"I have of late, wherefore I know not..."

I don't normally talk about this sort of thing here, but for the sake of honesty (and honestly, I've nothing else to talk about right now) I'm going to indulge today. Because it does have something to do with theatre, and because I need it.

I've been feeling pretty down lately. Not all the time, but I have definitely been going through a general malaise for a little over a week. There's always a little sense of post-show depression after something you've done has closed, but it usually doesn't start for a couple days after the final curtain falls and you slowly begin to realize that you have nothing to do with your time. It happens to most professionals in any field, but actors--whose personal identities are so tightly woven up with their job description--are often left with struggling to define themselves in a world where they feel they can't refer to themselves by their chosen job title unless they actually have a gig. That being said, this is not what has taken hold of me this time. It's is something else.

It started a couple days before the Festival opened. I was feeling anxious for seemingly no reason<--That statement strikes me as ridiculous, seeing as how I had plenty to be anxious about: my final performance for my master's degree was going up in a matter of days, and was still very much working itself out; I was waiting on Loukia to make sure everything was going through for the room in her flat; I was debating whether to or what job to pursue this summer; my loan check that was made out in US dollars and could only be made out to me was traveling over the sea to be deposited in a bank stateside by Brian, and I was waiting to hear that it had gotten there safely; and finally, and something I discuss reluctantly here, I had an audition last Friday at the Old Vic that I was incredibly nervous about. The overlying sentiment behind all of these pressures is that sense of seemingly chronic waiting, where I had no power over the majority of what was happening and simply had to hope for the best. I hate that.

Then last Tuesday we had an invited dress for the show, and afterwards I went out with my ensemble and the participating guests for several drinks. I woke up the next day around 4AM, and couldn't fall back to sleep. So I decided to make the most of it and go for a jog down to the Old Vic, partly for inspiration and partly so I'd know exactly where to go on Friday morning. So at 5AM, I was out on the street, running from my home down to the Thames, past the Southbank Centre and the BFI and the National, finally ending up at the theatre. (Let me just take a moment to say I feel incredibly lucky that I can get up and jog to the National-fucking-Theatre. That amazes me.) 5AM in London is quiet--like New York on Sunday mornings. It's great, but you still have to get up at 5AM to see it. But I digress. As I jogged along, I started thinking about theatre, and living for art, and all that really deep stuff, and I came to a somewhat bittersweet conclusion, one that I've come to before: that no piece of theatre is actually fulfilling to me because it's just artificial.

Now, let me say: yes, this statement seems pretty obvious. And this sense of artifice is actually what gives theatre all its power. To paraphrase Peter Brook, if a play is completely naturalistic, then what is the point? If there is nothing heightened, nothing distorted in the reality, then why stage it? I mean, in a simply practical sense, if I see a play with no element of theatricality in it, can't I just stay at home and watch my own life and get the same effect? Surely--and I'll save money doing it. No, you go to the theatre to of course suspend your disbelief and for a couple hours sit on the outside of life to reflect--a reflection aided by various theatrical devices. In the end, however, this is not the artifice to which I am referring.

No, it's far more simple than that. It's just all fake. You show up, put on your make up, do a tap dance for some people who are hopefully paying you, then get off stage, slap on the cold cream, and go home. Nothing has really happened--you just "acted" for two hours, and then went home and may do it again tomorrow. Nothing has really changed. I mean, there is more to it than that. But then sometimes, there's not.

I'm usually far more idealistic about the theatre. Don't get me wrong--I think it can still change things, still alter people's perspectives. Look at Angels in America. Look at The Laramie Project. Look at Waiting for Lefty--that audience on opening night all standing up, yelling "STRIKE!" to the actors on stage. (Every day, I wish I was reading Odets. I miss him.) I guess what bothers me is that those examples are so rare, so, so rare, and in the end are so fleeting--again, one of the things that makes theatre theatre is that it needs an audience to exist. A film can still be projected onto a screen without anyone watching it--it still happens. But theatre does not. And then it's there one moment, and the next: POOF. Gone.

