creativity

Amateur is Latin for Love

Over the past six months my life has taken a radical shift. I went from the intensive grinding gears of two large scale projects – one a gig for Shakespeare in Clark Park in which I worked as a director for hire as wells as The Ballad of Joe Hill a work created and produced by my own company Swim Pony – into a far more predictable series of teaching gigs – a new post as voice teacher for Pig Iron’s APT, a residency at Drexel, coaching a mostly non-actor set to coach med students interpersonal skills at UPenn’s school of Medicine and directing a production of Midsummer at Arcadia.

As I headed into the summer I felt a sense of relief and apprehension. Relief that my time into September was booked with work that I both believed in and had found a way to appropriately compensate myself for. I felt a sense of pride at having booked myself solid for the first time ever with 6 months of artistic work alone while still paying a mortgage and socking away from money for savings. I thought and felt, “Finally, we are approaching a place of stasis, a solid foundation upon which a life can be built.”

And as I left the month of September, reasonably compensated, well received by press and peers and patrons on my work over the past months, I still felt somehow just a little unsettled by I can’t say exactly what: a sense that I’d done well but… With a feeling that I’d created two works of which I was proud, one that I felt was the first appropriately resourced self produced piece I’d ever been in charge of but… That I’d made shows that I think showed my professional skill, that highlighted many aspects of my expertise, plays that made me proud as a professional creator, and yet…

Yet, still, something niggled at me. The audiences were a bit timid at one. The energy not quite right in another. The joy, the abandon, the feeling, the… what? the… love.

Yes. That’s it. The love was what I felt missing. That underneath the polish and skill and work was just a little bit less love than I went into all this seeking. Somewhere in this summer of incredibly hard work and tiring hours and beautiful images and incredible ideas I was missing a little bit of amore.

Look. The people with whom I created my last two professional projects are ones that I adore. They are my core creators, most of them, the people that I will work with in many cases for the rest of my life. But something about these last two shows left me a bit cold. Not through any fault of my co-creators, but perhaps because I myself allowed myself to be swept up in the accomplishment of professionality, of the implied self worth that doing a thing at a “meaningful” level of competence and expertise did I let myself hide a little of the messy and silly and sometimes uncertain and ridiculous person that I love myself to be in a process. I doubt these co-creators would admit it, but I bet deep down they felt it.

I could not have spoken this to myself then as I do now. But I think I knew it. We all wanted a bit more of that love in our work.

So it was at this juncture that I looked into that stretch of fall to winter months with no “professional” work in sight. Here I found myself in a sea of students of varying ages and skills sets and talent levels ahead of me. It was here, with a chip on the shoulder and a block of doubt in the stomach that I set off into the wilds of “amateur” theater. I went to auditions and first classes and training session with zero expectation of artistic fulfillment, looking instead to do a decent job, make some connections, steel myself against the antsy feeling being out of “real” rehearsals. I intended to let life be simple for a bit in order to plan my re-emergence back into the “real” theater scene soon enough.

So I went to my classes with their small number of students in order to get them on board with the weirdo piece I wanted to create. I went to rehearsals to direct play that I have loathed for a very long time expecting to wade through language I could care less about. I went to work to train folks on characters and skills I have repeated ad nauseum over the last few years. I went to these things expected a heavy heart and soul. I went there ready to be frustrated with amateurism and a lack of professional rigor.

I went there expecting these things. And I found that I was wrong. I found myself, suddenly realizing that I was happier than I have been in months, possibly years. That heaviness and weight of proving myself and my worth had been freed from myself and that for the first time in a long time I have re-found a kind of love. Yes amazingly, I find myself at the near end of this time more inspired, more buoyant than I have in perhaps years. I went expecting amateurs and what I found was love.

