So, I know what the next step is, post-Portland. The next thing I think I have to do with choruses is figure out different ways of imposing structure within and around them that don’t break up the creativity of impulse. Make it more like the jazz it keeps getting compared to.

And the next workshop I do will be about that.
Chorus plus structure.
Except I want as much as possible of the ideas for the structure to come from the actors and be regulated by the text, not by me. Spontaneous structure.

I suppose I should also hone in on one of the Greeks for the text. Go back to the original. I’d like to take several weeks on all the different Greek choruses within the context of their plays – I started looking at that when I was writing a pitch for someone and realized I’d never really shook it out. But this is the area where I keep getting slammed, this is where, if this method can grow, it has to grow.

If it can. I am feeling a little discouraged these days – wondering how on earth I ended up spending so much time and energy on this. Is doing an all-chorus show the theatrical equivalent of writing an all-rhymed thesis? Impressive, weird, but ultimately useless? Am I now actually at the point of wanting to let this go, in the same way I did rhyme? Am I only doing this because it’s hard and seemingly impossible, not because it has value?

That can’t be right, not when I still see bad choruses being staged. It can’t be. I keep on wanting to do the next round – Indy, Ithaca, San Antonio, if possible – I keep wanting to show these ideas to Caitlin, to Amina, to my other friends, and see how they will react.
I keep hoping that there is a way to make this method scaleable and usable.

Imagine if I could get past keyword: imitation, if I could go beyond saying just imitate other members of the group, and into a technique for staging choruses that could actually be used by other directors, in the same way that Meisner can?

But at the bottom of all this is definitely a fear that I’m spending my life and my most energetic years wasted on stylistic digressions. And sometimes I wonder, often I wonder, if I wouldn’t be happier and feel less like Don Quixote if I were “only” writing.

I do believe that it’s possible to move your life and your art forward on several fronts. It’s not a pie. You don’t have to give one thing up to explore another. But is this really what I wanted to do with my life? Do I care about directing choruses, or do I care about writing plays? The answer is and always has been – writing. And that scares and disturbs me, when I see myself giving so much more energy to forms of staging.

Staging is like writing, I guess, if actors are words. Maybe.