How do I do this?

Talking about talking

So I’ve been thinking a lot in the hours since my last post about how to have this conversation.

I’ve been thinking about how we can best begin to discuss issues of unequal representation in a way that both is honest and straightforward and is also productive and provokes dialogue instead of defensiveness?

In other words, I want to start by talking about how we talk about this.

I find it easy to provoke and push when the target seems large and imposing. I find strength in feeling myself becoming a David in the face of a Goliath. My guess, without having been there, is that this was the awesome power of what happened at #thesummit. It was a moment where the folks on the stage, the ones with some degree of sway and power and perhaps a degree of unknowing complacency, had to take in the might of opinion and feeling of the voices sitting on the other side.

But in a business as tiny as this, in a community where community is key, when networking and positive relationships determine your ability to get a job or a grant next week, month or year, it is easy in the micro-moments of inequity to excuse the tiny things. Too often any one moment or choice or thought seems isolated or small enough to swallow. And as the distance between we and the “giants” gets smaller, the harder it is to see them as the Goliaths they once were. Little things amass because it’s sometimes hard to know what is and isn’t a battleground.

And let’s also point out that these are really hard conversations to have.

Because so often I see an cry to battle dissolve when it has to translate into the daily implementation of such ideas on the nitty gritty detail level. Based on the conversation in our few meetings of the Awesome Lady Squad I hear female artists find the balance of when and how and where to try and bring these issues up the biggest barrier to change. “Do I really want to make this tiny line or scene or interaction a soapbox?” “Do I want to be that actress today, tomorrow, through this whole process.” “Am I really seeing this or am I being overly sensitive?”

It’s exhausting constantly trying to parsing it out in the moment.

And even if you are sure and you do know it’s an issue, it is so so so so so so so much more difficult to say things that are tricky and sticky to people we know and care about. It sucks to be a watchdog. To be a nag. To feel like you’re stopping everyone’s fun. To put people on their guard. It can feel like the opposite of the artistic impulse, where we want to feel open and accepting of each other. And I think it’s so hard because to have that conversation is also to acknowledge that the ills of our culture, the biases and darknesses that float around us all the time, also make their way into our brains. That we are sometimes making choices with little pushes from beliefs or stereotypes we’d never support if we said them out loud.

I wrote a while back about a study that showed how academic scientists displayed preferential treatment of men when filling a position for a lab manager.

In that post I explained how candidates in the study were never seen in person and scored based on identical applications save for the gendered first name of the potential employee. I underscored that this bias was shown in both men and women assessing the candidate. And I made a particular point of noting that none of the decision makers felt their choice had been affected by the applicant’s gender in any way. They all felt they were being totally gender objective in their assessments.

In other words, you can display bias and stigma and stereotype even when you don’t subscribe to them, EVEN when YOU are the negative recipient of them.

It is scary to think that stuff is in us. Even scarier to come to terms with the fact that it can affect our actions despite the best of our intentions. And when confronted with it, defense is natural. From the outside it seems ignorant and bigoted. But my guess is that the real cause is that no one wants to find in themselves dark things they didn’t ask to be in there. So sometimes it’s easier to believe they aren’t.

And it is here I want to point out the latent superpower we are missing: Yes, this is hard. Yes, It is tricky to talk David to David rather than David to Goliath. But. The closer we are, the more potential impact we are likely to have. The closer we are to them, the more likely we can get people to let that guard down. The closer we are to the offending source, the more likely we are to find a safe space to excise these demons with their hosts intact. And if we can win them to our side we grow our army of soldiers. The less it looks like a war and the more it looks like a conversion, I think the faster the battle will be over. If we have to kill them all, we may still do it, but I bet we lose much more time and resource and energy.

So I think we should begin with two assumptions, even if it may seem idealistic or naïve:

1) No one intentionally wants to make harmful choices to women artists.

2) Everyone imbibes some level cultural crap that will predispose him or her to doing so.

So when we look at the choices of a company, or another artist (or in our own work for that matter) and we see something that makes us feel squicky, our goal should be to remind them of #1 and help them see where they might be displaying the crap of #2 (pun by the way, totally intended).