This consistent sense of transience that has pretty much accompanied me through the past twelve years of my life (half my lifetime at present, it should be noted) has caused me to consider over the past few years what really matters to me--what I really want. These things include, but are not limited to the following:

1. A husband
2. A house (Own outright--not rent or mortgage)
   
3. A baby

Two things should be said: I know that actually acquiring any of these things will not guarantee happiness, and I also know that these are not necessarily things that should be established on a check-list of the things to get in before you die. I also don't believe in living my life on a timeline, ala, "I have to be married by the time I'm thirty!" Why put so much pressure on yourself?! These things will happen when they are meant to happen, not a moment before and not a moment after. And considering the era we live in, I'm a little too young to be preoccupied with the thought of becoming a crazy cat woman. Yet, I am now strangely impatient. And thinking again about the ever-ephemeral theatre, I find myself desperately clinging to these things which are somehow meant to last. And of course, that's a big fat lie.

My friend Mauro told me over dinner tonight that it was because I was turning 25. He said he went through the same thing then, and something similar when he turned 30. It may be that impending adulthood is causing me to wonder about the future. (I see it, there, at the end of that long tunnel--don't look directly at it, or you'll turn to stone!) But to me, there is also a sense of needing to re-evaluate what I'm doing right now--and what I may not be doing is making enough room for a life that expands outside my job or identity as an artist. Consequently, my work and art loses all of its value, practically and personally.

Which brings me to something else. I found out that a friend of mine that I'd grown up with's father died on the 9th of this month. I didn't find out until 21 June (Father's Day, of all days). I hadn't spoken to her in a while, but she's still someone I had been terribly close with at a time, had always been there when I needed a friend, and is one of the few people from my hometown I try to always see whenever I'm back in that neck of the woods. I found out because of the Facebook, because I got to thinking about her, pulled up her profile, and there as her picture was a tree with a ribbon tied around it--a memorial for her dad. I couldn't believe that this had happened and I hadn't heard about it sooner, and am confused that I ended up finding out about it because of the Facebook. I felt many things--that I should have known sooner, that I should have kept in better contact with her, that someone should have told me, and that I was a bad friend because I hadn't known and hadn't been there for her when she probably needed someone. I can understand the rational argument against this sense of guilt--that I am an ocean away, that we hadn't talked in a while, that we are no longer as close, and that our families weren't close enough for my parents to know this happened (I called them when I found out, and they hadn't heard about it). And still, I feel badly. I feel like that relationship, that so many relationships, was left untended. You can't keep in contact with everyone you know all of the time, of course, but surely a larger effort to let people know that you're thinking of them and they are important in your life is a good thing. I don't know if that would have changed this specific situation, but that's where I'm at with it.

Aaaaaahhhhh--this entry has gone on forever, and has been full of only a single and somewhat vague connection to the theatre! How about this one: to accurately convey something on stage, one must have a sense of life that exists off stage so that one has something to offer. I want a larger definition than just my job title. So for the sake of being a better actor, I have to start taking better care of my life outside the work, because that's what'll make the work valuable anyway. And besides, you can't take an audience home with you. Right? I mean, I guess you could take some of the audience home with you. Hopefully they're worth it.

I know, I know: life's just a bowl of cherries, and I need to let go-go-go. In the meanwhile, it's wicked late, and I'm headed to bed.

"Everything's as if we never said goodbye"

Hedva, Lisa, and Maria hard at work on our devised Turbulence Festival work, One May Lead to Another.

It’s a fortnight into the third term, and the day after the conclusion of my Geektastic week. Things are moving steadily (albeit slowly) along for the festival piece, One May Lead to Another. My company members are great. They really care about the work, and definitely want to not only do this production, but do it well. For the first time in a while it’s like I’m focused on actually working to create something, and that feels good. Not that I wasn’t trying to create something last term, or even during RMO necessarily, but there’s something about actually building a piece of theatre that is satisfying in a very different way than cobbling together certain pieces of experimentation, (Stage Two) or conducting and analyzing research (RMO). It feels more propelling than either of those things, and it’s something I’ve missed for a while now←I realize as I write that, the last time I performed in a play was in May of last year (Oh my God, it has been a YEAR?! {*Succumbs to anxiety attack*}), and the last time I did a reading was in September. That’s a long time to be out of the game, silent. I’m happy to be finally diving back in.

Despite this renewed sense of theatrical creativity now eeking out of my every pore (it’s pretty disgusting, actually) I’m still making a point of filling my life with a million other little things. This is pretty typical of me, and I hope I can make a point of carving out some time to really follow through with the work that I’m setting out to do and that I want to do for this piece. This weekend I’ll be going for my traditional weekend jog with Max, getting my haircut (for the first time in months—literally, the last time I had a trim was on September 30th, the day I left for the UK the first time), seeing my course tutor in a performance, catching Handa’s Hen at the Little Angel Theatre (a perk from my puppetry class), and seeing The Spy Who Loved Me at the BFI. There’s gotta be an hour in there somewhere when I can read some Stanislavski. Right?

