Accidental Art

As mentioned about a month ago, I'll be a participating artist in the Accidental Festival, a joint venture between the Roundhouse and CSSD. The piece I'm involved in is called Accidental Art, and will be generated in a twelve hour rehearsal the day before we perform it (similar in vein to the 24 hour play format that's become so popular over the past few years). So I literally can't tell you anything about what it will be about because: I don't know yet.

If you'll be in London on the 23rd, go here for tickets.

Wisdom from someone who knows more than I do.

I grabbed this quote to use for my paper, but ended up passing it off to a friend instead. Still, I liked it an awful lot, so I'm posting it here.

"One can say that a true artist is always ready to make any number of sacrifices in order to reach a moment of creativity. The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he in conventional. Everything that is conventional, everything that is mediocre, is linked to this fear. The conventional actor puts a seal on his work, and sealing is a defensive act. To protect oneself, one 'builds' and one 'seals'. To open oneself, one must knock down the walls."

-Peter Brook, There Are No Secrets: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre

We'll have no faffing here!

Hullo, all my little loves!

The past week has been beyond full, and I must beg your indulgence in regards to what will now be a very quick, somewhat overwhelming update. Masters programs are unforgiving. Ready? Here we go!

SATURDAY 4 October 2008
--Went to the Globe Theatre during their closing weekend and saw Liberty, a new play produced there this season. It was extremely timely, well written/acted/directed. It was brilliant to see a piece of theatre that was not set in Elizabethan period work in an Elizabethan structure, and somehow be informed from the space it was performed in as well as the time period it was being produced during. Heidi and I, after stopping off to the Globe shop for strange Folio inspired treats (I myself am now the proud new owner of a CD of Elizabethan Street Songs) then went to a pub nearby where it is said was the site of after rehearsal drinks for Shakespeare and Johnson and the like. We also walked briefly through the ground floor of the Tate, crossed the Millenium Bridge, sat by the Thames, and were interviewed by a Korean TV station about a floating work of art. Then home.

SUNDAY 5 October 2008
--Reading and day of rest.

MONDAY 6 October 2008
--First Day of Term. Our day started with meeting up with the whole of our program. There are about 48 of us, which seems both daunting and appropriate considering what were are meant to do (I'll describe the break down soon). We did those small get to know you games--interview the person next to you and introduce them to the group; make a circle with chairs and run around the room if you've done some specific act called out by whoever's in the center of the circle, try to get a chair, and whoever's left standing has to say their name and give another act to continue the game; etc. Then we met up with all of the other masters programs in the Embassy Theatre for one of what was to be several induction programs throughout the week. Here they took us through several aspects of Central life, broke us up into random groups, and sent us off to devise one statement per group meant to define our time here. My favorite, sadly not generated by my own group, was: "Excited to be creative revolutionary sponges, shaking the tree without faffing." ('Faffing' means wasting time--don't fret, I had to ask someone, too.) Then someone who is in charge of something encouraged us to get a cup of coffee or tea with the people next to us who we may never see again.

TUESDAY 7 October 2008
--Met with our individual strands (focus of study) in the morning, so I was with the performers in a space just beyond Central in a nearby community center. Went around with the fifteen other people and introduced myself--I think I learned more about how people introduced themselves and less in what they said. Then we made up a rule re: arriving on time for class. Then all the strands met up again in the space we've been using as our main meeting place and were introduced to our first project that was to deal with time. Then we were broken up into eight groups and sent off to work. (I will go into discussion of this project at another juncture, simply because it was so lengthy, that to put it here would be simply mad.) That occupied most the rest of our day, besides our library inductions.

WEDNESDAY 8 October 2008
--More work with our groups in the morning, and presentations in the afternoon, followed by a discussion with mixed results. The discussion was the most telling part of the day regarding our immediate student body-->personalities shined through, and it wasn't always in the best light, I must say. But hopefully that's just a matter of over eagerness on the parts of some, and things will calm down. Or they won't. We shall see. There's also a great farmer's market out front of the school on Wednesdays and Fridays and I finally found a good cup of coffee. I couldn't rightly believe it. We also sat through a talk by Mischa Twitchin, an alumnis of our program and a founder of SHUNT, who will be leading a lecture series offered to us called "Acts of Intelligence." Should be very interesting, but also very challenging.