To do that I think we start by asking these questions:

Is it conscious? – i.e. Does the person or company know and realize what they’re doing? Do they identify their behavior as a problem or are they truly unaware of it and its effect?

And

Is it conscionably contextualized? – i.e. Have they passively presented potential problematic material/decisions or have they taken steps (even if imperfectly) to justify them through dialogue or contextualization? In other words, do they balance a guy heavy Glengarry Glen Ross with another play with mostly female cast? Do they perform a problematic cannon text in context of a conversation series about historical representation of women in history to point out the potential in conflict with the morals we have today?

How we assess the answers to these questions will help set the stage for the modes through which we express our concerns and I think also help start to identify the solutions. And in tailoring it in this way, I think we get closer to coming to real understanding of what’s at play in each specific case. Because the devils really are in these details. And if we don’t treat all offenses alike, I think we’re likelier to find specific tailored solutions, likelier to find and commit the people who are ready and wanting to change but may not yet be brave enough or know how on their own to do so.

Quickie

Just a reminder that we’ll be convening the Awesome Lady Squad this Sunday the 26^th at the Parlor (come snow or come sun) from 7 – 9 pm at The Arts Parlor (1170 S Broad Street).

All ladies of all genres are welcome – artists, administrators, creators, interpreters, any and all folks with thoughts about how they’d like to see women take part in the arts community in Philadelphia. Feel free to pass the invite along to others as well.

And if you want to make sure you’re on the list to hear all the awesome updates about the Awesome Lady Squad as they happen just click here and you’ll be assured to get the info.

Have an awesome day.

Some days I’m just tired of talking about money

There’s a moment in Inside Llewyn Davis that absolutely slayed me when I saw it on Monday night. The movie, which follows a young folk singer from Greenwich Village in 1961, shows an artist struggling to survive. There’s plenty of emotional twist and turnage that make this film an engrossing one, but the moment that gutted me, that hit awfully close to my own heart’s home was one about two thirds of the way through. The protagonist has taken an arduous journey from New York to Chicago in hopes of impressing a music mogal named Bud Grossman. Llewyn Davis arrives in Grossman’s office looking beaten. He asks for… what? Recognition, money, help, something he doesn’t even quite know how to ask for, for an opportunity it seems he already believes he has no shot at.

Grossman looks condescendingly at the record he has just been handed, one bearing the same name as the movie, and says something to the effect of “Well show me what you got. Show me what’s Inside Llewyn Davis.”

So he does.

In a dark, half lit room, the character nervously sits with this man who holds the potential to change his future, a man who sits like a stone staring, unblinkingly at him.

Here Llewyn Davis sings.

Sing beautifully, achingly, heart-breakingly open. The camera moves so little, it is one of the closest things I have felt in film to the real spirit of live music, to being that close to someone who is filled up with song. For me, it felt as if I was witnessing someone doing the very, exactly, and absolutely necessary thing they were put on the earth to do. It felt that for Llewyn Davis music is the language that he as a person is truly intended to be speaking to the world. And the song, which I barely remember, is itself almost besides the point. The singing of it, and the feeling of doing it, is what’s really worth watching, and in the act is contained a beautiful kind of holiness.

At the end of the song there is this thick and vulnerable silence that feels like nakedness.

The man with the power looks at the one without and with all the casualness and ease of a Hawaii vacation, with all the finality and solidness of a period at the end of a sentence, says to him:

“Well I don’t see any money in that.”

Sucker punch.

In the heart.

With a spear.

Made of ice.

I’ve thought about that scene for days now. I’ve repeated this line to myself over and over and somehow, it only makes it worse the more I think about it.

Why does this injure me so much? Why does this wound to an imagined artist from 50 in the past get to me so much? Why does the reduction of one person’s lovely song to a lack of dollar signs get in me and stomp around? I keep asking myself these questions. And I really do wonder why, in a life where I spend so much time and effort fretting over and raising and dealing with and paying out and worrying worrying worrying about money why this stupid little line in this movie has got me so twisted and tangled inside.

This happened to me, this moment, in almost exact verbatim.

