In Progress

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

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.

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.

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

Gasping

Progress in the speed of real time is hard to see.

For years when I thought of the person I was back in college and the first early years out, I just imagined the same person I am now, maybe a little smaller, a little poorer and a little blonder (I was using Sun-In, one of the greatest follies of youth). Essentially though, I believed myself to be the same. I’d look pictures of the work I did at that time and imagine me in the work just the same as now. Some days it could feel frustrating to see myself stuck in sameness, not feeling the same clear progression I used to have demarcated by an academic calendar. This was partly the impulse for a return to such a place, where the promise of measurable and specified growth is inherent in the enterprise.

Yet… There are hints to the contrary:

Re-reading my directing notebook from The Ballad of Joe Hill as I prep the return to the piece now in 2013 I think about the fear I had that the work would all come crashing down around me. I realize how much more I’ve learned to love and trust intuition as a guiding force in my work.
Re-visiting my alma mater to teach or share work, I find myself talking with students and seeing more starkly the different between where they and I each are.
In a moment of fretting about someone else’s perception of something I’ve done or am doing, I catch myself, let it go, and think about times previous when that wouldn’t have been possible.

But mostly, I think our awareness of change is commensurate with its actual occurrence, meaning we acclimate to our new selves in the slow and steady forward tempo they are created. So our evolving selves seem to us a constant, even though someone who leaves and returns to us might be amazed by the effected change on us by life. Easy to see in others, hard to catch in yourself except in passing or in shadow.

And because of this it gets easy to get frustrated with growing, easy to miss the reward of experience (which seems to have been so clearly a fixed part of who we are) and mourn the vigor of youth and the promise of potential. This happens big (looking at the major arcs of our careers) and small (looking at what we have accomplished in a week of work). We go back and give our younger selves the benefit of the intelligence gained and then find fault in current ourselves for not having the future predicting foresight to avoid new mistakes, forgetting that the old ones got the current knowledge to us in the first place.

It’s a fallacy, just as much as the perfect unformed, undone, artwork whose imagining will never be tarnished by the reality of actually doing it. But fallacy or no, it works on us. And here at Swim Pony, I like not only identifying a problem or trend, but trying to alleviate the problem.

It just so happens that last 7 days have found me at home working mostly on my own. Tracking the progress of anything is hard, doing so in a bubble with no outside contact even harder. So nearing the end of the week I found myself saying, “I’ve done a lot. I swear I’ve done a lot.” With less and less conviction. But happily, near the end of the week I stumbled on a lucky accident that I wanted to share.

I am a semi-luddite, with a dinosaur phone and an instinctual late-adopter policy on technology. My to do lists are one area in particular that has stubbornly resisted updating from analog. Which is why each morning for the last week I’ve started the day with a sheet of legal paper (it’s longer) folded in half, a pen and a highlighter. I re-write the things left uncrossed from the previous day’s list onto the clean paper, add anything that has since arisen, and then highlight the things that are most urgent for the day’s doing.

Day to day, this tool is functional, helping me keep track of what’s come up and what should be on my radar and the priority in which I should be aware of it. And day to day, this list is a kind of metaphor for my growth and progress on the larger scale: taking in new info and removing things completed or learned. But unlike my larger progress I was left at the end of the week with a tangible record of each day’s doings, each step along a week of accomplishments.

Last night I stopped for a moment to take stock of this catalogue of agendas. On first glance, I was a little disappointed to see that the list size from day one to seven was roughly the same and that the number of things removed from each day was also just about equal across each list.

But then I looked closer.

I saw how things I’d thought I needed were taken off based on new information. I saw things I had delegated to others to share the burned of work. I saw things listed early in the week too vaguely had broken down into specific steps that I could (and did) complete. I saw that each day had been a small piece of progress on a multitude of fronts that added up to some big advances in the larger scheme.

And then, just to see what would happen, I went back to the first day’s list and crossed off all the things that I’d managed to finish in the 6 that followed and I actually (if you can believe such silliness) gasped at my desk.

