Process

Ownership is not the same as owning shit

What does it mean to own our creative work?

Is there anyone out there who hasn’t had a moment of green rising proprietary “back off what’s mine” sensation when seeing another artist doing something just a bit too similar to something they have already done?

I have. “That was my idea.” I’ve said that a lot. In the last month. More than once. So trust me, I get it.

Our creative work feels like it is of us. It feels like a piece of us. And when someone seems to takes that piece, even if they change it up a lot, even if they interpret it differently, we start to feel a little nervous.

Why?

Is it because that new version reflects back on us in ways that we don’t want? Is it because we fear that they might do it as well (better?!) as we did? Are we scared that people will see this new version of our thing and forget that we got there first?

A bit of all of the above, most likely.

Most of my artistic career I have spent copying other people. Often wantonly and shamelessly. Ariane Mnouchkine, Julie Taymor, Joseph Chaikin, Dan Rothenberg, Whit McLaughlin, Jon Stancato my college boyfriend, Robert Johnson my high school director, Tracey Servé (née Deerfield) my best friend at 16. All of these other people’s styles and humor and tricks were things I vacuumed up and spun around inside of me and spat back out into new forms.

Early on I loved Mozart’s Magic Flute and Greek mythology. In retrospect I see this isn’t simply because I had a natural born affinity for the finer classical things in life but because I happen to get to see my voice teacher in the chorus at the Lyric Opera and because my 6^th grade teacher had a bangin’ unit on the Greeks in which I happened to seriously dig on Hera. These are influences that planted in my forming brain and stuck there. So when I happened to get around to making some shit myself, it’s not surprising they dislodged and informed the things that started coming out.

At the time I had no sense of how the work came out of me, it just came. And as I started adding layers of influence, the studies in college, my own research, the new people I met and the things they had to say, it felt like my work kept getting richer and richer. All through school this trend continued and it felt like everything I saw could become part of the work: every word, every line of music, every movie, every image. These all had the potential to change how I thought about the things I was making.

And then a few years into working professionally, I made a show that I was really proud of and that show got a review and that review had a sentence or two that mentioned a couple songs I’d used and it was clear that they felt like I had no right to take this music and use it for my own purposes.

It sounds pretty naïve now, but it was the first time it ever occurred to me that I had to be careful with using other people’s material.

This is a tricky thing. There are times when we take the work of another and we do something to it that the original author might feel perverts the original message. That’s a tough thing. It’s tougher when we are farther and farther from the sources we appropriate. There’s a kind of cultural colonialism that can leave a bad taste in the mouth. This is something I think each artist needs to wrestle with. What is the story I am telling and why am I using this source? Only you can decide if you feel like you are doing so responsibly. Only you can decide if you are qualified to own that shit.

In this way, I’m glad to have become aware. I think it’s good to think, so long as it does not paralyze. It’s important to imagine how your interpretation of another’s creative output will affect you and them. Owning your inheritance is part of growing up as an artist.

But in another way, one that I think is quite separate from this first way of seeing ownership, I think we start to see our work as a commodity that we control.

The funny thing about the devising process, for me at least, is that it is a medium of association and collage. And the more I know, the more I start to see that every idea at some level comes from somewhere else. And the more I start to try and limit myself to the things that I can conceive of without “stealing” from another artist or person, the more I start to despair that any new work is possible.

I think that maybe there is no such thing as new ideas.

Lady M is Roy Hart voice on Shakespeare’s text and a lot of choral movement work I see in other directors

SURVIVE! is Radiolab mixed with a video game with Pay Up with Neal deGrasse Tyson.

Joe Hill is Hill’s folk music and Eastern State and historical re-enactment

The Giant Squid is “What if I mixed H.P. Lovecraft with Steve Zizou and site specific staging?”

These works feel the most unique to myself and my company. And they are all nothing more than a mash up of other people’s stuff. Everything I’ve ever made is just a mix of elements from other places that happens to come out in the particular measurements that are unique to me. And really, how else could it be? Is it really possible for anyone to have a totally unfettered and brand new idea? Really?