So often we define the amateur as the absence of talent skill or training. Back in late October I read an article by Todd London about innovation in which he points out that the word Amateur comes from the Latin root for “love.” When I read this, something dropped in me. An “Ah ha” kind of moment. A moment where I realized that the amateur is not solely, as is so commonly assumed, defined as one who does something at a “non-professional” level but one who does it for no other reason than a deep and abiding love. The amateur can have no other reason for doing the thing other than the pure and true love of it, for they have no other compensation to reward them. How often we degrade it, define ourselves in opposition to it, in order to prove our own worth. How often, I realized, I myself was working, creating and doing things in so many ways simply to prove that I was most certainly not an amateur but a professional, a person worthy of time attention and thought. Worthy to be seem by foundations to presenters to peers this need for professionalism had infected my spirits. It had stopped me from silliness. It is true that over the past several months I have created things and worked with those that on almost any level one would not call “professional.” But in exchange I have found something that might be worthier still: Love.

And after months away from it there are moments that I cherish

– The act of creating ritual, silly and ridiculous and childish

– The moment of discovery for the very first time in a scene or a word or a movement

– The undaunted display of failure, the expectation that one is at the beginning of a journey, and the sense that one is not worth less because they have not yet mastered the way how to do something

This thought, this core of the work as an exploit of love has lifted me. And now that I find myself nearing the end, I wonder how I take these with me back to the land of professional living. I wonder how I take the happiness and joy and love that I have lived with over these past months back to my work and my life and my collaborators.

And were this any other post here, I’d find some way to neatly wrap all this up into a perfect bow of professional conduct and meaning. But I don’t think I’ll do that just now. I’ll leave it ragged and happy and unfinished. And just be satisfied with that.

Sad truths about art, as imparted to an eight year old

The other day I was walking to the store to buy groceries. As I approached a park ahead on my right I heard a small voice emanating from the impending entrance and soon after saw that a young girl was standing on jungle gym equipment singing to herself.

She was maybe 7 or 8, the age before you’ve honed the full sense of shame and just how far your voice can carry in public. She clearly had no awareness that any passerby might notice her as she bent over in concentration swaying back and forth in pink high tops and purple pants to an almost trance-like beat within her. She raised her head to the sky and belted out words in her tiny voice as if her life depended on it. The song, a syrupy pop devotional, proclaimed a hunger for a romantic love that was clearly far past the understanding of someone her age. It was obvious however, that she wanted, nay needed, nothing else in the world but to feel that feeling that she sensed in the music. Her little voice strained to capture the fullness of an adult’s embodiment of love.

It was absurd and laughable, this. And also inexplicably cute. And I might have simply smiled to myself and kept walking had I not noticed something else. I might have kept going were it not for something that happened at the end of the phrase I happened to hear as I passed.

As this little girl made her way through a predictable downward cascade of arpeggiated notes – “So give me lo-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ove” – she hit a stinker. In this pattern mimicked from the radio or her sister’s ipod was one big nasty note that stuck out. I turned my head for just a second as I walked past and witnessed the full force of artistic anguish in this poor little girl’s face.

And that’s when I stopped. Just past the gates, out of her sight.

She let some fifteen or thirty seconds pass in silence, just enough time for me to almost begin walking again, and then took a breath to sing the phrase again.

“So give me lo-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ove.”

Again a bum note, different this time, earlier in the progression, but unambiguously not part of the intended effect.

And from the sounds that followed I can only presume she jumped to the ground and stamped her feet in rapid alternation to the frustrated bleet of “Ugh! UGH! Gah! GAHHH! AGHHHH! I never get that riiiiight! I. Can. NEVER. GET. THAT RIGHT!!!!”

Stillness for a moment. And then crying.

“Oh no,” I thought. “You’re in for it.”

Little girl of 7 or 8 that I passed on the street who I do not know and who I caught singing bad pop songs in the on park – you’re doomed. Doomed because there’s a secret that no one tells you when you first start making art. It’s a dirty bit of knowledge those tattered survivors fail to impart on the younger set: this feeling will never go away. You think you can’t do it now because you’re small and new. And while it seems tolerable that your level of taste starts out far higher than your talent, the truth is it never quite catches up.

That feelings you have in the explicitly “learning” phases of life – the ones that say, “I know I haven’t quite mastered this yet, but I know that someday, I totally will be like the people admire and imagine have landed. Yes someday in the far distant future I know that I’ll know what I’m doing.” – you think that disappears.