But for one task, everything I’d wanted to achieve at the start of that week, I’d completed. What struck me so completely was that, yes, the lists were the same size today as they were last Tuesday, but my wants kept updating with the days’ lists as well. And a little posting here day after day, we add to the finished pile one piece at a time realizing only at the end that each little step does add up to a whole body of work completed.

Perhaps it’s worth taking such moments of stock once in a while. Perhaps it might be useful to record the state of the self, to define one’s wishes and ambitions and current capabilities as they are and then compare them with the same measures from the past. So that we do not only, as we are often encouraged, measure our current selves against the prospective ones we hope to be, but also see that we have become “future” selves, ones who can take a moment to go back and gasp and be proud of how far we’ve come.

– A

Learning vs Doing

You know that feeling when something just… bugs you?

In that way where it’s not a huge deal, not enough to really even know exactly what about it irritates, but it a fact just rubs you wrong each time you hear it?

I get those little inklings once in a while when I hear about certain artistic projects happening out in the Philly sphere. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly which ones will they will be. But they are things that from first mention just make me itch. They leave a sour taste. They make my nose wrinkle. And recently I’ve tried to unpack those little pin pricks a bit to figure out what it is about them that creates that feeling.

Ok, long intro aside, I’ve been writing here long enough that hopefully you readers know that I care a lot about the art that happens here in my community. And if you read this blog you know that I am, almost always, for more work from more kinds of people. But there are just some projects that I hear about and get this negative vibe from. My guess is that anyone with a high level of skill in an area has feelings like this about certain kinds of creative endeavors.

Mine come when I hear about companies that are creating new devised or generative works for the first time. This is almost exclusively linked to full productions from companies that have not established themselves as devisors in the past. When I hear that company X that usually does this or that semi-traditional cannon work is doing a “devised” show I have this weird itch. It’s a gut feeling and it makes me turn my head to the side and squint a little. It makes me just a bit annoyed.

I don’t get upset in the same way when I hear about companies doing killer work I wish I were doing. I don’t get that way when I hear about new up and coming companies fresh out of the box. It’s something to do with relatively established, usually working the traditional mode, folks who out of the blue decide they’re doing this thing that I do all the time.

Why is that? Is it jealousy? Competitive fear? Haughty condescension? I don’t claim to be above any of those things. But I really don’t think that’s what it’s about.

Here’s what I do think it is: There’s learning and then there’s doing.

Learning is for us, the makers. Learning is the way in which we experience ourselves opening, vulnerable and hopefully awakened with a new methodology. It is the space in which we find room to grow. Learning is mostly a private affair because the real beneficiary is us, the learner.

Doing is the opposite. Doing is the ways in which that thing that we have learned and grown is implemented and displayed, put forward and adorned in front of an audience. It is about skill and virtuosity and execution. Doing is performance. And doing is about the viewer because we’re doing it for them.

In every artistic endeavor we are likely engaging in a bit of both. When we start out, we are doing very little doing and learning an awful lot. And the doing we do is mostly in service of the learning. In these early stages, when we do the doing for people, they know we’re just starting, it’s generally understood to view the thing through that lens.

As we grow older, as we become “professionals” there are fewer spaces for learning. We become doers, sometimes to a deadening degree. It’s understood that what an audience sees is doing without quotations. We take that caveat off our performances. And that means an audience can look at the thing with the understanding that this is mostly for them.

I am for learning. I am a believer in continuing the educational process. And In almost all of my creative works I build time set off from the making (the doing) of the play for the group to explore uncharted territory. This is usually called exploration, but it might as well be called learning. It’s the time when I give us room to grow that new growth without having to support the weight of doing it for a viewer.

In other words, when I start a new project, I make sure to find time for us to learn before we have to do.

I do that because devised work, by its nature, is a learner’s game. The piece does not exist. And in the same way a playwright needs time and space to learn about the world he’s writing, generators in a room together when they first start doing something, need way more time to learn what’s happening, what they’re going to do.

And I like the idea that people would want to engage in that process. I want more theater that is made this way. Which is why I especially like inviting in people who’ve rarely created that way to do it with me.

What I do have trouble with is when learning is sold as doing. And this, I think, is where the itchy feeling comes in. While I always include some amount of learning in a process, I know that I need less of it than I used to. Because I’ve been doing it long enough to know when I can accelerate or anticipate certain things I’ve learned about doing. And I have a pretty good guess when others can’t.

