art

Where are you people?

The other day I was in a room with a bunch of other arts organizations. We were all there receiving money from the city but beyond that the only thing we all had in common was a Philadelphia location and some connection to the arts in some way.

A woman came up to me and introduced herself as the director of an arts education program in the northwest area of the city. We started chatting about our work. After hearing about the great things she was doing with the kids she interacts with I told her a bit about the theater work I’ve been making. She hadn’t heard of Swim Pony (not really a surprise) or the giant Festival in the fall that used to be called Live Arts (that one I found a bit more surprising) in which I would be presenting my next show The Ballad of Joe Hill. I told her a bit about the show – its music, history and spectacular location at Eastern State Penitentiary.

At the end of the conversation she said, “That sounds awesome. I totally want to see that show! How do I find out about it?”

“Uh… Well… You can… go to my website. In August. Maybe July. Or, look… for it… Live Arts, I mean, Fringe Arts, I mean, The festival… they always have a lot of marketing. You’ll see big signs and stuff on bus stops. I assume my show will have one, I think. Or get on my mailing list. And I promise I won’t send you a lot of spam. No really. And our facebook page! Please like us. And here’s my card! Take it!!”

Does this sound familiar to you?

Audiences are weird magical unicorns.

I really believe that my work is pretty great. And I think if people knew that it was out there, a lot of them would come. Every time I do a show, especially a funkier, out of a theater, more experimental thing, the people who come that ARE NOT other artists are the ones the most enthusiastic. And there is a small core of those people that come to Swim Pony shows, sometimes emailing me to see what’s up with us when it’s been a while since anything has been presented. But these folks are the rarity. (How did I even find them in the first place?)

So when I’m having trouble funding people, I don’t really think it’s the fault of the show, but of me getting that show to the people that might see it. I think this because every week my partner and I also sit at home on Saturday and wonder where to look to find something awesome to do. And when we don’t want that to be theater, which we know about because it’s our profession, WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE TO LOOK.

The problem, I don’t think, is that there’s no one out there making stuff that’s weird and awesome. I think the problem is we spend so much time and energy making it that we can’t think about a lot else. And the super frustrating part is that right at the moment when we need to me THE MOST inwardly focused, THE MOST inside the process and devoted only to the work is EXACTLY the time when we need to be getting the word out about the thing.

And on top of that, in this time when people are bombarded with so much information, it is so difficult to be the thing that pops out in people’s minds long enough. I don’t think it’s cost. I don’t think it’s the difficulty of leaving one’s house. I think it’s getting the information that you are an interesting experience into the viewspace of that person that might come.

Facebook invites are over, yes? We all still create them, but we’re all ignoring them when they pop up in our notification tab in the upper left corner. There was a time when responding “yes” to an invite meant that you’d actually be there, but that time is over.

Reviews are no guarantee either. In fact, some of the shows for which I’ve had the best reviews of my life, I’ve had three people in the audience. One show, the first on which I spent a significant amount of my budget on a marketing firm had AMAZING press coverage and still couldn’t get butts in seats to save our life. In fact, the only times in which I’ve really had houses that counted in terms of size were when I’ve cozied into the audiences of another marketing machine: a festival, a theater company that’s been around, an event like a first Friday that’s got a built in base.

And because so few of us self producers really know how this brave new world of devising companies making a show or two a year can really keep someone’s attention, we’re all sort of schizophrenically operating on a variety of marketing platforms at the same time. We’re all trying whatever way we can to reach someone. A lot of us become PR machines – schmoozers to the highest degree constantly handing our stuff to anyone that comes near – and some just give up and plead irrelevance. A few luck into a snowball of awareness that gives some real and consistent support.

I don’t know what else to say about this other than that it is one tough nut to crack. I don’t know where to turn and it’s something that I’m increasingly aware will make the difference in my long-term success.

How do I find you people? There are a million and a half of you in the city proper and another five mil in the surround metro areas. If I could get just one half of one percent of those folks to see my show I’d have 30,000 people as my audience.

How do I get to you and you to me?

I know you’re out there.

Heavy

35.9% of Americans in 2009-2010 were considered “obese” by the CDC. An additional 33.3% were categorized as “overweight.” That means at that moment, 69.2% of the country is heavier than “normal.”

When we go to the theater what are we looking to see ourselves reflected in the stories portrayed on stage?