And if the idea of ownership and copyright were to continue to its logical end wouldn’t every combination of words or notes or movements at some point in the future become property of someone else? Creativity is a process of impulse and intuition. It is a process of meaning making in which we create image, story and metaphor by combining things in new and unique ways. That’s why we see other people’s theater, that’s why we study the masters as students. Because we want to learn and pick up things from those that have gone before us. We are supposed to be inspired by other people’s work. But I guess not too much, or too obviously.

Not enough so that you can see the raw materials we’re drawing from.

But isn’t that just the difference between an awesome piece of art and a mediocre one? Is the awesome piece of art really missing the same set of inputs that come from outside of themselves? Or is it just transforming them in a way that makes us astonished and awed and not really care where it came from, because of its so obvious newness in its combination?

There’s an article out there that I read once about how inventions arrive when the culture as a whole is ready to receive them. I’m too lazy to look up the exact link right now so you’ll have to take my word for it. But this makes sense, no? No one is going to create a light bulb until electricity has been invented. And similarly, a specific series of notes might not be possible until the culture of jazz or blues or funk or whatever has arrived to usher our ears into wanting to hear it.

It starts to feel a little arbitrary saying “This is mine” or “That is his” when really, we might both have never arrived there without the discoveries and forward motion of a million tiny pushes before us. People talk a lot about the kind of omnivorous consumption of influences in Shakespeare’s text. I wonder if such a writer could exist today…

This is why I think that taking ownership is different than owning our work the way we own a car or a book our house. Our work is a living, changing, shifting thing. It has meaning only in so much as we share it with others. And in sharing it, we need to know, need to hope!, that it’s going to matter enough to someone else that it’s going to stick in their brains and reappear and come out when they too start making shit.

I know it twists a little something inside when you see a character that looks just like the one you made. I know it hurts a bit to hear a melody that sounds too much like yours. These words and sounds feel like ours. But they aren’t. Not really. They came to us by virtue of the artists before us. If we’re truthful, if we really take a hard look, nothing we create is truly and totally our own. I don’t believe it can be possible.

And if we can give ourselves up to that, I think what we do is put the value on the expression of the idea, the form and context of the words, and the performance of the sound, rather than the thing itself. In doing that, we put the value not on the art but on the artist, on the producer and not the product.

Anyone can come up with a good idea. The trick is to execute them with brilliance. That’s where the real craft comes in. And ultimately that’s the value I want to create in the world: my worth as a maker, one who takes ownership over the influences I include and the messages I create of them, one who then freely gives that to anyone who’s aching to take it up so that they too might do with it whatever they will.

Project: Write your own eulogy!

You know what sometimes makes me a little sad?

If you ride SEPTA you know the strangely accented woman who voices the stops on the Broad Street line. A couple years ago I became hyper aware of the particular announcement she gives just before the metal entryway slides shut and the car starts to pull ahead:

“Doors closing.”

Think vaguely Indian mixed with British, every time just as you are about to move on:

“Doors closing.”

I don’t know why, but I always have this tiny existential sadness slip into my heart when I hear that.

“Doors closing.”

Now when I make a big choice, one that feels like it’s going to determine the course of life for the next month, year or beyond, I think of that announcement. When I hit a major milestone I hear it too. Sometimes, I’m just sitting there thinking and I realize that at one point I thought I wanted to be a doctor and now I teach actors to fake illness for them instead. I think about whether I could, if I had the inclination, turn it all around and still go after that medical degree. And I think, maybe I could, but I probably won’t.

“Doors closing”

That announcement rings in my ears often, reminding me that I’m about to do (or already have done) something that will dedicate myself to one path instead of another. It’s a wistful thing, but not an outright depressing one. This is the price we pay for depth of experience, this loss of the breadth, yes? But it’s still a pinprick of wondering what might have been, if I’ve made those other choices.

Too often, I think we see ourselves in this direction, from beginning to end, thinking only of change as a series of losses we incur. Too little are we able to imagine ourselves in reverse, looking back at the slow gathering and gaining of life. Would we do things differently if we knew better which path we want to be on, which doors we should be perfectly happy to let swing shut as we speed on by to our goals? This is for our careers, our artistic lives, but of course our artistic lives are inextricably entwined with our larger selves as well. They don’t all move ahead in step but shift forward and back in tandem creating the momentum for the overall direction we take.