The thing that’s tricky about trying something new that is similar but not the same as something you’ve been successfully doing is remembering that the new thing is actually new. That it’s a thing you don’t know how to do as completely, that you haven’t yet learned all the ins and outs of doing.

That the ratio of learning to doing that you’ve been operating on with the thing you do know how to do is not going to be applicable for the new thing you’re learning about doing. And that means that you need to give yourself more time to be in learning mode before you start doing it in front of people. And I think the itchy feeling comes when I sense that a project hasn’t made enough room for the learning. I know how hard devising is. I know how long it takes. I have a pretty good sense of the effort and skill needed to actually do it. Which means that I can sense when something is about to be shown as a thing “done” that is actually a thing that is still being learned.

It’s not just that I don’t want to see bad work (which I don’t). But I see bad work all the time. No, in this case the niggling feeling is tug of the mama bear. I am feeling protective of my craft. And I think generative creation really is a quite different skill than interpretive theater. Making a thing and enacting someone else’s thing are not the same. We cringe at a movie in which a basketball player mistakes sports fame for an ability to do any craft that involves performance in front of an audience. And in the same way, I sometimes worry that people don’t realize when they decide to devise that what they’re doing is a learned skill.

In the learning of my craft I have had so many opportunities to be a beginner. I had so many tiny steps along the way, small showings, little audiences, chances to build my skill incrementally. I don’t know any serious deviser that began with a full-fledged production. And I fear that those who attempt to do so will think the fault is in the medium and not in the desire to jump to the end of a series of steps in a developmental learning process. I fear people will assume that these methods new to them are not as good as the ones they’re used to without realizing that it may be because they are not as good at using them. I fear it will sour people that might be open to learning such things away from doing them successfully in the future.

I fear that not only will creators misunderstand, but that audiences will too. That they will see under-prepared, under-qualified work and think this is doing when what they are actually seeing is pretty raw learning. And I fear that because there’s no one to explain what they’re seeing it will do a disservice to the work on a larger level, make them ask for the same old “play plays” the company did last season.

I have been in devised work that did not get the allotted time or skill to be successful. And because such work demands that everyone be involved a lot more closely, I think it’s that much more painful when it fails. I hate hearing people talk about such disasters. It brings me close to saying things like, “Those people shouldn’t be doing this kind of work.”

Which isn’t totally true. They can. Eventually. If they take the time to learn.

There are actors who are so effortless in their doing, so complete in their learning that it seems like magic. It’s easy to imagine an unknowing audience member who might think that they too could simply get up and do it. But we “in the know” can see the skill, the deep learning behind what they are doing. And we can be chaffed a little each time someone off-handedly intimates that they could just step into our work with the ease and élan of that same skillful performer.

If that audience member tried to just “do” that same thing, they’d learn rather quickly how much they don’t know.

And I think that’s about the most apt comparison I can make for the itchiness I feel sometimes.

I know there are companies that will try and do it all right out of the gate. And I know that they’re not doing anything maliciously, that they just can’t see the effort that it really takes.

But still.

A part of me just wishes they wouldn’t go doing it until they’ve learned a bit more about how.

A fruitful metaphor

Something a little new for today. A sharing of work in progress.

Soon, I’ll be embarking on a week of exploration about choice, fate and living life. I’m interested in creating metaphor for things that we feel and experience every day as a way to look at them a little differently. And, partly in response to one of my challenges posted here, I’m interested in writing more.

So here’s a bit of… something. Something in the midst of becoming… something. Think of it as a step down the road. I’ll keep you posted on where it ends up.

——-

A SHORT SOMETHING ABOUT LIFE AND FRUIT

(You sit down at a table)

(You notice a bowl fill with fruit)

(Inside your head you hear a voice that is not your own. It’s a comforting voice, likely female. It is not too loud and not too soft. It is not to cocky and not too uncertain. It is simply the truth. This is what the voice says:)

On the table in front of you sit a pear, an apple, a papaya, a bunch of grapes and a plum.

(There is exactly this on the table)

They are in a bowl.