That evening myself and four of my classmates (Heidi, new American friends Melissa and Diedre, and new British friend James) saw the Barber of Seville, performed by ENO. This is, of course, the opera company whose Improbable-conceived production of Satyagraha I continually swoon over. Alas, this production was nothing like that. Everything was fine--well trained voices, decent set, nice staging, fine design albiet some questionable lighting choices. But it was in no way exceptional. And the production itself was translated into English, a language that rarely lends itself to the musicality of Italian, so that made it a bit rough. I was not terribly impressed, and the experience has put me off opera for a bit--at least watching it.

THURSDAY 9 October 2008
--Back to the Embassy Theatre for more advice on how to write a thesis and use the library. I skipped out on the second half of the morning with Melissa, who also was pretty sure she knew how to use MLA formatting (it was a review), putzed around the main street near school, and bought a toy:

(My mother is reading this blog right now and asking aloud to the heavens, "LEA--if it's So Expensive to live over there, what are you doing buying toys?!" Alas, I live in another country now, and her cries will fall on deaf ears. {"But Mom--he's SO CUTE! And I bought him at Woolworth's--they still have them here--so he was cheap. AND HE'S SO CUTE!!! Anyway, I bet Dad understands..."})

After our skipping which bled into lunch, we were back with our program, broken up into four groups this time, and led through our technical inductions. Then a short stop off at Ye Old Swiss Cottage for a couple pints, and then a long walk to Primrose Hill, just north of Regent's Park and the London Zoo, for a program-wide picnic. I pitched in with a few others for a bucket of KFC (I am not joking) to bring along. Those particular classmates have endeared themselves to my heart. We stayed until dark, and then made our way back to the tube, some of us heading home and others going over to the SHUNT lounge. I'm saving that excursion for next week.

FRIDAY 10 October 2008
--We had a day off from school. Most Fridays will be reserved for work in our specific ensembles, but since they don't exist yet, we had off. Heidi and I went to an art opening with a friend of hers who's studying at Goldsmith's. There were eight pieces and one performance artist who wandered around the room. The exhibit was at Hold & Frieght and was part of an art exchange: last year, English students had exhibited in Germany, and this year German students were exhibiting in England. I was not a fan of several pieces, but there were two that I enjoyed, the chief one being a video project called, Ivo Burokvic--The Life of the Fake Artist as a Young Business Model, by Paul Wierbinski. Wierbinski was appalled by the greed that was running the art world--Did you know there was an artist who sold ninety cans in 1961, each containing thirty grams of his own shit? About a year ago, one of these cans was sold for 124,000 Euro. Wierbinski responded by creating a pseudonym, Ivo Burokvic (a name he felt was appropriately Eastern enough), took a single photograph of a shopping mall, photo shopped it a little, mailed it to China, paid 600 Euro for a Chinese artist to replicate the picture on canvas, and then submitted and sold it at auction for 14,000 Euro. Genius.

The weekend has been pretty lax in theatrical experiences. I did make it to the Clink, this odd little British prison museum along the Thames. But otherwise, just some forced jogging around Russell Square, some walks around the neighborhood, and MOUNTAINS of reading to do for school. So here we are. Or here I am. Where are you?

"...and I realized as I was talking, that I was boring myself."

That title is a phrase I have sadly uttered when recounting a couple bad dates to friends afterwards, where I realized I had been going on and on and on because the guy wasn't offering anything up, so I just kept talking, and at some point realized that I was even boring myself working so hard for a reaction. This is one of the many reasons why I never date.

After blogging CRAZY consistently at the beginning of this month, I went on a brief hiatis. Part of it had to do with my schedule, which did not allot for enough time to make a thoughtful blog entry, which I try to achieve when writing here. But another, larger part was:

Blogging about Suzuki bores me.

Now, don't get me wrong: Suzuki itself does not bore me. Not in the least. But the specificity it was taking to discuss the method made writing the entries not only remarkably time consuming, but also really really dull for me to write. I like discussing the theatre, I like discussing performance method, I like sharing what I learned, but these things I like doing IN PERSON. To put it here, to do it so much and in such a detailed, crazy way just makes me lose interest. I may go back and blog specific stuff, but not today, not right now, and maybe not ever. So don't hold your breath. But here's an overview of what I've been up to whilst away.