Sorry, it won’t. In fact, you realize one day that you don’t ever get to get there, whatever you’ve imagined there to be. And then maybe just like now, you also will cry and stamp your feet because you feel like you don’t know how to do what you’re trying to do. Eventually, you just get better at hiding it. You might feel a little cheated that no one told you that the feeling of inadequacy that you think comes from being a student is something that not only doesn’t disappear, but grows. That feeling of faking it is something that simply become a fact of existence punctuated by glorious and terribly brief periods of belief that you actually know anything about anything. And that you too will likely hide in plain sight in front of younger artists who might even think you have landed and that you will perpetuate this facade.

Little girl of seven or eight, let me give it to you straight:

Imagine whatever you believe the end point to look like. Capture a distant island of “artistic success” in your mind. You think you can see a journey. You think you are building a boat to that island. But that too is a mirage. And by the time you’ve sailed your ship that far out to sea you’ll realize that there is no there there. There’s just you and an ever expanding horizon of what is possible. That note won’t satisfy you in the long run little one. For a moment or two, but not for a decade or more. There will be other notes you’ll get hungry for soon enough.

And were it not weird for me to presume that this tiny blonde thing needed my life coaching…

Were it not odd indeed for a professional theater director of ten years to stop a child on the street to give her advise on a life in the arts…

Were this little girl not likely to be justifiably scared of some adult woman stopping her on the street and projecting her own insecurities and fears and failures onto the song that she heard and liked and doesn’t understand but just wants to sing because she thinks it will make her feel good…

Were all those things not the case, I might have walked back a few steps and looked at her and said: “Keep trying. You’ll get that note. And by the time you do, you’ll have found something else to worry about. And that is both the loveliest and most frustrating truth of the artist’s life – that if you really want it, you likely won’t ever really believe you’ve done enough. You will have pride and accomplishment and satisfaction. But you likely won’t ever feel like you’ve arrived.”

And then she would likely have looked at me and said:

“Lady, I just like to sing. And I’m eight. And you’re scaring me.”

She’d be right. But so would I.

But because it was odd for me to do all those things I just listened to her stamp her foot and start again. I thought of my day’s own frustrations and furious workings to beg a thing that seemed so obvious and simple to please already just come into being.

And I figured best to just continue on and buy some bread.

– A

Lonely

I know that often I write about art in a general way, one that relates to most of the people working in my field, and when possible to the arts as a whole.

Today I’m not gonna do that.

Today I want to talk about being a director. And for me that can feel awfully lonely.

A few days back I was giving a colleague a ride home from an Arcadia University gig out in the burbs. Both of us have been hired by said school to direct student productions (different ones, in case that’s not obvious) for the college. And on this day when we both happened to be heading home at the same time of night we ended up in a car together chatting about the experience.

After the expected pleasant inquiries about rehearsals and how things are going, we sat in a still silence for a little bit. We chatted about upcoming works on the horizon and exchanged a few war stories about the theater scene. It was a perfectly nice way to spend 45 minutes headed home. It was the kind of conversation I have with other directors a lot.

A few days later we ended up in the car again. This time, catching up rather quicker on the status of rehearsals we were left without some of the pat topics that usually pop up. And somehow we started talking about what it feels like to be in charge.

It’s funny, it doesn’t occur to me often that this is a specific facet of the way that I work compared to the other artists I work with. It doesn’t occur to me that often, through repetition and familiarity, that many artists don’t walk into a process with that mindset. I know that when I walk in the room, I’m expected to have a plan of what we’re going to do. I know that I am the only one of my kind there to carry out the role. And I never see anyone else do what I do and therefore I have only myself to compare with.

There is a very basic power differential. The caveat, of course is that there are lots of people that try and create a sense of communal responsibility and I am whole-heartedly one of them, but it is there. And that sense of responsibility is exciting and distancing. It means you are always a few steps ahead of the rest of the room. A simple illustration: it is hard to imagine a rehearsal in which a performer or designer walked in and stated the plan of the day or one in which the director could show up and look at the others in the room with an expectation of what they are about to do. I don’t think this has to be good or bad. But it definitely is. And unless you’re a company without a director there is likely a negotiation that’s been worked out either ahead of time or during the process in which that power is defined and bounded.

