And some photos (this update is coming together in pieces, instead of the reverse)

First, this is a Lumia, made by Thomas Wilfred in, I think the 1940s.

There aren't many of these around, but the guy who is directing my show in 

Seattle collects them.  He and his uncle have the biggest collection in the world.  

It's better than tv.  It's slightly psychotropic.

But you can't tell that here, this is a still photo.  It moves, the light reacts with these spinning metal 

plates inside, they spin and make very groovy images, really like a lava lamp except

it feels somehow more, uh, what's the word, more complex.

This is a production photo of 'I Never Betrayed the Revolution,' my play in Seattle 

that is going to preview tonight (in a couple of hours).

I wrote the play 24 years ago, half my life nearly, so it is bizarre to see it come

to life like this.

This is a still from the media for 'Hotel Athena,'

part IV of Monsters of the Sea.

We closed this last weekend, the house was always full, we never had enough room,

but everyone who came got cake.  There were some interesting things that came up in regards to the

trance (mentioned in the previous blog).  I'm doing interviews with the performers soon,

in a week or two, and I suspect I'll find out more.

Some of the performers didn't feel like they went into an altered state at all,

others had very intense experiences.  

I like it that the method does not work for everyone.

I am thinking about possession and trance in terms of embodiment and representation.

Not just because those terms all look good in art proposals (I'm not sure if they still

do, I hope there are other words that are hot by now).

But because I am thinking of trance as a metaphor for performance in general, 

inhabiting a role, being inhabited by something else.

The idea of ghosting, doubles, and absence.

Herbert Blau and Peggy Phelan are my favorite theorists this month.

XO

Oh, also, romeo&juliet/VOID will go up in two weeks.  No photo yet, but those are coming, I'm told.

I saw a run-through last night, and it is stunning.

Although I kept ritual out of it (I took out the stage directions),

it didn't stay like that.

A very astute dramaturg, who spent part of her childhood in Central Africa, and has a Bantu middle name, was onto me from the start, and started researching Yoruba culture and cosmology when 

rehearsals started.

So.  The production team has been working with African concepts, particularly West & Central African-derived ritual, and are playing with mirrors quite a bit.

The design team for this is amazing, live degrading video and sound, and many other things

too complicated for here, at least right now.

I have to go see a preview.

This has been a fun month and I am exhausted but no longer tired.

C

Not yet an update

This is too soon for an update, it hasn't been a month yet, the last show (#4 of 5) closed last night. And there are some things that are churning around that I have been thinking but not writing so this is just that little first bit of writing.  Some new things happened.

First. After one of the shows last weekend (the first weekend), YYYYY had just come back from doing some work in Sedona, a workshop on fire medicine, archaic Egyptian techniques that I won't get into (I don't know and can't know most of it, and don't want to talk for her), after the show she wanted to hide in the back room while we were meeting and chatting with the audience, and she found that, in her post show meditation (after performing a part that has a very sensual and earthy fire dance, channeling Oshun dancing for Shango), she couldn't move, there were spirits all around her and she could not move for about half an hour.  I saw have been seeing am still seeing spirits all over the house, it's been cleaned with copal and sage and murphys oil soap haha, but it's still a very busy place.  These actors have been channeling a lot of things.YYYYY says that this experience could be partly from the work in the show and partly from Sedona and I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference? I need to explain. 

Second, XXXXXX, one of the actors more susceptible to altered states, came over early. In a panic. On Thursday night.  Things were opening and she was seeing ghosts and her spirit wolf following her everywhere, could not control it and needed help. I cleaned her and gave her some things to do (to be mentioned in the sorcerers notebook (this is methodology)' and YYYYY worked with her on some energy balance things, all went well, and her performance was remarkable, powerful and tearful and magic.

There are influxes of these spiritual things intertwining with the work I'm writing about, and it's not pure Lukumi or Bantu and this is a methodological problem because, even though those traditions are based in callaloo, mixing cultural forms and appropriating whatever works, these are not reliable nor repeatable results.  The data is getting confused.  But only if.  Only if I'm still making this as a method that other actors can use, to be repeated in other situations.

A few weeks ago I met with my ex-wife, who runs a phd program here in performance of the Americas, and I was telling her about my work, and how it might apply in the fields she knows of, and in talking I realized that there is a problem, in that it's not useful for others because they would have to have a resident santero in the acting company, otherwise my methods of spell and trance are not transferable, or rather, if the methods are transferable, then the cultural specificity of the methods are irrelevant, and any new age or earth religion would suffice. This puts it into that sphere where sloppy and generic ideas of a spirit world can be the basis for anyone wanting to repeat this, and there are plenty of performance works out there that use a watered-down and easily accessible set of spiritual principles in order to make work that is universal and ultimately banal. 

However. I trust my instincts as well as the advice of my supervisors and see that the pieces really and truly are all there, so it's a question of putting the puzzle pieces in a certain order to see what the pattern says, what I'm trying to tell myself.  And I see that this is, in effect, a shift in focus toward the ones this work is for.

I suspect that it is related to building a useful metaphor for performance, where actors channel characters in the way that mediums channel the dead, and framing the methodology to suggest that in my experiments I am finding that this metaphor is not only true, but that there is really very little difference. 

And that what I am constructing, then, is not a method for reproducing my work, but instead, constructing a theory of performance.  One that confirms what Herbert Blau, Lorca, and Phelan have been considering and theorizing, that art making is made by ghosts, and we are shells for ghosts to inhabit in order to make things in the material world, and these things talk to both worlds, the living and the dead, when they are enacted and embodied.

september-october: please turn down the heat (15 oct 14)

This time, when the fall drags her feet and doesn't want to show up, not fully, just waves her hand here and there, and we catch a glimpse of her hair before the summer sun fully occupies the hot tub of our frustrated hopes, there are a hundred reasons we can find for fighting with each other and with total strangers.  Cool mornings dull the edges of these frustrations, sometimes just enough to keep us calm when 92 degrees knocks on the window at 2 in the afternoon. Like those religious families in suits that walk the neighborhoods, you think they're gone, but not quite gone, and then they come back and want to talk to you about why you are going to hell.

This is the setting, the surround, for the past month, not that weather is everything, but at this time of the year, in the desert, it's not a small thing.  And I would have imagined that having three plays going on at once would be just like living in a candy store, where the candy being sold is validation and attention, and you would think that I would like those.

Of course, I do.  However.  We are rehearsing for MOTS IV (HOTEL ATHENA) in my house, performing it in the living room, den, front patio and back yard, with 7 actors and the director, and me, and often my daughter, and usually a very excited and not small dog.  You can see where this is going.  It's not unusual, but it is more intense than usual; more people, and more people complaining to me about how this is difficult.  Art is difficult, I say, while I'm also feeling like I've eaten glass, and can't find a place to complain, and the inside of my mouth is full of bite marks.

So I get flown to Seattle, to haunt an old stomping ground, and get to remember the difference between the optic and the haptic.  Those streets and the smell of the sound, they are still in my blood, in the center of my marrow, I nearly drowned in liquor here, but instead I was drowned in the writing of famous authors who haunted the bookstores where I worked. Instead of looking up my old theatre friends, I find that all of the people I miss the most were bookstore people. Writing and reading is how we all survived being twenty-somethings in the 90s at the center of grunge. This is where we learned that words constitute reality, that art was not just a reflection of it.

I am buying a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store in Bell Town, and the clerk looks at the red star on my shirt, and says, "You're a communist! How refreshing! You don't hear much about them these days!"  I tell him that I got this shirt in Prague, which somehow disappoints him.  He was hoping that the revolutionaries and activists were still making things, and I have the same hopes.

