work

The Ballad of John and Jen

When I started writing on this blog, it felt like I was pouring out a lot of the things that I had been feeling for a long time. The first posts were thoughts and arguments I’d been having a lot – internally with myself and externally with others – and were pretty well formed in terms of their reasoning and logic by the time they went onto (virtual) paper.

In the last few months, however, things have slowed. That’s partly (perhaps largely) due to my busier schedule of work. But I think it’s also because I’ve started to dig deeper into some of these things, I’ve begun to get at the stuff under that stuff. I’ve started to get at the things way down that one may not really realize. When you really start to pull apart your choices you start to see the unnammables that work on you, the things that you didn’t totally even realize were there. When you get down into the real muck of it, this stuff is less formed and harder to parse out. You start to pull apart shit that is often much much trickier to unravel and reason through.

I think this might be where some of the real scary stuff is.

I think this is where the less polite stuff is.

I think this might be where people could get a little upset.

But I think this might be where some of the real work is. And I think this might be the place where you start to tackle the issues that really might make a difference. All of which is to say that this post is coming back around to some of the women in theater/gender parity stuff. This is a first step at trying to dig into the muck.

Let’s begin with the truth: we have some major work to do. Even those of us with the best intentions aren’t really fixing this problem. Those of us with cursory intention are likely perpetuating it. We can blame the theaters that continue to produce plays with way imbalanced seasons. We can bemoan the writers that continue to create the plays. We can lament the market for having a glut of women. We can do all these things. But it isn’t going to get us anywhere. And if we actually want to get somewhere we have some “money where our mouths are” choices to make.

Backing up a bit: I had an argument back in mid-April, right around the time I wrote this post slamming a few Philly reviewers for their presentation of women in Shakespearean roles. This argument, one that had seven months ago is still picking at me and has been ever since I had it. It would randomly surface in my head in the middle of rehearsal, while driving, watching TV, I just couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let it go because at the time I had it I was trying and failing to say something, something that I felt with incredible force and vigor and anger and fullness, something that felt like it implicated me and in the way I make choices about my work, and frustratingly was also something I felt totally unable to articulate.

The argument was a sweeping one, the kind that starts with a couple offhand comments and ends up gobbling up an entire afternoon. It was the kind of argument you can only have with someone that you really trust, because you actually start to uncover defenses. It was the kind of argument where you talk about the things you believe deep deep down inside about yourself and the world around you. And my sole caveat here is that it’s totally impossible to try and reconstruct all the things we said. But basically, it came down to this hypothetical:

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

In the moment of the argument, it felt like I had no choice but to argue for the latter. It felt like a mission from on high. Like my entire life depended on making the case for that female playwright. That there was something deeply stacked against her. That I was the only way she was going to get a chance and if I couldn’t find a way to make that choice seem reasonable and obvious to my argument partner that she and no female writer after her would ever get it.

Which of course I failed to do.

And of course there are (and were) many reasons one could counter the position I took. Rational, reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful positions that we went back and forth and back and forth about. I almost ended up in tears because sitting there I felt so torn between the opposite side’s reasonableness and some kind of irrational deep down feeling that said there was something very wrong about taking a side other than the one I was on.

Neither of us could be moved. We left it unfinished.

But as I said, this question and the debate that ensued has continued to stick, continued to hang out in the back of my mind, needing to come to completion. It’s been this nagging incomplete thing trying to resolve itself for seven months now.

Over time, small details begin to accrue:

An review for a work of my own in which women played “men’s” roles

Writings from the dear Katherine Fritz

A book on the virtues of affirmative action

And then finally this: a study in PNAS about gender in the sciences that both control for and show statistically validated evidence of bias from Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues at Yale. It was this last one cracked something open that I can hopefully finally start to put into words.

Here’s an intro from Sean Carroll’s blog for Discover:

Academic scientists are, on average, biased against women.

I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.

What the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.

With me so far? I swear, this comes back to the arts.

So half of the applications were Johns and half of them Jennifers. What the findings showed were that the faculty members rated John significantly more “competent and hireable” than an identical female applicant named Jen. These participants also selected John to receive a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to this male applicant.

