.”  and getting those to columns to be one and the same.  I don’t honestly remember what I thought at the time (I had been drinking, mind), but I think I was just admiring that he could do that and I thought no way I could emulate such a drastic plan.  Walk away from my job to do something I loved?  Crazy talk.

Well.  The job walked away from me instead.  It wasn’t until I had moved back in with my parents and needed my mom to cover my bills that I realized that I was free to talk that crazy talk for myself.

Once the uninspiring middle class lifestyle had left me – no more tiny apartment with the wine fridge, no more compact, gas-efficient car, no more occasional vacations traveling hither and yon – that’s when I realized the day job had never been an absolute necessity.

Also not a foregone conclusion? The continuous mild depression… I was told I should get therapy and possibly take drugs for it for the rest of my life.  Maybe. Or maybe I should build a life that actually suits me instead of trying force myself to fit the prescribed roles.

It’s hard work.  Mad hard work and I haven’t had what anyone would call conventional success.  But hard work is unavoidable in life.  At the very least, hard work in the service of achieving my bottom line doesn’t feel nearly as frustrating as hard work in the service of achieving someone else’s bottom line.  It’s hard work getting the money and the love on the same page, but I prefer it.

Now, funnily enough, I’ve had to dodge the assumptions that the money voice over can potentially bring is what makes it so attractive.  It certainly helps that there’s more money in it than, say, Equity-waiver theatre.  But the idea of chasing the big payday of a national TV commercial spot is almost laughable.  (Hey! I COULD do it! It’s just not my goal…right now.)  I started nosing around VO because I like anime and even some domestically produced animation is pretty darned good.  It’s still what I want to do most.  If it doesn’t pay as well as a tag for a national chain, so be it.  As long as it does pay.

I tried talking about that once with other VO people who didn’t know me very well, and whom I didn’t know well.  Bit of a mistake.  Their attitude was never fail to chase down the big time.  I can absolutely see their point.  I don’t want to _fail_ to chase it.  However, it’s just not my goal to get up first thing the morning meaning to land the big time before dinner.

I don’t need or want a big house, an expensive car, or much in the way of fancy, pricey toys.  (I will admit, however, an underground wine cellar has a certain appeal.)  I want to pay my own way.  And I want to work on projects that are interesting to me, that get me excited to tackle.  I want to work toward that day when I can joyfully say that I have doing what I love and paying my bills on the same page.

God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’m pretty sure I can do that.

Odorous, Odorous

19 Saturday May 2012

Posted by in context-ual

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

I smell like a train wreck of time: childhood and adulthood in a messy tango. Sunscreen and coconut hair conditioner waft by and I’m back in a beach hotel in Mexico. Mazatlan, maybe.

My 30 year old recollection says it was dingy, tiled. My first experience with a wet bathroom. Sand throughout the grout, no matter how much we sprayed it down. Sunscreen smells like the beach to me, more than salty water or clumpy sand. It invokes those smells, and the scent of plastic inflatables, primary colors of beach toys, a bucket and small shovel built for five year old hands.

In my jacket is nestled the smell of smoke, from tobacco, fire and pot. And a faint whiff of dog, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s the smell of late nights with friends. Hanging out outdoors, well into the wee hours. Not as strong as it once was, without the fire pit at the HP Haus. But still. Dry air and smoke and quality company.

I have a scent, I’m told. I’m pretty sure it’s not a strong odor. But like anyone, my skin has its own um…fragrance. I don’t know if it brings these worlds, these times together. Beach motels and late night doobies. Fighting for my turn to wear the floaties and crying on a friend’s shoulder.

Not as nasty as adulthood gets, not as filthy as childhood. Blood? Blood is constant, universal. Can anyone smell it on anyone else’s skin anymore?

Can you sense Mexico on me from how I chew my nails? Can you read my heartbreaks from my deodorant? The couch I slept on, the coffee I chugged. I can tease out exhausted college mornings from my shadows and my dad working in his shop from the set we’re building. But where is the alcohol? Where are the books?

There’s a whiff of me. But just from one angle. One facet. Space and time defying, but incomplete.

Art and the Truth

04 Friday May 2012

Posted by in Theatrical

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

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

Posted by in Theatrical

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

“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?

Encountering Surrealism

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

I’ve wanted to write for the last month but straightforward expression has been failing me a little bit.  Dadaism gives me so little to work with I really don’t like turning to it for a mode of expression, even artistic.  But I’ve been on such a tear about surrealism, expressionism and the absurd lately that complete sentences with the standard subject-verb-object format feels stilted if not inadequate.  I’ll try to make this make sense, but no promises.