“Why did summer go so quickly/Was it something that you said?”

I’ve been wandering the city the past few days like a living ghost—haunting places I used to know, almost knew, will never get to know. I see people who will disappear out of view soon, who will haunt me while I wander the streets of a new city, getting lost, being confused, asking myself why here, why again, will any place lead to contentment, to peace? Then I’ll ask if I really mean these things, or if I’m only posturing, the way artists do: amp the tragedy and authenticate the experience. Why do people believe that things only really matter, only really happen, when the price they pay is in their own suffering? Why isn’t celebration more celebrated? We get so caught up so often looking for the truth just below the surface, the ugliness behind the glamour, that we can’t take a moment out to enjoy ourselves. We need to see the happy people in pain to appreciate what they don’t have—it brings us ordinary folk closer to their level.

But what do these musings have to do with anything? Nothing, really. But listen: the summer has been light, airy, not full of too much responsibility, and consequently I have not been my typical “intense” self. Now, “intense” does not mean depressive, or sad, or-Hamlet like in any way. It just means I ponder, I dwell, I tend to look closely, sometimes too closely, at aspects of life I think other people forget about while they’re out there living. (Okay, it’s a little Hamlet.) Basically, I stopped being an observer this summer and started living. I had an acting professor in college who once advised us that each of us was going to have to take some time off from our work at some point and live a little; just so we knew what the fuck we were talking about when we were acting those experiences on stage. I hope that I don’t cut myself off from experiencing things for the sake of watching, for the sake of observing so that my approximations on stage can come close to the genuine article. But I’m a little too realistic to believe that I succeed in that wholly. I’m an only child, what do you want? The problem with being a watcher is that you really don’t understand what it is people get out of certain experiences (falling in love, staying out all night till dawn, being wasted, being high, feeling like an utter failure, feeling totally alone, feeling like you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread) unless you experience them for yourself. You can’t. It’s utterly impossible to analyze those things. You can categorize, devise a chart of cause and effect concerning the events, but it’s not the same. “I’m older than I was when I came here,” to paraphrase Odets. So I took the summer off, off from sitting just outside the action, and played a little. And I had a great time. But I’m ready to sit out again, I’m ready to philosophize, I’m ready to exclaim about every piece of art I see, “It was A-MAZ-ING!” and run off on tangents about the human condition. Because this is who I am, and to deny my nature is the worst I could do. Needless to say, this blog is going to get a lot more emotionally driven. Sorry kids, but objectivity is only so interesting anyway, right? “Of course ‘right!’”

The other thing is, in response or reaction to my angst-ridden opening paragraph, I still feel nothing. I sat down with Kate the other day and asked her if she was excited for her upcoming wedding, and she said that she was honestly apathetic. She just wanted it over and done already. I concur in that sentiment to my own travels. I’ve been keeping this blog since March, and I feel like the suspended limbo is just about all a girl can take. I leave in five days, and still haven’t opened a travel guide (though I did buy a map today).

I am writing this entry on my MacBook (because I am obsessed), started to on the subway, and now in a movie theater in my old neighborhood, waiting for Righteous Kill to start, and really hoping it won’t suck. With Pacino AND De Niro, you expect more, always. With London and huge life transitions, you expect more. You hope, anyway. I will miss New York, but I am ready to leave—still, not eager, not (overly) sentimental. Just ready. But that doesn’t feel like anything more than it is. And that’s okay.

I will probably forgo posting until I get over—too much to do, and limited Internet access over the next couple days. So I’ll check in with you guys when I’m on the other side of the pond. It’s a big ocean, I know, but if you kids are in town, please look me up. I’m sure by then I’ll be “feeling” homesick.

Suzuki: Day Three

Long marching session today, and I was actually picked out with a bunch of other students who had previous experience with the form to actually demonstrate for the newer ones. I had a lot of pride in being selected, though it caught up with me right away--> I lost my focus, which is never stronger than when I'm doing this work, because I got concerned with looking good, and consequently made it harder on myself, caused me to mess up my footing in one of the marches, and in the combination during the recitation of "O splendour." I should explain: there are a series of movements we do while counting to three in Japanese, and after specific points we freeze and recite this piece of text.

