Thursday, October 30, 2014

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


Saturday, October 25, 2014

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.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

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.