And the real kicker? It didn’t matter if the faculty member was male or female. Both were “equally likely to exhibit bias” against Jennifer and viewed her as “less competent.”

A depressing graph:

How about another?

In her great Scientific American blog post about this study, Ilana Yurkiewicz appropriately writes:

Whenever the subject of women in science comes up, there are people fiercely committed to the idea that sexism does not exist. They will point to everything and anything else to explain differences while becoming angry and condescending if you even suggest that discrimination could be a factor. But these people are wrong. This data shows they are wrong.

The thing that stuck with me about this study, maybe even more so than the disturbing results themselves, is that, as Yurkiewicz points out, the scientists didn’t view gender as a factor in their decision-making. They thought they were using objective data for their assessments – rationally reasoned, non-gendered arguments – to determine the strengths of this particular candidate for this particular job.

I’d bet my house that were I to get into argument with those interviewers of Timon of Athens that the points they would have countered with would been rationally reasoned, non-gendered arguments. And my point is that just because you don’t obviously act like a sexist or consciously espouse anti-female philosophy doesn’t mean it isn’t working on you. And even the benefit of experiencing that disadvantage is no shield from inflicting it on others.

Does anyone want to guess about whether I think this pattern might be found in other contexts?

If it can happen so sneakily in something as cut and dry as the representation of skills on a job application with the exact same credentials but a difference of –en versus -ohn at the end of a J…

If there are forces that bias us against thinking that a woman is as capable and intelligent as a man in doing a job in such a carefully crafted scenario of objectivity…

If that can happen in a field whose express purpose is to remove bias from its methodology…

How can we possibly imagine that we can create object assessments in all the incredible number of variances and nuances and details about what makes a better work of art?

So of course if you knew for one hundred percent sure that you were absolutely judging the work objectively then yes yes yes yes yes you should absolutely pick the “better” play. But I what I’ve come to finally articulate these seven months later is that I just don’t believe there is anyone in the working world that can honestly say that they can do that.

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

The problem isn’t your answer to this question. The problem is that this is how the question seems to always be framed. And I don’t buy this scenario is really the one that any of us is objectively encountering.

So when I hear “It just turned out that way,” I’m calling bullshit. When I hear, “The season line-up just ended up male heavy,” I’m calling foul. When I see foundations that just “happen” to be given to a majority of male-driven companies, I’m not going to say “Well that must have just been the applicant pool this year.”

We all know the odds are already stacked against women because we see it manifest all around us. And while the scientist in me wants to document and collect all the evidence I can to try and display this finding to the world, the maker in me says I need to find a way do something about it now. I don’t have time to wait for a fix. I don’t have time for more research. I’m making my work right now. And there’s no thinking theater artist I know who would truthfully declare gender wasn’t an issue on the general scale. Where we break down is whether we are willing to acknowledge that it’s happens in our own personal choices.

Intentionally or not, like it or not, we are all making a million tiny anti-women decisions and justifying them with million other reasons. The troubling implication from that PNAS study is that we not only judge women’s past work less fairly but that the bias impedes the potential for future opportunity. And without opportunity we are less likely to create new examples in which people can start to see anything different. Every performer or writer or director knows without a chance to make anything you can’t get better at making things. Even if you wanted to work way harder to achieve the same perception of success it’s going to be way harder to find the opportunity to do so.

And here’s where I’m going to get honest with you all.

I think a lot about this. I try very very VERY hard to root this shit out at the source. But I know I do it too. I wish I didn’t. But it’s just… in there. And were I able to somehow analyze my seemingly objective rational non-gendered artistic decisions I bet I’d find that I too have subtly undercut women in my process or in the field as a whole. Though I might not see exactly how those predisposed biases slip in, I know am not immune. And neither are you.

And in knowing that, I have felt myself at a cross roads where it seemed like I was asking this question:

If you have a slightly better male artist and a slightly worse female one, should you pick the worse one to help achieve better representation of female artists?

And increasingly, over the last decade of my career I’ve forced myself to do the thing that felt, in some vague and hard to define way, the slightly less artistically “right” choice because I believed it was the better moral one to make.