I was sitting across a table from someone proposing a production of my work. I was asked to describe the project that I wanted to create. I talked about the legacy of a movement and the music that it produced. I talked about the textures of peeling walls and echoing voices down a 200-foot corridor. I spoke about the sweeping grandeur of becoming a legend and the power of watching and listening and singing as the eye bounces between the living humans and the decaying space that contains them. And for once, happily, when I finished speaking I really felt that I had captured it, this vision of my future creation, at least in part, at least enough that I believed I had spoken about it with honesty and truth and sincerity.

And at the end of speaking, I too found myself in a moment of silence, thick and vulnerable, waiting in a kind of nakedness.

“I don’t think we can get enough chairs in there. I don’t know how we’ll be able to cover the costs of this thing.”

Same story, different medium.

And you know the funny thing?

I felt bad for having done it. I felt stupid for bringing such a proposal in. Preposterous, even, for wanting to do something so commercially unviable. That I came to that meeting kind of knowing and not really caring that the thing wasn’t ever going to make money, that it was an inordinate amount of work for such a tiny number of potential audience viewers, but that I didn’t care and wanted to do it anyway. That I believed in its value despite this.

Here is a true statement: I am not a religious person. I was not raised in a tradition of faith. But sometimes when I make something it opens up a space that is larger than myself. And that space it is the closest thing I know to belief in something higher, bigger and more powerful than me. The moment of creation is the moment in which I feel the distinguishing line between the tiny bits that make up me and the tiny bits that make up the clothes on my body and the tiny bits that make up the people in the room and the lights above my head and the sound that passes between us and the floor that we rest on and the building we reside in and the whole rest of the world, all those tiny pieces become one part of one big thing that we all share together for the moment that the feeling passes through all of us.

Eventually I did end up making that piece that didn’t have enough chairs to make it monetarily worthwhile.

But I will never forget that moment: when you hope that the person sitting across from you, by virtue of being so close to the thing you have committed yourself to will understand, when you dream that they will see the world and the thing you show them with the eyes with which you also see it. When you imagine for a just a moment that it might be as easy as it was before you had to start selling the things you’ve made, things that in truth you would rather give away freely for the sheer love that the creation of them affords. It is the definitive nonchalance with which that hope is shattered, the tedium with which the deepness and sanctity and need you have for what you make is disregarded. This misunderstanding of what the art’s usefulness is, what it is there for, this is what punctures the chest.

It is not intended as cruel, this act of refusal, this alternate measure of art’s worth, but it is presented as truth, which to me is so incredibly much worse. Because it makes one feel that such a feeling is so thoroughly beside the point, and that you the person feeling it are silly and small in doing so.

It’s negotiating the massive space between a dollar sign and the thing that lights you up inside and makes you so much bigger than you were before. It’s taking that thing and then having to figure out how you can push and poke it so that 50 chairs instead of 40 fit inside your vision of it. It’s taking the most beautiful song that you know how to sing, the one that comes from way way way deep down inside you and being told, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world, that it will never make any money.

It is the definitive and inflexibly casual insignificance of the artistic product when it is unable to be shaped into commodification.

This is the thing that hardens the soul.

This is the moment of singing that song, Llewyn Davis, and I feel it with you.

Getting to “Fuck It” Faster

If you’ve been standing within 100 feet of me in the last month or so, you’ve inevitably heard me go on and on about my most recent directing project.

It is, in essence, a project that does not adhere to any of the rules that I follow in my “real” work. It is one that I traveled almost two hours a day to get to and from. It is one that rehearsed at odd and tiring hours after full days of other work. It is one that paid me far less than the salary I set for myself in my own company’s work. It is one that I embarked on with little choice in content, space, personnel or schedule. Never in a Swim Pony project do I allow designers to be assigned to me. Never do I cast a massive ensemble based on a day’s worth of auditions. Never do I work in a tiny and oddly shaped theater space. Never do I do so many of the things that I did for this recent production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at Arcadia.

Yet, I can hardly recall a time in recent memory when I have been this excited to get to rehearsal, felt as free in pushing and playing with my actors, as wildly open to trying any and everything that my mind could conceive. And ironically, I can also hardly recall a time when encountering things that did not go the way I expected where I felt so easy in adapting to the new circumstance and believing that success or no, it would all still absolutely have been worth it.