Admittedly, the dramaturgy project was many weeks ago and formally ended at the top of this month.  But I still have several fascinating books I checked out from the library and I’m rushing to read them before I have to return them next week.  Because it’s for my own interest now I returned nearly all the books on Algeria and kept a handful on Genet and related books on arts and drama.  It’s the wonder of that era that people like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre are notable both for philosophy and their literary works.  They were tied in to the creative world so thoroughly that it’s difficult to draw a clear distinction between the theories of existentialism and the modes of art that inspired them and were inspired by them, from Husserl’s phenomenology through Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and inclusive of Derrida’s deconstruction.  But, because I’ve approached this round as a dramaturg, I don’t have to hold my investigation to a scientific philosophic inquiry of dates and schools and interaction (though, trust me, a healthy dose of that always helps), and instead I can look for the guiding sense, essence the artists were reaching for.  Basically, why paint in a surrealist style?  Why muck up a perfectly serviceable language?  Why load up scenes with intense insanity, noise, pointlessness, humorous tragedy and filth?

For me, the greatest image that expresses it all so perfectly that talking about becomes a sort of painful superficiality – I can’t tell you anything that the painting doesn’t say for itself, and better – is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.  (If somehow you’ve read this far and you’re not sure which painting that is, by all means, look it up.  Right now.)  Its anguish is undeniable and immediately it gives a sense of crowding horrors.  Noise, chaos and violence have become so de rigueur that bothering to comment on them becomes a sort of absurd act.  The pain and misery is so great that it has to be cut up, given edges, boundaries.  The madness of it all has led to coping that consists of being able to identify objects and situations – woman, baby, cow, bomb – but not a cohesive comment that rises above the statement of madness itself.

My favorite painter is Frida Kahlo.  I’m tempted to say something obnoxious like I was into her before it became fashionable, but in truth I’m glad she’s popular now because it’s easier for me to get to see her works in person.  And furthermore, she’s become well known enough to anchor a fantastic exhibit at LACMA, called In Wonderland.

Goodness, I can’t say enough about this exhibit.  It took me well over three hours to wander through and the last hour was slightly rushed as my feet ached and nature called.  I want to go back.  Overwhelmingly I hadn’t heard of most of the artists on display.  And it’s a damn shame because no one should have to wait until the age of 35 to be exposed to Remedios Varo or Bridget Tichenor.

Here’s where language really falls apart.  Because I’m still very much under the throes of trying to come up with something that comprehensively expresses all of my thoughts, I want to say something about the exhibit but I have no idea where to start or how to hold to an outline.  It’s hard to talk about any one thing without it become something else, bleeding over into a new scene, invading the space of another idea, alluding to another theme, borrowing the colors of a completely different experience.  The essence of 20th century surrealism, maybe.  Also really sloppy reportage.  But really, you have no idea how many times I’ve tried to write this out and had to delete it all because it just chases its own tail.

I wanted to camp out/lay down at the foot of Las dos fridas and stare up at it forever.  I wanted to read every piece of ephemera, including Artaud’s Spanish-language article on Maria Izquierdo.  I wanted to commit the magic in Leonora Carrington’s Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess.  I was so struck by a piece of text by Julien Levy on Surrealism I had to write it down:  “[it] attempts to discover and explore the more real than real world behind the real; meaning which is expansive behind the contractile fact.”  And, my God, Dorothea Tanning.

The ideas! That women were their very own muses! That down in Wonderland, long past the rabbit hole, women found themselves bewildered by their own lives! That they didn’t need the madness and belligerent whims of the world at large to see where the disconnects came about! That mystery and identity are facets every woman has for exploring, too sublime to be reliable tools but powerful forces all the same.

Maybe this is what Rationalism has wrought, surrealism, existentialism, et al.  When the situation is deprived of its narrative (John killed Bob because Bob murdered John’s parents) and one is only left with the hard facts (Bob is dead; John shot him) the whole thing is senseless violence.  The human mind can’t really take that, there has to be some sense in it in order to live with the situation.  Even turning away and deciding not to think about it is an option.  But we’re hardwired to see if this-then-that in everything.  When that falls apart because expectations get foiled again and again (on the way to getting revenge for his parents, John is given governorship over a region far away and he laments his misfortune which inspires Mary, a maid besotted with him, to attempt the revenge herself which fails because Bob falls in love with her first and proposes marriage and when war breaks out a famous ballad makes its way to John’s ears about poor Mary whose betrothed was killed during the war and how she never got what she wanted and John determines that his vengeance will not be foiled if he kills Mary…) we are truly numbed to the present goings on, so goes the praxis in certain plays by Beckett and Ionesco, and put ourselves in a sort of holding pattern, waiting for this nonsensical story to play itself out and for “normal” to return.  But the funny thing about life, and reality, is it is no play, it has no narrative, and there is no “normal.”