I came to Seattle nervous about the work, this is a play I wrote 24 years ago, a linear, episodic plot, about a revolution gone wrong in an Eastern European country, which I was hoping would be apparent as a metaphor for this country.  I don't know if that will read, but I'm terribly excited about the actors working on this, and looking forward to how a 4-week run might play out (not in terms of my career, I'm not entirely hopeful about that, at least not in economic terms--I get paid for this, but even elementary math will reveal my wage is very, very low, which is not surprising to anyone who works in theatre in the U.S. or maybe anywhere).  I leave with a backpack full of books (What We See When We Read is my favorite), the smell of food shared with old friends and new friends, visceral memories of a marriage that saw its best years in this city, and something in my heart that is turning green from all the rain. I can't wait to get home to my daughter, my dog, my love, and the work in Phoenix.

I get back in the morning, and that night I'm sitting in a room in the Fine Arts Complex at ASU, listening to designers talk about my play (romeo&Juliet/VOID, which was the 3rd MOTS).  The director has some thoughts about the ending that I'm not entirely sure of (a suggestion that the whole thing was a coma-induced hallucination).  This is where it starts to feel sticky and hot.  I'm trying to keep in mind that when I gave him the script, I took out all the stage directions, and most of the notes, because it's always more interesting to me to see what someone will do with the work.  The work here is tough, and the director points out that there is no traditional conflict, the scenes are disjointed, and surrounded on all sides by monologues that are poetic swaths of inner life.  The script is all internal, it's all subtext and bounces back and forth between the imaginary and the real, so I am not going to complain about his ideas for the symbolic, I think it will be interesting, is what I keep telling myself.  And surely this is the most accomplished director I've worked with.

It's exhilarating and nerve-wracking to hear the words read out loud with an entirely new group of actors, and it's clear that some of this is too dense to sink in for the most part, but the video designer, he is swooning, tearing up, and his face is changing colors, because he understands it.  Usually I end up focusing on the one person who really gets it.  Or who shows that they get it.

The next night I'm having dinner with my daughter, watching comedy sitcoms on an iPad, and all the actors for Hotel Athena start showing up early.  Jake the director has been guiding them in trance when I've been away, and it's exciting to be back in this space, even though it's obvious that art is literally invading my home.  The only one to blame for this is me.

There are some nights where the actors are working, and I'm half-watching rehearsals and half prepping for my class when, in the space of an hour, I'll get questions from the director, an email from the dramaturg for r&j, and an email from the stage manager in Seattle.

And I sneak away from Hotel Athena rehearsals to go to campus and sit in on r&j rehearsals, and t feels good, but so very strange that there are multiple places in the world where people are speaking my words, all written at very different times in my life.  They really do become like children, children who are on the verge of growing up and making their own decisions, and somehow this is making me want to pay more attention to the time I have with my daughter.

For short bursts of time, before the attention gets pulled elsewhere, I can focus on the trance work in my living room, taking the ones who want to go in further, and making the time meditating more meaningful for the ones who are not prone to entering other worlds (there are a couple of these this time, and I like it that not everyone participating in this feels like they're entering an altered state, it makes the research more problematic, and more fruitful, ultimately, I mean, I hope).

Tomorrow we open, and my house is different.  Screens hanging up, everything is very clean, and spare, and it feels like I am living in a hotel.  I like it more than living in a house, because I can pretend that someone else will be responsible for making the beds.  Somewhere in the past couple of days, my irritation at the invasion in my house turned me from being the writer who watches things into someone who is making this thing, and that's a good role for me.  And I am reminded by all of this that the phenomenological questions I have about this work are as much about my own subjectivity as the others, and that, despite the relentless heat, this, this, this temporary space, is home.

august-september (and a little july): aha here we go (17 sep 14)

I didn't do one of these for 15 aug because I was in Berlin, and we all were, and that's how it was in August.  Talking about what we've all been working on for a year, and working on some new things, and then talking about those things, too.  So this post might cover anything not covered in all of that, and then there's more.

Between this post and the last post, the written portion of the RDC2 was returned for resubmission with rewrites.  In order to meet the timing of the studio work (which was looming, now it is not 'was looming' but rather 'is looming' or better, it 'looms'),  I took a week in the residency to do the rewrite, which is not necessarily typical, and I don't know if I would recommend it (on principle, because missing any of the sessions in the residency isn't what I would recommend at all), but I'm very glad I had the time to focus, because I came out of the fire of writing in the middle of things like that very much energized.  And in the process, had some wonderful conversations with my advisors, as well as the third reader, and left Berlin feeling much more grounded, grounded in a PhD program, and particularly in this one.

And two days ago, when this post was due, I got word from my DoS that the revision of the RDC2 was accepted, and, that symbol that applied to me before, 'MPhil/PhD' is now just 'PhD' and that feels very good, but more than that, it feels earned, earned with an awful lot of help and support from TI and Plymouth.  This was such good news, in fact, that I entirely forgot to write this blog post, which was due on that same day.

So I'm in the beginning of studio project #4 now, Monsters of the Sea/ Hotel Athena, with a script written and in rehearsal, and also have about 3,000 words on the next chapter on Methodology.  And for the first time, perhaps (though there is a philosophical problem with origins of course), I am experiencing the writing as not simply a hoop, an exercise, something to show the work, but as the work itself, that the writing is the work.  And the documentation is the work.  As much as the studio practice is the work.  That is to say, I have a better grasp on what artistic research is, and what it is for.  I'm finding the whole process very useful, and in itself energizing.

Part of the challenge could be to hold to an attitude that it is energizing; I think I can do that, because right now any bumps or blocks in the writing aren't coming from laziness or boredom with the tasks at hand, but result from things that have not been thought through fully.

This is important, I think.

Two things happened at the residency that lead to this.  First, the workshop on he Exhibition with Geoff, and the thought of Michel Schwabb, along with the presence of other PhD researchers opened up a fundamental discussion, one I'd been having unconsciously with the process, but had not brought into the light of consciousness (if it can be described as light).  This came about from seeing an art practice PhD in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is, to begin with.  What it is came later.

What it is not: through reading and listening to Schwabb, I understand that this kind of PhD is at odds with standard academic formulations, because it needs to live in two worlds at once, one that adheres to the modernist demands to 'make it new' while also conforming to the standards of, usually, social science practices.  And the challenge (ironic sense of the word) is to maintain the integrity of the PhD as artistic research that also performs artistically.  This while also being clear that, although it cannot live comfortably in the social sciences, it can and should use the tools of traditional humanities methods and methodologies.  So this became a question of re-framing, but particularly in terms of that sticky problem of method and methodology.

Here's a story: (this really happened) I stopped into the office of one of my old friends, a colleague who is tenured at the university I sometimes teach at.  He asked about my time in Europe, and I told him about RDC2 struggles and other things, and said that my problem was that I didn't really understand the difference between method and methodology.

He got excited.  "Tell me the difference!" he said (I use double quotes here because it happened in the U.S.).  Before I could tell him, though, he interrupted (this happens a lot to me, I don't talk loud enough, because I like to listen, I suppose).  He said, "Because it's obvious to me that no one really knows!  We teach it here, and if you look at the dozens of texts we teach from, they all say something very different."

End of that story.  All to say, this is nothing unique to an arts PhD, but to all of them that deal with constructions outside of the established disciplines.  So are we establishing the constructions, then?  Maybe a little, I like to think so, because it helps me to make a thesis knowing that this is something rather new, and we all have an unusual degree of freedom in determining the inner logic of what we are making.  But oh, there has to be an inner logic.

