L. Nicol Cabe

I don’t really do blogrolls or round-ups, as part of the point of this blog is my own analysis (and the process of making that better and clearer, which means you the audience suffers a little bit in the reading, I’m sure). But, there’s been small snippets lately that have caught my attention, but I don’t really have a lot to say about them, so I can’t justify a post about just one topic. So here’s several!

Understanding Shakespeare: Towards A Visual Form for Dramatic Texts and Languages
The project’s purpose is “to introduce a new form of reading drama to help understand Shakespeare’s works in new and insightful ways and to address our changed habits of consuming narrative works and knowledge through the capabilities of information visualization.” I’ve linked to the page with videos, so you can see impressive visual flow of this process. While each page is an assortment of text from different plays, and not an analysis of one particular play, it’s very affecting in its rapidity, and in the shapes used. I particularly liked the first one, since it looked like a dance between three people; the fourth one, with snippets of words that set my imagination on fire, trying to figure out what the next bit would be; and the fifth one, which reminded me of a horror movie, and could be a particularly useful visualization for Shakespeare’s more horrific plays.

And speaking of language …
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
I am so, so glad that the writer reminded the reader, right there in the beginning, that this recent study is not about how language limits how we think, because it doesn’t. The study of language’s influence on the mind had a sordid history, featuring a lot of racism and a bit of sexism as well. Instead, Deutscher is quick to point out that our thoughts are free, despite limitations to our words. In an article I wrote for ModernPoly.com about a month ago (not yet posted), I pointed out that part of our limitation in the English language is our lack of words for different kinds of love. While we understand, basically, the concepts of eros, philios (friendship), romance, etc, we linguistically lump them all together in one big pile — “love.” But they are separate feelings of closeness/attraction. The NY Times article goes deeper into, for example, Romance languages’ necessity of assigning gender to everything, even inanimate objects. Deutscher also discussed a rare Aboriginal language and its use of cardinal directions instead of egocentric directions — there’s no “left,” “right,” “in front,” or “behind.” They always use north, south, east, and west. This is not to say they do not understand the concept of something being behind them, they just don’t speak of it in the same way we do.

I would also point out that our understanding of someone else is pretty much always colored by our minds — and our minds are formed by a combination of genetics and experience that we are only beginning to understand. But your interpretation of my blog, for example, will be tinged by your own lens. In person, words are informed by facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, so that the meaning of “I love you” can change drastically. Our expectations and neuroses tend to lend a hand when we interpret emails or letters (the passive-aggressive smiley face emoticon is a perfect example of this — the writer might well mean no harm, but if the reader is pissed off, it can be wildly misinterpreted).

So, the human brain is a complicated thing. What happens when we start to reprogram it?
A novelist and two neuroscientists came by Big Think’s offices this past week.
There’s this website called BigThink.com that I know about via PZ Myers’ blog Pharyngula. Apparently they are most well-known for their annual month of blogging about controversial ideas, like taxing fat people (we have that in Seattle already, sorta — there’s a sin tax on candy), or repopulating the Midwest with megafauna, or something close to. I’m always interested in what science nerds put in their “Arts and Culture” section and discovered this article, which has an interesting teaser of a second paragraph. “The director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Shelby Freedman Harris is an expert on sleep disorders. She explained Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT), the therapy she uses help patients combat persistent nightmares, often associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. By rehearsing nightmares in their conscious minds (and working to change the scary aspect of the dream to something pleasant), Harris’s patients are often able to overcome these nightmares without any sort of medication. Harris also discussed other bizarre disorders like sleep paralysis and REM Behavior Disorder.” Here, folks, we have the power of an active imagination at work. I mentioned a few paragraphs up that neuroses often inform our interpretation of things, which is an example of the downside to having an active imagination. Shelby Freedman Harris is using the upside of an active imagination. And, frankly, I don’t think I need to cite any other examples (although I probably will) of why art is so good for us. Art is one among many human languages, expressing our world, and obviously it can be used to reinforce good, bad, normal, or unexpected worldviews. You can see your surroundings in a whole new light, or you can have your comfortable beliefs reinforced. I’m not passing any sort of value judgments on these things, as I think they all have their time and place. My point, though, is that this proves the importance of having art in school (an exercised imagination, like an exercised body, can help ward off disease), and the importance of having all kinds of art in your daily life.