“Doors closing” is sad because it reminds me I don’t have forever and I’m the one to make the best of the time I still have left.

Here’s a project for today: write your own eulogy. Take 20 minutes to imagine the kinds things people will say about you when you’re gone.

And don’t just write what you think might be possible based on where you are now. Write the fantastical “you” that you want to wish into being. Write about the art you want people to say you made. Write about the family you want to have been surrounded with. Write about the places you know you want to have seen, the people you want to have met. Write about your work in a way that makes you think proudly, feel flamboyant and believe in a future unchained by any expectations other than your own.

And then when you’re done, type it out and save it somewhere safe.

This is your map.

Let it rest for a few days or a week or even a month and when you’re ready take it out. And start to think about the distance between here and there. Plot your course. Do it concretely. Give yourself an estimate of time and fuel and direction and cost. Think about which doors you need to walk through and which ones you might even need to pry back open. Think about detours and tolls along the way that might pull you from the straightest path.

Know that you can always still get there, you just might have to be craftier.

Then think about all the routes you’re wasting energy on holding onto.

And if you don’t need them, let those doors close.

PS – Full disclosure: I’m stealing this from Creative Capital’s wonderful strategic planning workbook. But I think they won’t mind. And I hope you’ll enjoy.

Seven hours

I have an aunt and uncle who are professional artists.

I have vivid memories of being a little kid and having sleepovers at their house. Almost all of those sleepovers included a trip downstairs out of their living space and into the studios they owned in the same building. Walking through those two adjacent rooms, seemingly filled to the brim with potential and possibility, I can still feel the part of my younger self that looked around in amazement and thought: “Woah. This is what ART with a capital A looks like.”

In this room we created beautiful things that I was genuinely proud of. Miniature paper dolls of myself and my sister that we dressed in wild and colorful handmade clothing. Bottles covered in extra bits of mosaic tiles that we designed, glued and grouted ourselves. Bas-relief clay carvings that we snuck our initials into that went into a real life public sculpture park on Chicago’s Navy Pier.

Surrounded by the incredible sculptures of my uncle’s nestled on every flat cabinet top or file drawer I developed a sense of how artists lived. Amidst the wall-sized design plans for my aunt’s next mural, I found myself thinking, “This is the kind of life I want to lead someday.” Art was never a distant concept to me, it was something that one moved through and existed within. It was a place one created for themselves. I sensed that there would be a time when I too had a room full of potential-ness that I would go to every day and create new and exciting things.

This was my idea of how art worked: You were inspired and you spent time playing and laughing and creating something would cherish for years to come.

My aunt, I now see as an adult, is also a serious academic and a leader in the national discourse on art education. My uncle not “just” a creator but the executive director at a leading public art non-profit. They are both deep thinkers about the way that art works integrate with the community they exist within. They are leaders in their fields. In so many ways I see them as I see many of the people in my own artistic niche that are a generation ahead of me: They are the people who have made the communities that I (and those like me) became part of. I thank them for it. I appreciate their immense efforts.

But…You knew (you had to know) a “but” was coming.

The thing is, when I was a little kid and I talked to my aunt and uncle about making art, all we talked about were colors and shapes and beauty and feelings and making. When I started seriously making work as a teenager and early adult we talked about ideas and influences and impulses. Now as a “career” artist roughly a decade into my work, almost all we ever talk about is professional development and money.

I wonder in retrospect what those two rooms was like when I wasn’t there. I wonder how often the spirit of freedom and play that I felt so strongly was still present when I wasn’t around.

Let me back up for a second.

I know this isn’t news to anyone. I know that it isn’t even a new topic to this particular blog forum. But it’s still the thing that continues to confuse and bewilder me.

How the hell do I keep the art in my artistic career?

I remember a few years ago this guy from NYFA, a nationally recognized fiscal sponsor organization, came to Philly and offered free one on one coaching sessions. I signed up and was encouraged to bring in questions that I wanted professional advice on. I think that what I was supposed to ask where things about taxes and health insurance. I think that’s what this guy was prepared to help with.

But I know that I can look up more info on that kind of stuff. By that point, I felt confident that if a business type problem arose I was capable of solving it. Not that it’s always easy, but at least it’s usually pretty concrete. There’s information listed on the internet about these things. Effort-full, yes, but in someways blessedly defined. And the truth was, I already had no shortage of the “business” side of stuff to do.