(They are)

You are closest to the plum.

(You are, literally)

You are closest to the plum.

(You are, non-literally as well)

Sometimes the plum is small and sometimes the plum is scared. Other times the plum feels the opposite. This is because it knows there is something that makes the plum very different.

On the outside it’s much the same as the rest: shiny skin, plump, waiting for what it was meant for to finally happen. It, like all fruits, wants communion, consumption, to be made meaningful. And perhaps, hopefully, yes most surely, some day it will take its secret (guarded) wish and send it on to the future. The plum wants more than just to sit and wait and rot. Inside it has something to share, something that will grow.

The plum is the only single pitted fruit of the bunch. This is the secret it carries, it’s single inner promise, one that is big and solid and palpable.

And as the plum waits, it shrinks back into itself, desiccating infinitesimally every moment, and feels this rock of expectation within: immobile, immutable, and taking up an ever larger proportion of itself.

(Silence for a moment)

The plum feels cramped. It is being pushed upon. Who can see it with so many others in the way?

(It is in fact being touched by the other fruits. Perhaps it is near the bottom of the bowl. Another fruit is picked up and eaten.)

The plum thinks, “Why must I be buried under these indecisive many seeded monsters? Why do I have to spend so much time pondering this single thing inside me? Why does it take up so much of myself?”

The plum wonders what would happen if things were different. Wonders if the grapes wouldn’t spill over so much if they too had to commit themselves to one single investment, one sturdy wish to the future.

(Another person turns the bowl and you now see a papaya, blocking the plum from vision.)

The plum is sure the papaya is the worst of all fruits.

Why must they carry with them an excess of chances showering the ground beyond their fair share? For the plum it is an excess. A greedy hunger. The plum sees this as an attack – a wish to remove the opportunity from those that would happily share the soil if only each could keep to his own fair share of land.

It’s why the papaya must be so large. It can’t help itself, holding all those seeds.

The plum imagines a life in which it too were able to spread itself thinner and across a greater number of chances.

But wish or no, the plum still feels that singular purpose, and it’s sharpness is a reminder.

– A

Criticism

One of the things that I really love about Philadelphia is the supportive nature of the community. We are, by and large, a city that prizes community over competition. I’ve had people who’ve taught me to write grants, given me tips on where to find cheap equipment, loaned me costumes, offered me innumerable rides, donated space, the list goes on and on and on. Lest we forget, there are a lot of places that aren’t like that. There are a lot of artist communities where the initial instinct is to undercut each other to get oneself ahead.

This is Philly’s superpower.

Sometimes, though, it also feels a bit like our kryptonite.

In our instinct to be kind and supportive, is it possible that we are sometimes TOO nice? Too nice in a way that isn’t actually genuine. If we aren’t willing to receive and encourage useful and productive critique, do we doom ourselves to a community-wide creative dialogue about our work that is surface level only?

There is a right and a wrong way to offer constructive observation. We’ve all had experiences with a peer or critic who speaks or writes about our work in a reductive way that focuses on a tiny issue or comes from a personal perspective that doesn’t take into account the project’s overall aim or discourse. We all have been there when a particularly nasty something comes out and seems to be there simply to wound.

On the other hand, I also find an unspoken pressure to always have a cheery, unequivocal rave response to anything I see. I feel the need to do it. And I feel it from people I see after my shows, this plastic face people put on with a giant smile and that horrid, omnipresent phrase: “Great job! Congratulations!”

When I was in college I took the simplest directing class in the world. We got an assignment and then once each week presented the work we’d been doing to the other classmates, their respective casts and the professor. It became our artist community. We learned how to talk about what the piece was trying to do, how we all felt it was doing on that front, what frustrations and exhilarations the process was offering and any other observations that might be useful.

There were times some pieces got more laughs. There were times some pieces made us cry. There were times when the work seemed super hot and others when it was stuck in the mud. Everyone’s stuff went through highs and lows and over time, you learned that one week’s success was nothing to get too boastful about because a few weeks later you were bound to be feeling lost in the artistic forest. But that openness of dialogue meant that I always felt like I was getting a real beat on what kind of responses my theater was provoking. I loved that chance to really talk and share what I was doing with people that would watch with keen eyes and interested minds.