However, I’m getting off topic. That isn’t really what I want to chat about. I think there are interesting questions about what might happen if we tried to change this dynamic. It might show us why that structure is so necessary or it might open up new and exciting potential. But for me, who for better or worse, is working in this way almost any time I work, it makes me realize how lonely I feel so often.

I’ve heard a lot of directors say that every time they begin a show they ask themselves, “How do you make a play again?” I thought this might be particular to devisers so it was surprising and kind of heartening to hear that those who dwell mostly in the scripted experienced the same terror. It was interesting to hear that she too re-reads her old notes from shows past to figure out how that person from the past navigated the journey from nothing to something. And I was happy and sad to see that she too spends a lot of time feeling lonely in a process.

I wonder if that sense of “how did I do this before?” is something to do with the fact that you don’t share your process in the same way. So much of what we do is before and after the rest of the room arrives and leaves. And even with documentation, it can be hard to track all the discoveries and thoughts that by necessity are shared between actors and designers and stage managers with the people they work with. One reason I so often try and go back to my old books of notes is to sense the person who was able to do this thing before and catch some of her strength.

Another strange thing about being a director, that I think may be unique to the role: you never watch others like you work. There’s only one of you in a process. Designers and actors get to see other designers and actors. They see people like themselves develop their craft. And for better or worse they have to do this a lot. And there are times when I get jealous that in doing so they get to watch and experience other directors too. That they probably know more about the particulars of other directors than I do. I sometimes ask them “What did that other person do?” not because I have some desire to copy but because I genuinely just want to know.

My sense of myself in the work is kind of like an island. I know what my terrain looks like. I know how I traverse it. And when people who’ve been elsewhere come to visit me, they can share stories of their experiences, but I know that I really have no concrete sense of what’s going on in those other locales. And while many of the directors I know get the chance to observe early in their career, there is not the built in continuation of this practice as time goes on.

When I first started in school and was just out of it, I saw a lot of other directors directing. I was in other people’s rehearsals a lot. And it provoked thoughts in me about how they solved the problems in front of them. It made me think about my process and question what I would do in the same scenario. And some of my favorites were those that were quite different from my own sense of artistic aesthetic, not because I wanted to do what they did, but because it made me really need to define why I wanted to do it my way instead. In fact, I once had a director say to me as a fledgling AD, “I love the thoughts you send in your notes. I will use none of them because they aren’t the play I’m making, but I love them.”

I learned to be a director in a room full of directors. And since becoming one, it’s been a very long time since I saw another one in the wild.

I’d like to.

I wish I had the opportunity. To watch. To listen. To observe a bit.

To travel to another island simply to try and understand the way it works in contrast to your own.

For the other

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

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

To forgo sleep over art.

To lose oneself over art.

To cry and despair over art.

Doesn’t that sound so silly and small?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe you do.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it is neither.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tectonic Shifts

Something tectonic is shifting.

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

Let me back up.

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

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

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

Here’s a bite at least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the need to look beautiful.

With the need to be right.

With the need to impress.

With the need to be known.

With the need to reach out to others.

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

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

With the need to push sadness away.

With the need to feel at home with others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a kind of divinity really.

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

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

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

Like I said, tectonic shifts.

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

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

Spirits…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gasping

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

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

Yet… There are hints to the contrary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then I looked closer.

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

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

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

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

– A

Learning vs Doing

You know that feeling when something just… bugs you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But still.

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

Digging Deeper

A few weeks ago I wrote an essay about a few reviews for local company The PAC’s production of Timon of Athens that I thought were heinously misogynist. Right after I finished, still vibrating from the anger that I felt from writing it, I went into a brainstorming session with a collaborator of mine that I really respect. And because the essay and the larger issues that it alluded to were so present on my mind we ended up getting into a two hour discussion about opportunity and success and how that works in regards to dealing with making theater more equal for “othered” communities. And I’ve been trying in the days since that conversation to put into words something that I’m wondering about.