If so, why don’t two thirds of them look like two thirds of the country? If not, are they the images we wish ourselves to be? Or are they simply supposed to be the strongest creator available for the role, and if that’s the case, why are so many more of them than us so much thinner?

Do you notice how carefully I’m wording things here? I do. Have you noticed that I haven’t used the “F” word yet? I do. It’s hard to write objectively about this. This is such a tricky subject. It is so sensitive. But it dominates so thoroughly the vision of our stages that I’m going to stop dancing around and just say it:

It is hard to be a fat actor.

It is hard if you are not fat, but a little heavy. It is hard if you aren’t fat but could be and fear becoming so. It is especially hard if you are a woman.

There might be a few reasons that don’t point toward malicious bias. Heavily dance or physicality based works are going to require a higher level of physical strength and endurance and result in a larger expenditure of energy. While that does not exclude a heavier performer, I think it makes some logical sense that you’ll get a higher proportion of people who are thinner, which is probably somewhat correlated to long days of exercise and physical activity.

Being fat might make it harder to do your job… maybe. But it might not. And I think it’s rarely the full reason that certain kinds of roles are off limits to certain BMI’s.

Because that argument just doesn’t fly when it comes to a lot of theater. It is possible to be in tune with one’s body even with “extra” weight. And if the performer doesn’t limit themselves, why do we limit the roles that are open to them? Why are we instinctively so nervous about seeing certain shapes do certain things onstage? Are we grossed out, worried, upset? What is it? Forget the gender gap, the racial paucity; I defy you to find me a show full of “fat” actors in Philly. You will not be able to.

If you are doing Grapes of Wrath and everyone is starving, fine, I understand. But show me where it says that Emily Webb from Our Town has to be skinny. Yet I’d stake my savings that 9 times (or more) out of 10 the thin girl gets the role.

Look, I don’t pretend to be objective here.

I have a long and complicated history with weight, one that has spanned both ends of the size spectrum. At 13, I probably weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 or 190. I don’t really know, because I didn’t go near a scale if I could help it. My grandmother used to chide me with reminders like, “Fat girls don’t get married.” An aunt once remarked, “Adrienne eats like it’s war.”

By my own admission, I was not happy with my body. I hated it. And to compensate I retreated into my brain. I was at war with the free and uninhibited person I felt like on the inside and the tight, closed off and frustratingly clunky form I had on the outside. Which was why late in my 14th year my mom intervened, told me that she loved me no matter what but that if I wanted, she would help me develop a healthier set of eating habits.

Which I did. Sort of.

That summer I started paying attention to the things I put in my body. I stopped housing bags of Doritos absent mindedly. I started exercising on a consistent basis for the first time ever. I learned to really enjoy cardiovascular work outs. I realized that it helped allay my natural tendency toward anxiety. I felt better. I liked how I looked. I was proud of myself for doing it.

Then I went back to high school. I felt so much better, I was so much more excited to be seen. I got the only female lead, as a sophomore, in the first play of the year. I was bumped into a higher level choir and auditioned and was selected for the state competition. I got a boyfriend, which I’d never had. People suddenly paid attention to me. I got friends in the older kid crowd. I felt on top of the world. The change was so sudden and so total and so completely timed with the shift in outward form that it seemed impossible to extricate the experiences of that year from the process of losing all that weight.

The truth is of course not so simple. Yes my outer self had changed, and because of that I allowed more of the person I really felt myself to be to shine through. All the confidence and brazenness and smartness and silliness I always had suddenly seemed like it had a venue to be shown. I had just finally given myself permission.

But of course at the time I associated my new-found creative and personal successes with being beautiful. And I associated that beauty with being thin. And so when I had to wear a bathing suit onstage, I lost another 15 pounds. And when I played Wendy in Peter Pan and was told to try and look younger, I lost another 10. It became a game, the weight loss. One that I assumed would just continue to result in rewards, in a better and better version of myself.

I would go out with friends and eat watermelon for dinner to save on calories. I worked out a couple hours after donating blood in 90 degree heat. (PS, I didn’t eat the cookies). I was obsessed with food and thought about it ALL THE TIME. I fixated on my “big hips” which I couldn’t do a damn thing about because I had whittled them down to jutting bones. I want to look back at 18 year old Adrienne and say, “You actually can’t workout your way to a smaller pants size if you have a wide skeletal pelvis. Maybe put some of that energy into learning your lines.”