What I really needed guidance on what the panicky feeling that I got when I looked at the amount of time I spent actually making the work. Especially compared to the amount of time I was spending doing all the other stuff it seemed the work required. It was to the point where there were days that I sort of wondered if I even knew what making the work was any more.

What I asked this guy was, “How do I stop my administrator brain from ruining everything? How do I keep enough hours of artistry in my theatrical business?”

He looked at me quizzically and said, “You mean, how do you make sure you have time for your studio work? Uh… I mean… Just do it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not understanding what you need help with. Scheduling? You could set up a calendar…”

The total unhelpfulness of his answer blew me back a little bit. I wanted to yell at him and say, “Really, buddy?! You have no idea what it feels like to have the business side of art start to eat up everything that you used to devote to creating? You’re telling me that it’s just as easy to find the energy to make stuff as you used to? The answer to how do I keep motivated is ‘Just do it.’ If so, I guess I’m just crazy then.”

Apparently, this guy had a similar experience with a whole bunch of Philly artists that day.

And then a really really tense info session following that.

It’s about as close as I’ve seen collected Philadelphia creators come close to a mob riot.

This past weekend during a round of auditions for The Tempest, even under the stress of time, I was struck with the sensation of how much fun it was to spend time with these actors and these scenes. When I made myself relax a little and stop worrying about auditioning “right” and really just have fun looking at possibility, I started to see how the play could become so many interesting variations on itself. I started to love the different versions of the characters people created and started to note all the little additions and interpretations they brought. I wrote down dozens of ideas that struck me or lines that could potentially open up in new ways I hadn’t imagined.

At one point it struck me that I was actually thinking artistically. It struck me how much I was enjoying myself and how long it had been since I felt that.

And then I went home and wrote a bunch of emails following up on 1099 tax forms, looked at the grant plan I created last week, thought about how behind I am on sending info about another set of auditions coming up, about prepping for 3 separate presenter meetings, the new class I need to promote so I have a teaching gig next term, the grading I need to do for the class I’m teaching now…

The list goes on.

With it out in front of me, I see that all the things on my “artistic” to do list are not art. Following up on funding, seeking new sources of income, thinking about how to use a new intern effectively, laying out budgets and schedules, even when I have figured out how to pay myself for the admin time, even when I’m diligent about not letting these thoughts infect the rehearsal room when I finally get there, I still find myself overwhelmed by a lack of time I have for the work itself.

We artists are constantly bombarded with “career” advice about updating websites, polishing work samples, cleaning up mission statements and promoting ourselves in the various medias social. There are so many lists I’ve made of people I ought to invite and promoste my work to. I think we all get a lot of professional development advice. And the people who tell us to do all these things aren’t wrong. These things are important.

But we need to remember that they are not the work. They are tools, useful ones, but they cannot be the focus. They are not the work. They are work. But they aren’t the work. They are effortful and time consuming and attention demanding. But they will only matter if you remember that your work is thing that creates the need for them and that they are extra and will be only useful if they support of that central core goal of art making.

It’s got to be a daily mantra. You have to keep reminding yourself. Your work is the work. And if the other stuff takes a few years more to get in gear because the work is still the work, well, maybe that’s fine. The other stuff will get there. There’s always time for that. The thing we most cannot afford is to lose touch with the thing that drives all the other things.

We have to make time for it.

The funny thing is that now, as an adult, I have a room in my house like the one I always imagined. I wake up many days with an open calendar and room to laugh and create and grow as I always imagined I would.

But I often don’t. Sometimes, I feel like I have forgotten what the room is for.

And when I think back to that guy from NYFA, misguided as he might have been, I think there was a weird kind of truth to his “calendar” statement. In fact, I’ve been thinking lately about how transformative it was for me to know that I had to commit the 60 to 90 (120, 180) minutes a day towards writing in this space. Now that I am not officially “required” to write something it is a choice each day whether to write anything. And I wonder if it isn’t time to actually require creativity every single day.

I wonder if it’s time to force myself to make a commitment to even just an hour every single day of some creative effort – researching, writing, sketching, conversing, whatever – that moves my theater work forward in the same systematic and “professional” way that the money and administration seems to require.