Maybe the advance of rationalism has been handily or conveniently assisted by globalism and intercultural realities.  The more we let go of expecting a certain course of events and allow for alternatives as a measure of our tolerance for other customs, perhaps the less we find our own customs instinctual.  We’ve learned to question our customs – to question authority.  We’ve raced around the globe and crashed into ourselves on the other side.  Recognizing ourselves once again, after all of that can be disorienting and we may never be the people we once were.  (As a woman I can’t help but be glad about that.)  There’s a new normal hanging around.  It doesn’t make any sense but it’s not like you should get used to it.

In closing, if there is any way you can, hie yourself to LACMA’s In Wonderland.  In until May 6 2012, but you should go now.  NOW.  Go, go, go, go!

Theatre Nerd Powers Activate! form of: Dramaturg!

20 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Theatrical

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

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.

Brain Hack: Foreign Language Edition

30 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in context-ual, Japanese

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I haven’t been asked for quite some time now why I’m studying Japanese.  A year ago several people couldn’t seem to help themselves, though I suppose it may seem out of the blue if someone hasn’t already made a life out of linguistics.

The most obvious answer, to me, is one studies Japanese to know Japanese.  Much like when I moved to New York, it was to live in New York. Continue reading →

On Profession and Professing

23 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in belief, context-ual

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Today on Twitter Fr James S Martin (so-called chaplain of The Colbert Report) wrote “Gospel: When Zechariah fulfills what God has asked him to do, his tongue is loosed. When we follow our calling in life we are able to sing.”

Two things come to mind quickly.  First the one that made me happy, that made me want to blog and then second the one that maked me question everything and feel unsure.

First, even though I think I know what I’m good at and what I enjoy doing and I put my effort into making them be the same thing, as well as that thing that pays the bills, it’s quite the juggling act.  I have yet to be successful at it.  More over, there’s still enough play in my certainty of myself that I’m not sure if The Man Above has set me on this Earth to do this.  I mean, I also get a lot out of serving others, helping and solving problems.  Or just feeding people.  Maybe I should be doing that? Continue reading →

Finding the Wrong Way and Working Backwards

21 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Voice Over

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. –Winston Churchill

At Whitechapel, the only real Web forum in which I participate, some of us have taken stock of our lives and felt a bit frustrated all over again to see we’re not at all close to where we figured we should be at our age(s).  Several of us are staring down, if not fully ensconced in, middle age and reliant on someone else to help us get through everyday, whether its parents, spouses, housemates, etc.

It’s not just the frustration of trying to keep the momentum of a career going during tough economic times, many of us already got kicked around town by that particular bitter pill, but now we’re trying to get a new career going.  Many of us (because it’s Whitechapel and this is the sort of folks we are) are having a go at careers that involve artistic ability.  Man, talk about all around asking for negative judgment.  Subject: 35, lives with parents, limited background for but seeking paying projects in creative writing, acting, photography or graphic design.  Even I’m trying not to scream “get a job, ya bum!” and that’s pretty much my life.

I guess at no point in career counselling did anyone promise the line would be straight and clear between getting an education and securing an income, but then again no one ever mentioned it would be so murky, confusing, and rife with soft spots where a person could get awfully stuck.  Pushing your art as a service means running your work like a business and oddly enough it’s a rare curriculum that teaches artists/actors/musicians/writers how to do this.  There’s practical advice, here and there, but advice lacks the regimentation of study and is often contradictory.  What I mean is, I learn lessons from a classroom more clearly and for longer than advice I run across at receptions or on Twitter.

Of course, the reason advice is contradictory and isn’t subject to any kind of review is because these careers don’t have single correct path for advancement.  There just isn’t one and maybe there simply couldn’t be one.  There are many, possibly even one for every individual.  (Ugh, what an annoying thought, moreso because that’s probably the most accurate way to think of it.)  Everyone has to blaze their own trail because achieving success isn’t about getting to a virtual territory where all the pros are, but securing a professional status for oneself.  In other words, even though we think about it as traveling the better metaphor is evolution.  You become what you’re aiming for.

Oh well, all I’m trying to aim at saying is that I don’t know what are the wrong methods of going about this.  But what I have learned, and had confirmed for me by people who would know, is that a certain false path is giving up.  The only way to fail to get to where you’re going is to just not try.  Even if I put all my effort into this crazy career of mine and get hit by a bus before ever landing a paying gig, is that really failure?  I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to be sure I’m not any good at voice acting is if I quit before I get anywhere.

When Improv Attacks

12 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in Theatrical

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

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.