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Viewpoints: Turning Accident into Incident into Intent

21 Thursday Feb 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Son of Semele Ensemble

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 Friday Nov 2012

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

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

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

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

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

I once wrote about Butoh:

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe…

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

Why Me, Revisted

12 Monday Nov 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Present Works

17 Monday Sep 2012

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This summer has either been feast or famine with projects and labor.  I’ve either been juggling a show or a project and class or workshop or I’ve been flat on the couch, watching cartoons.  When I’m busy I have a lot I’d love to write but I can’t sit still long enough to post anything.  And when nothing is going on I can’t think of a thing to say.

Well there’s plenty to say now…and of course I haven’t the time to hammer them out.  Between voice classes, imrpov, a weekend retreat with my fellows at Son of Semele where we were off being creative and more than a little drunk, coming back to a weekend of crafting the next play we will devise, and now a show to stage manage at Open Fist… there’s been a lot of stage-y stuff going on.  It’s quite exciting!

Of course, it’s not exactly what I was hoping to do, precisely.  I kind of need to get paying work.  Like a lot.  And I haven’t been pushing for it.  Like at all.  (At least the Stage Managing gig does offer decent-ish pay, but not until the show goes into production.)  So I haven’t been working on auditions in a while; I’ve barely been keeping a feel for VO work with a couple of workshops here and there.  I need more than that – I really need a couple more coaching sessions to feel grounded again…and of course that takes money.

Eek.  I really get suspicious when people say things like following one’s passion with every expectation that money will follow/take care of itself is totally reasonable or even a positive way to go.  Working on making money is what makes money.  Working on making theatre is what makes theatre.  If my efforts managed to combine them then I may be able to get a combination that satisfied my need for both.  I just don’t buy that following my bliss is all I need in life.

Although I hear, with enough bliss I may forget to be hungry which could solve the problem of money for food as well as getting me to lose weight.

 

Anyway, off to rehearsal.

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.

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?