Author: Swim Pony

Swim Pony: Loud, strange and never seen before on earth! Swim Pony is committed to the creation of unique live performances that are joyful and defy tradition in order to bring contemporary audiences beyond their experiences of the every-day.

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Is it just me or do people seem tired lately?

I don’t mean standard issue Festival post-partum malaise. I mean an industry-wide heaviness that is seeping into a majority of the conversations I have with people these days. A lot of people seem really weighed down, overwhelmed and ready to cut and run. I’ve been thinking about this weight, the sadness I sense in others and creepingly in myself. I’ve been thinking about how to tackle it and where it comes from.

First, a story, or a confession rather.

About a year ago, I was on the relationship rocks. Not through any kind of infidelity or betrayal. No, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with my partner and I. That said, through nit-picking and bickering, through the penumbra of apathy and assumption that LTRs can sometimes attain, I’d found myself in a place where nothing felt particularly right either.

I was bored, I felt trapped and I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted my future to look like.

The long and short of all this was that I had to ask myself some hard questions. I had to be honest about whether I was actually living the way I wanted to. I had to really own up to whether the choices I’d made were ones that I really wanted to continue with.

Basically, I had to decide if I wanted to stay or I wanted to leave.

Here’s the thing: as scary as that realization was, it occurred to me for the first time in a long time that I had a choice in the matter. Having to contemplate the very real possibility of not assuming the things I had would always stay that way meant that I really looked at them closely.

And for the first time it occurred to me that some of them were things I really didn’t want to lose. And it also occurred to me that there were things I was doing that were not making that terribly easy. In the midst of this very dark time I had to look at some choices I was making and some habits I was holding onto that were working against some of the things I professed to want. Contemplating whether I really wanted these things kicked me in the ass a bit about getting in gear to go get them.

Another confession, while this was happening in a lot of areas of my life at the time, the LTR I was really most worried about was with my identity as a creator.

Look.

We’ve all found ourselves in the midst of a lot of work that we don’t much care about for, work we don’t really even seem to like. And in those moments it’s easy to say to yourself, as the proverbial Talking Heads saying goes, “How did I get here?”

I, clearly, didn’t throw in the whole towel. But I did throw out a few things and I gave myself some mandates on what had to change. I decided to let go of some things that were making me tired. And I decided that when I get to the end of a project, as I have done just now, I’ll have to think not only about what the outside world tells me in terms of whether the work is good or bad, but whether it’s making me happy, whether I’m really doing what I want.

Another full disclosure: I really liked working on The Ballad of Joe Hill. There were a lot of great things that happened for the show.

But I’m pretty sure the Festival wasn’t the right vehicle for the piece.

…

That’s hard to write.

It’s hard to write because I spent years courting them and building my reputation as a creator worthy of presentation. It’s hard because there’s a measure of success that comes with being presented by a big name. It’s hard to write because without something like the Festival, I’m on my own to find the people I want to see my shows.

But I still think it’s true.

I’ll give the required caveat: I really appreciate everyone that came out to see Joe Hill. A lot of people really responded to the work. I am thankful to them. I appreciate them. I am happy that they came.

But I still don’t know that they are the people I wanted to reach. And I still don’t know that I totally achieved what I set out to do.

That’s even harder to write.

But I still think it’s true.

What I set out to do what get people that might never see a “play” to come and see this thing that I made. I wanted to find the folks that are a little rowdy and rough around the edges. I wanted to find the people that are into a dare, a risk, a potentially strange, dare I say, unsafe experience.

That’s what I really wanted. Because that was the promise the 2006 version offered to me all those years ago when I first made the show. That was the LTR that I signed up for: an off-road practice of the theatrical experience. A chance to honestly and actually shake up an artistic medium.

What I wanted out of Joe Hill was to get actual NEW theater audiences into the seats. To pave the way for a future definition of theater and theater audiences that are more in line with the ones I want to make.

And I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t get that this time.

Which doesn’t take away the success the show did achieve on other measures of success. It doesn’t take away the pride I have in what I made. But it also doesn’t excuse me from what I really want.

And unless I want to end back up in the heavy place, I need to keep reminding myself of that, and I have to be honest next time I start thinking about where I want my work presented whether it’s going to have a fair shot at getting me where I want to go.

See, there’s nothing wrong with failing. But you have to be honest at the get go about what the goals are and whether you’re really working towards them. And when you aren’t, you have to be ruthless, even when it’s hard, about pointing yourself back towards the where you want to head. This is the divining rod we all carry around in us as artists, that magnetic pull that tells us whether we are truly inside the truth of our work. And sometimes fear or failure or poverty or allure of praise can push us off that course. Sometimes a compromise isn’t a bad thing. But there are times when it isn’t what we really want and we can feel it, deep down, when when it’s actually at odds with what we really need to be making.

Look, if you’ve already made it as far as a life in the arts, it’s pretty clear that no one is forcing you to live any way but the way you want to. Last I checked, there was no theater artist acting with a gun to their head. And the bold, startling, scary but ultimately empowering truth is this:

No one in the world will be a stronger advocate for your work than you will be. No one will better articulate and know what you need than you do.

Which means you have no one else to blame if you aren’t doing something you love. Which means that if you feel your work is selling out or getting too middle of the road you are the one that is letting it get that way.

But which also, happily, means that the only thing stopping you from exactly the work you need is yourself.

“But the money Adrienne! The Money!!!” You cry.

“Really?” I reply “Is it really the money? Is the money so good that it’s worth it?”

I just don’t think so.

“But the structure! The company! The audiences! I’ve worked so long and hard to get it to this point. What will I do if I have to leave it all behind.”

Look.

Pew doesn’t know your work. Fringe Arts doesn’t know your work. Independence, William Penn, that big name donor, that huge fancy festival, that amazing company artistic director, that opening night party tray sponsor, your viewers, even your long term collaborators, not a single one of them know your work better than you do.

Only you know the work you need to make.