Just so that I’m totally clear about this:

I’m saying that I have steered projects in artistic directions that I might not have otherwise had I not cared about making a less imbalanced world through my theater. I have often picked the slightly “worse” artists because I believed it was the morally right thing to do.

And I do it constantly. I do it on projects ALL the time. Not just on the ones where it seems obvious. I make myself go against my gut in lots of choices because I think it’s better for theater as a whole.

I don’t often don’t say that out loud.

In fact, I don’t know that I’ve said it to almost anyone before now.

And part of the reason for my artistic public persona – my warrior-queen-who-get-all-the-grants-and-deserves-them-because-I’m-a-badass-take-no-holds-creator stance – is to show that despite doing this you cannot impeach my creative process. I want to demand that people acknowledge my artistic worth. And I do that because I secretly fear that people will see what I’m doing and think less of the work. Because deep down in the muck I fear that most people think women are not as artistically capable or that their stories are not as interesting.

In the past I’d get really hung up about it. I’d worry that I was losing my sense of artistry in order to make a point. And though I still believed it was worth it, I fretted about the cost.

I used to think that I was trading quality for principle when I did that.

Now I’m just going to think, “Jennifer.”

Perusing the outcomes of those choices here’s what I find: way way way more often than not, the person I picked was able to bring something to the table that was tangibly better. For obvious reasons, I am not pointing out specifics here but suffice to say, when I went with that slightly non-gut choice, I was often rewarded back in spades. And even when I wasn’t, if I could remember to view the failure in context of the qualities of the artist’s work and not simply their gender, I almost always saw that the real issue had little to do with them as women.

I’m not saying you have to pick terrible performers. I’m not saying you can never work with who you want. But I am saying that creative worth is totally squishy. I’m saying that we make artistic assessments for all kinds of totally ridiculous reasons. I’m saying that the way it’s usually is done is a massive amount of momentum pushing you towards a choice. I’m saying that we’re probably wrong as often as we are right about how a collaboration or an artistic impulse is going to work out. That failure is built into our creative growth. I’m saying we might as well start being “wrong” for the right reasons.

I’m saying that if you do this for a living, you have to know that so much of the time the difference between two options in the scope of a whole process doesn’t mean that much in the long run. I’m saying the difference between “really good” and “just a little bit better” is likely negligible. And perhaps not actually there. And even if it might be, at a certain point, the artistic benefit no longer justifies the outcome.

I’m saying if you’re at all considering a chance to give the opportunity to a female voice or person or story you should do it.

I’m saying if you actually care about doing anything about it, you have to do it. Even if something is pulling you away from it. Maybe especially then. Because that thing that’s pulling is ugly and dark and mean. And it hides in reasonable arguments’ clothing, it hides in gut reactions we don’t quite unpack. The only way to exorcise it is push in the opposite direction. Even when it seems strangely hard to do so. Even when it makes you feel a little funny. Activist-y. Moral high-ground-y. Like you’re doing the wrong thing-y.

Trust that you’re an amazing artist. Trust that this small push in the other direction will not harm your work. Know that it is a better thing for the world to have done. And see that your work is no worse off for it.

And then perhaps we can start actually getting this shit fixed.

– A

You can

Is it just me or do people seem tired lately?

I don’t mean standard issue Festival post-partum malaise. I mean an industry-wide heaviness that is seeping into a majority of the conversations I have with people these days. A lot of people seem really weighed down, overwhelmed and ready to cut and run. I’ve been thinking about this weight, the sadness I sense in others and creepingly in myself. I’ve been thinking about how to tackle it and where it comes from.

First, a story, or a confession rather.

About a year ago, I was on the relationship rocks. Not through any kind of infidelity or betrayal. No, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with my partner and I. That said, through nit-picking and bickering, through the penumbra of apathy and assumption that LTRs can sometimes attain, I’d found myself in a place where nothing felt particularly right either.

I was bored, I felt trapped and I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted my future to look like.

The long and short of all this was that I had to ask myself some hard questions. I had to be honest about whether I was actually living the way I wanted to. I had to really own up to whether the choices I’d made were ones that I really wanted to continue with.