Let me diverge for just a moment and share something: I have my mother’s last name.

And I’d like to be clear that I knew my dad all through growing up and he was part of my life from the start of it. My sister and I received my mother’s last name not because my dad was not in the picture. No, my parents were married during both my and my sister’s birth.

And yet, I have my mother’s last name.

It was a bet. The name thing. Or rather, a decision left to chance. As I’ve heard the story told my parents agreed that if the first born of my parent’s union was a boy, it would have my dad’s family name Gude. If a girl, we’d be Mackeys. And then, for consistency, all kids after that would get the same no matter what the gender.

I, as the eldest, came into this world a girl, and as such, the Mackey line continues.

It was a point of extreme confusion to many many people when I was growing up. People from school called my father Mr. Mackey all the time. My dad, for his part, seemed to take it in relative stride. (Though he did, I noticed, seem to find it a bit more annoying than the mother of my good friend whose name was different than her husband and daughter.) But on my part, it took me a long time to get why people were so incredibly surprised by this. I was in my teens before I understood how incredibly rare such a thing was.

I do now.

Something else: I’m in the midst of reading the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg that’s been getting so much press lately – so many people had mentioned it to me that I almost felt obligated. And there is a lot in there that feels like a larger parallel to some of the issues that I’ve discussed about gender parity in theater. Especially a 2003 study in the book (cited all over the internet if you want to read the full thing) from two Columbia Business School and NYU professors that showed students (both male and female) who rated impressions of a successful venture capitalist were less likely to view the person as likeable when that person was a woman. In both cases the person was respected but while success and likeability were positively correlated for men the opposite was true for women.

Instinctively, as women succeed we tend to like them less. As an emerging leader in the field, I feel this deeply in theater. The study indicates that there there’s an unspoken but present and persistent hurdle towards success for women. And while it’s not insurmountable but it’s likely always there. Which means that even if people are smart, open minded, even if they believe in equality. Even in a “liberal” art form we can have let biases infuse our choices. From within and without we have this extra bit in the way.

As my friend and I discussed my PAC review essay we both brought up Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and the study in it that showed professional hockey players in Canada are nearly all born in the first four months of the year. Researchers surmise this is because the cut off date for participation falls at the end of the year and so children born in early months are a small bit larger due to an extra few months of growth, a huge advantage at a young age, and receive attention and positive reinforcement for their successes. Their little bit of totally random age advantage is seen as a greater degree of talent even though it’s really just being born in the right month.

That study makes me depressed because it showed how small advantages seem to make concrete differences in the long run.

There’s another study we talked about, one about societal messages that influence us. This test, the IAT, measures instinctual associations between words. Here’s the site where you can take a number of such tests.

I took the “Gender – Career” test which “often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males.” In other words, how strongly we correlate a particular gender with working and another with staying home.

I understood the implications of the test and how I felt (that I didn’t want to associate male gender with work more highly than female gender). I knew what the test was testing, how it worked and tried to prove that I could outsmart it. Here’s the result I got:

Your data suggest a STRONG association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.

And on that same page with the result was this sentence:

“Evidence suggests that implicit associations form based on everyday experiences, so the daily exposure to differences in gender roles in one’s own family might be influential on how these associations form in memory – whether we consciously agree with them or not.”

That’s tough.

Consciously, clearly, I do not agree with that statement. A major part of my identity is wrapped up in the idea that I am no less capable as a theater professional, a professional of any kind, because I am a woman. I think that my success in the directing field, one that is stereotypically male, is in large part because of that belief. That success is due to the fact that I believe myself to every bit as creative, intelligent and capable as a male director.

And yet I, Adrienne – I have my mother’s last name – Mackey seem to have instincts to the contrary. Even I, Adrienne – I run my own company – Mackey seem to have that hurdle there to have to jump over. Even I, Adrienne – I’ve made a giant stink on the internet about the equality in this work field women deserve – Mackey seem to have a little voice in my head somewhere deep down that tells me otherwise.

