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
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