Basically, I had to decide if I wanted to stay or I wanted to leave.

Here’s the thing: as scary as that realization was, it occurred to me for the first time in a long time that I had a choice in the matter. Having to contemplate the very real possibility of not assuming the things I had would always stay that way meant that I really looked at them closely.

And for the first time it occurred to me that some of them were things I really didn’t want to lose. And it also occurred to me that there were things I was doing that were not making that terribly easy. In the midst of this very dark time I had to look at some choices I was making and some habits I was holding onto that were working against some of the things I professed to want. Contemplating whether I really wanted these things kicked me in the ass a bit about getting in gear to go get them.

Another confession, while this was happening in a lot of areas of my life at the time, the LTR I was really most worried about was with my identity as a creator.

Look.

We’ve all found ourselves in the midst of a lot of work that we don’t much care about for, work we don’t really even seem to like. And in those moments it’s easy to say to yourself, as the proverbial Talking Heads saying goes, “How did I get here?”

I, clearly, didn’t throw in the whole towel. But I did throw out a few things and I gave myself some mandates on what had to change. I decided to let go of some things that were making me tired. And I decided that when I get to the end of a project, as I have done just now, I’ll have to think not only about what the outside world tells me in terms of whether the work is good or bad, but whether it’s making me happy, whether I’m really doing what I want.

Another full disclosure: I really liked working on The Ballad of Joe Hill. There were a lot of great things that happened for the show.

But I’m pretty sure the Festival wasn’t the right vehicle for the piece.

…

That’s hard to write.

It’s hard to write because I spent years courting them and building my reputation as a creator worthy of presentation. It’s hard because there’s a measure of success that comes with being presented by a big name. It’s hard to write because without something like the Festival, I’m on my own to find the people I want to see my shows.

But I still think it’s true.

I’ll give the required caveat: I really appreciate everyone that came out to see Joe Hill. A lot of people really responded to the work. I am thankful to them. I appreciate them. I am happy that they came.

But I still don’t know that they are the people I wanted to reach. And I still don’t know that I totally achieved what I set out to do.

That’s even harder to write.

But I still think it’s true.

What I set out to do what get people that might never see a “play” to come and see this thing that I made. I wanted to find the folks that are a little rowdy and rough around the edges. I wanted to find the people that are into a dare, a risk, a potentially strange, dare I say, unsafe experience.

That’s what I really wanted. Because that was the promise the 2006 version offered to me all those years ago when I first made the show. That was the LTR that I signed up for: an off-road practice of the theatrical experience. A chance to honestly and actually shake up an artistic medium.

What I wanted out of Joe Hill was to get actual NEW theater audiences into the seats. To pave the way for a future definition of theater and theater audiences that are more in line with the ones I want to make.

And I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t get that this time.

Which doesn’t take away the success the show did achieve on other measures of success. It doesn’t take away the pride I have in what I made. But it also doesn’t excuse me from what I really want.

And unless I want to end back up in the heavy place, I need to keep reminding myself of that, and I have to be honest next time I start thinking about where I want my work presented whether it’s going to have a fair shot at getting me where I want to go.

See, there’s nothing wrong with failing. But you have to be honest at the get go about what the goals are and whether you’re really working towards them. And when you aren’t, you have to be ruthless, even when it’s hard, about pointing yourself back towards the where you want to head. This is the divining rod we all carry around in us as artists, that magnetic pull that tells us whether we are truly inside the truth of our work. And sometimes fear or failure or poverty or allure of praise can push us off that course. Sometimes a compromise isn’t a bad thing. But there are times when it isn’t what we really want and we can feel it, deep down, when when it’s actually at odds with what we really need to be making.

Look, if you’ve already made it as far as a life in the arts, it’s pretty clear that no one is forcing you to live any way but the way you want to. Last I checked, there was no theater artist acting with a gun to their head. And the bold, startling, scary but ultimately empowering truth is this:

No one in the world will be a stronger advocate for your work than you will be. No one will better articulate and know what you need than you do.