They want a lot of things all those people. But for you to want them, you have to, have to, have to also want to be doing the thing that they want or your collaboration with them will always be you wishing you were doing something else. And no matter how happy or supportive or structured or monied these things get you, it still won’t be worth it.

I think this is the fatigue. I really do. I think it’s years and years and years of trying to ignore that the difference between what we have and what we actually want to be doing. You can feel the honest to god joy when you really fucking nailed it on the goddamn head with exactly what you were meant to be doing and who you should be doing it for. And you have to chase that shit like there is no tomorrow.

You do not have to take that role if it’s stupid or offensive.

You do not have to apply for that grant if you hate the terms of agreement.

You do not have to have expensive costumes if the fundraising stresses you out.

You do not have to seek out wealthy audiences if they aren’t the folks you really want there.

You do not have to do any of the things that others tell you. You can do what you want to do. And only when you do that will you start figuring out if and how that is possible. And it is possible that it isn’t possible. But at least you aren’t pretending that it is and that you’re actually doing it. At least then you can decide if you want to do something else. Or maybe, maybe likely, maybe amazingly, you’ll take that incredible wealth of talent and actually figure out how to do that thing you really wanted to be doing.

Too often I hear my peers talking about work they don’t love with companies that don’t pay enough with people they don’t really want to be around. This is what’s making us tired. And I’m tired of it.

You don’t like the work you’re doing. From now on, it’s on you.

Because you can change that.

Your leverage is your presence in their company.

Your leverage is your work in their festival.

Your leverage is your name on their grant.

Your leverage is your kindness and intelligence and heart in their life and you CAN use it to stem the tide in the opposite direction.

You may say to me, “But my leverage is nothing. They don’t care if I leave, they’ll just find someone else.”

To which I say, then is that really the system that you want in on? A world in which your presence has no value whatsoever? A place in which the uniqueness of what you bring to the table is completely devoid of significance? A system in which your abstention on the grounds of monetary or moral grounds doesn’t mean anything?

Is that worth giving up your happiness for?

No it’s not.

And if they don’t appreciate it, maybe especially if they don’t, if you don’t feel satisfied, if you aren’t getting enough to make the thing worth it, it’s up to you to use that leverage in the other direction. To show the folks what you’re really made of.

You can, nay, you must.

If you don’t, no one else will.

Brash Young Thing

OMG. I am typing this on a new computer y’all.

For those not personally acquainted with the previous Swim Pony computational control center this is a big frickin’ deal. I will no longer have to look at the wine stain in the lower left corner of the screen. I will no longer have to deal with the processing speed of a drunk hamster on a rusty wheel. And best of all, I will FINALLY be able to walk away from my computer for more than 60 seconds without worrying that it’s turned off.

“Woah.” You interject, “What did you mean in that last thing?”

“Well…” I sheepishly shrug, “I kind of of had some issues with the circuiting on the keyboard which meant that the power button constantly believed itself being pushed.”

“What?” You reply, aghast. “So, what? You just never walked away from your computer for more than 2 minutes?”

“Yeah…”

“So what if you’re editing a video and it needs to export out of that program? That takes hours.”

“Yeah…”

“Oh my God Adrienne. What is wrong with you? Don’t you work 90% of the time from home? Wouldn’t that make any small thing you had to do on your computer a giant decision about whether to turn on and reboot your laptop? Wouldn’t that prohibit you from using it for any kind of movie or music playing application? Wouldn’t you also have to constantly live under the tyranny of whether you’ve saved your documents every 60 seconds? Wouldn’t that make even simply answering the phone and getting caught up for a moment too long a danger? Might you not have lost tens, nay hundreds, perhaps thousands of words that you had slaved over due to a single second’s distraction?”

“Yeah…”

So you can see why this is huge for me. After three years of the “Oh, yeah, sorry, I need to keep fussing with it or my computer might turn off” shame and embarrassment I am finally free. And so you’d think that as I sit here not having sprung for the “idiot spill protection” insurance that cost just a bit more than I’d budgeted I wouldn’t be staring a label on a bottle of spring water in the face. But no, it’s right there, to the right in fact, in the same spot where the cat knocked over the coffee that began the last big mess I was in.

There. That’s moved to a far away window sill. Maybe we can learn something and not repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Anyway.

As I bask in the literal glow of my new toy (PS I just walked away from my computer for 5 minutes and came back to type this sentence) I am forcibly required to look into my past, at least for a little bit, as I sync the accounts and passwords of the old with the new. I keep my spam to a minimum on my personal email and so I generally send things requiring me to “verify this” or “click to sync that” on my old right-out-of-college email account. And as I went to check one of those “please click to update your account” emails I saw a notification for my old blog, the one I keep back in the early aughts of this century. The comment of course was spam, as I’m sure no one has looked at the thing in nigh on a decade, but I was caught in a little moment of nostalgia and clicked back and read a few. All I could think as I read was:

Brash Young Thing.

It is sweet and a little bitter to see oneself from the past. This person that was very much figuring it out, this persona of knowledge and bravado, this was what I needed to be at that time. I needed a self as oversized and hungry as the lack of real meaning and control that I felt. I wrote with complete certainty about life and work and love, replete even with seemingly aged wisdom on how I had grown and changed and come to deeper understanding of all those things. I wrote because then, as now, I needed to. Because something inside felt twisted up and boiling and I had to throw it off my chest. I wrote veiled messages to others, wrote with heart and passion and fervor, wrote little missives that I threw out in blog bottles to the internet ocean hoping they would come back to me some day. I wrote, in part, to help myself define what I currently was and what I wanted to be soon. The writing was the thing that helped me try and chart a path from one to the other. And more than anything, that writing was the thread between the work I had done as a student and the oh-so tenuous idea of the “professional” I was striving to become. I didn’t know how one made theater. I didn’t know where to begin. I just knew I needed to create something.