At my thinnest, I was somewhere around 104 or 105 depending on how much water I’d had that day.

I’m 5’6” by the way.

And that was the point at which my mom said I was done losing weight. If you consider the standard BMI measurement useful (which is super questionable) I started just on the cusp of officially “Obese” and plummeted down well below “Underweight.”

I got over it. College food helped. Learning to love weight lifting helped. I work hard to focus on feeling strong, quick and agile rather than simply thin.

This blog isn’t an autobiography. And I don’t bring up this story for sympathy, though I bet many people reading this who can sympathize. But my story is not the same as many others. There are people who are beautifully in tune with their bodies regardless of their body fat index. Who are graceful and flexible and could be called fat. In fact just this afternoon I was talking to a friend who said that gaining a bunch of weight after having a kid helped her to realize that her creative talent wasn’t dependent on her staying small.

The point is that I felt able to embrace and believe in a fuller vision of myself as a creative person when I thinned up. Until that point, I’d always loved theater. I participated in middle school and my first year of high school. I’d had lovely, nearly transcendent, experiences. But I didn’t believe that I was eventually going to be one of those seniors that got out front and center. Based on the things I’d been cast as before – Mrs. Hannigan, the mom in Music Man, Golem in the Hobbit, ensemble member in Godspell – I figured I’d find a niche in the strong character roles that I’d seen other heavy girls play.

When I came back that summer lighter, I was so upset that they’d switched the fall play from Arsenic and Old Lace to a Neil Simon romantic comedy. I knew I could kill at those funny old ladies I’d been practicing all summer. But it didn’t occur to me that my lovely voice, passion for acting and intelligent incisive attack of text could put me front and center.

I couldn’t be a leading lady. Not if I was fat. And in my head I still was.

I auditioned for that show’s sole female part – an ingénue role – with little expectation. But during the audition process, I began to realize that people saw me differently now. And no doubt, the confidence that blossomed that show, that year, had to do with the fact that for the first time, I believed myself capable of ANY kind of role, ANY kind of creation. I could make people laugh or cry or sigh. I felt like I had control over my creative destiny. And I assumed all of that had to do with the new exterior through which those things were expressed.

I believe with every fiber of my being that there is no way I would have gotten that part if I hadn’t been thinner than the year before. And some days I really wonder if I hadn’t lost all that weight if I would have believed in myself with the same vehemence and confidence. And without that, I wonder if I’d have bothered continuing with acting, found directing and do what I’m doing today.

Two thirds of people in this country are “heavier” than “normal.” How many of those people do we see on the stage? How many stories do we tell that can include that perspective? And more importantly, how many kinds of characters do we unconsciously limit the size of, regardless of the actor’s ability to embody the role.

When was the last time you saw a heavy Juliet or a pudgy Romeo?

I’m left with lots of questions and not a lot of answers. Is this inevitable? Who’s driving it? Why does it happen?

And if it bothers us, what can we do about it?

Context

The other day I spent my lunch chatting with a group of apprentices from Interact and then immediately went and had a meeting with a soon to be graduated student from a small liberal arts college. In both cases the conversation centered on navigating a career as a maker and producer of theater. In both cases I had plenty of concrete advice about resources to look for, things that I had tried in the past and either found successful or not, and how to keep a hold on the reasons one starts making art in the first place. I found myself repeating this phrase a whole lot:

“I’m not sure if it’s like this everywhere, but I know that here in Philadelphia…”

This combined with the recent discussions in relation to grad school and collaborators has me wondering how environment affects our work. A bad rehearsal space can hinder creation. An underwhelming performance locale can limit the scope of one’s imaginings. But what about a city? These smart young women I met last week have all had to weigh the question of context. They are all in the midst of deciding if this city is fertile ground from which to plant their artistic seed/selves. And I started thinking, “Why?”

Why Philly or why not? What does this city have to offer an artist and how does that offer change as they grow? I started to think about how I have been shaped by the place in which I now live and create my work. I started wondering how the daily backdrop of Philly and the people within it have made me the artist I am.

I’m interested in what questions a city can raise. What thoughts and ideas does it bring out of us? How does being here in particular color us as creators?