So the breakthrough here, in these stories, for me, was that I had written my RDC2 to try to satisfy two separate models, a social sciences model that I am not trained in, and an arts research model that I had not fully constructed.  So I had to construct it again.  And fortunately I had help.

Short version: I threw out the (unstable) dependence on ethnographic, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological methods altogether, using them, with my advisors' and third reader's recommendations, as contexts instead of methods.  And the bricoleur methodology I barely articulated was thrown out in order to give a place for the first instinct, the methodology of the Kanga, a new methodology.  Using practice-lead methods, interview methods, and subjective methods, to build a frame for what I was already doing.  Thank you all for all of the help.

The second thing that happened at the residency: Wolfgang's seminar on Conflict.  Based on the theme of conflict, I watched him tell us a story (with too many interruptions, he does not talk loudly either, I like that in a thinker) about a history of the continent I was on, one that reflects some essential conditions (historical, political, and philosophical) of the continent on which I live most of the months of the year.  This experience in thought, ideas that added up to a story, with an underlying imperative to make work that speaks to that story, was groundbreaking, because I have not been able to follow lines of thought all the way through, for the better part of a year, and maybe even two years.  (Mostly because of personal losses that made it difficult to think, but also because the work on my thesis was still a batch of unconnected things, waiting for me to find the connecting threads).

So I left that continent, thinking about the bullet holes in the walls, the dirt from another visit to Sachenhausen (am I going to visit this place every year??), and the things that artists do after a war, to come back to a place where everybody seems so terrified of losing all of their material things they don't think much of anything beyond it, and also a place in the middle of terrible violence from the police against young black men (among others), annnnnnd work at a university where they are going to start arming the campus police with assault weapons (there has never been a riot on campus, it's too hot to organize).

Putting the growing desire to move to Europe aside, I'm back to where I have been working with many others to build an artistic community based on mutual support, and back to work.

The new project, Hotel Athena, is a theatre piece for multiple rooms, set in a hotel in another country, where someone is looking for someone he lost.  The theme is a little bit Robert Graves (of all things), loss of the feminine, death of the father (the master texts), and the resurgence of the maternal/feminine in the material and immaterial world.  Lots of room for ghosts.  The performers have been through the spell, and we've begun trance work; it's much more individual this time (and the spell is much more communal this time), so the methodology is already serving as a potent guide. For documentation, we're recording more, images and words, using better video and sound capture tools, and I'm also starting to look more at how projected text can work (I understand how it can work to generate meaning in the documentation, but am working on the aesthetic, so that it is pleasing to the eye even if it is sometimes confrontational).  I'm still looking, though, and always open to suggestions on that part of things.

Deborah sent some wonderful resources for ethnography and video, taken from the field of cultural geography, that will be useful in guiding this next phase of documentation.

And a central concern, one that Laura brought up when we talked this morning, has to do with, interestingly enough, voice.  Finding the voice (or vocalities) for the one who is making the Kanga, the voice I will use as the central narrative author for the text of the thesis.  Be ruthless, go for the jugular, don't edit yourself, and consider what the placement of words can do to a page; all of these things.

Ok that's enough.  I hope you've been well.
xo
c

reading diary not late oh it is late this is my late reading diary

--there are, of course, two types of people in this world, those who think in dualisms, and those who do not....
this, then, this, then, is a journey between trains, a journey in thought between trains, all the tracks connect, and the stops are clearly marked, but there is no way to know how the tracks are going to curve as we go--between one thinker one thought and another, this is a train ride, history and culture are train rides where tracks converge and some of them go to the same stops, the tracks cross, and usually the trains do not crash into each other, but sometimes they certainly do...
but first.
i have seen socially embedded art, and maybe even made some (not much), and have some contexts for having seen this kind of work that i think works, but.  most of the time, when there is an event where the people performing talk about conscience and social change, i try to find reasons to be out of town for a week or so, because, because, i couldn't articulate it very well before, but because, there is that sense of us and them, where we in these scenarios are part of something disenfranchised, and them is part of something that disenfranchises, and then we get to see work about how bad those people are who are disenfranchising, and it seems so very easy, and so very uncomfortable, and incomplete.
instead, thinking with the texts (rather than through them), there are some patterns emerging about the nature of discourse generally, this is very post-structural of course, but the subject object relations through language, and the impossibility of stepping outside the father's narrative, that help illuminate why the us and them cannot hope to undermine anything, and at best, someone in the crowd might be able to think a little more deeply, but probably not really.  so.
it seems as though it's necessary to consider how we might make not only an art of social practice, but a good art of social practice, and this means bringing the aesthetics along, and looking at the very structures of how we travel on the tracks are working.
so we have to travel, because we cannot stand still, we simply cannot stand still.
and next, the tracks:
they are, out of order:
they are out of order.
they are:
HARRISON's notion of dissonance enters through music in terms of structures of harmony, weaving into nazi degenerate art, kandinsky and others playing with harmony in new and unusual ways, the idea of harmony now upset, now something else, now something made to upset, this one and that one, the opposites do not play off each other so easily, or rather, that philosophy of difference, of the other the one that resists the either this or that, in favor of playing against harmony that is rooted somewhere in heraclitus, no, SCHMITT, no, they didn't invent dualisms, of course, but those are the tracks we have to travel on to find out how we got to here, this us, this them, and that question from Billy Bragg, wondering whether the 'man in the mask or the indian is an enemy or a friend of mine'.
and harmony finds its counter or its spherical doubling in coupling and the idea of divine love, in that heavenly spherical way, the union of perfect opposites, that thing called by some masculine and that thing called by some feminine and when they collide, that conflict (is that a conflict? is love a conflict? zizek on lacan, oh he's always on lacan, but that, that violent force that selects this one out of all the other ones? is that conflict?) is not safe, is not so heavenly, is not being treated well by marxist materialisms, that one that one we always see walking with sartre, what is her name? the metro stop named for her was, and it's name was, and her name was BEAUVOIR is running on similar tracks to HARRISON, the other, the feminine, the eternal feminine, the jew, any other who is not the us in the us-them of dis ding, her track is one that traces tracks and ends somewhere at the tip of the nose, that is, on the body, that unsuspecting body, that other in the dualism that negates the self, the mind negates the body in order to justify genocide, does it seem to anyone else that the self-other thing has to come into play after the nation state has committed an atrocity?  and does it seem as though what is also remarkably original about this time (aside from the surveillance, etc.) is that there was a time when the self-other thing was the beginning of the state building toward atrocity, whereas now they/we (we are them, we have met the enemy and he is us) commit the atrocity and then find the discourse, find the self-other thing, to talk about why we did what we had to do?  and it also seems as though there was a time when the nation-state believed the self-other discourse it speaks, and now the state uses the discourse to tell the people why we are at war, and everybody knows that no one representing the nation-state really believes their own words, that it is something else, and something perhaps much much worse? (i read too much zizek and i did not have the proper training in philosophy to put the arguments together correctly)
and there are tracks, there are metro stops going to tracks that are there to lay down foundations, to build structures, or reveal structures, in order that they be revealed as something more concrete than, than, um, in order that they be revealed as concrete.  useful foundations, such as.  KANT's metro car is built with good intentions and even feels a little charming these days, a little naive, but worth the time to admire the scenery and enjoy the company of ghosts who would rather be resting than rolling over in their graves.  and then we have to get off and switch back to BEAVOIR, again, building toward a philosophy of immanence, building toward a becoming not based on the conflict being won by one who is not the other.  MARX&ENGELS, the next stop, is where we will pause and get off and wait for the next train, because for some reason, on this subway line, this stop has the best snacks, but they're expensive (it's what happens when history runs into itself), but here we really should stop and sit on one of the benches and talked about what worked and what didn't work, because truly, they laid down some of the most solid and reasonable foundations, you start with the problem (the spectre) and then begin to build the opposing forces and offer a solution, that should be an angry gesture made with a fist, haha, something like that, something like a manifesto. and it would be good to nap for a very long time, most of the afternoon even, until the rush hour traffic starts to come and we would necessarily be inclined to move, even though perhaps it wouldn't be the worst thing to stop, to just lay for a little bit longer and see what we can build from this, what to build next from this. and only then would anyone in their right mind get up again and perhaps we are wishing by now that the next metro is a merry go round with horses and unicorns but instead there is AGAMBEN and we have to take that, he picks up the notion of state as providing security from SCHMITT and instigates a foucaultian revisiting where terror becomes a necessary ingredient in what might be a dialectic, this certainly sometimes usually often appears to be a dialectic, and if we forget why we were traveling here to begin with, there is the last stop LEDERACH who leads this back to art, this peaceful form, based on harmony and discord, based in a balancing that is never quite one thing against another thing and the collapse of those things into each other, or the towering of one thing over the other, but the balance of things where they talk to each other, is it really just about having a conversation? is this just about learning how to have a proper conversation? (and not a fight or an argument, but a real, civilized conversation)?
(this was not a civilized conversation this was just a monologue)
(out of order, but then perhaps we are out of order, the restaurant is all out of order, and instead of ordering more order, we are ordering something else instead, not chaos, either, something else instead.  the choices on the menu are order and chaos, but we are ordering something else instead)
aha