Maybe it is time to set up such a calendar.

So I think I’m starting with 7 hours. An hour a day. 7 hours every week that go into written form on my schedule in the same way meetings with producers and grant deadlines do. Because if it isn’t as solid as that meeting, how can it stand up?

Efficiency

Quick note : for those interested in the women in theater conversation there’s more coming your way. I am trying to get some more data together and want to also include some thoughts about the data that I’ve already put out there, so stay tuned later this week for that.

But for today: Something I’ve been thinking about lately is efficiency.

On some levels one could say that theater isn’t efficient at all. There’s nothing easy about creating work, in fact the easier the work is to create, the more rote or robotic, the less I personally tend to be interested in it. This is efficiency for efficiency sake alone.

This is not what I mean when I ask, “Can we be more efficient?” No, I am asking if we can be more streamlined in the path to the goal we strive towards. In other words, how can we be most efficient at the need we are sating?

And to do that let us first ask: why do we do it, what is the base need to create artwork? I think it’s something to do with our own necessity to express and the need of others to listen. We are telling stories, making music, and moving bodies and in experiencing those things our audiences uncover something about themselves. It’s like a communion of infinite variety – magically shifting the experience of one into the bodies of many.

On one level, the standard four week process is rather efficient, isn’t it? We all know what to expect, when things will arrive, how the art will progress from start to finish. There are, of course, deviations but there is a kind of simplicity in knowing how the process is supposed to work. But is it efficient at delivering this communion? Does this process get us closer quicker to the ability to give a piece of ourselves with those that might take it in?

I don’t know.

Increasingly, in this time when many theaters are losing funding and audience base, I hear stories of shows with rehearsal process that are condensed to three (two?!) weeks of rehearsal. There is this way that we say, there’s simply less room, less resource, less money, so we have to be more efficient with our time. But. But. But… Is it? Is it more efficient? We have shortened the time we take, we have lessened the money that costs, but have we made ourselves more efficient at the ultimate goal? Many days I look at that model and wonder if there’s actually a palpable difference in the outcome. Or is this simply a more efficient means to create something?

I don’t think so.

I think we can feel the difference. I think the audience can too. Even if they can’t articulate why, I think they just know when someone has just started working out a first good idea instead of the third, forth, eight, tenth, deeper and more realized choice. I think this kind of efficiency gets the “job” done, but to what end? I think it prizes the output over the process. I think it makes the external trappings of the product the parts that we place the most value on.

Naïve. Simple. Dreamer. Call me what you want. You can tell me that I don’t know what it’s like to work in the “real” world.

But I wonder if we all have to define “real” art in the same way. I wonder if we haven’t all deluded ourselves into accepting a much narrower definition of our form than is necessary.

When you started creating theater, what was the context?

Was it in a flashy space? Was it with hugely expensive surroundings? I doubt it.

If you’re like me it was in a class in a basement without any stuff. You fell in love with that first moment you saw an actor really transform into a character. You swooned a bit when a designer took a single light and flashed it across a wall in a way you’d never seen before. You adored the director that first changed how you thought about a scene. One found grandeur in such tiny things, and that somehow in all this nothing, something was able to emerge. It is in the midst of this dingy room with its banged up chairs that we find our capacity to create.

And that, I think, is the real efficiency. It’s that with nothing that is tangibly expensive or valuable we create beauty or pain, feelings that are deep and real and genuinely meaningful. We make something so real out of things that are so obviously made up.

The traditional stage with set and lights and sound and costumes and velvet curtain and seats and air conditioning, and lobby and box office – is it efficient?

I don’t think so.

What is theater? Ask yourself. Is it a script? Is it character? Is it telling a story? Is it moving people through space? Is it visual splendor? Is it interplay of light, sound or object over time? Is it some combination of all of these things?

If you know what theater is to you, then ask yourself if you are getting there most efficiently?

Is that other stuff getting in the way of actually getting to the real thing?

Is that push towards “professionalism” actually pulling you from making the thing you desire?

Is it possible that theater is at its core something more basic, more internal, more directly accessed than we’ve made it out to be? If so, can we be brave enough to do it more efficiently? Can we shed some of these trappings for efficiency’s sake and preserve what is most needed?