For the record, I didn’t intend to live here. I moved to the east coast for school and always thought that eventually I’d go back to Chicago. Somehow everything in the east coast cities I visited felt like it had a little less breathing room than back home. My family was there and at heart I felt like a Midwesterner. People here seemed a little harder, a little more closed off. I didn’t want the scale and exhausting competitiveness of New York. Boston seemed too small and insulated. And Philly was… a little off-putting.

I knew very little about this place before I came here. In college the entirety of my sense of the city was limited to taking the R3 from Swarthmore and bumming around South Street. I thought Olde City was cute but small. I had a few bewildering encounters with Fringe shows. I capped every expedition with a wait for the train in Market East. In short, my sense of the whole place was a bit gritty, a little dated and a lot dirty.

I see it differently now. That one-year gig after college turned into more. I grew up a lot while being here. I found a strong and supportive community. And something about this place now feels like a familiar if sometimes frustrating kind of home. So here I am. But going back to the initial questions – what influence does the city have on its artists? If it had gone another way, would I still be the same?

So for those new folks, looking to weigh the city on its artistic-potential inducing merits, here are a few observations:

Philadelphia feels like a small city, at least artistically. “Philadelphia County” is listed 5^th most populace US city. We’re bigger than Dallas according to 2010 census data. But I don’t think most of us think of this place as having a big city feel. The areas of Philly you move within are likely rather confined. It feels like a city of neighborhoods and we tend to stay loyal to the areas we inhabit. The artistic community in particular feels small. This can be great to be so familiar, to watch people grow and change, but it can also be limiting, difficult to be honest in critique. With the web so interconnected each shake or tear carries more weight.

This place feels like a family in the best and worst ways. It is hard to define oneself entirely out of context of the artistic family members that one is surrounded by. Sometimes it feels like funders are like parents with only so much love to go around. As a second generation experimentalist there are times when I feel like a second sibling who will always be in the shadow of those who came on the cultural landscape earlier than myself. I can’t help but wonder about those that will come after me. Will they have any room?

Philly is a place of genuine artistic fraternity and support. The arts are where the real brotherly love lies. I have shared stories with friends of mine in other communities about the help and mentorship I have received here. They are often jealous or astonished. No one can believe me when I tell them that things like Artist U are free. I have been amazed at the kindness of those ahead of me in sharing their knowledge, skill sets and literal stuff. It makes me want to do the same. We are a familiar folk, we Philadelphians, and in general we pay it forward and want to love and support each other.

We are also a city with a lot of history and legacy. It creeps into works in small and big ways. We employ a lot of theater folk in our historic cultural centers. We make stuff in sites of history. We have stuff that’s older than most US cities. There have been lots of “Philadelphia”s – from Ben Franklin’s to Rocky’s. We are still figuring out how to blend them together both in life and our work.

We are a relatively cheap city that feels like it’s on an economic upswing. An artist can own a house here. Let me repeat that. An artist can own a house here. Do not underestimate how radical that is to people living elsewhere. You can get space for cheap or free. There’s a bit of breathing room in a city that isn’t so expensive. People are easier with giving things away. You hustle a lot less. Art is more of your actual income. And at the same time, it doesn’t feel like that is at the cost of the city falling apart. Even in the midst of the worst housing crisis, many neighborhoods (mine included) have not lost property value.

There’s that Quaker thing. Maybe it’s because of my Quaker college that I feel so aware of it, but I do think there’s something about the large presence of Quakerism in the early history of this city and the quiet witness it continues to bear here that raises a sense of consensus and social justice in its people.

In a similar vein, we are a city surrounding by academic institutions. There are those obviously in its borders (Temple, UPenn, Drexel, Jefferson, PCOM, UArts, St. Joe’s, Pierce, La Salle, University of the Sciences, PAFA, Curtis, Moore, Chestnut Hill, CCP) and all the ones within the city’s reach – Villanova, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Haverford, Arcadia, Rowan, Rutgers, Ursinus, Cabrini, Eastern (I know I’m forgetting some). This is an insane number of schools. And all these are places we create our work, teach, attend and learn from, make money at, borrow resources from, use the libraries of, connect with students from. Whether you personally work or study you are still the beneficiary of the many intersections of these institutions with the arts community.

Philly is dirty. What is up with all the trash? In both 2011 and 2012, TRAVEL & LEISURE put Philadelphia in near the top of “America’s Dirtiest City” list, for having the most unremoved, publicly visible litter, selected and voted for by both magazine readership and city residents. What does that do to our sense of aesthetic? How does it change our relationship to beauty in our work?