june-july: decomposing & decompositioning (15 july 14)

this month there is much less to tell.  after finishing the third studio project, i've been getting things ready for this, this trip to europe, traveling in ireland, italy, switzerland, austria (and soon the former czech republic, poland, then berlin).  collecting data from the people in the third project, planning the next one, and putting together the video for the mila kunst exhibition.  that, the video, is unlocking some things about documentation that i like very much.
i am considering the possibility (maybe i wrote about this last month?) of the presentation in plymouth to be an installation with stations, one station for each performer (just the ones who have been in all or nearly all), and collecting their performance selections, interviews, writing and ephemera.  so there would be multiple stations to represent multiple bodies.
oh, also, thinking through the comments from the third reader on the rdc2, and at times i get a glimpse into something useful, but more often it's hard to get through the condescending tone of the thing, along with the suggested further reading list with books i've read and absorbed 20 year ago already.  hm.  that tells me that there's something very elementary in the work that i'm not saying out loud, and i'm not sure what it is yet.
santeria is a system that contains elements of yoruba religion that are very old, but itself is fairly new, less than 200 years old, really, in terms of how it's practiced formally, though it had its birth during the slave trade--as the system that it now is, it's survived through absorbing other traditions, ideas, thoughts, and to me, adding lacan into the list of things it can absorb seems incidental, and not worth going into discussion about colonialism, etc.  it seems divisive, but i understand the implications of ignoring these things as well.  and honestly, i don't think anyone can be inside of it and not think about those things constantly, because it's born from the institution of slavery, inside history and not outside in some eliade-like eden that is above time.  hm.
similarly, feminism, post-feminism, and liberational discourses on otherness also seem embedded in the work, so there is something that i'm not saying, and i think there is a simple way to say it, but first i have to find out exactly what it is that i'm not saying.  i suspect i'll know in a month.
very much looking forward to everything that happens next, yes yes yes

meeting w/laura (12 june 14)

look at: tim infold ; lines, how they intersect, twist go apart come together; double helix-y.  this work is like that, can visualize like that--two strands come together and converge and wrap and unwrap and go in different directions and converge again, etc.  the two sides of the spell-desire equation, sometimes it works together iike they were both together, but even when they are in their own 'domains' they still speak to each other.

next work, next project, talked about the outline of an idea posted in my last blog.  

thinking now to have 1 media projection w/no performers, 2 performers w no media, 2 performers w media.  test to see how spell and media work together, how trance works for each performer.  media enters into image and imaginary, i said oh this is about seeing, but what about hearing and she said, look at that french guy again, voice and gaze as objects of drives. look at what zizek says about this, the orifices of the face, the shadow

also note to self : look at laura's thesis again, on gaze and voice 

lacan's word: exstimacy - inside and outside come together (in voice and gaze)  

--focus for next part, again it's the presenting, how to present, be more willing to experiment in all of this, the presentation of the documentation (geoff's seminar on exposition will help articulate this, the mila kunst exhibition will be good practice for the practice, haha, a pun)

and thinking forward to the last project: she suggests i do something already written, removing myself in all the variables til the last, which will see how this works in a text that is not written for them.

this next work is going to be massively written for these particular performers and their particular abilities in trance.  

so the last one will be how this method might work outside of this context.  mm hm. mm hm.

yes.

on fire,

c

may-june: whispers & mirrors (11 june 14)

a little early, not too early, a little ready, not too ready.
bittersweet residency, some sad things, hidden under the tongue, they slip out, a little late, not too late.

start over.

dear diary,
i finished my rdc2 submission, and i like it.  i think the argument is there, finally, i didn't know what i was arguing for the longest time, but i think it's there.  this lacan, how desire functions in us (problematic us, i don't agree with ideologies that say us, or are spelled us, but spiritually, there is always the us at the beginning and the end, oh, that's such a problem, but it's not my problem), this afro-caribbean thing, how spells function, what trance does when accompanied by a proper (don't look into that word very far, i don't mean what i think you think it means) spell, they are similar, very similar, and can do things to performers in a state of trance, things that i want to talk about, but not here, not in an rdc2 way, not in a lit review way, in the methodology sections way, that's later, that's still coming, but the argument, i think, the argument is there, i think, and i know i like where it is.
so i'm waiting to hear if it reads the way i think it reads (it never will, but there are linguistic blueprints--how can you be saussure?--haha my favorite joke--there are blueprints of how we know things through words, and this writing, not this one here, the rdc2 one is the this here, this writing might fit with that in a way that makes sense to someone trying to decipher whether or not this is on the level).
too many ways to say what i want to mean.  what i think you want me to say.  what i want to want to say.  to say what i want to say.
oh but this: what i want: i don't want to pass, i don't want a degree, i want to be challenged, and earn a degree in the process (more precisely, i want to change my identity in the process, to learn how to think differently about what i do when i am making art, talking about art, learning about art). so far i am challenged very much so, yes, very much so, and i love this.

part 2.

dear diary,
i'm leaving on the 24th of june to spend four & a half weeks exploring europe with my mom and my daughter.
i'm packing and arranging a life here to move it there, but so much of it is left here.  that's how it is when you are in between places.
on august 6th heather is coming from paris to berlin.
this means that everyone at transart will get to meet the three most important women in my life.  i am very excited.
i am going to miss my dog, jake the dog.

part 3

dear diary,
we finished the show that makes up part three of the studio work.
the production was solid, but there were lots and lots of problems.  things that made it almost impossible at times to focus on the trance work.  i don't know how it worked, because i haven't interviewed the performers yet, that's still coming.  i don't know if i'll have interviews when i leave, they might have to be captured across borders, wirelessly.  but the audiences responded as if something very large and mysterious was happening, and i got to talk about my phd work in the press. we'll see how the rest of it turns out when we all get to talking about how the trance worked for them this time.
oh but there were some large problems that were beyond my control.
i can't talk about all of that here.
personal things about persons who are not me.
you know.