The past few months, I keep thinking about this question, about whether I could take all that money I spend on building things that I will tear down in a few weeks, and instead create something in a space that already exists. I wonder if I need to budget for all that stuff. I wonder if anyone would even miss it if the work was good enough. It seems so much more efficient. What if I could create a theatrical experience in which the audience interacted directly with the performance? What if I didn’t even need “actors?” What if I could put a “play” into a box and hand it to someone? Is that possible?

I don’t know.

But I feel like I need to ask the question. I feel like I need to find out.

Are you climbing up the mountain?

There’s this thing that my friends and I used to do in college while we were eating.

“Oh my God, I am so fucked right now. I have a biochem lab write up and a Theatre History paper AND I need to read three chapters for sociology.”

“Well let me tell you that I am so f-ed right now because I have to do the Theatre History paper, memorize two scenes, complete three comp sci projects that are all past due and I have an a capella rehearsal until 10.”

“And can I just say how totally and completely screwed I am because I have a poly sci exam tomorrow that I haven’t even started studying for, a 10 pager for linguistics, the Theatre History paper, the scene memorization, two rehearsals and I said I’d tutor my roommate in French for an hour.”

This can go on ad infinitum.

There was a perverse glee with which we detailed and enshrined our over committed-ness. It was pandemic across the student body. It was our mascot, this looming specter of the impossible tasked to us. We wore it with pride the way we might have worn out maroon and white had we been a school with more traditional means of displaying pride. (Perhaps it’s why something as lame as “The Garnet Tide” was allowed to continue into perpetuity. Really? The Garnet Tide? Though, for such an extremely liberal school, a vaguely menstrual symbol of our collegial devotion is also sort of fitting. But that’s a side note.)

Anyway, in thinking a little deeper about the writing that I did last time I was in this space, I was trying to suss out the exact difference for myself between useful frustration at one’s limitations – the kind that leads to progress and growth – and shame and anger that pulls one back and gets in the way. I started thinking about that habit, one that I took to so easily along the route of higher education. And I started to realize how this parasite of “I am so fucked” has found itself quite a number of comfortable hosts here in the artistic community.

How many times when you talk to people about their work do you hear them bemoan their over-full schedule with stuff it sounds like they aren’t really excited about? When was the last time you asked someone the dreaded “What are you working on?” and received a calm and happy, “Just this one amazing project that I love”? I notice in myself a weird feeling of not enough if I answer that I am simply doing one show for months (years!), rather than rehearsing one, finishing off the run of another, while prepping three for the next coming months in the span of a few weeks.

Why is that?

To be sure, there are financial pressures that force us to do more than we ought. But if it were money alone, why are there are an awful lot of projects that I see people take on for next to no pay or exposure? Projects they don’t even like. Projects that they seem to refer to with disdain.

“If you hate the work and you aren’t really getting any money, why are you doing this?” I often want to ask.

But I don’t. It doesn’t feel like my place to tell someone that they seem to be making some pretty artistically self-destructive choices. And who am I, with my measly one or two projects a year, to say anything at all?

What if we all took a step back? What if we all tried to cull the herd and take on things that really serve at least two of three purposes – artistic growth, making money, or real enjoyment.

I used to have a day job that was just a money job. I hated it and it felt like it was actually making me stupider. It was also really easy. And over time, I realized that even if this job paid me double, triple, ten times what I was making, I would still resent being there. And that’s when I quit.

I’ve also had artistic projects that felt like they were so fulfilling and so happiness inducing that I would find a way to make time to make them happen even if I had no cash. So I kept doing them, because they feed enough of the other parts of me at that moment to make the little money worth it.

Sometimes we start things because we love them and they make us happy, and we forget to check back in and see if that’s still happening. Like any relationship, the way that you are when you first start seeing someone/something has to change over time. A job that at one point in life was a real step forward, ten years later might feel like a step back. That only makes sense. But it’s tough in the moment to remember that, that sometimes we outgrow the things we once wanted.

Here’s the image that I have in my head. (PS credit where it’s due – I first started picturing this image for myself after hearing an amazing speech by Neil Gaiman from a commencement at UArts). Imagine the artist you want to be, the life you want to lead. That life is the top of a mountain. With each step you take, are you going up the mountain or down? Are you getting closer to the top, or walking away? Even if the thing you’re considering seems like a good idea, is it still getting you closer to the peak?