At the start, in the first awful year out of college, the very worst year of my life so far, I created drama. I created chaos. I created illusions that were bound to come crashing down so that I had something interesting to pay attention to. It worked for a little while, until I realized that the thing I’d created was a mess that I didn’t want. It was nothing I could hold or touch or care about.

Oh my dear, dear, Brash Young Thing. It took all that mess to finally kick you in the ass and realize that you needed figure something out, had to find some way to make something one would actually want to share with the world. That mess is what started the writing every day. And eventually forced your to make a play, and then another, and then another. It took so long to realize that you didn’t have to wait, that your art is nothing more or less than the stuff you manage to make. It took you so much longer than necessary to realize that there’s no such thing as “enough to get started.”

I had a meeting with a lovely young woman the other day who is just beginning her own journey. She asked me how you start to make theater. I said, “If you want to know know some tips on fundraising, I can pass that along. But the truth is you just figure out how you are going to make theater. And then you have to go make it.”

As I read the words of that Brash Young Thing I see both the need and the pain that she was in. I cringe a bit at her ignorance and I mourn a little for the confidence that she simply had to lose to actually start getting shit done. We all have to get off our high horses a little, don’t we? Brash Young Thing wanted to be smarter than everyone else. She wanted to magically know how to do it. She wanted to be the prodigy that everyone had told her she was for a long time. She wanted an A. She wanted a prize.

And I have to keep reminding myself every day that the work is the prize. This life, as insane and poverty inducing as it is, is the prize. I love what I do so much that I am afraid of it. So much that it scares me. It literally manifests the struggle to be be and create something amazing. And here I am, with a partner and a house and some savings and decent health insurance on the cusp of a new chapter in which that struggle may soon be the only thing I do every day.

Brash Young Thing, don’t despair. You’ll do just fine.

The Hard Hard and the Easy Hard

Epiphany.

There are two kinds of hard: Easy Hard and Hard Hard.

Easy Hard is something that takes a lot of work. It is effortful. It is a struggle. But it’s something that you genuinely sense that you are capable of. It’s something that feels possible in your body and brain. As if, there is already a neural pathway somewhere in there that says, “Yeah this is close enough to something I know or have done before to assume I have all the faculties to complete it.” Easy Hard is rewarding because you achieve something that you set out to do and you are able to see it come to pass.

Now don’t get me wrong. Easy Hard is most certainly not Easy. Easy Hard takes dedication and motivation and drive. Easy Hard is when you kick yourself in the butt to go out and finish that grant application even though you’re tired. Easy Hard is coming in and banging out a movement sequence or staging transition that still feels clunky. Easy Hard is planning the timeline for your next show or figuring out what the right collaborators will be to give the piece the legs it really needs. These are the tough and daily choices we make between apathy and inaction and getting shit done. They ain’t easy.

But they are, by in large, things we know. Or at least they are things we have a sense of how to do. And they are likely different for each of us. Because now that I write this, I realize that my Easy Hard is probably different than someone else’s. The things that are a slog but I know are doable are likely to a lot on who I am and how I function.

This is related to what I was saying last time I wrote here. That there are some things that seem to me to come with being an artist and it’s a tough thing to know sometimes whether I should adjust these expectations or whether I should try and tackle them in ways that are less comfortable.

The money thing for example.

We all need cash and for those on the path of self-producing rather than pay-for-hire work there are a few ways we get it: foundations, individual donations, ticket sales, etc etc.

I have always had a pretty small portion of my budgets come from donations, especially of the large individual patron-esque kind. This is pretty much because I hate talking to people. Exaggeration, maybe, but the kernel of truth is there. I have a very hard time schmoozing. Not because I am terrible at it. I just absolutely, in the very depth of my soul, seriously writhe around in discomfort because of it. Not because of the people, who are almost always incredibly nice and supportive and wonderful. They give money away to the arts. What better kind of person could I be talking to? But for whatever reason, that goes way further back than just this company, I have something in me that says “You don’t deserve to be talking to these people.”

The scale we’re talking about pretty much doesn’t matter. I’ve almost gone into panic attacks asking for a party platter and I’ve started shaking because someone told me I hadn’t responded to a major donor email fast enough. Don’t even get me started trying to cold approach a presenter at a conference. And though I’ve done it, and still do it, it is inexpressibly uncomfortable to step up to that plate.

This is the Hard Hard. It’s the thing that you do that doesn’t seem at the same rate as other things. It feels a little like trying to sing and knowing that you’re tone deaf – something you might sense is off but can’t figure out how to fix. For me anyway, the effort of doing never seems to lessen. The Hard Hard is the stuff that is likelier to be deeper rooted, stuck in your own stuff from way back, and much harder to get around.

The Hard Hard is usually not logical. Which I think is why it’s Hard Hard. Writing a grant is boring, but for me it’s a pretty routine thing. Though I don’t love doing it, once I get in gear, I can just get it done. With Hard Hard things – like calling an actor and saying that they’ve hurt my feelings or trying to assess the best person to hire for a job I don’t know much about – even once it’s done, even when I know it’s the right thing, I still am just glad it’s over and usually hope I don’t have to do it again.

But I wonder sometimes, can you just work through the Hard Hard? If you just force yourself to stay there will it eventually go away? Or will it get done but just take a ton of effort?

Right now, when it comes to money, I generally circumvent by diverting into an Easy Hard solution. I don’t make dinner parties or fundraisers or modes that require talking to people much any real portion of my income stream. I write a lot instead and thus far, I’ve gotten away with it.

And I am still on the fence about whether this is a victory. Whether I’ve just found a way to game a system that doesn’t play to some of my strengths by exploiting a tiny portion, or whether I’ve painted myself into a corner with way fewer options. Whether I’ve just put myself in a place where more and more I don’t have to tackle the unknown.

Over or Around

Back in 2008 I was lucky enough to travel to Paris and study for 8 weeks with the Roy Hart affiliated Pantheatre. It was valuable training at a time when I needed a creative hurdle. And I definitely appreciate the specifics of what I took away in terms of approach to the voice in theater.