One: I bought my plane ticket. It actually cost about $120 less than I had anticipated, partly because I bought it through STA Travel, and acquired the below card, which is meant to get me discounted rates for various travel-type things. (And 10% off at the Mac store.)

Not the most fetching picture of me, true, but I was unaware that they'd be making the card up right then and there and had no other picture to give them.

I was so happy about the plane ticket being so cheap that I went to Forbidden Planet and bought this:

I still say I'm not a nerd, but probably just a fangirl. And it was only $6.99-->I needed it!

It also turns out that I will be able to go to my bff's wedding ceremony, but will need to leave IMMEDIATELY after pictures are taken, and go straight to the airport to make my flight. Intense.

Two: I cut Suzuki Monday night to do a scene for my roommate's directing class at HB Studios. I haven't acted in a while, despite my prowess as a GPS unit, and it was both fun and foreign to go back to a script and try to build a character and whatnot. It was the first scene in Proof, a play I love and would kill to be in. I actually played Catherine in another friend's scene in college, so it was fun to revisit her in a different place. Maybe someday I'll play the whole thing...

Three: I did more Suzuki. Tuesday and Thursday night, I was back, marching, slow tempo-ing, and learning a dance that dealt very interestingly with focus. I will try to backlog these later, but again: I just don't feel like doing it right now.

Four: I talked to someone who knows better. I went to see Hamlet this past Saturday, and after being rescued by my friend Tim, an electrician at the Public who brought me to the electrician's office to wait out the rain, he invited me to go for drinks with the crew once the show was called. An older actor in the cast, who's pretty successful on the NY boards but who will remain nameless here because name dropping annoying, stopped into the bar where we were at and sat next to us. Tim introduced me, mentioned I had gotten into Central, and the actor congratulated me and started to give me advice on what to look at in terms of British acting when I was in England. It was a great chat, he was a super cool guy, and I felt reassured in a way I haven't been in months to go on this adventure. It was totally needed, and I feel really lucky to have friends who garner me the chance to have these opportunities. So, thanks Tim and Heidi.

Five: I found someone else going to England for grad school this fall. We had gone to HS together, and had known each other, despite the fact that she is two years older than me. She already knows where she's going to live, and pointed me in a couple directions, which was great. I happy to know someone else going over, to maybe bounce travel ideas off of, and to have as a "safe person" if trouble happens overseas. And I could always use another Facebook friend, which is where she located me. So here we go, Liza.

In my spare time, I've also been seeing some friends, giving feedback on some one's play (like a good little dramaturge), wondering about BSG, trying to figure out who would be reading my blog in Austria (I see you, thanks to Google Analytics) and trying to make myself read Pinter. Could I really do all these things and sleep, and write about Suzuki with such specificity while at work?

I don't think so.

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.

"...I'm leaving on a jet plane..."

Not yet. But below is a picture of me backstage of the show I'm currently in (we close tonight), playing a GPS unit in a car. And oh yes, that's a stewardess's outfit. I look like I walked out of the Britney Spears "Toxic" video (I love that video!). The girl to my right is fellow cast member, Colleen.



This is what happens when you do favors for people. I was a last minute replacement when they had some girl drop out unexpectedly. My friend Jake asked me at an audition we were both at two weeks ago to step in, and I realized I wasn't doing anything else this weekend so might as well. I do more random stuff because I have nothing else scheduled, I swear. Another friend Andrew is also in the show, in the first piece of the evening, which was unknown to me until he sent out an invite e-mail. This just proves once again that the New York Theatre world is really only four people big, and that some where along the line, you'll have worked with everyone, even if just by-proxy.

I have to find/write another play wherein I play a stewardess so I can get my money's worth out of the costume. Though I have to say, I have a right mind to wear the little jacket out--it's ridiculous, but somehow cute in it's gratuitousness. Very dance recital. I need to put some darts in the back, though. I picked it up at Abracadabra, and I suppose it's meant to be one of those "sexy costumes"<--the company that manufactured it was called "Secret Wishes." It's made out of this kind of manufactured polyester that's closer to plastic, that I can only assume is really useful in terms of being easy to clean if something is spilled on it ("Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more!"). I look very silly, I assure you. But I do so little in the play (the majority of my lines are directions: "Left turn in point two miles." "Make a left." "Remain on the current road.") that I had to do something to entertain myself. This was the best thing I could think of.