If it’s not, why are you doing it?

Coming back to the original thing for a moment: Taking on too much can be a way to distract ourselves.

If we are so busy that we don’t have time to stop and think, when we are so busy looking at the road just in front of us and hacking through the brush just to move ahead, it’s actually easier in some ways. We don’t have to evaluate choices. The work to get ahead is so strenuous, so effortful, that the prize is simply moving forward, having done it at all.

That forward motion may be exactly what you need. Or not. You have to look at the mountain to know.

When I was in school, I had a moment where I realized that by committing myself to a Chemistry thesis, a devised acting piece, an original directing work, a voice recital in four languages, not to mention the choice to shed dorm life and learn to pay bills and cook my own food all at once, I was giving myself an out.

The out was this: If I do all of these things, no one of them has to count.

If my concert was under prepared, that was only understandable, as clearly I had no time to rehearse. If my thesis was a little sloppily slapped together, well that’s alright, because I was balancing so much else. If I wasn’t the actor I imagined, that was because I was too busy not because I didn’t really belong on stage. If I paid my bills late, who could blame me, no one else in my peer group was acting like such an adult.

All these things together meant that no one of them really reflected back on me. Their shortcomings were the limitations of my time. Their successes were the “real” me.

As a life long perfectionist, this has always been a struggle – finding ways to keep hold of this “real” me fantasy. But these days, when I have actually set up my life in such a way as to actually have that stuff, the time and money, I find myself strangely more bottled up than ever. As I found ways to have more control over my life, it was more difficult to keep pretending that given infinite time and resource I would someday make those amazing things that I kept promising myself about.

I think it’s because there’s finally no excuse. There’s not much left between “real” me and myself. And it’s hard look at the things you’ve done and say, “That is the best I could do.” Not because I was busy, not because I was under funded, because it was actually just the extent to which I was capable. This is why we (definitely me!) procrastinate. Not because we are bad. Because we are scared that we might be less capable than we wish we were. So we over book and over commit so we never get the chance to measure the “real” thing, and so we can keep the fantasy.

The times when I have most found myself climbing down the mountain are the times when I was afraid to come up short. They were the times when I let myself be measured by other people’s expectations (and hated them for it!) because I feared myself incapable of succeeding by my own. The times when I have most despised theater and myself in it are the very times when I’m carrying all this crap I didn’t want, when it feels like it’s holding me back, like some kind of gravitational inevitability. That time and energy were conspiring to keep me from my best self.

There is a real sadness in giving up the idea of the “real” self, and as Americans I think it’s especially difficult. We live in a culture that teaches one to dream, dream, dream. BE YOUR BEST SELF, we are admonished. And while I am all for dreaming, the flip side of that tendency is get so comfortable with the imagining of one’s best self, that we never actually bother to get it. You have to give up the ideal to make something real.

I think more likely, more often, the thing holding me back is me. Me struggling to be ok with being less than perfection.

Owning It

There’s a great quote that starts one of my favorite books about the artistic process – Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland – that goes like this:

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

– Gene Fowler

The book is a pretty straightforward and unsentimental view about art making. It talks about how much of your output will be ignored (“Virtually all artists spend some of their time – and some artists spend virtually all their time – producing work that no one much cares about”) and the various ways we set ourselves up for self-sabotage. What this book also says is that the only way to get better at making work is to make a lot of work. As they say, much of your output is there simply to “teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

I like the idea that when I make crap, it’s not just crap, but crap that builds a bridge towards something else that is not crap. Then at least the crap is useful. And I need that crap to feel useful. Why?

Because I live, work and create in a shame-based economy.

It might not seem like it from the outside, but if I’m really being truthful, most of what I do is to avoid the pain of looking like an idiot. That awesome rehearsal plan didn’t just spring happily from my mind. It took the spectral terror of being left with nothing substantive to say in front of the room to make it come into focus.

People have asked me why this writing project was something I wanted to make public. I might, if I’m being cagey, tell you that I sensed a lot of people were feeling the same way I was.

True. But not actually the truth.