part 4

dear diary,
i am thinking about the next project.
not much, or not much that i have access to.  images and dreams and things that i don't quite have access to.  a room that's too dimly lit, where spirits are working out details for me, before they turn the light on.
i think brecht is right, people need to be able to smoke cigars and drink inside the theatre.  (i don't drink though, i tried it once and it went on for 20 years and was sort of messy, but you can drink, if you're lucky it's very nice, i wasn't so lucky).
there are inklings of the next piece though, and they are like this:
first, i have a production in seattle in october, and one in tempe in november, so i don't know when this will work, but i know it has to work somewhere in there.  that's a big part of my thinking about the next project, the logistics of time and schedules.  i wish it weren't so much about time and schedules, but oh, i don't want to have to keep rushing things like i have been.
i see a series of stations.  maybe this won't be in a theatre this time.  a remote location out in the middle of the desert would be best, but hard to do here, not for lack of space, but because there are too many people with guns in those spaces.
it's obvious that we have to do something about those people with guns.
so maybe this is in my house, and outside my house, where there are stations, not like stations of the cross, but stations that number 5 (because of oshun), 5 stations where there are 5 groups of performers, some groups of 2 or 3, some groups of one (the word group is not correct for a group of one, but language is all that we have, or rather, interpretation is all we have, based on desire, how we hear what we want to hear, how we hear what we think they want us to hear, based on magic, how words make things when they are put together in certain orders).
the 5 stations perform an act, or a scene, continuously, so that the spectators can walk through them in whatever order they choose, and end with an incomplete vision of the whole.
one station with media only where a narrator puts the viewer into a state of trance.
one station where performers interact with media, a film about their experience.
3 stations that are only performers, these performers are in a deeper state of trance than we've done so far in this monsters of the sea.
all stations are performers reflecting on an experience, an experience with some basic components: a restless night. an argument between a heart and a head.  falling into exhaustion finally and waking up hearing the dead singing.
this is about seeing, looking to see the world of the invisibles, and seeing something else instead.
an ecstatic rite that begins and ends with dancing.
that's all i can see right now.
love.
c

april-may: stutters (14 may 14)

this update is reporting on two things: like usual, writing and studio practice.

writing wise, i have finished the second draft of the rdc2 chapter, and am working on draft 3 of the rdc2 report.  will have notes etc from my advisors in the next week or two, and am planning on submitting by the end of may.  the chapter, losing the glossary and taking the form of a play, was a good idea, i think, it opened up everything for me.  it also helped me to put my advisors’ comments in a (dialogical) context, and i saw something in my writing that um i don’t want to talk about out loud but because i don’t want to i will.

i wrote a lot of words without saying anything, and see now that the first draft was in large part me thinking things through, but not very thoughtfully haha.  and it took all of this upfront work (which i didnt think at the time was work i wouldn’t use) in order to get to where i could articulate the main things i’m trying to articulate, that is: lukumi spells, palo charms, lacan’s desire, when put in place, in action, in rehearsal, have effects on the performers that seem very similar.  this i’ve said, but not so much in terms of how.  which part of the charm is like the subject, or object, etc etc., and suddenly i am seeing why some have had trouble understanding what i’m talking about, because i am not articulating what i know, but i didn’t know what i wasn’t articulating, and now i know.

so i am learning how to write.

in terms of the studio project.  yikes.  i formed a new theatre company with friends, and am not directing this time, so i can focus on the ritual parts of this, getting performers into trance, putting them under oshun & yemaya spells, etc.  however, the director tore a ligament and a tendon, lengthwise, and had to have surgery, and so i got to direct for a bit again.  and the actors have had staggered schedules so tonight is the first time we’ll all be together in the room at once.  and this: the space, we have a perfect space, but suddenly can’t get in touch with them, and they’re not answering any questions about moving in next week to open, so, we are not sure we have a space after all (this has not happened before, i’ve worked with this space lots of times and think the people are lovely), so.  these complications have meant that i’m not focusing on ritual and trance with the performers but am doing many things at once.  not ideal, but i suppose it never is, and, this one is focusing on the psychoanalytic mind, and a deep trance is not necessary, just a lightness of consciousness, a light state of otherworldliness and lots of discussion of projections and mirrors,  it will work, but not with as much documentation in the process as i wanted.

i’m guessing i’m not the only artist-researcher who has been frustrated, but at the time that it happens, it sure does feel like you’re the only one in the world.  we get to work through these things and find out what we found out after it’s all over and not a moment before xo

march-april: this is not here (16 apr 14)

This update is preoccupied with the things this update is writing about.

There is the work, the written work: oh this has already been written about, however, in the last 2 posts.  But.  To summarize, or rather, highlight:

I am reading two new books, The Claude Glass (history of the Black Mirror) and Phantasmagoria.  The latter is interestingly laid out, a structure for looking at the ‘more things in heaven and earth’  (wax, ether, air, etc.); the former seems to have a link for my methods, where the black mirror is something that catches the gaze (not in JL’s sense of gaze, to be clear), and the act of looking is power, so to take it away from someone is agency and authority and all those things.  I’ll write more on that later, I’m sure.

I have some new methods for collecting subjectivities (in a jar, haha), and my favorite one, the one I’m looking forward to, is interviewing analyst-style, not face to face.  Looking forward to seeing what I find, and next Sunday I start rehearsals for project #3.  Oh this is a busy month, mm hm.  But I know it’s been rough for you, too.

Next, dropping the idea of a glossary for the lit review, almost altogether but not quite, almost dropping Cortazar but not quite, and instead taking the form of a play, a dialogue between directors in a play, so that the discourses can argue amongst themselves, so that there is a fluidity and elasticity between them.

I finished draft 2 of the RDC2 report, and am in the middle (beginning of the middle, say, like on the early end of a beat) of writing draft 2 of the lit review.  Oh, this, these things, all with a very very big debt, I had a lot of help, a very big debt to my advisors.  Yes, very much.

Oh, and I have plane tickets to Europe.  This is all happening too soon, but exactly soon enough too.

xo

c

supervisory meeting p2 of 2 (11 apr 14)

met with Laura today on Skype.  Very fruitful.  The big questions centered around form and structure, I’m looking for central metaphors to guide this work, central metaphors that could dictate the form and structure of the work.  The Nkisi is still in my mind as a guiding poetic object, but the form that lets the reader in is Performance.  I’m still thinking through this in terms of how the rest of the chapters are laid out, but the literature review, instead of a glossary, will be a play.  I’m already writing in voices, and the problem I’m having is how the voices need to be able to speak to each other, and a play solves that.

The idea of a Rehearsal Director being the central narrator (which fulfills the same role the Lecturer does in Malcolm Ashmore’s The Reflexive Thesis).  Two assistant directors, a Santer@/Paler@, and a Lacanian.  Aha.  This will work.

In the next week I’ll be writing a revision to the RDC2 report, and in three weeks a new draft of this chapter, to allow for another round of revisions for a May submission.  Yes.

Other points:

To include my footnotes, I can’t use Harvard style, but, Laura suggests, Harvard style makes better writing, because we’re forced to focus.  I will do that then, because the form is playful enough to allow for side trips, but it needs to take the reader on a journey that’s not frustrating to follow (at least, not at the outset).

Also, need to include Mulvey (of course).

And more theatrical and other artistic sources throughout.  Again, the play format, where the setting is a rehearsal with a dialogue about the research questions, will make this not only easy, but really essential.