O splendour of sunburst breaking forth this day
Whereon I lay my hands once more on Helen my wife. (breath)
And yet it is not so much as men think
For the woman's sake I came to Troy, (breath)
But against that guest, proved treacherous,
Who, like a robber, carried the woman from my House.
(Excerpted from Menelaus's Trojan Women)

We also work on moving slowly from a squat position to a standing position using that text, or instead replacing it with the second piece:

O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! (breath)

Then with a passion would I shake the world,
And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy (breath)
Which cannot hear a lady's feeble voice, (short breath)
Which scorns a modern invocation.
(Excerpted from King John, Constance, 3.4)

So yes, my ego got the best of me, and I screwed up some of the movement. But when we were working with the Constance line, I found a breakthrough with my breath that I had been looking for--we'd just been working the "O splendor" line lately, and I always feel bombastic when I do it. Volume is my strong point, and is one of my tricks. I'm trying to work away from it, without abandoning it, use it but not be dependent. It's a hard balance to find, especially given who I am in life: usually a very loud person. So it was nice to finally find where the breath was supposed to be, properly supported, and not taxing my voice. It was, as I like to say, "a small grace."

We also need to have learned by now a song in Japanese, "Suteki Da Ne," which, along with seemingly everything else in my life, I have put off in really getting to. Hopefully this weekend. At some point. Someday.

My group worked with Robyn tonight on slow tempo. Slow tempo is not slow motion--usually in slow motion there's an idea of restrain in order to create movement of that quality, and also that when you are doing slow motion you are seeing something that is slowed down from our normal sense of time. In slow tempo, you are actually respecting a different idea of time all together: what you can accomplish in one minute of slow tempo time takes ten minutes of real time to show--if "real time" even existed to be gauged against. But the idea is that it doesn't. I saw a production of The Water Station some years ago, done by Robyn and Steve's company, which utilized slow tempo for essentially the whole show. It takes a little getting used to, if only because an audience's sensibility is so geared towards realism these days that anything from the norm takes about 15 minutes to even accept. But in the end, I was really affected by the form and it heightened my relationship with the whole piece. I can honestly say if that had been done in "real time," I would have cared much less about the whole evening.

Slow tempo is hard, especially when living in a city that is so geared around goinggoingoing, and is pretty physically taxing in its way. I will feel it tomorrow no doubt. But there is a sense of serenity when entering it, and maintaining it is almost a form of meditation. Again, though, it's something as a performer you miss, when really focused on the doing of it, as most of our work is. Which is sad sometimes.

Next Monday's class will be cut short for me, as I am doing Heidi's scene for her directing class, the first exchange between Catherine and Hal from Proof. I'll be sad to miss, but it will be nice to do a scene after such a long absence from formal acting.

Suzuki: Day Two

(This entry is going to be more note-like, as I'm basing it off the ones I took this evening.)

More feeling old, but today it seemed less obnoxious.

The girl who was working hard to really work is still doing it, and it's almost distracting. It's also affecting her work--her statues are predictable, you can tell she's pre-planning them in her "ready" position. In this same vein, I am working so hard to just let myself be: stop worrying what Robyn, Steve, and Peter think of my work; stop worrying about being "right"; let go of whatever ideas I have about where I'm supposed to be since I'm older and have done this before. Like yoga, Suzuki is meant to be constantly learned, never mastered. I'm trying to remind myself of that, and shut off those hyper-perfectionist urges.<--They're going to get me in trouble in grad school, more in the realm of making me remarkably unhappy than anything else (I am also super competitive, so these kind of things are hard).

Thought of the night from Steve: Your exit from stage is just as important, if not more important, than your entrance. True in acting and true in life.

The girl pre-occupied with her appearance came with her hair down in cascading waves. I wonder how much longer that will last.

There's one girl, Kelly, whose work I Really like. You know she's just finding things as she goes, and she's letting herself experience the work while doing it. She's fully present and invested--but not Overly invested. She also has a killer yoga practice.

Peter worked with my sub-group today, discussing the value of space. While the focus can fall greatly on the architecture of the space you're working in, we also looked at creating value of negative space by using a partner to sculpt an image. We worked with a partner, one person doing the manipulating of the image for a time, and then switching. The key here was that the manipulator had to use their body fully to create the shape with the other person. When they stepped away from the space they had been taking up, displayed by the shape maintained by the clay-like partner, that space would have value because you knew something used to be there. But you couldn't just move your partner's body around with your arms. If you used your whole body, you were really partnering with them, rather than just applying a shape. You were, in effect, dancing with them. I really liked this exercise, even though I don't think I did it all that well--I got stuck taking my partner into the same places, and felt a little embarrassed of some of the shapes I got her in. When you're working with people you barely know, and suddenly you have to have contact with them, you find out pretty quick how much of a prude you still are. At least this is my experience. So anytime a pose felt intimate for whatever reason, I got worried, "Is she cool with this? Is she uncomfortable? I hope she's not." Hopefully, she wasn't.