I thought about this yesterday as I semi-moped about my house feel post-partum performance let down. I thought about what it might mean that I have been so very happy these past weeks and what I might need to do to capture this feeling more often. And as I was semi-moping I thought about the times in the past when the work has felt the most fraught and when it has felt the most free. And collage-like came a cascade of things people have said to me that feel strangely similar:

A written comment from a vocal jury performance: “Adrienne Mackey is a wall of sound”

A reader of this blog: “It surprised me to realize that you could be that vulnerable.”

The remark during a training session for Roy Hart work: “Adrienne, you are like a golden tank. Beautiful but bulldozing over everything in your path.”

In a therapy session recently: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I find you very hard to read.”

And as these thoughts fell through my mind over the course of the day, they began to layer into the shape of something resembling a realization. Not an earth shattering one, in fact something that I’ve pretty much always known, but one that I realize I haven’t totally acknowledged as a problem: that when I really intensely care about something, especially when I’ve had the chance to stew about it for a long time beforehand, I often psych myself out of really enjoying it. When I really want to do my best, when I am trying my hardest to do that, I often over-think myself out of doing what I want and having a good time.

Often in school, in training, in life, in my work I have these moments where I want so badly to do well and I feel myself failing. And this failing becomes this nasty spiral where I want to do well so I push too hard or work too much and then feel the falseness of that work, feel the desperation of it, and end up falling farther down the hole. And so I try to relax and not care, but of course, I know this too is a lie, that I do care, that I want to do well, and so feel guilty about trying not to do and bounce back and forth between half measures of forceful pushing and uncommitted frustrating motions of trying to disengage from my angry and needing and deeply caring self.

Almost always when I get to an incredibly exasperated and dark place at the bottom of this spiral I say, “Fuck it.” And only then in hopelessness despair do I finally give up trying.

And this, inevitably, cliché-ingly predictably, is when I finally break the cycle and start making the stuff that’s really good, the stuff I wanted to make the whole goddamn time.

It is so recurrent that I can even know that I have to get to “fuck it” and in mind boggling-inducing meta levels of self-sabotage manage to try too hard at finding the feeling of “fuck it” until I give up even at this and rage at the gods with a hearty “fuck it trying to find fuck it!”

And then, of course, the work gets good.

Perhaps external measures of success have become so entangled with my own sense of worth, with my own sense of desire, that when I think about it I genuinely feel like I don’t actually know what I want. Maybe I am so often in my head that I start to game out every strategy ahead of time and this removes me from actually experiencing anything in the actual moment of its happening. Or possibly the key to really loving something is the delicate balance of knowing when it’s time to try hard and when to let go.

Maybe it is all of these things.

The real gift of the process I found with my students at Arcadia was that I walked in and had absolutely nothing to prove to anyone. I was doing a play with no one to impress in a style I have almost no expertise over on a subject I pretty much didn’t give a shit about. And somehow that gave me freedom to do exactly what I wanted. Which was lovely and freeing and incredibly important to me. And by the time I realized how much I cared about it, I had already found the permission to keep doing it. And in so doing, saw the freedom and permission that all of my lovely darlings gave themselves so that together we all set ourselves free.

This is what I thought about yesterday in the afterglow of a lovely process. And sitting here now a day later thinking about those thoughts I think this:

What the fuck (it)?

Because, really, what the hell do you do about that? What do you do with the knowledge that when you try hard you are trying too hard? That when you try not to try you end up trying harder? That you’ll keep going around that until you despair and give up and then stop trying and then you’ll finally do it right? That this always happens unless you magically manage to end up doing something where you don’t realize that you care until its too late and you’re already doing a good job?

Ugh.

If I look back at my past, I see this pattern emerge everywhere. Beginnings are so often the most joyous place for me. The moment of beginning, the time before I know enough to know enough to know when I’m messing up is usually when I manage to subvert the work and get to “fuck it” faster. It is the moments when I don’t realize what I’m doing or I go into it not thinking much at all about it that I am able to just relax and really let rip.

This is how I discovered a theater of devising rather than scripted plays.

This is how I became a funk-a-delic back up singer.

This is how I started teaching new approaches to voice.

This is how I found myself loving so fully a production of Midsummer.