Finding out that so much of this writing is learning how to say what I know but haven’t spoken because it’s so much a part of my world that I don’t think to articulate it (but without these articulations, it doesn’t communicate what it really is).  And also finding out that so much of this is unknown, what is happening and what will happen when these notions are put to the test in the laboratory of art.

supervisory meeting p1 of 2 (4 apr 14)

The nature of these meetings I understand is to have everyone meet at once; in this case, I’m working on my RDC2, and need to be able to work toward a very rapidly approaching deadline, so, I’m meeting with my supervisors separately, because of complicated travel and teaching schedules, and also because there’s a lot of material to cover (60 pages or so), and individual conversations are necessary (but everyone is talking to each other, we’re all conferring in loops so that eventually we’re all participating in the same conversation).

This morning I met with Debbie, and had a wonderfully illuminating discussion of the report and the first chapter.  We’re discussing the structure of the whole; I have a Cortazar-like  (and a little of Barthes) glossary to begin, and am thinking of how this might manifest into thinking about the thesis as a whole.  A document that’s based in a structure, Debbie is suggesting, found somewhere in Lukumí oral tradition.  So I’m thinking about the Odu, the Ifa corpus of oral knowledge, and how that structure might suggest a structure that could guide this whole thing (and it would, by nature of the Ifa corpus, lend itself readily to post-structuralism, because it is already post-structural).

The intro (which I have a draft off, but not a draft I like yet) would in part explain the reasoning for the structure, in order to help the reader along, but also to position the work philosophically in an African-based and art-based system, which already has political implications which with I am very comfortable, because it is a subversion of traditional academic thought from the get-go.

We also discussed the interview process with the performers, and I’m thinking of ways of capturing their words on video and audio, according to psychoanalytic theory (by that I just mean setting the stage so that they are not looking me in the eye, like on the analyst’s couch, so that they are more likely to speak as if speaking into a mirror).

The mirror.  She suggests I look at two books, Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria and Maillet’s The Claude Glass. I ordered both.

Yes, things are rolling along very nicely right now.  More after the conversation with Laura next week,

tschussie!

february-march report from the trenches (16 mar 14)

Oh my gosh.  This one is not going to be very illuminating, or very long.

I’ve been working on the written part of my RDC2, have an intro, first chapter, and a bibliography; and drafting the RDC2 report.  I have written a lot of words and all of them are in an unusual order so that, when read together, it sounds like something I would say.

Oh, you’ll have to read it to understand more, I can send it to you if you like.

In terms of the practice, we secured a space downtown, a nice 50-seat theatre, for 2 weekends of performances in May.  This is for MOTS3: end of play.  Have the director, most of the actors, going to go into rehearsals in a couple of weeks.

All is well here.

(except my cat has gone missing).

(but the world outside is perfumed with orange blossoms, and it’s a ridiculously lovely time of year to be living here.  please feel free to visit.)

xo

C

january-february: into the trenches (21 feb 14)

Back home from the residency.

These things always get me recharged, and this one was particularly electric.  This next month I’ll be working on the text for my first chapter (I already have 8,000 words, but still have a lot of ground to cover–so I’m planning on writing like mad for the next week or so, and spend a week editing what I have down–I thought I was done with writing workshops, but it turns out that Klaus’ seminar on Academic Writing opened up doors in a most useful way), as well as a draft of the 3,000 word document for the RDC2.

That’s the future, now going back….

Most of January was spent on getting my presentation ready, editing a few hours of video of myself, as well as video of the last performance.  I hated seeing myself for so many hours of the days, but, I have to say, I loved doing this.  Editing video for performance is something I rather like, but I’ve never edited video so that it would work like academic writing.  It was much more labor-intensive than writing, but I needed the writing to perform, and it seemed like the best way to make this work.

A conversation with my supervisors left me wondering about documentation in a big way.  Discovering that my performance videos don’t communicate much, not without contexts.  So.  It took some fighting with my own ego to work these issues through, in order to realize that I’m not presenting work, I’m becoming a researcher, so I had to force myself to start seeing my work as raw material for research, and this felt like a breakthrough.  And the meeting with Laura and Debbie in Chicago sparked my enthusiasm for this, and I’m excited to take their notes to heart and work with a larger idea of documentation for the next project.

It is a central issue, I think, the issue of documentation in ethereal art forms (and I’m not sure it matters if I’m doing theater or performance art, since I have my feet well soaked in both of these, so that whatever this work is, it’s always going to be a little bit of both….and even more to the point, after I got home I read an article where Vito Acconci was talking about how Marina Abromovic’s work has become much less interesting the more she repeats herself, and he suggests that performance art isn’t something one can do for long, it’s a way of getting out of the habits of work in order to make room for a new kind of work, and I feel like I’m there, making that work now).

The residency peaked for me in the presentation, of course, because it’s the event that had the most personal pressure.  I appreciated the comments very much, very encouraged, and also challenged.  I like to be challenged.  And it did remind me that, even though I wish we were at a point where colonial intentions weren’t suspect, the political climate in the world at large (inside my own state, which just passed a law making it legal for businesses to discriminate based on religious beliefs <which will target the LGBT populations, as well as those outside the fundamentalist Christian mainstream>, inside the U.S. with racially-motivated murders where the murderers get off, and outside the U.S. where police are killing citizens in the streets or Cossacks are beating Pussy Riot members with whips in front of cameras) suggests that there is, as yet, no equal playing field, so.  I have to position myself within this work explicitly, even though it might seem implicit to me.   I like Godard’s notion of making work politically, rather than making political work, and that kind of work doesn’t always show its ideology on the surface, so I’m working on articulating that ideology (the idea that no one is free until everyone is free has always been central to my thinking, because of what my parents taught me, and I understand this may not always be apparent in the discourse.  Trials by fire are wonderful ways to find the knots that need to be untied.

Of course, I’m at a point in this work where so much seems implicit to me, and this is the best time to be writing my lit review, because I’m discovering that these things I thought I had already articulated are still unspoken, and I get the chance to speak it (with citations and footnotes).

Overall, then, my response to the residency is a very positive one.  I would prefer New York City to almost any other place in the U.S. (because of the energy of the place, as well as the possibilities of making artistic connections), but I also liked the chance to be in a place where the energy of the surround was focused in academia.  I wish I had been more prepared to take advantage of the conference, because those connections are ones I’d like to start working in order to start positioning myself for a university career.  Oh, but I also really wish we could have the big, planned meals in more reasonably priced restaurants.  The night at the Thai restaurant was great fun, but the night before was a little bit dreadful (and I was so hungry afterward).  I also liked the opportunity to connect with the PhD cohort, and after going through a couple of trials together, I am looking forward to spending more time with them in the residencies to come.  I’ve always wanted to blur the lines between MFA and PhDs at Transart, because I think we feed each other in remarkable ways, but I also am much more in line with spending residency time doing PhD-related workshops and events.  We need each other to get through this, it’s stimulating and intense, and I’m learning that the experience of a PhD student really is a very different beast.

The workshops, then, were really just fine, interesting and engaging and relevant to the work at hand, and I wish there were more of them.  To reiterate some of what we’d discussed together, I would like more mini-sessions, where we can spend time learning things that are more specific to our haptic experience (Voodoo Pad, citation, and issues of documentation, all of these I’d love to be part of).

Overall, I’m very proud to be part of this, working with interesting people, students and instructors and administrators, and doing what feels like essential and necessary work while having some lovely conversations along the way.

december-january: a little calm before… (16 jan 14)

That month went by so very fast.