Philly has a higher than average rate of crime for a city our size. As sensitive people, we take in our environment. Ask most artists and they have multiple stories of witnessing or personally being the victim of crime. That stuff can’t help but come out in one’s creations and the more it happens, the larger it weighs in your work.

It takes a long time to get anywhere. “SEPTA. We’re getting there.” Is this the most unintentionally accurate slogan ever? And given the small size of the city and the high number of artists that use public transport, this matters a lot. I think it holds us back as a metropolitan community. I think makes our city seem less professional and unapproachable (as do we, its artists, by association). I once had to give an NYC playwright friend directions on taking a Philly bus. Just one, in a straight line from the north part of 4^th street to the south. I had to make sure she had two dollars, exactly. I had to promise a bus would come to the directed corner even though no sign would indicate such. I had to tell her to go 10 minutes before the schedule said because you can’t trust what’s printed (but then it might be 10 minutes late, sorry it’s cold outside). Thank god she didn’t need to get from south Philly to the Museum district.

We are a city with a deep racial divide. Last April I was lucky enough to be sitting in the “grantee” section at a Knight Arts. As I flipped through the book of other winners I noticed another listing for Theater: $20,000 for GoKash Productions to expand the Philly Urban Theatre Festival. It amazed me that here was an award winning company creating original works and an ENTIRE FESTIVAL that I had no idea existed. I thought it amazing that such a company has survived without support from the traditional funding sources and, as far as I know, with little support so many other small companies enjoy from the larger theater community. There’s been a lot flying around the major theater blogs recently about how get people of color to the theater. I thought of GoKash. They’ve already done it. How many others companies like them are out there? Why are they disconnected from the community I am connected to? What is my responsibility in that? More recently, as I gathered data for my women in theater posts, I noticed a trend, especially among larger companies, to produce a single “diversity” play in a season with a relatively small (if existent) number of actors of color throughout the rest of the year. I thought a lot about how I feel about all women shows – incredibly protective of their importance but at the same time nervous about being set apart. Racial division is a backdrop to our lives. How can we become smart and aware about its influence in our art?

It’s not as easy as you’d think to be a solo creator. Though we have a lot of them, solo creator artists don’t have the easiest time. The funding structures in this city are pretty company (aka non-profit) oriented. Despite a few high profile grant programs, we are overwhelmingly deficient on residencies and grants for individuals. Most foundations won’t let you apply until you have the tax exempt status and a certain level of size. There are precious few folks past their 30’s still making their own work without having gotten the 501 c 3. Which means in general, if you want to make your own work in Philly you not only need to be a creator but a producer as well. This is not the case everywhere else. We are in desperate need of curatorial institutions. Yes, we have Fringe Arts. And they do a lot. But we need more than one voice. Where are our PS 122’s, La Mama’s, and HERE Arts spaces?

We have some crazily bizarre liquor laws. Alcohol, like it or not, is a huge part of how most people socialize. I’m going to guess that’s even more true for the coveted 20 – 30 something age range, one that theater in particular has a hard time reaching. Imagine a band in a place where no drinks were served. And while some people get around this, I think that it cuts out a huge social lubricant and money-making avenue for smaller theaters (who could never afford the insane liquor license fees) to access.

And finally, when I step back, I see that we are not actually one artistic community. We aren’t even just one kind of theater community. There is a dividing line in town between the generative artists and the interpretive ones. Between “straight” theater and devised. Between the experimenters and those who find meaning in tradition. But as different as we are, there’s an open curiosity that I see around me. What I like about Philly is that this division is, as the cell biologists say, a permeable membrane. I’ve found real growth in interacting with actors who have never written their own lines before or created a scene. It reminds you to questions your assumptions. I’ve learned a lot by jumping out of my usual role and ADing a super “play play.” And as I grow, I find that more and more useful, to seek out opportunities to watch how other people do what they do. And there’s a trust and respect that Philly fosters that allows that to happen. And if there’s anything that’s kept me in this place, that’s it.

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.

Potential Energy

Can I admit something?

When I was in middle and high school I used to want to cry when I saw Country Time Lemonade commercials. Little Debbie sometimes also got to me.