At the end of today, I mentioned my school to someone and a couple of the kids piped up--they had heard of it and congratulated me. It was really rewarding to have people recognize the school (so few people actually know about it here, which still surprises me every time) and to also be impressed by my admittance. I'm proud of having gotten in, but usually downplay this pride because I worry about coming off like a jerk. So it was nice to have some validation, and from a truly unexpected source.

I think for the future I'm going to stop calling them "kids" and start calling them "classmates." I'll make an effort anyway.

"Know These Things: Shouldn't You"

Today I head back to my alma mater after a couple years of self-imposed exile in order to begin a Suzuki workshop. Suzuki, for those of you who don't know, is a form of movement that falls under the heading "physical theatre" in that it largely tries to produce a story and evoke a reaction from an audience using some form of stylized (though not always standardized) movement--something that isn't quite dance, and is definitely not realism. And it's usually light on dialogue. For an overview of Tadashi Suzuki, developer of the method, and his theory of practice go here.

I have done an intensive like this before with the same instructors actually, and am eager to re-examine it after some time away, and especially before I go overseas to study other forms of "physical theatre." I thought it would be a nice send off, and a good way to stay focused while I'm not actually acting in anything, which always makes a performer a little depressed: you're not doing what you're pretty sure you're meant for, so you stop seeing the point. In anything.

I don't think tonight is going to be easy, and those who know about the style may join me in lamenting the pain of one's quadriceps during the process of conducting it (if you don't know, you just have to trust me). I'm hoping I can hold my own amongst all the kids--a lot of the students will still be earning their undergrad, and despite our near proximity in age, I have a real feeling I'm going to feel like the old fogey in the back. And at twenty-three and eight months, that says a lot. Maybe only about my more neurotic tendencies...

But I'll try to make an effort to work past my age paranoia, and blog about this as much as I can, with any thoughts I think will be useful and hopefully lasting in my work in the future.

OD #1: Next question, please?

OPEN DISCUSSION...PRETTY MUCH

(This one's for the actors, or those who have studied it in their time, or those who use such technique at some point.
Or for liars.)

Okay, guys: I think periodically I will ask a question here and look to all of you answer it, because I think a strength of a good blog is to engage in or introduce a discussion. Hopefully this will work. This is something that came up during my interview for the Classical course at Central. I was posed this question during my interview:

"What do you do when you act?"

For the actors, you'll be thinking, "I'm focusing, I'm saying lines, I'm listening to my partner, I'm putting myself into the circumstances of the character," etc. Well, you're wrong. Every answer I gave of that ilk garnered the response, "Yes, but what are you Doing?" An example of the interaction:

"Well, I'm staying present."
"Yes, but how do you Do that?"
"With my body, with my breath, with my voice...?"

I had no idea. I was exasperated and so was my auditor, who assured me, perhaps in an attempt to cut off the conversation, that there were loads of answers. I just didn't have one. He wanted something beyond Stanislavsky, and I could only really call out technique. I just didn't have an answer.

I thought about it a long time after--the rest of the day the question followed me: backstage at my performance of Much Ado About Nothing, and later into the audience of Conversations in Tusculum, which is where, while watching Aidan Quinn stand against a column, an answer occurred to me.

Here's what I came up with. I think the answer is that you breathe. According to my yogiraj, breath is one of the three things that make up life (the other two being light and love). Breath has been known to control our rate of thinking, the pace of our dialogue, our action. It keeps us present, calms us down, speeds us up, and is the thing we live on. All of these things are happening when we act and affecting how we act, what's going on in the moment, so I think that's my answer.

My roommate, Heidi, another Central acceptee this year for dramaturgy, who I had repeated the question to later, came home with an answer to days later. She had seen a documentary made about mounting Mother Courage at the Public in 2006, where Meryl Streep was basically asked the same question. She said something to the affect of being a translator; that she was both Brecht and herself, both 1939 and 2006, embodying this story and making it coherent for an audience of today, singing the songs of old so they not be forgot.

So Meryl Streep translates, and I breathe. What is it you do?

Lying, lying liars: feel free to comment as well.