I do appreciate the people who’ve responded to what I’ve written. And I love hearing from you all that these struggles are shared. But the real reason I am writing publically is to shame myself into getting my ass in gear to put words on (virtual) paper on a regular basis.

I do things like this when I know I need a kick in the ass. When I decided I had to leave my day job at NBOME, I wrote a post-it that I affixed to my computer with the date. I gave myself one year from that post it to get out of that job. And then I told everyone I knew about it.

Why? Because, like I said, I live work and create in a shame-based economy. I knew if I kept telling people about the post-it, people would remember to ask me about it. And when those people asked me about, that feeling that I might not get it together to find some other, more sanity inducing, way to make money would surface. I did get nervous that I would disappoint, and I figured out a way to make life happen without the work that was making me miserable. And 4 months before the post-it deadline I left.

If I know that someone will think less of me, if I think that someone will perceive me as failing, I work harder. It’s why I love structure and clear evaluative systems. It’s easy to know if you’re staying ahead of the curve if it’s clear what wrong looks like. I spent a lot of my education in high shame-potential situations. I committed to more than seemed possible. I tried things that I saw other people do a lot better than I did and then held myself to their standards. Once in a while I felt a little insane. I beat myself up about stuff a lot. I was also really productive and found myself doing things I never knew I was capable of.

You might say that this is unhealthy. You might be right. Heck for a really long time I felt a lot of shame about feeling so much shame. That’s how deep it goes.

So for a period of time after school I worked really hard to remove all the shame inducing motivators and gave myself huge swaths of freedom for my art to wander through. I stopped comparing myself to people who had more advantage or resource. I kept things a little closer to the chest so that stuff couldn’t be critiqued until I decided it was ready. I wanted to give my art room to blossom on it’s own, without that fear of failure looming over me.

And while I was in the middle of doing that I noticed something:

I wasn’t making or doing anything I cared about.

I had tried to force myself into a place where I acted as if I didn’t need to care or listen to that niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach when I didn’t do anything creative for a few days. I had convinced myself that the ambition and failure terror weren’t linked. And I was semi-successful for a little while. Until I looked at what a life without one of my biggest motivators actually left me. And that was something I wasn’t really all that excited about.

And then I started to feel bad about that.

Oh, old friends embarrassment and remorse, you’re back! How I missed you so.

I’ve come to terms with regret and shame as ways that I learn from my past mistakes. Just as the impulse to jump too deep into the pleasure pool can get one’s life off track, so similarly can overwhelming feelings of mortification cause one to block their creative selves. But no one sane advocates for the removal of all of life’s pleasures. So maybe we can leave a little room for the negative emotions, so long as they help us get where we’re going.

Thinking about this I recall a thing that I always tell my students when they first start working on their voice. I say that there is no such thing as a “bad” voice, only voices that do what you need them to, and voices that don’t. The voices they have were developed from a style and set of communication patterns that helped them, at some point, achieve something.

High pitched and squeaky? Maybe it helps you to sound small and cute.

Low and monotone? Perhaps you need to show the people around you that you have emotional control.

The point, as I tell them, is that these patterns emerge when doing these things a lot offers some kind of reward. It’s efficient. And there’s nothing wrong with a sound if it’s doing what you need it to. The pattern only becomes a problem, only gets called a bad habit, when you decide you want something and the voice you have gets in the way of doing that. When the natural voice you have developed is something you can no longer control the way you want to. Flexibility is the key.

Whether it works for you is what actually matters.

“Ugly” voices aren’t bad if they’re useful. I think “ugly” feelings can be viewed the same way. Some of my best work has come to me when I have felt my worst. Which is different than saying that I need to feel at my worst to get anything done. For as long as I can remember, shame has been a strong motivator. Sometimes towards good things and sometimes not.

So the question isn’t, “Can I remove shame from my life entirely?” because from what I’ve lived so far, the answer will be no. Instead:

How do I use and shape the natural impulses I can’t always control towards a healthy and productive life?

There’s another saying in the Art and Fear book that I really love:

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

– Stephen DeStaebler

I write this blog knowing that other eyes will see it.

Because I want to be culpable.

Because I want to be exposed.

Because I want to increase the pain of not working.

It’s already worked, clearly, because I’m still here.