Even after I finished that track of courses, it felt like those that I’d shared the experience with were still able to hold on to that sense of interest and honesty as we moved into new projects. I liked coming out of a show and having them ask questions about what the piece was trying to tackle and having a genuine conversation about when it was (and wasn’t) doing what I’d set out to do. In many cases, the opinions were wildly different, which was SO incredibly useful. People picked up things that I hadn’t intended or missed giant swaths of stuff that I thought were obvious.

I’ve found myself every once in a while back in a situation like this – in my voice training programme for Roy Hart, in the LAB fellowship, in a small circle of directors that make similar work – but it feels notably absent in the majority of interactions I have with other artists in Philly. More so than in other places I’ve lived and worked in. Am I alone in thinking this? I don’t think so.

Again, I think it comes from being, on the whole, a small supportive community. But like many small supportive communities, we have to be careful about gentleness to a point of over-protectiveness. I think this impulse is worrisome not only because it gives us a false sense of how our work lands with people, but because it encourages us to think about our work as “good” or “bad.” If we make complex work, that has lots of layers, especially from scratch, it’s likely that it will be neither of those things. Or it will be both. It will be “it.”

If I see a raucous comedy show and I come out with my sides in pain from laughing so hard, is that the same “good” as an emotionally turbulent sweeping drama about genocide that leaves me numb and raw at the same time? Of course not. But I do what everyone does when they see people after a show, “You were great, congrats.” Or “Congrats! What a great play.” Or “Great job. Congrats.”

At this point, the congrats/great is so ubiquitous as to be an empty gesture. It had become so devoid of meaning that I used to see any sign of anything other than complete and total positivity to be a mask for hatred or disgust. Which was crazy making. So I’ve pretty much stopped listening to comments post-show. I assume they don’t mean anything and that the comments that people have that will mean something aren’t going to be said to me. Which is too bad. Because I think I could probably use them more than whoever else they’re going to be said to. But it feels like there’s not a lot of space to hear real responses.

Congrats. Great. Congrats. Great. Congrats. Great. Like we’re all some kind of “congrats/great” artist lemmings constantly running up to friends, “congrats/great” hugging them and running away to leave them to receive the next “congrats/great” in a giant “congrats/great” receiving line.

When someone says that to you, does it mean anything? Especially when you know a play isn’t simply “great,” (maybe it’s complicated, in-progress, raw, beautiful, heart rending, personal, silly, unfinished, whatever) when it’s something that is more complex that just “great” does that “congrats” mean anything? Wouldn’t you rather that same person just walked up to you and said “I was here for you” or “I am so happy I got to see what you made.” Because, really isn’t that what you’re trying to say?

Regardless of how “good” or “bad” the thing that the person made was, you’re coming up to them because you’re saying “I support you in this crazy endeavor. I know that you, like me want to make something that moves your fellow human beings in some way. And you did it! You threw your heart and sweat into this thing and now it’s been put out in front of all these people. And I was here! I saw it and now I’m seeing you and more than anything I want you to know that I am proud of you.”

At least that’s me. After a show, when I see my artistic peers, that’s what I want to hear. Not that you loved it or hated it, but that you came and you saw the work that I did and likely you know what it took to do what I just did.

I can understand if you’re in a place where you don’t trust people, where you feel like they might undercut, where their motives aren’t in your best interest, you might not want someone’s advice or response. But this is a town where I feel like respect and trust are pretty flush. And you are a bunch folks whose real opinions I’d want to hear. Because I doubt that what I make is only great or terrible. It’s a lot of things, many of which I probably don’t even know.

I am here to learn. Most things I make are in progress. And all of them are still conversation as they enter into performance. I wish there was a way to let people know that it was ok to be however they are after seeing the thing I made – happy, sad, confused, alienated, indifferent, or pensive – and that they have permission to express that being in whatever way they can, without worrying about whether it’s great. Without needing to give me congrats. Seeing them is great congratulation enough.

Next time after a show just walk up to me and say, “No lemming?”

And then I’ll say “No lemming.”

And then you can say whatever you want.