And then there’s this disappointing, hurtful article on other ways to judge art and entertainment:
Theatre Talkback: How Do You Measure A Hit?
This article is infused with yet more typical American panic about money and Broadway. Theatre loses money, investors in theatre basically never make back the money they put in. There’s some borderline interesting discussion about how smaller plays generally do better at recovering costs than large plays, irrespective of ticket price or media hype. My problem with this article, of course, is that Zinoman, the author, conflates the value of art and entertainment with its financial and commercial value, without saying anything about any other kind of value to society at large. Granted, the discussion centers around modern Broadway hits, which are obviously only about franchising, money, and advertising. They’re about stupefying the audience long enough to make them feel like spending $200 on tickets was justified — I mean, just look at how many sparkly, revealing costumes the main female character changed into! Money well spent. I can’t really justify using art to anesthetize the population, although the trend was started way early in our history with Greek theatre (and, since opera is based on a reinterpretation of Greek theatre, and American musicals are a reinterpretation of opera, the continuum makes perfect sense). But I think this article is sad proof that Western culture just doesn’t have a good way of talking about the actual benefit of art, nor do we have a good way of defining art. We still talk about its benefits in Victorian terms, that its good for us just because its art, that “high” art is better than pop culture, etc etc. We’re living in the Age of Science, people! Let’s look at those statistics, let’s do those experiments, let’s show how brains change in reaction to language and visual stimuli. Then lets apply that to our art.

Of course, I guess we’ll need to beef up our math and science programs for real before we can have scientists who think like that. Which means we’ll need to stop making our culture stupid with awful shows like “Spiderman: The Musical.” Fortunately, I read enough and see enough geeks in the counterculture who are finding their own way to their own affective art, in a smart way. So, I suppose I shouldn’t be too worried. I think the age of the dumb Broadway musical will be over soon.

Since I’ve made it my mission to go see as many plays as I can this year, I have often gone into theatres without knowing what the play is about. I knew this show had something to do with science fiction (based almost entirely on the poster), but I didn’t know what kind of science fiction it was.

Turns out it’s a satire about the future of the United States. “Satire” is, to be fair, pretty loose — there’s some very heart-wrenching moments in the show, and also some incredibly comedic moments.

Also, I never thought I would enjoy a play about Glenn Beck so much. Some time ago, I had a coworker who told me, first as a joke and then with increasingly insistent seriousness, that I should write/direct a musical about the Tea Bag Party. I am so revolted by this new party’s selfishness, pettiness, racism, sexism, homophobia, fact-ignoring, fear-mongering, and general snooty, eye-rolling, quietly simmering hatred that I didn’t even want to touch them as a subject, for fear of accidentally justifying their existence somehow (you know, like how violent video games are supposed to somehow make children more violent). So when I walked into the theatre and saw a print-out of Glenn Beck’s simpering, dough-like face attached to one of the walls, I had just the teensiest moment of panic. This play could easily be too accommodating to either side of this ridiculous political argument, or it could be too much of a spoof, to the point that it becomes the dreaded liberal propaganda that we’re always accused of pushing.

To my great relief, the play was not that. In fact, it’s one of the better plays I’ve seen so far this year. Per the show’s website: “Her Mother Was Imagination is a bold new culture-bending play by local playwright Elizabeth Heffron, directed by Ellie McKay. This edgy satire explores a future society who are seemingly confined to a massive sky-scraping tower living safely above a treacherous and inhospitable earth terrain below. This almost Orwellian life in the tower is both savage and decadent and at times an opulent spectacle in this fantastical new world order.” There’s actually a lot of other art attached to the project, AND, in a bold yet classically Seattle liberal move, the lights for the show were hooked up to generators fueled by bicyclists. So the play was lit entirely by a few cyclists hanging out in Annex’s bar area. As part of an immersive theatre piece, Heffron has created an immersive community of art and activists that the audience walks into for the show. It’s a fantastic idea, and well executed.

The show itself is quite good, as well. While there are some glimpses of life on the outside (mainly through a courier service referred to as “Brownshorts”), and hints that some kind of biochemical weapon has destroyed the landscape and forced a significant number of the population to live indoors, most of the play takes place on a skyscraper’s floor 21, and its inhabitants — who, yes, live there full-time. One can be transferred, but that seems rare. Value is assigned to how high up the tower one lives, of course, so the top several floors are inhabited by “spiffs”, with the top floor reserved for the Elders (yes, there’s several bits and pieces inspired by the nastier aspects of Mormonism). Value is also assigned by how industrious the floor is — floor 21, being the entertainment floor, is pressured to come up with new and inventive pageant plays constantly, as well as make a side business of farming gerbils for food (to prove they have “entrepreneurial spirit”, as one character early on explains). Per a pageant play featuring this troupe at the start of the show, Glenn Beck and select few of his cronies climbed to the top of this tower, with several of their mindless followers joining them on lower levels, and sealed the place off to the outside world. Their premise, of course, is that these “Elders” were going to focus on praying for the salvation of their country, but it is obviously a move born of cowardice. In the present time of the play, the Elders have aged to 110 years, and are kept alive by farming tissue from their subordinates, which is then fed directly into their systems through tubes (these scenes were done behind a screen, almost as though the Elders were marionettes, and it was beautifully grotesque). Meanwhile, in a move reminiscent of the king in “Braveheart,” the Elders have declared that at each woman’s 18th birthday, she will lose her virginity to an Elder, as part of God’s ordained plan. The three main characters, all sisters, represent different aspects, with two of them of course falling into the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. One sister is pregnant from the experience, and gives birth over the course of the play; however, her baby has tested negative for a specific gene, probably used by the elders (so we have shades of both Soylent Green and eugenics), and she is forced to give him up. The other sister has a nurse smuggle birth control so she can avoid the experience, and use her feminine wiles to get favors from upstairs (which always backfires).