Which means you have no one else to blame if you aren’t doing something you love. Which means that if you feel your work is selling out or getting too middle of the road you are the one that is letting it get that way.

But which also, happily, means that the only thing stopping you from exactly the work you need is yourself.

“But the money Adrienne! The Money!!!” You cry.

“Really?” I reply “Is it really the money? Is the money so good that it’s worth it?”

I just don’t think so.

“But the structure! The company! The audiences! I’ve worked so long and hard to get it to this point. What will I do if I have to leave it all behind.”

Look.

Pew doesn’t know your work. Fringe Arts doesn’t know your work. Independence, William Penn, that big name donor, that huge fancy festival, that amazing company artistic director, that opening night party tray sponsor, your viewers, even your long term collaborators, not a single one of them know your work better than you do.

Only you know the work you need to make.

They want a lot of things all those people. But for you to want them, you have to, have to, have to also want to be doing the thing that they want or your collaboration with them will always be you wishing you were doing something else. And no matter how happy or supportive or structured or monied these things get you, it still won’t be worth it.

I think this is the fatigue. I really do. I think it’s years and years and years of trying to ignore that the difference between what we have and what we actually want to be doing. You can feel the honest to god joy when you really fucking nailed it on the goddamn head with exactly what you were meant to be doing and who you should be doing it for. And you have to chase that shit like there is no tomorrow.

You do not have to take that role if it’s stupid or offensive.

You do not have to apply for that grant if you hate the terms of agreement.

You do not have to have expensive costumes if the fundraising stresses you out.

You do not have to seek out wealthy audiences if they aren’t the folks you really want there.

You do not have to do any of the things that others tell you. You can do what you want to do. And only when you do that will you start figuring out if and how that is possible. And it is possible that it isn’t possible. But at least you aren’t pretending that it is and that you’re actually doing it. At least then you can decide if you want to do something else. Or maybe, maybe likely, maybe amazingly, you’ll take that incredible wealth of talent and actually figure out how to do that thing you really wanted to be doing.

Too often I hear my peers talking about work they don’t love with companies that don’t pay enough with people they don’t really want to be around. This is what’s making us tired. And I’m tired of it.

You don’t like the work you’re doing. From now on, it’s on you.

Because you can change that.

Your leverage is your presence in their company.

Your leverage is your work in their festival.

Your leverage is your name on their grant.

Your leverage is your kindness and intelligence and heart in their life and you CAN use it to stem the tide in the opposite direction.

You may say to me, “But my leverage is nothing. They don’t care if I leave, they’ll just find someone else.”

To which I say, then is that really the system that you want in on? A world in which your presence has no value whatsoever? A place in which the uniqueness of what you bring to the table is completely devoid of significance? A system in which your abstention on the grounds of monetary or moral grounds doesn’t mean anything?

Is that worth giving up your happiness for?

No it’s not.

And if they don’t appreciate it, maybe especially if they don’t, if you don’t feel satisfied, if you aren’t getting enough to make the thing worth it, it’s up to you to use that leverage in the other direction. To show the folks what you’re really made of.

You can, nay, you must.

If you don’t, no one else will.

For the other

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

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

To forgo sleep over art.

To lose oneself over art.

To cry and despair over art.

Doesn’t that sound so silly and small?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe you do.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it is neither.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tectonic Shifts

Something tectonic is shifting.

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

Let me back up.

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

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

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

Here’s a bite at least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the need to look beautiful.

With the need to be right.

With the need to impress.

With the need to be known.

With the need to reach out to others.

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

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

With the need to push sadness away.

With the need to feel at home with others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a kind of divinity really.

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

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

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

Like I said, tectonic shifts.

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

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

Art crush

Hello my friends. It’s, again, been a few days. And this rhythm, perhaps once or twice a week, is likely where I’ll be living for the next few months.

I don’t say that because I think you’re upset about it, I just like to keep folks informed. Because the truth is I’m back in rehearsals, and that changes the tempo, the rhythmic pace, of one’s existence. It gives me such a different perspective on all these things I write about.