So I stopped for a second and thought. I made myself picture in my head women in power suits sitting behind fancy wood desks typing on computers. I imagined the names Michelle and Julia and Anne on the marquees of theaters and in programs. I imagined women battling over budgets and running production meetings. And then I pictured a bunch of guys carrying babies and hugging at weddings. I imagined them sitting in houses and doing dishes. I did that for two minutes straight.

And then I thought about my name. I thought about what a small but potent message it provided me with as I grew up. And sitting here just a few days after mother’s day, I let myself be struck by what a powerful gift that last name was.

I made myself think about the fact that my name tells me that my mother’s lineage, work, identity and being was just as important to carry into the future as my father’s.

And I took the test again.

Your data suggest a SLIGHT association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.

Look, this is obviously an unscientific measure. But we’re finally getting to the point here. This is the thing I’ve been wondering about: Let’s roughly assume that most people don’t really want the huge gender inequity we see in the arts. But for whatever cultural reason it is instinctually in us to make certain biased choices that may make real tangible differences in opportunity for people. They may not want to, but they might still do it.

If this is true, what do we do about it?

I think we have to take time out to prime ourselves – give our brains a small kick towards a particular thought or idea – away from the negative directions that they’ll tend to go.

John Bargh is a researcher who has come up with a series of experiments in priming I read about in a different Gladwell book. One of his experiments sprinkled a disproportionate number of words that people associated with being old into a random word test and found people walked slower down a hall immediately afterwards. In another words that intimated demureness and quiet caused people to wait longer before interrupting someone.

In a different Dutch study (also pulled from Gladwell’s blink) people who thought of themselves as professors got 13% more questions right in a game of Trivial Pursuit than those who thought of themselves as rowdy sports fans. And students who are reminded of their minority race immediately before taking the GRE drop their scores by up to half.

So back to the conversation about the essay:

One question we debated was what you do to combat that that negative stereotype. We argued about how to deal with the difference in opportunities. Do you take an affirmative action type route? What do you do if you have an A+ play from a man and a B+ play from a woman? Which one do you put on? Is it fair to deny the “better” work? What if you hadn’t known the gender of the playwright at all?

And as I’ve thought more about it, I think that perhaps the question should just be framed differently. I think instead, we need to really ask ourselves if those grades are fair. If that kind of situation ever actually arises. Given the subjectivity of art making, can we really always trust those judgments about absolute “quality” in the first place? Perhaps, rather than assuming there will be B+ plays from women, we should take a step back and re-prime our expectations. I think we need to say that we’re not going to argue for or against the merits of doing lower quality work by women for the betterment of the theater medium because the choice isn’t that kind of either or. We need to believe we can do good work by men and and we can do good work by women. We need to start assuming that both are out there.

There’s a lot of negativity that flies around about this, on both sides. I’m not saying we never need a little angry shove sometimes to motivate – writing letters, demanding equal space, letting people know you see the gender parity – but perhaps we can also take concerted time and effort in our interactions to encourage another view.

What if every literary manager had to take a minute before reading a female playwright’s script to stop and read a short list of amazing plays by women authors?

What if every time artistic staff met to discuss a season they read a few short positive press quotes about the female driven shows that their company has produced?

What if every time a director had a role in which gender really didn’t matter and could be cross-cast they thought about three different women in the role?

What if every grant panel took a second to remind themselves that women’s work is equally important to represent?

Could that tiny thing make a huge difference?

Not because women’s work needs help. Because everyone (whether we want to or not) has a lifetime of subtle cultural pushes away from our ability to see women’s work as equal. And these little pushes back to the center might help make things fair again.

Artistic leaders, creators, and supporters are you daring enough to find out?

I hope so.

– A

On Valuing Age, On Appreciating Wisdom

I find my thoughts drifting these days to my almost three year old niece and the fact that any day now she will become an older sister. She’s decided on her name for the impending baby. I imagine is as excited as an almost three year old can be about such a thing, understanding it about as much as an almost three year old can.

I keep thinking, “Man kid. You have no idea how much everything is going to change.”

Then: “You are about to feel so grown up.”