In the middle of this is Pearl, almost 18 (raped just before her birthday, against the rules), who often plays leading roles in the pageants and dutifully tends her gerbil farm. Her and her sisters’ mother, Lulu, was tossed out of the tower for revolutionary, green- and womyn-centric ideas, although Lulu had been the best pageant writer before her downfall. Lulu is often heard in the background, through a hand crank radio or from the outside, protesting the patriarchy and bastardized Christianity that drives the tower communities. Pearl secretly holds her mother in great esteem, and in Act II leaves the tower to find her — only to be disappointed. But she sticks with her mother and together they storm the towers and tear down the feudal society put in place.

Naturally, I have a couple of problems with the play, although I will say these qualms are really, really minor. Act I was stronger than Act II. I felt that, after Pearl left the tower, time went by too fast — the Revolution, led by Lulu, came out of nowhere. The scenes surrounding the literal fall of the towers — except for the very last one, featuring the devoted Christian sister — were weak, emotionally empty, compared to the rest of the play, but I think that’s mainly because the events happened too fast and didn’t seem tied to anything, unlike the rest of the play. Granted, the show was about 2.5 hours long, so they had to speed things up just a little to get the audience out in a reasonable amount of time, but I think there were other bits that could have been cut or shortened to allow for more scenes revolving around the end of the show and the fall of the dominant culture.

Also, I have a problem with what Lulu represents. There was only one mention, at the very end of the show, that maybe she wasn’t any better than the Elders perched high in the tower, and I was interested in that. But, honestly, I’m not sure what she was really supposed to represent. She was a generalized opposition to the tower, but she was too general. Mostly she talked about returning to the womb, thinking “circle” instead of “square” (as in “circle of life” instead of a linear timeline), and returning to the earth (although in a land ravaged by plague, I’m not really sure why one would think that was a good idea). I suppose she was supposed to be the polar opposite, a totally Liberal person, but … well, I guess she was too Pacific Northwest Liberal for me, and I don’t think that nature-centric, mystical female-centric liberalism is ACTUALLY the kind of opposition that would storm a tower and tear down the phallic hegemony (although a lot of those 2nd wave feminists might). And, as the antidote to feudalism, she just didn’t work. I mean, if you look at history, what has pulled civilization out of the dark ages, more than once, has been a revolution in knowledge. The biggest example, of course, is the Renaissance — when knights started bringing back lost texts from Greek philosophers, long ignored by Catholicism, Western culture started changing radically. It became more secular, art was more inspired by new ideas, and the scientific revolution really kicked off. Suddenly, the world wasn’t about the Pope, and Jesus, and being Saved. This world, in this play, has returned to the ideas of Salvation and the Second Coming, and I would have liked to see more of an allegory with science and communication and knowledge — real knowledge, not this mystical airy-fairy crap — coming in to take down the dictators. Or, I would have liked to see more of how Lulu was too similar to the Elders, how one mystical culture replacing another happens, but is not for the good. Lulu was so built up as an escape, and then shown to be sick and failing, but not really demonstrated as actually the ultimate good, or actually just another form of evil. There were hints in both directions and I’m not sure where the playwright fell on the subject.

That said, I loved this play. The first act by itself is worth the cost of a ticket, and a lot of the second act is good. The concept is great. Even if there were no other art projects surrounding it, even if the lights had fed off the city’s power grid and not cyclists in the bar/lounge, I would say it succeeded in making its point. And I love stories that just immerse you in the culture and expect you to catch up (A Clockwork Orange being a prime example). So its absolutely worth seeing as a story that you can piece together as its happening.

There’s one more week. Go see it.

TED is pretty well-known, at least amongst nerds, as having some amazing talks. I fantasize over one day being able to go to the conference — they present all kinds of speakers, from poets to astrophysicists to video game developers. I did NOT know, though, that they featured other kinds of live performance, but it totally makes sense.

This troupe, Philobolus Dance Theatre, makes me wish deeply that I was still back on the East Coast so I could take some of their classes. These two dancers are in such supreme control over every movement, it’s incredible. It’s like gravity has no meaning for them, except as a tool to use or ignore, as they choose.

I’m more interested in how things like this tie into more traditional theatre, but good gods, it would be nice to be able to do something like that.

I haven’t blogged about the last handful of movement classes I’ve been to, because I can’t seem to consciously hold everything important that I want to talk about in my head for more than a day. This is really unfortunate, because I feel like the class is having a huge effect on my life. I mean, we’re learning an etude, which I suppose is the biomechanics part of the class, and we’re learning handstands and we experiment with different movement exercises (we did one yesterday that was walking up and down a set of stairs in different ways that required some concentration and balance, which is scary for me because I have a back injury from falling down a set of stairs, but I worked through my fear which I’m pretty proud of), and we’re working on some Lecoq movements.