It’s a kind of amnesia, getting one’s feet back onto the floor. It’s as if all of the sudden I’m remembering a feeling that I’ve forgotten. There is a kind of: “Oh! This! I remember this. I love this. Why have I been doing anything else but this all this time?!”

This is always how it starts.

All those things we later don’t understand ourselves putting up with. All those indignities that in stark recollection we are surprised at our ability to tolerate. The long hours, the strange spaces, the running from place to place, all of it.

Last night I had people rolling on the ground outside covered in wet and dirty spandex while it rained.

And when it’s good (and right now, it’s very good) it all seems totally worth it.

A new work, for me, is a little like falling in love. And like falling in love, the moment when we surrender to an emotion that has the capacity to make us feel bigger, fuller, than we had been just the moment before, it is easy to allow ourselves to do anything to stay in that place. It is easy for the feeling, which can be so ecstatic and full, to feel like greater compensation than any amount of money ever could.

It is a constant surprise to me that this can continue to stay true even now, ten years into the doing of it.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about this: how the process of making something can feel like someone opens a door and on the other side is something amazing and incredible. And when you have to close it for some length of time it’s hard not to just yell at people who don’t care about the door, hard not spend all your time just waiting to open it again, hard to recapture the image of what’s on the other side.

An artistic love, like any affection, is a process of revealing oneself to an another, an unknown, and finding how you fit into it, into something larger than yourself. It is an amplifying mirror – reflecting one’s image back to themselves in bigger and sometimes stranger ways than we usually see ourselves.

Like love, it causes me to panic, simultaneously scared and excited to meet this new thing I’ve temporarily committed myself to. And the newer that love is, the less known, the more it throws me into paroxysms of emotion. Ups and downs between wanting to commit the rest of my life to this thing and feeling so silly and small and unsuited to this task, waves that come and go over days, hours, sometimes minutes.

I, for one, still struggle to be in it.

Even when I know the agitation, the terror, the butterflies, the inability to sleep as the mind races through images at night, even though I know all these things are part and parcel with the joy, I sometimes don’t know how to just release and let them in. And for me this manifests in extremes of doing and not doing. I spend hours creating detailed, printed, minute by minute plans for the day, which are often tossed aside within the first hour. And then later, exhausted, I sit and stare out windows or listen to the same song over and over again trying to get it to reveal artistic secrets to me.

This cycling between manic outward production and preoccupied inward energy gathering, like love, binds us to the thing we cycle around in a way that, like love, can feel so specific and special that it’s hard to believe that other people can share this passion. It’s sometimes frightening to think that even the others involved might not care for it as deeply as I do. And like love, the feeling can make one feel enmeshed and alone all at the same time.

I have these dreams about rehearsals. Both waking and asleep. Nothing in them is ever sexual or explicit in any literal way. But they feel like romance dreams. And in recalling them, they pull on the same strings deep in the center of my chest. It is a love ache that these thoughts elicit. I think about a rehearsal’s scene or sound like a person’s offhand joke or their dimple. And like a giddy teenager I can replay the moments again and again trying to recapture the rapture they engender.

Let’s call it what it is.

It’s an art-crush, this.

And like a new love, I worry about letting the feeling take over me. I worry talking about it too much. About putting too much faith in its newness. About giving away all of myself to it before I know it will catch me.

But really, there’s nothing to be done but to just be in it.

To try take it in so we do not deny ourselves the pleasure, with an eye or two on the rest of the world so we don’t too totally lose touch with reality.

To endeavor to be honest with our new love, so that we do not lose our sense of selves in an effort to fit inside it, but stay supple enough to let it change and open us in ways we might not have known possible.

To keep our sense of fairness and standard and integrity, so that even if we could give everything of ourselves so thoroughly away, we don’t, because later, when our love tempers and perhaps even fades, we’ll need it.

– A

Gasping

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

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

Yet… There are hints to the contrary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then I looked closer.

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

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

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

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

– A

Learning vs Doing

You know that feeling when something just… bugs you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But still.