I guess this will be the last show I do in New York. That realization is kind of weird, considering the piece, and considering that it may very well be it for me in this city. But that can't true. I don't think I really believe that.

I wish I had little gloves that stopped at the wrist. That would be the ultimate accessory for this outfit.

Next time.

PROJECT!!!

Inspired by all this puppet stuff, I've decided to build my own. I went a little mad yesterday on an awful ride back to the city on New Jersey Transit (story upon request), and ended up story-boarding a whole piece, and began sketching out the puppet. It will be a meager design, perhaps, but I am only beginning. He surely will not look like other puppets I have built--see below for Vatican Vince.

I'll keep you updated.

NY Event Number Three: Seeing a dress rehearsal at the Met.

Thanks to the company I work for, I had the good fortune of sitting in on the afternoon dress rehearsal today of Phillip Glass's opera, Satyagraha, which will mount at the Met in two days. The title is actually a combination of two Sanskrit words and is the name of the practice of nonviolent resistance used and developed by Gandhi (so says/confirms the wiki, to which we all bow). It's music is quite beautiful, and this new production originally staged in England (w00t! I knew I picked the right country to move to.) by the English National Opera and a company called Improbable, who I am slowly falling in deep artistic love with, really struck me. So much that I felt the need to blog about it. Incidentally, if you like Neil Gaiman and know The Wolves in the Walls, Improbable produced it for the stage as a "Musical Pandemonium." Enough said.

But give me a moment to explain something: not only is this a New York Event, but it is also a piece of great art. As it will be a while till I get to England, I feel like I'm going to have to talk about other things here in the time being, without diverging too far from the original, founding, and central idea/purpose for this blog. Under that heading falls, I think, an opportunity to discuss the kind of work I'd like to start producing once I get to England. Specific ideas and topics that I'd like to produce art about will likely remain hidden from this blog--I am pretty private about stuff I intend to develop, always worried about artistic thievery (it's true: I'm a paranoid fuck). But discussing form and methods of production I think are totally okay. And if I see something that really works, to the point I really want to share it here, then I will. It's all the excuse I can offer. I hope that will suffice.

The opera uses the original Sanskrit text of the Bhagavad Gita, a really wonderful epic poem and Indian religious text. One of the reasons I love operatic music, the little that I know of it, is because it’s often written in a language that is not English. Because of the foreign language, and the sound that operatic singing produces (far from normal speech), what is being said textually and directly, is less immediately accessible to the audience. (Unless, of course, you know Sanskrit.) This affect makes language as a tool here secondary, and forces the theatre artist to convey with body, vocal production (we’re talking about the affect of sound here, not the words themselves), staging and other theatrical affects (lighting and the rest) paramount in portraying a story that would be incomprehensible to most on a simple, spoken level. It should also be noted that this production is done sans the Met Titles usually used for performance, and instead projections of short sections of the English translation of the text are thrown onto the back wall, giving the basic overview of what’s being sung as opposed to a line-by-line interpretation.

This kind of dismissal of language (though it must be acknowledged that language does provide the opera structure and aids in the conception of some of the specific staging the Skills Ensemble pulls off beautifully) I think can be likened to circus, clown, and strict physical work--basically anything that is performed sans or sans distinct text--in that it asks the audience to respond in a more primal way, associating the bodies on stage with their own bodies, identifying with them, projecting themselves onto the journey the stage characters make more directly than they would for a piece where dialogue is used, which can be colored by regional accents, implied meanings and cadences by the actor, etc. In this way, non-text based performance can be more universal, even when dealing with a specific story, ie: Ghandi's. The program I'm going into deals a lot with developing original work, without coming from a place of text OR working with ancient text and developing work out of that. It was exciting to experience first hand such a brilliant work dealing with those principles.

Something else here, which I touched on briefly above, is the element of sound in performance. I love sound because it's so isolated, and can often be one of the most powerful elements in terms of establishing setting and mood--I know it's a movie, but I'd like to give a nod to Alien here as one of the best examples of this. It's something I had wanted to play around with for my grad school audition piece, but ran out of time to develop my idea fully. Hopefully I'll be able to revisit it and experiment how to make shape with this element in the upcoming school year.