This is how a person who has intense personal space issues looks at a hoard of college students and cannot help herself but to hug them, to grab them about the ears and kiss their faces. How a person whose persona is thoroughly entrenched in wanting and needing and demanding respect in my field and from my peers can have no shame. How she who is so studious and careful in letting people in has no trouble showering these students with all the feelings that I am filled with when I see them in voluminous words unprepared ahead of time (so as to ensure they accurately describe the true depth of my feeling). And how in such total lack of preparation I find truer expressions than in the many times in the past I have tried with hours and days of writing and re-writing to say something right from the core of me.

Even here. Even in this space, it feels just a bit forced trying to pin it down in words after the fact. And I am trying as I write these very words not to hit the back button, but to allow myself the luxury of letting these thoughts tumble out just as they come.

And I don’t exactly yet know just how I will do it, but I think this is the work I must be doing now. Finding my way to “fuck it” faster. Figuring out how I can be as generous with myself as I am with them. How I can give myself the sovereignty over my artistic space, to do whatever I want simply because I want to, because it makes me happy, and believe that this happiness is the key to my artistic success.

– A

You can

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.

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.

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.

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…

The way we think about charity is all wrong

I’m not usually a re-poster of videos and I’m usually especially loathe to re-post TED videos. Too often it’s just too easy to pass along another person’s great ideas in place of the far more difficult task of sitting down and coming up with one’s own. Too often it feels as if such videos are a way of saying, “Here in place of original and provoking thoughts I had to wrestle and wrangle myself is a shorthand to someone else’s.”

But today I make an exception.

I want you to watch this. All the way through. It’s 20 minutes and it encapsulates so many of the feelings I’ve tried to express in this space that I felt like I need to pass it along.

Mr Pallotta eloquently expresses how our current conception of what a non-profit is and how the current system actually hurts the causes they claim to be protecting. Here are just a few responses to the five points he lays out.

1) Compensation: The quote from this that struck me most: “We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interesting that we don’t have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people.”

He then follows with: “You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We’ll put you on the cover of WIRED magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you’re considered a parasite yourself.”

It’s funny. I still have an internal sensor that goes off when I think about that statement. I believe artists are important. I believe their work matters. And when I think about an Artistic Director making half a million dollars a year, but first instinct is to think of them as stealing. This “ethical” stand requires those of us who imagine going into such a field to make a trade off between doing good for the world in general or doing good for ourselves in particular. Wouldn’t it be better if we could incentivize the future’s most brilliant thinkers away from working for oil companies and towards making the greatest art possible?

This is not a theoretical conversation for me. I did not think I would go into the arts. And if I hadn’t, I would be making a lot more money than I do now. Not a lot like 20 or 30% more. A lot like 10, 20 maybe even 50 times more than I do now. My chemistry degree is one I could have parlayed into a career at places like Dow or Dupont. I could have gone to a grad school that someone would have paid for. My very first year out of college I could have made triple what I currently earn. That is a long term sacrifice. And I think that as Pallotta says in the video the “stark and mutually exclusive choice” can at times seem like a crazy thing to have done.

There’s a graph he shows in the talk that looks like this:

Is it any wonder that the best and brightest are NOT staying in the non-profit arts world?

Terry Nolan, for reference, the AD of one of the largest theaters in town was making just under $101,000 for the year 2011. Amy Murphy, the Arden’s managing director, was at just over $88,000. Do those numbers of first blush make you angry? They might, because we’ve been taught that our work is intrinsically rewarding and therefore not worthy of payment. It is up to us to think about how we can recalibrate this expectation. I don’t know either of these two terribly well. But guess that these figures are nothing close to what they could be making for similar intelligence and hours applied to other fields. And this is the very top end of what’s currently being compensated in Philly.

I found both of these numbers, by the way, from a 5 minute Google search. Because if you’re a high paid member of a non-profit, you are legally required to publish to the world, exactly what your salary is.

2) Advertising and Marketing

This section is especially interesting to me in thinking about my work as a performance medium. Pallotta cites 2% of GDP as the figure at which charitable giving is stuck. I thought about at different 2% – the percentage of people in the Philadelphia area that go to see theater. Does your theater company convince 2% of the population to come see your work? I doubt it. Could it? Would changing the way with think about investing in marketing help? Once we reached those people once could we fundamentally increase the participation in the art form as a whole?