When my thoughts drift this way, I think about how much my identity as an older sibling has meant to me, shaped me, and shifted who and how I am. My earliest memories start around the time my own sister was born – at that “almost three” age. So for as long as I’ve had a remembrance of myself, it’s included the sense that I was older and more experience than at least one person in my little world.

It had a profound effect.

It meant that even when I was a “little kid”, I was still the “big girl” in the family. It meant that I always saw myself in the light of being the first to pioneer new frontiers. It meant that I linked being older with being wiser, stronger and more powerful. Getting bigger meant I would be that much more the holder of experience that I could pass along. It became a deep value of mine, the acquisition of such wisdom, and it’s become a huge part of who I am and what I want out of my life. So I’ve always reveled in “grown up-ness” and deeply appreciated what each increasing year has given me. And I still look forward to getting older with excitement and anticipation.

Of course, there are plenty who would tell me I’m a young pup. Which, of course, I am in many respects. While many days I feel like I’ve done a lot and lived a fair amount, there are certainly times when I see myself in context of those that are ahead of me and feel young and inexperienced indeed. But unless you have just been born NOW! or are Jiroemon Kimura you always have someone younger and someone older than you. And that means that you always have the ability to view your identity in the context of being more youthful than someone ahead of you, or further along than someone behind you.

The arts in general (and the performing arts in particular) aren’t always the best contexts for celebrating experience. While we pay some token homage to great masters, anecdotally it feels to me like we tend to reward the promise in a young savant painter, the grace and beauty of a youthful dancer, and the charisma of the impish new actor far more than we do the earned and learned skill of decades long practitioners in these same mediums.

And really, that’s too bad.

I think fetishizing the early work of artists is damaging to art as a whole. Not that such young work can’t be beautiful and moving but it’s often much simpler and straight ahead than the stuff we make later on. In art as in life life, we generally learn that things that seemed so black and white once upon a time are much more complex and mysterious. Things that we held positions on in unilateral unyielding ways we start to see shades of gray in. Things we never ever believe we were capable of, both good and bad, we suddenly realize we have completed. Our creations cannot help but reflect our deeper and more multifaceted views of the world.

So though I can appreciate the promise in the early works of a budding artist, it’s usually in their mid and later stuff that I think you really discover the complexity and depth of what a creator has to offer. It’s in the complexity that you see what these makers are really made of. It’s these kinds of works that may not be so easily digestible that challenge me to be a deeper and better art viewer. It’s in the stuff that reflects all the life that others gained that I see the kind of artists I want to be. I believe we should be treating this like gold.

And I try to remember this when I sometimes fantasize about my early creation, try to caution myself from forgetting its value. I try and stop idealizing an approach and attitude that lacked the decade of making I now have and remember how easy it is to forget what was tough, rough and messy.

I’ve had the luxury of re-working shows that I started creating 3, 5, 7 years ago. And with each of them I have had a moment in rehearsal where I think:

“I am so so much better at this than we used to be. We are all so so much better now than we were before.”

Not everyone gets that chance and sometimes a slow building of skill and experience can seem to have always been there. Which is why it’s so important to remember not just what you have learned but that you have learned, that value of age and experience.

The arts are a punishing field. If you’ve lasted a while, you must know something that others who haven’t stuck it out don’t. But there aren’t enough voices out there that tell you that.

Recently, I’ve seen a number of companies with variations on apprentice/young professional programs. I’m often struck when I see them in action by the distance between the actors with years of well earned experience and where these fresh faced folks currently are. I jokingly say that I keep seeing babies on stage. Sweet, wonderful, babies. But babies nonetheless.

These lovely eagerlings are the promise of artistic potential, but they are often not the delivery of that craft. At least not yet.

And that’s a great thing, so long as the attitude of our community is that as an early career artist, the work ahead of you should be what you have to look forward to. It’s a wonderful place to be so long as you know you will be rewarded as your depth and skill and knowledge increases from here. It’s a lovely path to look ahead to when it means that someday you can turn back to the road traveled thus far with pride and not a sense of burden.

It’s important to remember.

I don’t want to be part of a profession where people don’t need to wish they were babies again. I want to be part of medium that rewards me because I want to keep growing up.

– A