What I’m becoming concerned with, lately, is continuing my movement education. George is teaching a clown class in the fall, which sounds kinda interesting, but Freehold classes are expensive (I really can’t continue with installments of $130 a month), and I’m not particularly interested in clowning. A big part of that is that I’m just not a performer at heart, anymore. So why am I interested in movement, in relation to performance? Well, I’m not totally averse to performing, but I’m also not interested in finding my comedic timing, or more traditional storytelling movement performances. I’m not particularly interested in learning ballet or jazz, for roughly similar reasons. I’m interested in the weird and out-there, which is why I’m interested in things like Butoh and Biomechanics.

I’m also strongly concerned about continuing with movement because I don’t want to lose what I’ve learned. I love what I’ve gotten out of this class. I have more confidence in myself physically, I have better balance, I find that I want to practice the etude and dance a lot lately, I take physical “short cuts” to do things (like jumping over the couch to get to my messenger bag), and I’m much, much more curious about how and why I do things, and how that can change and what effect that has on me. George often mentions in class that humans are inherently lazy creatures. I don’t think this is entirely true. Part of the problem is, in our fat and leisurely Western society, we are trained to sit still all day, starting at school and ending at a desk job. Another problem, which is more personal, is finding a kind of movement that engages you. I’ve always hated — even resented — going to the gym, because it’s boring. What I love about this movement class, and blues dancing, and yoga, and even one of the few things I got out of the Butoh workshop I took last week, is that I feel a growing connection between my mental self, which is the self I focus on most of the time, and my physical self, which has long been neglected. Doing reps at the gym forces more distance between those two aspects of me, because I try to ignore the pain and boredom by distracting myself, with music or a book. Obligation is not a good motivating factor for me, nor is guilt, and I feel both of those things when I think about “working out.” But if it’s something I enjoy doing, suddenly its not about forcing yourself to do something so you can enjoy the end product — it becomes all about the process. What is my dance partner going to tell me to do next? What happens from this squatting position when I move my right arm a little higher? What is the precise sequence of movements this person is doing so I can imitate that?

I’ve been searching for more Butoh workshops and classes, and there just isn’t that much. I’ve friended people on Facebook and followed people on Twitter like crazy just to get updates. There also are not many Biomechanics teachers in Seattle, nor many movement teachers in general (I think the prevalence of Butoh practitioners has both to do with the popularity of the artform and Seattle’s prominent Asian population). However, I did learn recently, through an email list, about a field of movement study called the Feldenkrais Method. It’s more about exploration, with some focus on movement therapy, than it is about dancing or a set movement structure. “The Feldenkrais method is designed to improve movement repertoire, aiming to expand and refine the use of the self through awareness, in order to reduce pain or limitations in movement, and promote general well-being.” The last part of that sentence, about reducing pain and promoting general well-being, concerns me, as I think it might allow a little too much woo into the practice. But I do love the idea of concentration and exploration, and the classes offered by Velocity Dance Studio are weekly, and you can drop into one at any time to try it out. Plus, I might learn fun things like this:

Or AWESOME things like THIS:

But then, you know, it can always start to seem a little too silly and unimaginative:

I’ve been thinking a lot about WHY I’m so obsessed with movement, other than I’m experiencing a lot of interesting side effects in daily life. As mentioned, I’m not really a performer at heart, and my main motivation for taking the movement class with George to begin with was that I needed some new tools to be a better, more interesting director. I’d hit a huge rut this past year, and this has for sure helped me break out of it. I’d like to think that part of my interest may even be genetic: my mom was a ballet dancer years before I was born, as well as a painter, and she’s always encouraged my creativity. Does fascination with movement/dance run through certain genetic lines? Or am I having subconscious flashbacks to taking a gymnastics class when I was very young? Most of that was fun, as I recall, although at the end of the class we had to do a forward flip over a bar, and I refused to do it. My first real anti-establishment thought, in fact, came from that class: I reluctantly flipped over the bar, and once everyone in the class had done it, the teacher encouraged students to try it again by offering a piece of gum as a bribe. That struck me as dumb, and I was all of four years old at the time.

Anyway, I don’t really know what draws me to this so much, especially since I’m not hugely keen on performing it myself (if I can find a decent Butoh teacher, I might feel differently about that, but we’ll see). The exploration is fascinating, and I love feeling more connected to my body, like its actually part of who I am and not just this vehicle I’m stuck with, an inappropriate vessel that contains/restrains the “real me.” I’m also deeply interested and concerned with finding theatre that just can’t be effectively translated to film. I was talking briefly to a new theatre company here, about possibly working with them on future productions, and the woman I spoke with mentioned that they wanted to tie in a lot of video in their shows, specifically to lure in a younger crowd, which was more accustomed to movies and television. And that struck me as very, very wrong. I can’t be that accommodating when it comes to pop culture. I want to do interesting, entertaining theatre, but I don’t want it to be an experience that could just as well have been a movie. Gods forbid it might be better as a movie — that means I’ve failed completely. Movement is the kind of thing that you can translate to film, which allows me to use YouTube clips with some frequency, but the experience is nowhere near the same as seeing it live.