3) Taking Risk

“So Disney can make a 200 million dollar movie that flops and no one calls the attorney general.”

In the arts in particular this topic hits incredibly close to home. Pallotta’s talk is mostly in relation to risk based on revenue generating ideas and that does ring true in the arts, but the micro-managing fatigue I hear in others and feel in myself is particularly pointed in the arts section. Creating new work is inherently a risky business and I’ve written before about the ways in which current funding structures don’t reward innovative or unanticipat-able process that result in real revolution in art making but instead encourage all aspects of a project to be figured out ahead of time.

“When you prohibit failure, you kill innovation.”

The larger culture praises the Googles and Apples and Facebooks for trying 100 crazy of ideas in the hopes that one of them changes everything about the way we think about the internet or phones or email. Artists are by their very nature programmed to be doing this kind of out of the box thinking. By definition they are masters at bringing into being things that neither they or anyone else has yet been able to conceive. So why do the systems for getting them the resources to do that so often require overly controlling and specific explanations of process and outcome before they’ve even begun to create? It’s a recipe for non-visionary work. That artists manage to succeed despite this is a testament to their creativity and power, not a message that the system is a good one.

4) Time

“Amazon went for 6 years without returning any profit to investors.”

Artists know exactly how long it takes to hone and build craft. But were we to ask for the kind of time and investment of funds towards a project on the order of 6 years we’d be laughed at.

5) Profit to Attract Risk Capital

This is a major difference in the way for profit art mediums – record labels, movie studios, Broadway theaters – work compared to the non-profit. I’m not saying that we should all become corporations but it might be worth thinking about the ways in which entrepreneurship and traditional business structures can help revitalize the way we think about raising money in the arts.

Lastly, he goes into the point that the question of funders wanting to stick to project based work and keeping overhead low. This again, is an area that most artists I know are constantly up against. So much work needs to happen before a project is conceived and in the in between spaces to continue to keep the company going that we end up with overworked, under-resourced administrators and creators who when they finally get into the room are so distracted and tired they aren’t able to make the work they’ve been spending all the time preparing for. What if ALL funding was “general operating”? What if artists had TOTAL control over how they funded their art making process? I bet after a few years of adjusting to the shock they – the folks who are making work every day and see how and where that implementation would be most useful – would be more productive than anyone would imagine.

Are you interested in this? I am. And I want to open up this discussion with other artists. Maybe if we can all get on the same page, we can codify the way we’d like things to be and share that vision with the people that could help make that happen.

If you want in, hit me up?

– A

PS – Thanks to Brendon Gawel for passing this along to me in the first place.

It ain’t that deep, but it really is

If you visit this site often you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a little thin on the posting the last week. It’s because I’ve been going through some family health stuff, specifically with my Dad. And while I know that this isn’t exactly an autobiographical space, it is one that I feel comes pretty directly out of the thoughts and experiences that I’m having on a given day.

Usually, my day includes a lot action and thought about the making (or not making) of artwork.

And for the past week or so, that hasn’t been true.

Or rather, it’s been as true as usual, but in a very different way. That is to say, while I’ve not been in rehearsals (but that’s not usually a majority of my time) I’ve still been keeping tabs on a few projects, answering emails, doing some planning, working on budgets and reading of research. The difference is that right now I’m doing it with a slow and steady pulse of fear and anxiety in the background.

And so, the art making things (or art making supporting things) I’ve been doing have seemed to fade pretty far into the scenery of my feelings this week. I have felt a lot of things, but none that I was quite able to articulate in a way that felt complete enough to share here.

Today, April 29^th, at roughly 5pm EST I expected to be arriving at the Art Museum. I expected to be receiving an award for an $80,000 dollar project that will hopefully launch me into a year of nearly full time art work. I expected to be celebrating with the other Knight Arts Challenge grantees on their great success and excitement embarking on something new and wonderful.

But instead I am sitting and my recent passed grandmother’s dining table waiting in limbo for the results of an operation on my father’s heart, one that is not simple nor routine.