But also concurrent with the particulars of that program was an interesting personal exploration. Things I noticed while in this program:

– I can spend an inordinate time alone

– I am often content not to speak to people for long stretches

– Without other distractions I implement an incredibly rigid and rigorous routine in almost every aspect of my life

– If I give myself the task to do so, I will write a lot, and do so every day

These were not particulars to the work at Pantheatre. At least not intentionally. The habits I developed arose in part because I knew this was a time, the first in a very long time, in which my only task was to be in one place working on a skill. And because I really had total control of my environment and my schedule I slipped into extreme habits that I normally couldn’t.

I woke up early, made my breakfast and lunch for the day, took the metro to class and spent the next 6 – 8 hours there. I then would go home, buy groceries for dinner, workout for 60 minutes, listen to one of three podcasts while I ate, write for a half an hour or more, read a chapter of the book I was researching in for a new piece, and then go to bed at 10:30. On Wednesdays when we had only had half days of class I spent afternoons visiting a destination selected from a list of places I’d made before leaving the US. Saturdays I’d pick two. Sundays I cleaned my apartment from top to bottom and looked over my finances.

Every single day I cooked each meal I ate. Every day I exercised. Every day I wrote.

I pasted my schedules and lists onto the walls of my Parisian apartment so that I could be surrounded with order and structure. I took copious notes in class, ones that I still use today. I journaled about every place that I saw, dissected each moment and feeling I had. I didn’t really talk to a lot of people other than my classmates, and even them, just a few. I deviated just once or twice to go out with the group on the class outings.

And I when I write all this it seems a little lonely but in truth it was one of the happiest, richest times I can remember. I felt incredibly full, expanding in all directions. The work resonated in the tiniest spaces of me and the routine became a kind of ritual that I could dig a little deeper into each day. I tasted food more than I had in years. I was in tune with my physical being in a way that I had not been perhaps ever. All of my teachers noted that by the end of the program I seemed settled and happy and calm in a way that was remarkable given where I’d started. They all said that my performing became freer and easier than it had at the start. I felt that too. Something about the structure outside the room made me ready and able to tackle the wild challenge inside it.

As soon as I came back home, all of these habits vanished. In truth, I didn’t even really try to keep them going. I knew even before I stepped off the plane that there was just no way to be the same person here that I was there. And the kind of rigidity that had come so naturally, just wasn’t suited to the life I lived in the “real” world.

I think about this time a lot.

I think about what I should think about it.

It’s probably obvious that I’m a pretty introverted person when left to my own devices. There are a lot of things that come with being a theater professional that I find inordinately anxiety producing or difficult. I have often had to suck up this tendency and learn skills that are not always easy. I have also found ways to circumvent traditional ways of doing something. This is the perennial question: over or around?

I’m never certain whether trying to navigate a new path is cowardly or inventive. Am I simply giving in to fear when I try and do something in a more complicated but easier for me style? Or am I making a world where people like me can do things like I do them? Hard to know.

Been a while…

Hey Friends.

So.

It’s been a while.

This summer has been a bit of a hiatus from this space. It’s been a lovely and hectic and busy time. And it’s filled me with lots of new thoughts about making and doing.

And I’ll be honest, at some point after being away for a while I started to feel a little guilty. This is par for the course with me. I like to do things perfectly or not at all, and once I start to get that, “I haven’t written anything in a while…” feeling, my first instinct is to find some kind of distraction – a stupid show or a silly game – that keeps my mind off the fact that I’m feeling a little overwhelmed because something I care about isn’t perfect.

This is the same perfection/ignore cycle that resulted in my mom threatening to cut me off if I didn’t call her to say hi during my junior year of college. Because once you feel a little guilty about not doing something it just builds and builds and builds.

Back then, I just worked more to keep that feeling away and at bay. And surrounded by other workaholics, that seemed like the norm, just what you did – put your personal problems on hold – so I never questioned the impulse. Now though, whether it’s because I don’t have the stamina (negative view) or I’m less able to give in to the self-destructive impulse (positive view) I just don’t tolerate the punishing schedule ad nauseum anymore.

Which isn’t to say I don’t work hard. I do. We all do. But it is not with the frenetic blind need from before. I can’t work and work and work if I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, if it seems like it’s working for working sake alone. And this summer has been an interesting case study. It’s one of the first times in years that I’ve had as many things going on. But it’s also one of the first times that I feel like I’ve given myself a process in which I actually have all the resources I need.

The Ballad of Joe Hill which is running currently at FringeArts has, in particular, given me some food for thought. The first iteration of this show had a kind of magic. It was brutal, produced on about $1,500 of cash and a whole lot of sweat and heart, begging and borrowing. There was a tiny core of people and we did everything. We carried each object into the space with our hands. We rehearsed in dribs and drabs when we could fit the time in between jobs. We changed where we performed. We hauled dirty, heavy risers in and out of tiny storage spaces. We printed fliers and begged the press to come. We made change for the audience and stored our money in a cigar box.

The stuff is still carried, the space is still dirty, but this time Joe Hill has a small army of folks – a full time SM, PM, riser and light crew and more. Our equipment was delivered. We have real bathrooms. Our box office is taken care of. I have not once had to think about marketing. We have had full 8 hour day rehearsals in lovely controlled spaces. And – and this really is the greatest of all the things – I haven’t worked a single other job since we started working full time.

If I had to imagine what I really needed for this show when I did it that first time, this is close.

And I have to remind myself of this. Last time, the crap that seemed out of my control the first time – the money, the resources, the time, etc – gave me a mental pass on making my best work:

“If only I had real money”

“If only I had everyone all the time”

“If only I knew someone with more expertise with lighting”

“If only I could just concentrate on doing my job”

“If only”

The problem with “If only” thinking is that it puts you in the past (“If we’d only had…”) and the future (“If I can only get…”) but never in the present. And theater in particular as a medium is about the glorious immediacy of RIGHT NOW. It’s our biggest superpower – the ability to require another human to “be” with you, right then and there. “If only” stops you from seeing what’s really there and instead what could have or might be if only you were a different person in a different place with different stuff.