Next up, I am working on my presentation for the RDC2 in Chicago, just starting to write the first chapter, and getting all the things in line to start on the next project (performers, and uh, the script, too).  Lots of things to work on between now and the next update.

But here, I’d like to write a little bit more in terms of de-briefing and reflection from the last piece.  And I’m realizing now, as I’m getting my thoughts together, that it might make a lot more sense to write the reflection before asking anyone to watch the piece, in order to comment on how it works with my research questions.  My bad.  I forget how important context is for all of these things…

So first, there’s this note from the program, this is what the audience read before the show so they had an idea of what was going to happen:

This project is part of a PhD for Transart Institute in Berlin, in conjunction with Plymouth University in the U.K.  I’m studying trance, looking at ritual states of consciousness, and how they work in performance.  I’m looking at trance through the eyes of Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions (Lucumí and Palo Monte, to be precise), and also through Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas.  We are working in states of trance.  I can explain more, but I won’t try here.

 This is a story you know, told in a way that you might not recognize outside of your dreams.  

You’ll recognize some of the characters.  There’s Romeo & Juliet, of course, and Mercutio, Romeo’s best friend, and then there’s the Nurse, and Susan, the Nurse’s daughter.  Susan is mentioned in the original script a few times.  She died when she was very young, so while the Nurse raises Juliet, she has a ghost of a daughter with her.  And Rosaline is also here, you don’t really see her in the original, but she’s the one who had Romeo’s heart until he saw Juliet.  Hahaha, he thought he would never love again.  These stories are repetitions of things that happen to us. 

This was made during a gorgeous and stormy time.  The loss of my father, and meeting the love of my life, all happening at the same time.  So if you feel a little lost, just keep in mind that this is about love and grief.  And if you’re not lost at all, it’s still about love and grief.  Or maybe love covers it.

Thank you for coming.  

There was an overwhelmingly positive response to this work, and, in part, this is something that’s more likely to happen when you’re inviting people into your home to see something, rather than soliciting responses from random audiences in a more public space (I think I would like to try the next one in a more public space, because although I love the intimacy that is possible in a closed setting, I can learn more about how these trances and charms work when it’s taken into a less controlled context).  There were theatre professionals in every audience, but there were also outsiders, friends of actors, or students who had heard about it from professors, and there were some houses where the audience was largely made up of people who were not necessarily interested in experimental theatre, trance or ritual.  The responses from all of these audiences were much the same, that they found the experience to be entirely captivating, and took them into a mysterious place.  There were three responses in particular that stood out for me, the first two illustrate the ritual intentions of the piece worked well, and the third is more personal.

Quan, a Vietnamese refuge who is now working in Phoenix as a teacher and healer of traditional medicine (he is also the teacher of my girlfriend–oh, now fiancé!–who played Susan in the show), told me that he felt as though he were the subject of a peculiar kind of magic.  He later told me that the magic felt like something he had not experienced in his travels and teachings, and would like to have conversations with me in the future about my own (spiritual) practice.

One of my friends, Isis Costa McElroy, who teaches Brazilian literature, posted this comment after seeing the show: “stunning! congratulations to all involved! this is pure NKISI to be decoded and cherished.”  She is perhaps the most well-informed spectator, having written about Afro-Caribbean ritual and spiritual practices herself.  Her use of the term Nkisi is particularly apt, using a term from the Bantu for a spirit object that is wrapped.  The show opens with Susan, in the center of a circle, being unwrapped, like a charm, and closes with her being wrapped like a charm, and then the Nurse (played by me) wraps the entire cast to close the spell.  It’s important to mention that as she is being wrapped and unwrapped, she says, “Am I going back?”  These were the last words my father spoke on his deathbed, so this was intentionally quoting and also invoking traditional Kongo ritual, and also consciously addressing the spirits of the dead.

This needs unpacking, and further reflection, but it strikes me that I am working on both quotation and invocation here.  I think that it’s likely that somewhere in this space, between quotation of a ritual and actual invocation of the ritual, there is something where the distance between performance and rite gets blurred.  There were further references to this idea of wrapping (wrapping is one of the translations of the Bantu word, “Kanga,” which is sometimes mistranslated as spell, but they may be the same thing) throughout the play.  Characters get wrapped up, tied, and there are dozens of verbal references to wrapping and tying in the script.  This was also intentional, where I was trying to set a groundwork for a piece of theatre that was, in itself, a charm.

The last response that was particularly powerful was from my mother, who, when she heard the words in the opening scene, gave me a look that I can’t describe but can’t ever forget.  For her, and I think now, for me, this was a play that was about grieving, a public act of grieving disguised as theatre.

But that very personal meaning is something that I’m not sure of, not sure how to write about.  It’s personal for me, and not meant to translate to anyone else, except for the very few who were there when my father died.  I think that’s problematic, methodologically speaking.  However, I am one of the subjects in this process as well, so I just wanted to remark in that in this semi-public forum.

I haven’t interviewed the performers yet, and will have these done before the month is over, so I have the data for the first project before I start the second project.  At that point, I’ll have more information to offer in terms of how they experienced this, and have some particulars on moments where the sense of being under a spell, or in a trance, was more pronounced.  For now, though, I can say that from group discussions and de-briefings, they all felt as though they were performing in an altered state of consciousness throughout the performances.

In rehearsals, we would begin by going into a deep meditative state, where they would find an aspect of their own psyche, an aspect that would be willing to take over for the duration of the rehearsal.  I developed a technique for this while we were working together, and so far it seems to work well.  We also worked on developing a shorthand so that we could access this state very easily, but more importantly, leave the state when the rehearsal was over.  We applied this same technique to the performances, so that each of the six shows was performed in a state of trance.  This notion of trance is one that I’m going to speak to very specifically in the presentation in Chicago.  People have expectations when they hear the word “trance,” and I sense that it may be something much more acute (with writhing on the floor and shaking and trembling) than what we’re working with.  I also sense that I’ll learn more when I talk to each of the performers in more depth, and am hoping to find some keys to developing methods of going deeper.  And I also need to be aware that there are performers who don’t want to go deeper, that there is sometimes fear surrounding these things.  So it’s my intention, then, to build works and environments where they can feel comfortable, as much as possible, and then find out where the work takes them.

As I keep discovering, the biggest knot in all of this is in regards to questions of documentation.  Participating in the work is the best way to see it (at least for the purposes of this research), seeing the show live is the next best way, and watching a video is a very distant third.  But it’s what we have.  I am certainly curious about how I might present this documentation in order to demonstrate what the research is uncovering, and I’m going to play with some of these thoughts (the ones Laura and Debbie shared with me in our conversation yesterday) for the presentation in Chicago.  I’m hoping that will open up some new channels of thought in how to construct the documentation in a way that’s useful and engaging, but also can offer a chance to see the work from distant locations.  It may well be, however, that outside of the experience of the live event, any experience of the event would be as an ethnographer, looking through an ethnographer’s frame.  I am curious about how it might be presented, then, toward such a frame, and think that there are exciting possibilities there.  If that dividing line between performance and rite is really very thin, then perhaps live theatre, when it’s presented as an artifact, needs to be presented in the same way that rituals are presented for a camera.  And I need to keep in mind that this is much like that, with videos that serve as the rough footage, the rough footage that contains the performance.  And rough footage needs unpacking.  And I hope this entry serves as a beginning for some of that unpacking.

nov-dec: the work (ii) (24 dec 13)

The main thing for this month’s report is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4tLauSi3bU&feature=youtu.be

This link is to the video of the last show, that show being ‘romeo&juliet/VOID’ or, part 2 of Monsters of the Sea.