But getting back to what was produced here, we're not just talking orchestration, which worked a lot to drive and maintain tension through the story (Glass loves his repetitious themes, no doubt), but also vocal performance. The thing about vocal performance, likened to the above idea about an audience's relationship with movement, is that it is something the body can physically and organically produce. It's resonate (literally, figuratively) because it is in the audience's capacity (in most cases) to do that themselves, again playing on the universality of that method of performance. Being a yogi, I do believe that different energy is produced and sent in different tone and pitches of sound, and that's something I'd like to explore as well.

Okay: last thing. This production really demanded a lot of the ensemble, and I loved that. Watching an entire company build the setting that they're going to be performing in is a wonderful performance tool, and constantly engages the audience in experiencing the transformation that is a key element to theatre entirely. Along with the Skills Ensemble (aerial, puppet, and circus artists employed for the production to do the business a singing chorus member would be unqualified to do), the chorus is in charge of setting some of the stage dressing, and it just totally worked. It was really powerful imagery, particularly due to such an en masse grouping covering the stage of the Metropolitan, with simple but direct movement. And I loved it.

Re-reading this post, I have to say I am the master of the run-on. Sorry about that guys, but look forward to more of it in the future.

Anyway, if you're in the NY area, save your pennies and catch this if you can.

"This is a lie..."

That title's a reference to the Cure, if anybody cares.

Katie--this one's for you. Mostly.

Okay, I want to take a moment and talk about narrative structure. Partly because the thing fascinates me so, and also because it came to mind the other day when thinking on older "Battlestar Galactica" episodes, and what they mean to teach us about this season.

This post will have nothing to do with grad school, I assure you, though it will talk about art in a way and so I'm going to scrape by posting it here on that justification. And furthermore, it will fulfill a dream of mine and one GreedyGreen's desire to discuss narrative structure over blog. We had hopped for video blogging, but that shit is just too frakking expensive. (And yes: I will be using "frak" to excess over the next few months. And no, I will not apologize.) So here's a poor man's version of what could be, of what may have been. You may not understand the example I give and the ponderings thereafter if you don't watch the show. Suck it up and start renting the DVDs.

Recently, a former high school cohort who is also a BSG fan reminded me of an episode where Leoben, a known Cylon, pulls Laura Roslin to him and whispers, "Adama's a Cylon," right before he's thrown out an airlock. This happened some time ago, and I had forgotten about it. But now, with a season geared towards the revealing of the final Cylon, the question lingers. Could Admiral William Adama, commander of the remaining Colonial Fleet and guardian of the human race as we know it on this show actually be Cylon? OR: did Leoben really mean Bill Adama at all? There are two known living Adamas: the admiral, and his son Lee (or as I refer to him, "The-hottest-of-the hot"). What if Lee Adama was the Adama Leoben was referring to? What would happen then? (For those not familiar with the series, I hope those links were useful.)

But both of these questions are based around the idea that Leoben was in fact stating a truth. The question remains: was it a Cylon trick, and a lie, or will some Adama eventually endanger the lifespan of the human race on the show? The problem with telling a lie in performance--the portrayal of lying, I should say, not bad acting which is occasionally referred to as "lying"--is that the audience usually needs to be in on it for it to be of any use as a plot device. You need that sense of dramatic irony to create tension that will help propel the play. Theatre is all about the relationship the piece has with the audience. Since we understand theatre can't exist without an audience (trust me on this one) we must appreciate the dependency therein, and even if we're trying to deeply offend our audience in some kind of theatre of cruelty situation, we must acknowledge that our efforts are useless without someone to subject that kind of cruelty on.