I don’t have that pass anymore.

I have myself and the work.

And in a way, that makes this project a bigger win. Maybe even harder fought. Because it’s not a battle with tangible limitations. It’s just a battle with myself and all that empty space. If I fail, there aren’t other excuses to blame. It’s not because I didn’t have what I needed. It’s because of me.

So.

It’s been a while.

I hope to be here more often. And I’m going to try and not let myself get too caught up in the “If only I had more time to write this” feeling I’m having right now. I’m going to attempt to work through this lesson and simply do the work that I can do, right now, and let that be good enough.

– A

For the other

Fellow art makers, I ask you a question because I want to know if you feel the same.

I struggle to talk precisely about my relationship to my work, to making, to creativity, to all the things that are connected to and impossibly diminished into the imperfect word that is art. Even writing it, thinking it, it seems so much less significant than it feels.

To forgo sleep over art.

To lose oneself over art.

To cry and despair over art.

Doesn’t that sound so silly and small?

Like a child who cries when an imaginary playmate drops their tea. Like a teenager lost in their own emotional maelstrom and unable to see how little their problems are in the grand scheme.

Which is why I ask you: is it just me?

For you, creator/builder/music-maker/dreamer/poet/writer, it isn’t so small, no? For you it isn’t small at all. I want to know if you too feel a strange and entwined feeling. Not just to a collaborator, or a particular work, or even an entire genre. But to some kind of entity, a large and all encompassing force that is both rooted to the very center of you and simultaneously massive and larger than you can hope to conceive.

It is a relationship that I struggle to put into metaphor.

It is some part romantic, some part friend, some part deity. It is in many ways connected to those with whom the work is created, at times weaving together disparate persons who under any other context would have no reason for connection. But it may also be a force of isolation, leaving one standing alone with their beliefs and their visions and vainly crying out and wishing they could offer the eyes through which they see. And while it can work through people and manifest itself there, it feels at the core that it is just me and it – the thing, the feeling, the intuitive relationship to the work/skill/force.

And lest I get all Bronte on you (but really, given the flowery and Romantic nature of this writing, aren’t we already there?) it is actually the deepest and most sustaining love I have ever known. It is the relationship for whom I have sacrificed the most, the bond for which I have been most willing to grow and change, the one that has redefined and required the most of me.

And while it is deeply personal, it doesn’t feel like it is one that I have with myself. I’m not battling with my own insides. I’m fighting to figure out how to be with and in this outside force. Like swimming in a current unsure if it is taking me somewhere I ought to be going.

The work and I are locked in step – sometimes in battle, sometimes in sync.

And because it is unlike any other relationship I can see and define, it is so hard to know if it is the work or me when I feel the friction between the two. Hard to know if I am wallowing and caught in a destructive undertow or leaving untreated the pangs of pain that come from when one is violating the core of the artistic impulse.

It’s why, my fellows, I’m asking you, do you have these moments of struggle as I do? It seems surely you must.

It seems that you too must have days when you fear it is more than you are capable of. It must be that you too must have times when you feel yourself alone and rage against not having more faculties to fix what is ailing. When everyone around you seems to see the path that eludes you. Days when you do forgo sleep, lose yourself, and cry and despair over the work, the art.

And on those days do you also, my friends, do you fear, for a moment, that the otherness with whom you wrestle isn’t all that you sense it is?

Or do you also wonder, as I do, if it is as large and full as you sense and that you are too small to encompass it?

I believe you do.

I believe it because I cannot see how else we could stay with it, in it, for years and years. If it is not as big as all that how else could we let it take up so much of our lives? How else could it work through us so thoroughly? How else could it light up our emotions so strongly? How else could something as silly as a song or a scene or a sentence mean so much to us?

How else could I be left sitting over coffee in the morning so uncertain about whether I have been enough for those I have striven to be there with?

I may be less than I hope to be. This is possible.

There may be more strength than I can currently see. This is also possible.

Perhaps it is neither.

Perhaps it is a thing that exists on its own course and runs on an energy that I cannot entirely see, a thing I cannot entirely control, a reigned beast for whom the tighter I try and hold it close the harder it will be to feel its push and pull.

Perhaps what I have given to nurture it most is only tangentially related to the particular worry and fear I feel at this moment.

And perhaps I can only get up from my table to disrobe and stand in the shower and do my best to scrub away the deficiencies in myself I feel.

Or perhaps instead let them fall over me, try my best not to fight them so they do not catch and block, take a moment to have them fully before they wash away.

Perhaps I let myself be in the fear of failure, even allow myself that the losses I feel are real, and that maybe, they are necessary part and parcel with that otherness with whom I am entwined.

And perhaps in a week or two when the thing has come and gone I will look back at myself and shake my head at silly tears. Smile sadly for the person caught in waves of doubt and wish I could tell her that she cannot really fail so long as she does not hide, does not shrink, and does not let the fear make bitter that great love, this love of her life.

Tectonic Shifts

Something tectonic is shifting.

It’s difficult to articulate the magnitude of the slow but massive moving plate of direction and force I feel. It’s something that says it’s time to let go and ask oneself what I actually want, not what I think I can achieve. Of saying aloud what I truly truly can envision.

Let me back up.

So, it’s been a while my dear friends.

I’ve been caught up in the web of work that distracts and delights. My “life” is in at least three kinds of shambles due to lack of attention. But it’s the kind of whirlwind that I adore. How amusing and ironic it is that just as I start to gain some traction in this space, pick up a bit of speed, find a voice through language that seems to start nibbling on the edges of these issues, the work itself intrudes and demands all of my attention. So I’ve had so many feelings and thoughts about making and doing and what matters over these past few weeks. But the energy that I usually reserve for this endeavor, the space and time to think and carve out reason and lessons from impulse and feeling, is currently directed elsewhere most of the time.

So there’s been a lot to ponder, but little time to share it.