There was a long time when I couldn’t really articulate why. But every time that farmhouse with the grandfather and little kid sitting on the porch staring off into the sunset came on, I’d start to well up. They’d stare out into the sunset drinking from that frosty yellow glass and I’d start to get this panicky feeling like I was losing something. This anxiety would rise from my stomach into the back of my throat until I could actually taste the lump like acid.

Those commercials are intended to elicit a false nostalgia to make one wistful. Ostensibly we could catch a glimpse of the former simpler time by buying some over-sweet juice mix. I saw that purpose behind the scene played out. I knew what they were doing with that lens fuzziness and sad music. Still, it just made me sad. Really really sad.

If you asked me why I was upset I would say, “It’s Sunday afternoon. That commercial just makes me think of Sunday afternoon.”

I don’t know that anyone in the commercials explicitly says that the long angle sunlight porch sitting is taking place on Sunday, but in my heart I knew it must be true. It just felt like a Sunday, knowing that this moment couldn’t last, that everything was about to change. And not simply any Sunday – end of the summer Sunday, Sunday just before school starts.

This is what Country Time was doing: Making me face the end of potentiality. To confront the idea of perfection with the reality of what actually is.

If you’re thinking, “What are you talking about?” let me put it this way:

Friday afternoon has always been a symbol of everything in life that is possible. On Friday afternoon in high school, one could feel the tangible finish of a long week’s work. One had earned the right for mystery and intrigue of the weekend. Friday night held the possibility of infinity potential energy. In those intervening days before Monday morning, I might create an amazing piece of artwork, I might get far ahead on my studies, I might go on an adventure with friends that I would never forget. I dreamed about Fridays because I loved the idea of standing at the precipice. It was the blank canvas about to be brushed with the very first stroke of paint.

On Friday evening ANYTHING was possible and in a strange way, imagining all that potential it almost seemed like ALL of them might be achievable. I didn’t really even need to do any thing, I just liked the idea that I could.

Sunday is the opposite of Friday. Friday is the promise of perfection. Sunday is always a let down. Sunday is the time when you look back at the weekend and compare what has happened to what might have been. It’s a bit of an impossible demand on Sunday to live up to all those Friday maybes, but I did it nonetheless. It was a rare Sunday afternoon that I took stock of the rehearsal, family outing, or friend hang out that I’d taken part in and found it to be as big and full as the mirage that Friday had dangled in front of me.

Sunday afternoon is especially desperate. Unlike the evening when one has finally acquiesced to buckling down and working on through to next Friday, Sunday afternoon one can’t quite let go of the weekend. It is like the last ravioli in what was once a beautifully full bowl of delicious pasta. There’s so little left of what you once had, and once you take this last bite, it’s all over. Sunday afternoon still leaves me staring at a pile of work left undone, knowing that it must be finished in the next few hours, and resenting it for jailing the last remaining freedom that the weekend holds.

That Country Time commercial made me cry because I felt that is said this: Life ahead is a promise of infinite potential. Life lived is an unsatisfying catalogue of the actual work that one has gotten down and done. It made me confront my mortality. It made me feel small. It made me imagine that I could do many things, but I couldn’t do all of them, and I probably would do many of them imperfectly.

As a product of German and Scandinavian heritage, one thing that both of my ancestors share is a drive to work hard and be productive. There are few aspects of a Midwestern upbringing that I can specifically point to as an obvious influence on my art making, but this one I know:

I need to feel like I’m making progress.

I need to believe that hard work will make me better.

I want to have done a job to the best of my ability. I want to feel that I have made good use of my time and that I’ve been productive. In friendship, in artistic work, in love, I want to be moving forward. And to move forward with progress one needs to believe their best work is still in front of them.

But is it? Is the best yet to come? Or am I sitting on a porch with grandpa?

I know that sounds melodramatic. But I do think that my most radical notions, my most openness to truly new ways of thinking feel like they are harder to hold onto as I age. I fight it. Hard. I consider and weigh these questions often and to me it is the way I make sure I am still doing the hard work. But some days it just feels like the potential energy of my earliest questions about theater are slowly dissipating with time. It feels like I need another height to lift it up to.

It feels like I need another Friday.

Is that a new art form entirely? Is it throwing away most of what I know about how I do things? Is it picking up a new canvas so that I have to start over?

I don’t know. But I want it.

I want it badly.

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.