So, essentially, I don’t know what I want to do. I want to focus on movement that deals particularly with performance, but whether or not I actually perform it myself is up in the air. I think I’m going to give this Feldenkrais thing a shot, although its making my bullshit-ometer twitch. I’m also interested in going for the F.A.C.E. training, with the specific aim of combining facial expressions with body expressions. I guess, really, I have to get into all this stuff to figure out how it fits and how I want to use it. And I probably will end up on stage again, using all this, because, as my mom says, if I don’t do it, who will?

Here’s another Biomechanics video for you:

Since I catch up on the blog Theatre Ideas with some frequency, I ended up reading this article over at the Huffington Post this morning: The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary Writers. Most of this article struck me as something along the lines of, “You damn kids, get off my lawn!” in its contempt for current literature and literature criticism (or lack thereof). Shivani basically argues that modern readers are too swayed by shiny things and advertising to know what an actual good book is. He then criticizes MFA programs for making big deals with publishers to get mediocre books read. There is certainly something to the argument that only the uber-educated end up with enough connections to get into the publishing industry — which is Theatre Idea’s argument with our current theatre community (particularly playwrights and the critics who promote them). Okay, fair enough, it’s an issue in the arts, that only those with MFA’s or PhD’s are assumed to have a critical enough eye to decide whether their own literature is good or bad. And since they’ve gone tens of thousands of dollars into debt, they must be on to something. Sure, this attitude is faulty.

What Shivani actually seems to be arguing, though, is not so much the corporatization of the current system, but that contemporary writers just don’t write well. And yes, maybe the ones that are promoted hugely are not worth anything (I admit to being a big Amy Tan fan, however, and he criticizes her writing in the extreme). This sounds similar to a recent argument I heard on NPR, that there’s no “real” journalism anymore. Considering the history of journalism in the United States, I think we’re actually closer to how the whole mess started than ever before, although that means most of what’s published in newspapers and magazines is either gossip or overblown horror stories.

What I think Shivani, and most of the country, actually suffers from is a deep flaw in the education system. This flaw begins way, way back in middle school, when English classes start morphing from grammar lessons to literature analysis — it has little to do with the MFA programs. These classes have a set of prescribed, canonized books, which are then forced like so much corn down our gullets to make us fat and accepting, rather than strong and healthy. There’s little I’m personally thankful for from those years, but I am thankful that, somewhere in the move to another city between 5th and 6th grade, I discovered science fiction and fantasy literature. I’d been reading young adult pulp novels before that — The Baby Sitter’s Club, Scary Stories, and the banned Goosebumps — but my mind soared further and higher while reading about far away lands, imagined cultures, and mystical powers. So when the time came to read the more prosaic, “realistic” literature, long considered great by those with dying imaginations who, to me, suffered from stunted megalomania, I rebelled. I read only as much of the book as I could get away with, sometimes even accepting failing grades because I just couldn’t get through such boring, trite, self-indulgent modernist crap.

Shivani actually has the (wrongly flashed) cajones to define what makes good literature: “Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself. These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism.” Really? Has he ever read James Joyce’s vague, showy, narcissistic modernist piece Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? That’s one of the absolute WORST books I’ve ever read in my entire life, and I’ve read a lot of Anne Rice. Or how about, well, anything Faulkner published? His obsession with the crumbling post-Civil War Southern Aristocracy is primarily about style over substance, and his style involves so many commas and semi-colons and parentheses that I don’t think the man ever actually finished a sentence. The Inferno was also mightily narcissistic and showboat-y, as are The Canterbury Tales, all of Shakespeare’s plays, The Great Gatsby (at least Chekhov had the decency to mock the upper class whilst bemoaning their demise), and pretty much anything written by Enlightenment and Romantic writers, who set the standard for using THEMSELVES as prime examples of morality and artistry. I think the only non-self-indulgent modernist book I’ve read was Herman Hesse’s Hiroshima, but I still couldn’t get into the writing style.

My point is that the problem with the whole system is not the MFA programs and the publishers joining forces to create an evil empire. The problem is that we have this boring, self-centered crap forced on us all from an early age, then we’re told specifically that 1) we’re reading it because it’s good, AND good for us, and 2) here’s how to write an essay on it. I would add that “writing an essay” means “praising this book in a pre-determined way that your teacher will outline for you.” So we learn that, even if we don’t enjoy it, “good” art will be dictated to us, and once we’re told what good art is, we learn how to regurgitate those ideas with the help of a thesaurus.

This isn’t actual analysis. Actual analysis looks at the work, picks it apart, and probably starts an argument over it in the process. This “moral core” Shivani talks about can only be defined by whether such literature works for you or not. Amy Tan doesn’t work for him for some damn good reasons, but she works for me because she was the first major writer of her kind, she actually lived through similar experiences that she writes about in her books, and although she writes non-judgmentally about racism on all sides (probably because it is a fact in her life), her real focus is interpersonal relationships, rather than the relationship of one cultural body against a larger cultural background. She’s not trying to be the Chinese-American Ralph Ellison.