Here’s a bite at least.

I’ve written before about the relentless pursuit of the perfect, about my contentious relationship with potentiality. It has been both a motivator and inhibitor. It was, perhaps is still, a trait that I both love and fear in myself.

Loved because I believed that this need to impress, to perfect, to show the world how amazing a thing I can make was/is the reason I make impressive things. I believed that an instinct that runs far back into me, as far back into the conception of myself as I can remember, must be at the core of the work that I do, that it must be at the heart of the thing.

Hated because it was the same voice that said that no amount of doing was enough, kept me awake in the middle of the night believing I would fail this task while simultaneously shouting that it was too small, too pedestrian, too simple to be worth attempting, and that had I bigger vision, I might pursue an artistic feat more real and true.

And too often what ended up happening was this: the beginning of a work is filled with the elated holiness of that first blush, and over time as the thing came into sharper and sharper focus, it seemed to fade from that Aristotle inspired image of a perfection play that lived in the clouds of my imagination. And it’s apparent to me now that near the end of every major process of the last decade or so, I’ve walked away at the moment of the work’s full birth feeling a bit like a fraud, filled with big words and ideas, and scared that someone will expose me and show that none of them have really made it into the thing itself.

But recently, and it’s been building over time, as I’ve found moments to reconnect with old works, think about what truly brought me joy in them, it strikes me that, no, the ideal that I had in my head was not the thing I wanted and loved about being a creator, but a dolly waived in the face vigorously enough that I was distracted into thinking it the goal.

This current piece in particular, this Tempest, shows more than ever how funny that idea was in the first place.

Perhaps this is news to no one but myself, but there is no such thing as THE Tempest. Certainly not with 6 weeks of rehearsal in a park with little money or people. But even with years and infinite funds and whatever space one could imagine, there is no such thing as a definitive. There is just this Tempest, just a Tempest, that I happen to be working on. A particular work made by a particular group of people based on a particular set of factors that govern how the thing is made. Some of these things we can control. Some we cannot. And while I could lament, if I cared to, about how I might better perfect the process, even if I nothing ever went wrong, even if I had more time or money, even if I never lost a performer to circumstances beyond their control, even if the bounds of physics themselves were magically lifted and anything I could see in my mind were possible. Even if all this were true, it wouldn’t change one basic thing:

At the core, the work is you wrestling it out.

With the need to look beautiful.

With the need to be right.

With the need to impress.

With the need to be known.

With the need to reach out to others.

With the need to be larger than you feel yourself to be.

With the need to say something that matters to the world.

With the need to push sadness away.

With the need to feel at home with others.

With a thousand needs that I cannot imagine that are totally unique to you.

With the need to make something perfect and untouchable that no one can ever criticize.

And whatever of those needs drive our feelings and impulses we are often caught figuring out whether to fight or free them as we make our way through the scene (or song, or paragraph, or whatever). Sometimes that fight can feel like endpoint of the work. But I don’t think it is. It’s never the reason we began our art in the first place.

And, for me anyway, I think I’m seeing that beating oneself up about the distance between the ideal of the thing, the perfect version of The Tempest, or LADY M, or The Ballad of Joe Hill is really not about simply getting to the penultimate amazing version of the show. It’s letting the needs dictate the process.

Because perhaps, if I could just get there and prove the worth of the work, the implicit message is that that need with which I am wrestling will magically quiet. Which is why I keep opening the door to another wrestling match even as I grow weary (and older) and feel a little less ready to duke it out inside myself.

But the voice isn’t so strong any more. And I’m a lot less interested in yelling at myself.

Which at first I feared was a mellowing of the artistic impulse.

And perhaps this is what was so disquieting to me several months back when I despaired about the state of my art and myself in it. Perhaps it’s why I felt so far away from the form and unsure if I could continue. Because the thing I identified in myself as the core of my artistic self, this need to work and work and work towards only this “best” version of a piece, wasn’t sitting right anymore. That voice just made me tired a lot of the time.

And in feeling that, I worried that I was losing the central part of myself that made anything worth anything close to worthy. And I worried that I would give in, and make stuff I didn’t care about. That I would give up and stop making at all. That I would have to concede that the making didn’t really matter.

But I think I was missing the point. That I might not make things that appeased the voice. But I also might get to ask myself what I really wanted out of all this. When I am truthful, when I think about the reasons I actually stay, it is no longer to make a perfect piece. It isn’t really to even impress anyone any more. Those used to be bigger driving forces but I don’t know that they are any more.

And somewhere in the midst of this place, one in which there are so many things I can’t control as I usually do, places where there is no way to keep perfection as an attainable outcome, I realize that I have to ask myself what it is that I actually actually want out of being an artist. And perhaps rather than being dependent on that relentless voice to propel me into success, that perhaps I am actually succeeding in spite of it.

If this work isn’t perfect, but it still feels worth doing, something else must be at play. And I think I’ve honed in on what it might be:

It is the moment when out of nothing, comes something. Whether a room of 4 or 4,000 I am able to witness a birth of sound or movement or word that I didn’t know or only sensed was possible and by helping to direct it, or shape it, or even just witness it I am part of something much greater than the tininess of me. And it can feel perfect in that moment of birth, but the perfection isn’t really the point at all.

It is that in the face of chaos and nothingness and void, there is connection and creation and discovery.

It’s a kind of divinity really.

And I’m learning that it is what in the work actually satiates. Not the most amazing performance, or the most ingenious transition. Because a particular skill or craft does not always equate to genuine creation. Maybe those less practiced in the outcome can actually be a more direct means to find it.

And strangely, in the midst of seeing how joyful I find the moments of that spark in this process in which I am bereft of so many of my usual tricks, I see more clearly the ways in which I am setting myself up to put it lower on the docket of importance.

And so perhaps it’s why I’m coming to this funny cross roads with theater. Because I’m sensing there are ways more efficient to find that spark that ignites through the emptiness. And that the ways that seems most directly plugged into that are more and more looking less and less like a regular process, or theater, or even perhaps “performance” at all.