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

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

It ain’t that deep, but it really is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sell Out

I wrote a bit last week about the difference that can occur between the way an artist lives their life and the way almost everyone else does. I’ve been thinking a bit more about that difference and what’s been hitting me especially hard is the strange and terrible relationship most artists have to money. I think this issue in particular – how we think about money, what it means in relation to our work, and how we decide to navigate that relationship – has a lot to do with why so many of us feel like no one understands how we live.

While it’s obviously simplistic to reduce an entire nation into one value system, in my own experience I can say that I often find myself a little at odds with the American context in which I exist. Ours is, and of course I’m generalizing, a culture that places a high value on earning as a measure of success. And because of that, it’s one that makes justifying the life of an artist particularly tough, tougher perhaps than countries whose wealth it exceeds.

I would wager that on the whole, the impulse to make and share our work is anti-monetary. Artist are in a rush to give away their product, especially when they first start making it. I would also wager that the impulse to “own” ones work like a product or thing is a learned skill. It’s something we find ourselves having to do, not something that is inherent to the thing itself. Of course this is not always true, and not always true of everyone, but for the purposes of this article, I’m again going to generalize and say that on the whole the artistic process is one that is at its core financially altruistic, and therefore at odds often with commodification. (Read Lewis Hyde’s wonderful book The Gift for more on this.) We do it because it’s what we really want to do. And for whatever reason, we’ve managed to value doing that higher than we value making it value driven.

Think about how radical a notion that is. Seriously.

For most, the conversation about how to navigate career is so thoroughly dominated by money that it’s almost hard to imagine how deeply strange it is to most people. No one is surprised that a doctor might choose a specialty that pays more, but we often feel guilt about picking a role or working with a company for the same reason. We make our work and then we are dying to give it away. We are inclined (and often do) so whether or not other people want to pay us. We don’t want to choose jobs on solely on income potential but equally (if not more) on artistic merit. The fact that you feel that at all means you have decided to step outside a value system that many people accept as a large guiding path in their entire lives.

And weirdly, because art does live outside of this metric in some ways, I think the oddity of such a thing, the mystery of how art can “charm” people out of this traditional way of thinking, becomes romanticized in its own right. We think about “poor” art as something that must be so enrapturing and enthralling that one would give up money to do it. Even I still bring forth the specter of the young impassioned creator in a terribly tiny apartment and having no money but loving your art so so so much that it’s worth it. This is in the cultural subconscious and it’s something we have to contend with.

But we’re not oblivious. There are tangible ways that money matters: it influences who has power and status, it can give us access to security and education, it feeds and houses us, and can give us cool stuff. Wealth can determine an artist’s path – to pursue art in the best way that the work demands or to make difficult choices about the kinds of personal investment they can leverage or the resources and programs they have access to. Frustratingly, training in the arts is almost always expensive. Compensation in the career is generally not. As creators we don’t want to care about it, but as citizens in this country we see we need it. We don’t want to make our work about the money, but we also don’t want the people we work (or ourselves) with to live in an unhealthful and unsustainable way.

This must be why some parents bitterly resist their children embracing a life in the arts. If you don’t have the experience of the intensity and depth of the artistic practice and experience, of course doing such a thing looks like a waste – like deciding to work at the GAP when you could be saving lives in the medical professional or running a business. Not all artists are poor. But in general, a great painter or theater actor or dancer is not making the same income as a doctor or lawyer. We are indoctrinated early that we do our work for love and not money. We are told ad nauseam by our society that “starving” and “artist” are nearly synonymous.

So as artists, we live daily with some pretty insanely contradictory attitudes and behaviors in relation to money. There are a lot of voices saying that we should want to make a lot of money if we’re good at what we do and there are a lot of voices also saying at the same time that if we are doing this art thing then it must be fulfilling enough to do for it’s own sake.

Take for example the phrase: “Sell out.” What’s your gut reaction to it? Is it good or bad? Well, it all depends on what context you’re looking at.

When you are mounting a new work there is this thing that happens when a show starts to “sell out.” This is true even outside of the self-producer realm, where you actually are counting the dollars that those ticket sales are bringing in. Yes, I’d say even in a straight up “actor for hire setting,” if you’re a “sell out” show there is a sense of accomplishment, of pride, of elevation in your work having reached a certain kind of level. That it’s something people connect to. Even if you receive not a single extra cent for the sold out-ness, it makes you feel better, doesn’t it?