I agree with Shivani that there’s a lot of bad and pointless writing out there that’s being heavily promoted on best seller lists (Eat Pray Love, anyone?), just like there’s a lot of bad movies being made that still make their money back at the box office, and a lot of bad theatre being produced, particularly on Broadway. But the real problem is that the potential audience is NOT taught how to actually view these works of art: the audience is taught to sit back and take it, from a very early age. And — I keep saying this — since we’re social creatures, and this is used as a standard to measure our fitness in society, most of us learn early on to suck it up and change ourselves, because clearly there’s something wrong with us for not liking the standard.

That’s wrong. If you hate modernist literature, or think Shivani’s article is bullshit, you’re not alone. Just because you like something that happens to be highly popular doesn’t mean you’re a sheep. The real issue is how you decided why you like it, and since art is subjective, the only real way to decide why it’s good is whether it makes you feel something (happiness, curiosity, catharsis, horror, whatever, just FEEL SOMETHING ON YOUR OWN).

I hate the idea of missing plays, but sometimes life, or exhaustion because of/with life gets in the way of getting out and seeing something. Also, sometimes my complete lack of money gets in the way. I make enough to live on with a pretty good amount of fun money left over, but I’ve had a lot of extra bills lately, particularly because of the movement class (which is finally paid off! Yay!). So, unfortunately, I’ve missed quite a few shows in the past two months, shows which I’m sure were wonderful.

So, I would like to apologize to:
“Wyrd Sisters” at Open Circle
Greenstage’s “As You Like It”
“Fuddy Meers” at Seattle Public (one of my favorite plays, written for a theatre back in my hometown, too)
“Kindred Spirits” at ReAct
“The Laramie Project” from Strawberry Theatre Workshop (I also missed their production of Brecht’s Galileo like, three years ago, and that STILL bums me out)
“Zanna, Don’t!” from Contemporary Classics (I heard it was hilarious)
“An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein” over at Theater Schmeater
“Doubt” at Gold From Straw (which is in Tacoma, but I had a friend in it)
“Keefee’s House of Cards” at Printer’s Devil Theatre (also heard it was hilarious)
“Nietzsche! The Musical” improv show at Unexpected Productions (with a title like that, how dare I miss it?)
“Sassy! A 90′s Cabaret Tribute” from Live Girls! Theatre (which I technically haven’t missed yet, but since I have my movement class that night, I will)
“An Inconvenient Squirrel” by Theater Scheater (today’s the last day, and it’s raining, and it’s outdoor theatre)

There’s always so much small, fringe performance going on in Seattle it astounds me. Not only are there lots and lots of plays, there’s also dance and performance art and staged readings and improv. I’ve missed more in the past month and a half than I have the rest of this year, but I’m trying to get back on the ball.

“Greetings from Styx” was about an hour long, starting at 4 PM, an odd time in the afternoon in the summer. Granted, it’s starting to get dark earlier again, as we head into fall, but it seemed oddly preemptive. That, or they didn’t want to compete with the timing of other, larger outdoor theatres like Greenstage and Seattle Shakespeare/Wooden O, who all start in the evening. I’m not sure.

The show, as any mythology nerd could guess, revolved around Greek myths, presumably set on the banks of the River Styx. However, the time period was updated a bit to the turn of the last century, almost into the 1920′s, so the setting felt both covered in cobwebs and like a day on Coney Island. The 4 myths presented were mostly comedic, although they ended darkly, and were performed with all the physical vitality of great vaudevillian performers. It was quite an enjoyable performance — the actors were focused and physically on point, although perhaps a little tired since it was the end of their run..

However, I have a similar criticism to this production as to Balagan’s earlier production of Oedipus — it’s not new. The script was new, as far as I know, but the stories were not original, obviously. The idea of setting something in the 1910′s/1920′s isn’t new, either; this is a fad that seems to be based on the popularity of steampunk. “Greetings from Styx” is yet another postmodern-in-the-extreme production from Balagan, which is entertaining and interesting, but doesn’t add anything new or vital to theatre — it’s just a pretty montage of someone else’s ideas. I don’t mean that every single production ever NEEDS to be 100% original or some sort of dramatic, seriously-created “art”, but I would say that Balagan’s focus isn’t on the art of theatre at all — it’s on the entertainment value, on pulling in audiences with pop culture fused with something supposedly intellectual (I’m frankly surprised they haven’t picked on Shakespeare yet this season, but I guess too many other companies are doing that, so they resort to Greek myths to look like they’re thinking originally).

So, although I enjoyed the performance and the actors, I was overall disappointed with the production. Writing a review of this as “theatre” is like trying to review cotton candy as gourmet food. It doesn’t work.