The video is taken from 3 shows, but the bulk is from Thursday, December 12th, when we had both a camera operator and cameras that were fully operating.  Um.  One thing I want to tell you, the music during the dance bits (there are 2 of these) is not the music from the show, but a short clip I put together on Garage Band so I could upload this without violating any copyright laws.

So, I’ve been working on that this month, it closed December 14th, so pretty much all of this past month’s work was spent in rehearsals.

I’ll have more next month in terms of reflection and writing.

I’m starting to get ready for the 1-hour presentation in Chicago for my RDC2 talk, and am also just starting to hammer out some thoughts on how to structure my lit review for the written part of the RDC2 (I’ll have a draft of that sometime around the Chicago conference, too).  Also, I’m starting to think about what to do next, what part 3 will be.  I’m thinking more about the idea of being in love, and how that is also some kind of a spell, so the next work will be focusing in on that part of spells/trance/kanga.

In the meantime, I’m going to wish you all a lovely lovely holiday, and hoping for wonderful things and lots of magic for us all in 2014.

xo C

oct-nov: into the laboratory (16 nov 13)

Ok, so there’s video.  I’m uploading a 6-minute section which includes some shots of early rehearsals, along with the most productive and interesting de-briefing we’ve had so far.

http://youtu.be/Y8RH4mZFZ9E

The bulk of my time is in this project, in the studio, making this new work.  It goes up in a couple short weeks, so I’m thinking that the next blog here will be a lot like this one: not much to say in terms of new writing, but lots of work in the laboratory.

The collaborative process here has been very smooth, the staging has been easy and exciting.  There are some issues with altering work schedules, and a very loud and affectionate puppy (who is really large and has sharp claws and teeth).  Sometimes I cage the dog (they say that dogs like it, so far they are not correct), and schedules are getting more regular as we get closer to opening.  Either way, I’ve decided to make dog sounds a part of the mediation practice, and if someone comes in late while we’re lying on the floor getting trance-y, it’s not very disruptive.

I’ve been worrying about that for awhile, how disruptions might get in the way.  Except.  I’m working on defining a ritual consciousness, one that takes in the circumstances of the surroundings, while being able to focus on ritual and intensity of experience, and so.  Such disruptions are, I think, rather fortunate circumstances, because they are helping me to test my theories.

So far, so good.

In other news, Death still hurts, Love still rules, and everything is ok.

 Happy happy fall!

sept-oct: same love, same death (16 oct 13)

Oh, but it’s not the same, not the same at all.  The people are the same, though, but it keeps changing.  In terms of grief, it’s been a wild and wicked month, of course…a memorial for my dad, where 200 people showed up, all from different parts of my past, growing up, high school (some friends, and my best friend’s parents from the West Indies), and the present, my ex and her boyfriend and my daughter, family and extended family, and Heather sitting with me in the front row with my mom and brother…putting together a slideshow of my dad’s life, and giving the eulogy, all very heavy and the whole thing just beautiful…odd thing, the eulogy, it was easy and impossible to write, and I wanted people to know my dad’s sense of humor and give them space to cry, too…all of this puts me in a space where I want to start writing where people might understand what I’m saying…which feeds into this…

Talks with Laura and Debbie to get a plan of work together for the fall and winter, and a talk with Sarah about ethics, and this thing has really begun…the second work, this one called ‘romeo&juliet/void,’ a lot like I described in the last post, but it’s changed already in ways I did not suspect.  First, this Heather, she’s in the project, and we’re also in love, and it’s a love spell I didn’t make up but fell into, and would like to be here for a very long time, so…ethical issues aside, we talked about how to make it so that this project doesn’t interrupt the love story, and for the first time I can remember I’m finding myself keeping art and life separate, and I’m not confused about which is which, and have no real desire to confuse them on purpose…so we don’t talk about rehearsal outside of rehearsal, for one…and instead of her and I playing a love story in this project, she is Susan, and I am her Mother, the Nurse; she can trace things in her character’s journey about her own healing work and coming to herself in her new identities, and I’m seeing how I can trace my own feelings about my own daughter, Elli, now 14, Juliet’s age in the play (and the age Susan would have been if she lived)…

I had about 20 pages of script written, but the morning after my dad’s memorial my computer crashed utterly, and it got sent away to apple-land, and they told me the hard drive would need to be replaced, so the work was lost…this a week before we started meeting to read the script…so…a hard week of solid writing, putting together something all new…when my computer came back, it had the hard drive, so all the old script was there…so it was a process of putting the two together…in all of that, a lucky accident or so, perhaps, this story takes place in the land of the dead, out of time, but for all of that, very linear, with secrets and through lines and threads, again, this is new for me, I don’t usually write in any kind of straightforward way (this blog post a fine example of that), and my art has not been like that very much either, ever, but it makes sense for this work…especially the idea of threads that weave through it, because it is working very well, metaphorically, in regard to Bantu philosophy (Bantu being the origins of Palo Monte), and the way thread, literal thread, works in kangas…

So we’ve been working on the script.  It’s in really good shape right now, and the performers all claim that they’re very happy with what they’ve got to work with, and I can’t wait to start getting into the staging parts of this (next week)…and the ritual parts are very much under way…last night I had the performers all bring a request, something that they would give to Oshun & or Yemaya, and with these requests I am constructing charms or works for them so that they have a connection to the spirits that are in the house, which means that the spell is on, really on, for the whole room (and the spell seems to be working for my new dog, Jake the Dog, who is crazy and likes to chew on us when we are working, because she is either possessed by Kongo spirits herself, or perhaps just because she is a puppy)…

The script, even though it is linear, does have many layers, and there are multiple spells being enacted within the story, and I see an arc of events in the story where they all (the spells) build and multiply on top of each other…very nice, just as it should be, and I’m sometimes convinced that Fellini’s ghost is somewhere close, watching…

In my own speaking subject position, I’m seeing myself playing multiple roles, in complicated ways…as a writer, I need to make sure they don’t give me so much authority, because the script is really secondary, and as a director, I need to have their confidence and trust…as a ritual guide, they need to trust me, too, but I also need to have a healthy sprinkling of doubt, a sense that I might be a charlatan, so that they do not buy into the religious and spiritual system from which I’m drawing, but instead buy into the process, which is one that can allow any system, or no system, and still produce interesting results, and performances that work with their own subjective definitions of altered state of consciousness, but still with a common idea that we’re all working toward a ritual state of consciousness together.

More on that: I met with an old friend, Boyd, who is currently visiting professor at the University here, teaching the media courses, because I wanted to get his participation on helping the media to work seamlessly, and also get some help in editing the projections.  He said yes, but after we had a long conversation about the idea of working with art and ritual in the same room…interestingly, we had a lot to talk about.  He grew up in a spiritual tradition with missionary work and proselytizing (this is also true for two of the performers), and left this tradition (same with the performers), and has a certain ambivalence about anything where people are working together in a common belief system.  It was good to articulate my intentions, and the conversation dovetailed the ethics conversations, and in fact put a nice bookend on these conversations.  It was like a test run of the discourse, and I was happy it worked out well, now…now…now I get to start testing how it works in practice, next week, when the performers have charms in their pockets, and the spells they enacted for themselves will start to work or not work, and then we’ll get to see how that plays out in the room.

Next time, I’ll have video of the rehearsals, right now there’s no video, since it’s just been us sitting at a table and reading, but starting tomorrow I’ll need to start keeping the work documented, and will start posting bits of that here.  Yes.  Have a lovely Halloween Season. xo C