What does that phrase even mean? Literally, that all the seats were bought. But it’s come to roughly equate with artistic quality. If all the seats are bought it must be valuable. And if it’s valuable it must be good or why would so many people pay for it? Conversely, there’s an unspoken pressure that says if a beautiful and amazing production has few buyers that something is wrong it. It’s a value system that isn’t concerned whether a piece happens to have picked a bad time of the year to perform. Or that the subject matter happens to have a smaller audience base but for that base the work is HIGHLY impactful. Or that your 3/4 full houses absolutely LOVE your show compared to the full houses for the work down the street that is merely entertaining enough to spend 20 bucks on. It’s a message that uncomplicatedly says more money equals better art.

Even if you know it’s not true, it’s still working on you somewhere in the back of your mind. So it’s worth sometimes saying out loud, even when it seems obvious, that small houses don’t mean you’re a bad artist. You might be, but the two aren’t necessarily related.

And weirdly, while on the one side we’re putting pressure on ourselves to be financially successful, we also have another voice inside telling us that making art for money is a cop out, a cheapening, a bastardization of the “true” impulse for creation. “Sell out” also has the connotation of the artist that is corrupted by money, who makes their work for financial gain alone and has lost touch with a “real” creative spirit. We tend to romanticize the bohemian life, both from within and outside the profession. It’s also a fallacy, this idea that our work without the pressure of money is “purer,” but it’s equally as potent.

It is strange, no, that the exact same phrase is both an indicator of our highest measure of success as well as a total debasement of the form. It is a frustrating dissonance that an art maker is trying to navigate all the time. And if we aren’t vigilant about what the goal is at a given moment we can end up in a kind of schizophrenic negativity where no matter what we do we’re coming up short.

Look, if we only made the work that made the most money, we’d probably cut out the most ambitious, and personally fulfilling projects. And yet, it’s also true that there are limitations on what’s possible with our work and those limitations are often determined by a project’s bottom line.

There are times I’ve looked back at works I made with a thousand dollars and felt wistful about the “purity” of my choices. I look at that work and think about how I did it just because I loved the art, that it was uncomplicated and “true” (or whatever). But, really, when I’m honest, that’s pretty BS right? The impulse for the work wasn’t actually less complicated by money, I was just making the same kinds of choices about how and where to allocate cash but on a much tinier scale.

I think that as we become more successful, we more obviously have to confront these questions – how does money work in out work, what do I spend it on, what kind of aesthetic am I after and how does cost play into that – but I don’t actually think they are new. People who want to always spend all the cash on fancy stuff do it when they have a little. They do it when they have a lot. We just notice it more.

And troublingly, I have no good answers here. Just an observation that we, like everyone, have to figure out what standard of living we want and what we are and aren’t willing to do to achieve it. What we can do is not abdicate the decision to others but continue to make it for ourselves. You can argue whether you agree with the way that America equates wealth with success and decide how much you’re willing to let it influence your goals in life. You can create a work environment you believe in and pay people whatever you decide you want to and allow them to make the choice if the monetary recompense is equal to the task. Your project can lose money or knock it out of the cashola park. It can be the best thing your ever made or a total hack job. With every choice there are two assessment tools we need to use – one financial and the other artistic. And it’s up to you to decide which one needs to take precedence at this particular moment.

We don’t want to make money the value on which we measure our creations, so we should be wary of allowing it become an indicator of our success. On the same token, our ability to make work is predicated on the rest of our life being functional enough to keep the artistic part going. Money plays a part in that.

I don’t want money to drive my art making process.

I want to make enough money as an artist to live sustainably.

Two statements.

Two totally different standards of measurement.

So the trick is to remember that they have to be either/or and they don’t have to be correlated directly. They both are like spinning plates that I need to pay attention to in order to keep them in balance. Which might mean a little nudge on one for a while and then run back and push on the other a little.

And my guess is that I’ll always have to keep an eye on that balancing act.

– A