Like I said, tectonic shifts.

But for now, let’s just enjoy letting the angry perfect voice go in pieces. Let’s enjoy knowing that I cannot give you THE Tempest.

Just this one upcoming, which I think you will enjoy.

Spirits…

O the heavens, we are in the thick of it. O, yes, we are.

I often wonder what exactly I must look like in rehearsals.

The best days I am blessedly unaware of myself, seemingly like the spirit in this play I’m laboring on, a mostly un-embodied ball of energy that floats in and among the room’s inhabitants, sending thoughts and energy to and into them. I am aware of only the echoes of shape and motion – a sweep of the arm, a pacing back and forth, a note scribbled quickly in a book. In this form I feel massive and all encompassing, a thing of air and energy.

The worst days I see myself far more concretely, feel myself sitting on the floor or see the words almost tangibly come out of my mouth. On these days I am small and desperately trapped – by body, by brain, by the limitations of time and gravity. In these moments I often see a room staring at me and in the space of a breath or pause quietly ponder at the insanity of them to have followed me here.

I try to look at them squarely. I try not to shrink under the glare. I try to tell the truth of unknowing while still believing that I (for it is never they that have brought us here) can lead us out of the tangle and wooded thickets we have ventured forth into.

When in directing mode senses come into sharper contrast – sounds either exalt or oppress, the room can be a nest in which to cozy in or an overbearing push that squeezes down on the work like a trash compactor. It’s like the sensitivity dial is jacked up to its highest point. Even clothes can suddenly itch and scratch with a fervor that seems sudden and unwarranted.

Am I alone in this? Is this why there are nights I toss and turn? Is it why I cannot help myself but to apologize again and again in the room for such sensorial dissonances, whether not I am the cause? I don’t know if it is also the purgatory of other artists to feel this way, to know you must open yourself so wide and full and then chafe at the rough hewn bits that pass through your fingers. To know that the only way to make them smooth is to sit in that roughness and work it out.

In working The Tempest at this moment, I can’t help but feel a little bit of Ariel in myself. I’ve agreed to be here, sought out this particular form of servitude. And I take delight in the use of my powers to create shape and spectacle, to send the inhabitants of this island running, hair up-staring and all aflame like reeds, in many places and then bring them back to meet and join.

But unlike that dainty spirit, I’m sometimes less perfectly certain that I can perform the task to every article, that I can do such worthy service, and do so without giving over to grudge or grumbling. Like this production’s particular version of that entity, which takes its shape not in human form but appears in and about our space’s fabric elements, I am finding that pushing too hard or getting stuck too long forces the magic to be lost. I see how the promises made and kept earlier in this process are no guarantee for pay off and that there is plenty more toil to do.

But when I sit and ask myself on this morning why undertake this service, I cannot help but believe that unlike that spirit, that when it comes to the end of all this I will not gladly demand my liberty. That for me, the strive towards freedom from this earth-bound form is the freedom. That it is not in the finishing of the task, but in the doing of it that we mere humans glimpse at the capacity for magic. That like another in this play, I will miss it well and be sad in giving this work its freedom, even when I know well the necessity in completing the contract to do so.

The time twixt now and the end will be spent by us all most preciously…

Art crush

Hello my friends. It’s, again, been a few days. And this rhythm, perhaps once or twice a week, is likely where I’ll be living for the next few months.

I don’t say that because I think you’re upset about it, I just like to keep folks informed. Because the truth is I’m back in rehearsals, and that changes the tempo, the rhythmic pace, of one’s existence. It gives me such a different perspective on all these things I write about.

It’s a kind of amnesia, getting one’s feet back onto the floor. It’s as if all of the sudden I’m remembering a feeling that I’ve forgotten. There is a kind of: “Oh! This! I remember this. I love this. Why have I been doing anything else but this all this time?!”

This is always how it starts.

All those things we later don’t understand ourselves putting up with. All those indignities that in stark recollection we are surprised at our ability to tolerate. The long hours, the strange spaces, the running from place to place, all of it.

Last night I had people rolling on the ground outside covered in wet and dirty spandex while it rained.

And when it’s good (and right now, it’s very good) it all seems totally worth it.

A new work, for me, is a little like falling in love. And like falling in love, the moment when we surrender to an emotion that has the capacity to make us feel bigger, fuller, than we had been just the moment before, it is easy to allow ourselves to do anything to stay in that place. It is easy for the feeling, which can be so ecstatic and full, to feel like greater compensation than any amount of money ever could.

It is a constant surprise to me that this can continue to stay true even now, ten years into the doing of it.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about this: how the process of making something can feel like someone opens a door and on the other side is something amazing and incredible. And when you have to close it for some length of time it’s hard not to just yell at people who don’t care about the door, hard not spend all your time just waiting to open it again, hard to recapture the image of what’s on the other side.

An artistic love, like any affection, is a process of revealing oneself to an another, an unknown, and finding how you fit into it, into something larger than yourself. It is an amplifying mirror – reflecting one’s image back to themselves in bigger and sometimes stranger ways than we usually see ourselves.

Like love, it causes me to panic, simultaneously scared and excited to meet this new thing I’ve temporarily committed myself to. And the newer that love is, the less known, the more it throws me into paroxysms of emotion. Ups and downs between wanting to commit the rest of my life to this thing and feeling so silly and small and unsuited to this task, waves that come and go over days, hours, sometimes minutes.

I, for one, still struggle to be in it.

Even when I know the agitation, the terror, the butterflies, the inability to sleep as the mind races through images at night, even though I know all these things are part and parcel with the joy, I sometimes don’t know how to just release and let them in. And for me this manifests in extremes of doing and not doing. I spend hours creating detailed, printed, minute by minute plans for the day, which are often tossed aside within the first hour. And then later, exhausted, I sit and stare out windows or listen to the same song over and over again trying to get it to reveal artistic secrets to me.