And as I sit here pondering this series of events, and the cascade of cancellations that followed me to this moment, I realize something about my own work that seems but deeply paradoxical and true all at once:

A life in art, my life in art, is somehow simultaneously really not that deep, and at the same time, totally is.

Which is to say, that it is not the extent of me, that it should not consume me, stop me from remembering it is a life I am living and not some task to be completed, and will likely also be the only thing in the end that saves me, saves all of us.

At times like these I am confronted with the vast enormity of my own powerlessness, made aware of how little I am prepared. When I stares at such definites, I am so keenly aware of what a tiny portion of things I actually have any control over. I am made supremely conscious of how little I matter in the vaster cosmic scale of things. I realize this in a way that is both utterly terrifying and strangely freeing. It seems so true that who I am and what I do matter very very little when it really comes down to it.

In the face of such a truth there is potential paralysis, and it is a feeling that I have felt often in the last 48 hours. But there is also a way of seeing all of that meaninglessness and impossibility that removes from me a sense of obligation. In the face of a truly impossible situation, I cannot fall back on attempts to fix, or work harder, or do more. Regardless of love or duty, in this case I have no choice but to simply hold out my hand to take what is given, and do no more or less than the very best I can.

It is a rare time when I can do this in my work, to really look at the thing head on and say, “Ok, regardless of what has come before, here we are. Let’s do everything of which we are able.”

I think of all the times I have been confronted with moments so very much smaller than these that have taken up so infinitely larger a proportion of my heart and mind. And it is only logical that such things, those that work on the personal, human scale, feel so large at the personal human size. I think about the moments I have lost so much of myself in trying to perfectly solve this single problem or that particular person and getting lost in it. Lost in myself in worrying and fretting and letting myself ignore what I was really doing, to obsess over a tiny fragment of the whole. These are the choices I have wept over, sweated bullets for and tied myself in knots about. These are the things that got so much in the way and seem so silly in retrospect.

And when they come again, and they will, these are the times I hope I can still capture just a bit of this feeling and remind myself to do the thing I know I need to and get back to everything else. I hope I can remember that no one of these little choices really matter in the long run, not matter how large they seem in the moment. To do the thing that may be difficult or hard in that teeny tiny second, but pushes me closer to something bigger and truer in the long run. To use that cosmic sensibility to offer some perspective on the human scale so that I can see this moment both large and small. That if I can see this huge feeling moment as a tiny bead on a longer chain, it might be easier to do the best I can, whether on not this single moment goes right or wrong, because I can see its connection to a larger string of that matter – forthrightness of character, honesty, kindness, an unwillingness to baby or coddle, a relentless seeking of excellence. Without it, I fear giving myself over to ease in the sake of the moment, in the sake of fear, in the sake of seeming safety. But if I can remember at these times that there is no ease or safety, not really, not in the long run, then I can be fearless, than I can dare to do the difficult, even when I might not know exactly what that will mean.

And at the same time I see all this, I also begin to see how deep, how very important it is to make a space for art in the world. In the face of such a thing as this moment, I see how vast my emotional strength must be. And more than ever before I see how we need to practice for these moments of sitting at our grandmother’s dining tables, of emotional weight lifting that readies us, however little, for what lies ahead.

We use art to build our capacity, our strength of heart and spirit muscles so that we might be a bit stronger.

Our work is instruction. It is sadness and joy delivered in ways that help us train through experience, teach us to process and think and prepare. Artwork is a way to add weight to our soul’s daily training, a bench press for the psyche, cardio of the guts.

Art work keeps us emotionally vital, it teaches our hearts to expand, and feel and understand. It toughens our inner selves and makes supple our character. And while it cannot prepare us fully for the intensity of actual battle, this training for life does help to bolster and build us up so our resources are there when we truly need them.

Our work teaches us to love and laugh and cry and give that up freely, so that it does not block us when we must race into the fray. It reaches us to open and receive when there is no other choice but to do so. It pushes out the boundaries of our hearts so that they can take in more than we thought possible. And it helps us in some tiny way see meaning in things that are so impossibly more than we can know.

It helps me to open up the borders of myself so that I can receive the enormity of a moment just like this.

There is no adequate preparation for the fracas of life better than this.

And it isn’t really that deep these little works on little stages, but oh yes, it really really is.