Sunday’s class was mostly about multi-tasking. I mean, we’ve been memorizing the Tennyson poem, and reciting parts of that as we move, but what we did on day 6 was moving different parts of our body, in different rhythms, at the same time. It was tough. It also seems counter-intuitive, because actors don’t usually do that much on stage — blocking and talking at the same time, right? But you actually do quite a lot on stage, and having an awareness, a potential to be able to multi-task in the extreme is very important. The contrast between fast movement, slow arm rotation, and speech can be quite dramatic. Also, we had try a handstand. George explained the method, and I got the position correct, but I really don’t have any upper body or ab strength. All of my strength is in my legs, and since I’m biking around more now, and I dance once in awhile, that’s only going to get worse. So I feel like I got the form, but I can’t actually get my legs over my head without landing on my face.

And speaking of my face, the big event of day 7 (Tuesday) is that I slammed my face into someone’s knee. We have been working on a full “scene” with movement — otkaz, movement, stoika. George has been adding obstacles to this in previous classes, and this time we had to use a simple actor block to jump onto. So the entire sequence was otkaz, movement toward block, stoika on block, then otkaz off block, movement to opposite wall, and stoika. We got to a point where there were two of us running to the block, then three, then four, and finally five. That’s when I screwed up. I was trying to do something interesting, aiming for the corner to land in a position that wasn’t just standing on the block, but crouched a bit. And I slammed my face into someone’s knee. Moral of story — physical self-awareness is important.

Otherwise, the class was particularly interesting. I think, as a director, I’m getting more useful tools to help get plot and character and scene information off the page and out of my head and actually into practice. In one exercise, we partnered up, with one person a “lump of clay” and the other person the sculptor. It got really interesting when the sculptor used parts of their body other than their hands — like legs, hips, shoulders, backs. I thought it was fun being clay. I can definitely see using this exercise in rehearsal.

George also got off on a bit of a tangent about dramatic tension with movement. It was interesting, but as with any good lecture, my creative mind went a bit nuts. He mentioned boxers, how they weave and duck and get so in tune with each other physically that they don’t even throw punches for a huge chunk of time. That actually reminded me of two cats fighting.

At the beginning of class, we read a selection from one of Mamet’s critical writings, discussing the failure of searching for “Truth” in a scene, the bastardization of the Stanislavsky method, and trying to reach beyond the self-critical into the daring. I think all of these are important, and I’ve mentioned before that it is important to be able to make minor adjustments without beating yourself up for being wrong. This whole issue of “Truth” drives me a bit crazy, though. There is a truth to the scene, in the interpretation that the director and actors work on. But it’s not the only possibility for the script, usually (unless you’re doing Beckett). This whole notion of Truth-with-a-capitol-T, to me, seems to create anxiety, because there’s an ideal out there somewhere in the ether that you’re not reaching. And yes, you might approach that perfection, but you won’t attain it. Because it’s not real!

Anyway, George and I had a disagreement about the nature of truth vs. Truth. That’s okay, because we’re using descriptive language, and the thing about language is that everyone has slightly different connotations with words, so a phrase that works for me won’t evoke the same images and feelings for you. So the idea of Truth doesn’t work for me, and it works for him. I think perfecting a scene means making it more interesting and dynamic, and perfecting your physicality, especially with set movements like the series of Biomechanics etudes, just creates a more interesting, different feeling than a “sloppier” physicality. And when I say “sloppy” I mean, simply, a physicality that is closer to your personal neutral, one that is not out of your normal comfort zone and doesn’t make you think in new and interesting ways.

There’s not an actual “perfection” out there, to me. There is only new and different, a strange and unusual path that you want to follow, where the character takes you.

In other news, for right now I will be assistant director to Gesamtkunstwerk’s production of “Shoreditch Madonna” this fall. Looking forward to possibly using some of these techniques in rehearsal.

I have to sum up two, because its been a crazy week, which includes a fixed bike that I’m going to start riding to work, hopefully.

We continue to move and explore in new and crazy ways, trying things with a partner and experimenting alone. We are, however, finally bridging the gap between trying new things for the heck of it, and moving in new and different, controlled, ways to elicit emotion. Day 4 presented a challenge for me — we had been working on all this movement work, but the end of the class we stood, individually, in front of the rest of the class, and then everyone discussed their impression of our presence. There were 3 rounds of this, and we tried each time to be as open and present as possible. I think most of us ended up shedding a lot of layers of emotional protection, which is great for actors, but … I’m not an actor. I mean I guess this is important for me to try, if I want to use it as a technique in rehearsal, but it was painful. I’m not a fan of exercises like this, because this is part of why I don’t like being on stage. That vulnerability. So I was uncomfortable.

Day 5, though, was better — we tied that emotional vulnerability together with movement. One of the exercises was walking across the room — and then, later, walking toward a chair — and changing the rhythm of our walking. We went from normal pace to faster, to slower, etc. And, yes, this changes the story being told. We watched everyone individually walk toward their chairs, and we all came away with stories. That, as a director, was a lot of fun, and a great learning experience. I am sorely tempted to explore this in the next show I direct. I don’t want to choreograph it myself, but let the actors explore how each movement changes the scene.