This cycling between manic outward production and preoccupied inward energy gathering, like love, binds us to the thing we cycle around in a way that, like love, can feel so specific and special that it’s hard to believe that other people can share this passion. It’s sometimes frightening to think that even the others involved might not care for it as deeply as I do. And like love, the feeling can make one feel enmeshed and alone all at the same time.

I have these dreams about rehearsals. Both waking and asleep. Nothing in them is ever sexual or explicit in any literal way. But they feel like romance dreams. And in recalling them, they pull on the same strings deep in the center of my chest. It is a love ache that these thoughts elicit. I think about a rehearsal’s scene or sound like a person’s offhand joke or their dimple. And like a giddy teenager I can replay the moments again and again trying to recapture the rapture they engender.

Let’s call it what it is.

It’s an art-crush, this.

And like a new love, I worry about letting the feeling take over me. I worry talking about it too much. About putting too much faith in its newness. About giving away all of myself to it before I know it will catch me.

But really, there’s nothing to be done but to just be in it.

To try take it in so we do not deny ourselves the pleasure, with an eye or two on the rest of the world so we don’t too totally lose touch with reality.

To endeavor to be honest with our new love, so that we do not lose our sense of selves in an effort to fit inside it, but stay supple enough to let it change and open us in ways we might not have known possible.

To keep our sense of fairness and standard and integrity, so that even if we could give everything of ourselves so thoroughly away, we don’t, because later, when our love tempers and perhaps even fades, we’ll need it.

– A

Thoughts for the cast and crew of Clark Park’s “The Tempest”, on the occasion of our first rehearsal…

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus past couple weeks. It’s summer and we’re all a bit more relaxed, no? You needed the time to catch up on other things.

Part of that hiatus has been a dive into prepping my next project, The Tempest for Shakespeare in Clark Park this summer. Last night we had our very first rehearsal as a group and I’m not going to lie, this is going to be a good one.

Here’s some thoughts I shared with them, that I now share with you…

—-

For me it begins from the experiment.

I tend to make work that one might classify as “experimental” which I think gets a bad wrap for being weird or strange for its own sake. But for me, “experimental” is not a look or style but a philosophy, one that assumes there is always more we can discover. That we use the wealth of knowledge we already gained and see if we can push ourselves to further greatness than we currently know.

I formed my artistic sensibilities at the same time I worked in an actual laboratory. And in spending that time with equal feet in both arts and sciences, when I finally committed to this path, I brought with me the lessons I learned as a science experimenter. And what I most took away was this deep sense that you run an experiment because you’re looking to answer to something, that you must always have an active question and know what it is you’re seeking or you lose the vitality and excitement of the result.

So for me, a creative work always begins from, “What if we…? Is it possible to…? Can I get I make the audience…?” and the process is experiment through which define the questions we all want to be asking and figure out how we want to answer them. And I’m inviting all of us to propose the questions we hope to find answers to.

And The Tempest, for me, is an experiment.

It’s an experiment in an author’s work that lots of people know and love and have strong feelings about. Which is partly why I picked an oddball – one with elements that were new and untested when he wrote them, the same aspects that challenge that excite me. This is a rare Shakespearean work in that it actually takes place in real time, almost time frame that the show will perform in. It has almost no break between acts and scenes. It has weird shit in it. Even Shakespeare didn’t try to stage this one outdoors. But we will.

It’s an experiment in what we really need to create theatricality. I really want to create a sense of magic and surprise, which will be doubly tough in a setting so exposed. We have one long light cue that’s going to dwarf almost every trick we try. So we must be extra smart in thinking about how our intimate human scale can grow to fill all that space.

It’s an experiment in sound. I want to fill this story with music. I want the music to be the magic in this world in a way I have not yet seen. And I’m excited to have on board, someone for whom this way of approaching music is also a kind of brave new world, so to speak.

In some ways it’s an experiment in casting, but I want all of us to get on the same page in talking about this aspect to others. I think we’d do well not to let people get caught up in that. I cast the people I thought were the most interesting artists to tell this story, and some of those choices I hope will add complexity and intrigue into character conceptions and relationships. But this is not a gender story, in Shakespeare’s version or ours, and to focus to narrowly on that will undermine the artistic excellence that drove the choices in the first place.

You’ll notice that I haven’t used the word “play” yet. That’s intentional. I don’t want us to think of what we’re doing as a play, but as a story we share, an event, a gathering.

Because more than anything, Clark Park is an experiment in connection. To a vast range of people on a massive scale.

I imagine Marla was surprised when I approached her about wanting to create this show. This isn’t a cannon I live in often, my own past work tending toward the new and unusual, in dusty basements, using Gregorian chant or with 122 variant performance possibilities. But that impulse to experiment with form and content comes from a desire to surprise people into letting their guard down, into stopping for a moment and being with other people in a way that is immediate and human, which I think we desperately need in a time when so many things allow us to isolate and stay separate.

And through skill or luck or magic, Clark Park has managed to pull the spectacle of theater into a massive public space and amazingly create an event that is deeply personal and communal, the exact kind that I seek in my own work. It gathers together people that would never, ever, have reason to be with each other and gives them an experience that binds them. And for lots of folks, it is literally the first, maybe the only theatre they will ever encounter. And for many it is the only time it occurs them to take part in the art form we’ve all committed ourselves to. We become a gateway. And that is a great and wonderful responsibility to shoulder.

And the best part is, we can’t mess it up. Seriously. We actually can’t mess it up. There have been Clark Park performances in which I’ve marveled at the artistry and those I have not. But the experience as a whole is always a lovely late summer evening picnic in the park with a thousand people gathered together and feeling happy with their kids and their dogs and their wine. On the lucky days there are 100 of them for every one of us. And we can’t touch that, it’s so much bigger than we can hope to be. We can only try and lift our work up to meet that awesome massiveness. We can only try and make that amazing, literally amazing, event a little better.

And seeing the hard work you have already begun, I know we’ll get there.

Let’s get started.

– A