So: here we are with our audience. They're already in a state of suspended disbelief because they've come to watch something they know to be a play/movie/whathaveyou. They have to take what the performers give at face value. It's part of the agreement they make when they take their seat. Much drama centers around watching characters functioning in both public and private settings, the contradictions between the two being what is offered to the audience as the truth of those characters, and this is so often done that it is expected. We watch human drama because we want to know what's real, what it is to actually experience something like that, whatever the circumstances. We want all the nitty gritty shit shown to us, no excuses. So when a lie is introduced, it needs to eventually be verified for being one. The great part about Othello and Richard III is that the antagonists let the audience in on the joke; both Iago and Richard turn to the audience and pointblank tell them, "I'm going to really fuck things up for these people, just watch." The audience is allowed in, and so the lying is okay because the viewers are allowed to recognize it as a device. But when that access is denied, it's almost an act of bad faith on the part of the writer/performer. Remember that episode of "Dallas" where Patrick Duffy was discovered in the shower, still alive when he was supposed to have been dead, and the entire season that had taken place turned out to be a dream? I don't, I was too young--but I've heard tell of it. Such an action on a writer's part basically undercuts the entire journey they've taken the audience on. Unless the play was somehow a large discussion about deception, and that choice was made to show the audience that even they were vulnerable to it happening to them, it's just an asshole move. Period.

So I guess basically, getting back to BSG, I want Leoben to once and for all say that Adama, whichever one, is not a Cylon. Or see more examples of Cylons lying--which there have been many, but none recent enough to remind me what they're capable of (save the day-to-day existence on the Galactica of the four known of the Final Five...I guess there's a lot of deception there, too). If it is a lie. (And I venture to guess that it is.) And generally I'd like to see a good, solid piece of drama that may trick the audience into thinking they knew the answers, but then discovered they did not. Which is great drama, truly.

When am I getting a job with SciFi?

(Note: I did find an almost completely naked picture of Lee Adama on the web, but restrained myself from posting it here. This is a blog, not a smut show. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but the epic hotness of Jamie Bamber was bound to be just too frakking distracting for the likes of me, and I couldn't do it. Sorry guys.)

"After years of waiting nothing came/And you realize you're looking/Looking in the wrong place"

From May 2005 till about October 2007, I had been working on a project that was a fictional retelling/theatrical response of the story of Matthew Maupin, a US soldier who was captured during an ambush in Iraq in 2004. The director of the piece had come across an article dealing with Maupin about a year after his disappearance, and during the workshop of another, entirely different piece meant to meld modern discussions of torture and Ophelia from Hamlet (don't ask), themes about Maupin's story kept creeping in until we'd switched gears entirely and the whole thing became about him. The big, overlying detail of the piece was that Maupin was designated "Missing: Captured" and his real life family had continued to grieve and hold out hope for his return. The US government could not give these people any surety either way if their son was alive or dead. The family held on for literally years in some state of suspended grief, and just this past Sunday (3/30/08), word came out that his remains had been uncovered. Through DNA testing, they were able to identify whatever they found of him as him. This came about a week or so before the four year anniversary of his disappearance, an occasion that was going to be commemorated in the town he grew up in. Now they've commemorated something else.

It's taken me a week to sit down and blog about this, 1) Because I haven't had the time to actually blog about anything; and 2) Because I wasn't sure how to talk about this without getting too personal, which, as always, is something I seek to avoid in this forum. <--Perhaps, though, that is inevitable, as one of the novelties of blogging is an understanding that this is the author's take on whatever it is they're discussing, and that's just part of the form. But I'm still going to try to avoid it as best I can.

It's strange, this thing. If you know me well, you've probably inadvertently gone on this journey with me over the past couple-of-years-and-change, and you may know that I affectively left the piece in October (I tried to earlier, but it just didn't work out). So for me it was over, even though the play itself was seemingly not. But now Matt Maupin is dead. And so perhaps too is this journey, for real, not just because I left the show but because that question that kept it alive all those years, that same question that kept his family campaigning the US Government for information, "Where is Keith Matthew Maupin?" has been answered. It is a passing of a different kind, and I'm glad it's come.

I would not presume to say that my response or any sense of grieving I may feel about this happening is anywhere near the family's--that would be a flagrant lie, and truly a slap in the face to anyone that knew that individual and cared about him. There is also a sense of distance because one Must try to maintain some sense of objectiveness about the topic one is discussing on stage--it is the only way to produce well-rounded art that lends itself as a discussion, instead of a piece of stage propaganda. But something is definately over now, and I see it as another sign that tells me I'm ready to go.

Even if that journey doesn't start till January. Frak.