There’s a story that George likes to refer to regarding Marlon Brando on a movie set with a tea cup. I forget who the other actor in the scene was, but the point was that Brando’s character had to drink tea in the scene, and he spent a huge amount of time before filming, figuring out how his character would drink tea in the scene. Precisely. The point, of course, being that every minute movement has an impact both on how you, the actor, feels as the character, and how the audience reads your character.

And the point of the previous day’s exercise, of course, is to show how easy it is to be misinterpreted when you have layers and layers of emotional shields up. You want to convey one version of yourself, but often other people read that differently. So its important, even if its awkward, to find your personal neutral, open personality, and start work from there.

No videos this week: my work is piling up while I focus on learning my bike commute to work. I’ve also become absorbed in a couple of Amy Tan books I picked up at a local book store. I have three scripts to read, all of which I’ve read but two of which I need to reread to form more solid opinions. And, I need to reread the next script I will dramaturg for. Plus I have some articles to write. The month is obviously just not long enough. I hope I can get most of this accomplished this weekend, before the next class.

I wrote these down in my terrible handwriting, fully intending to post them here, and I keep forgetting to. That actually happens quite a bit — its sort of the downside to having a notebook and periods at work with a lot of free time.

So yes, the big one was from the very first class. As I mentioned in the past couple of posts, I’ve taken yoga before. One of the things one learns in yoga is timing your breathing to your movements, especially exhaling — and it is perfectly okay to exhale loudly. I also learned Lion Breath, which is clenching the back of your throat just slightly so that you make sort of a raspy noise both when you inhale and exhale. The noise, theoretically, reminds your subconscious that you need to breathe at certain specific times. I think.

Biomechanics is different. About 1/3 of us in the class, on the first day, were panting, which is loud, and some of us were breathing loud intentionally, especially on the exhale, as we had been taught in aerobics and yoga classes to do. George, however, insisted that we shouldn’t breathe loudly — since this class is about performance, not getting in shape, breathing loudly distracts the audience. What he said specifically was that breathing is a private matter, just for you. No one else needs to know about it, although you still need to breathe. I thought that was an interesting take on breath.

He also said something I really liked last week. I’ve noticed, in a lot of cases, that embarrassment holds some of us back. I really try not to let it get in my way, but honestly, I don’t know what my movements look like to other people. Anyway, so there are moments of embarrassment for most of the class, and George, in a fit of frustration, said that shame is self-indulgent, so don’t do it. I love that phrasing. Shame is self-indulgent. It really is! It draws attention to you, demands that others make you feel better by being awkward, and prevents you from furthering an activity that would, if you were decisive and not reserved, probably be pretty good. I mean, at least you tried. If you are ashamed, you don’t try. Okay, so that’s a little life lesson-y, which I dislike, but its definitely true for actors in rehearsal and on stage: shame is a waste of time. As a director, I’ve definitely seen this hold actors back — waaaay back. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to the director or ask for advice if you need the help, but my response to confusion, as a director, is often to ask actors what they think should happen and either guide them to a more clear version of that, or tell them what I think should happen for the purposes of the story. I mean, actors have a better sense of character than they think, but they are often ashamed to express themselves. It’s my job, probably more than anything else, to keep the story clear. I reserve veto power, but I find that actors come up with new and interesting interpretations of the story that I then want to incorporate, or their point of view about a character agrees with mine. But its the potential humiliation that keeps them from speaking up, which, honestly, makes them hard to work with. The best actors to work with, for me, are the ones who are not afraid to do weird things, make bold choices, and are then able to laugh it off if they screw up or look stupid. And trust me, audiences want to see that — they don’t want to see attention hogs, but they want to see actors who are bold onstage, but who also look controlled and rehearsed, which is the whole point of the rehearsal process. And, the whole point of this movement class.

George also mentioned that a big problem actors have is that they have a sense of what the show “should be,” and they become critical of themselves when it doesn’t fit that. As if we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. I mean, sure, there’s a lot that can be worked on, improved, and yes, there is such a thing as a bad play (either from interpretation, performance, script, or some combination thereof), but forget regret and forget quantum physics and forget Sophocles’ metaphor of the cave — at least, while you are in rehearsal and performance. If you didn’t do your best, do your best next time, that’s the only thing that can fix any screw ups. If you continue to emotionally flagellate yourself, you won’t be able to move ahead; conversely, if you decide good enough is the best you can do, you’ll never evaluate yourself, which leads to bad theatre as well. So being able to evaluate yourself is good (another role the director plays is evaluation — are you telling the story clearly? You might feel like you are, but you may not be, and that’s what I’m here for, and it’s not a judgment on you personally, because it can be fixed). But evaluating yourself is not the same as hating yourself for every mistake. Evaluation leaves room for improvement — shame, self-hatred, do not.

Again, a little life lesson-y. If you find these are problems in your daily life, I advise that you find a good therapist, because a good acting teacher should only be giving you advice for your performance career. But, I do think these are good notes for rehearsal and performance.