Monthly Archives: November 2007

the chorus

Friday with the Greeks

It was a dark, cold day today in Ithaca. I spent it sitting at a graduate student carrell inside Cornell’s Olin Library, on the sixth floor, in my favorite call number: PA 3800, the Greeks. (Cornell lets you walk into their library without an ID card, a guest pass, or anyone checking any bags at all, unlike Stanford.) The new deadline from R&C has encouraged me to get it together and pick my four favorite choruses to work with. It wasn’t easy, but I did end up with mostly what I was expecting:

Sophocles – OEDIPUS AT COLONNUS (am still flirting with ANTIGONE, and using OAC as a kind of umbrella chorus for the entire project)
Euripides – MEDEA
Aeschylus – THE PERSIANS
Aristophanes – THE WASPS

It’s hard for me to let go of ANTIGONE because I so vividly remember Professor Ginsburg and Professor Abel, my Cornell classics professors from my TASP (Telluride Association Summer Program) analyzing those choruses with us. To this day, I refer to “May he never share my hearth – may he never think my thoughts” as an example of the chorus using the singular pronoun, the collective character of it.

I took the bus in, but I walked back to stay warm – and I swang by 217 West Avenue, the Telluride House, on the way back.

Professors Ginsburg and Abel are both dead now. I never saw Judy Ginsburg again after our TASP. I did see Lynne Abel in 2003, before I went to Germany, when Christian and I co-led a TASP at Cornell. I went to her house at the lake and she gave me advice, some of which I took. I never let her know how the play in Berlin went, and I heard she had died before I could.

At least I’m still working on the Greeks, and still with the ideas they gave me.

Standard
UpstageProject

The Sky is Falling!

It was snowing when we woke up this morning – only the second time in my life I’ve ever seen falling snow, and the first was in Berlin, the night before we left to go back to the US. Light snow, soft and white.

Really good session last night on UpstageProject. Amina and I reviewed the various different kinds of things we want to go on the site, and decided that most of them can fit into the category of either blog posts or articles. I had divided articles up into a bunch of other things, but it’s a little unnecessary. So we’re working with a much simpler model now.

She is interested in streamlining our workflow, particularly the editorial review process. We want this website to be like a real magazine, where your work gets commented on by an editor and goes through multiple drafts – but it’s a lot of work for our small volunteer staff, and we want to make sure we’re not overwhelming anyone.

Amina has a lot of experience, from Telluride and other places, in how to create a workflow model that will last. I’m really relieved to have her helping with this.

To this end, we’re not going to NYC tomorrow, but are going to stay in Ithaca and continue working over the weekend. This also gives me more time to get the Convergence script the way I want it.

Standard
a propos of nothing

Overheard in Ithaca

Walking on the Ithaca Commons, a kid under seven with a woman over seventy. I hear them mid-stream, discussing another country.

Grandmother:…You know, a lot of their citizens don’t even have health insurance.
Boy: Why not?
Grandmother: It used to be a Communist country.
Boy: So?
Grandmother: A small number of people took all the money.
Boy: Why?
Grandmother…
Boy:?
Grandmother: They’re yucky.
Boy: (jumping up and down) I wish evil didn’t exist.

Standard
convergence, the chorus

Switching gears, again.

So, my fellow Convergers are making breakneck progress on getting great meetings with folks in Indianapolis – there is lots of interest and enthusiasm. However, due to this progress, Rob and Caitlin need a draft of the 13 Ways Of Looking At The Chorus script, and they need it tomorrow – just another instance of the universe catapulting me into action. I’ll spend tomorrow hammering it out at the Cornell library. I just have to find the right choruses, and the right translations, and I’m very close to it.

Sometimes when you’re stalling, the real world comes up and smacks you with a deadline, and then you get it done.

I’m working from Collegetown Bagels in downtown Ithaca – and the radio is playing “Proud Mary.” Rolling…rolling…rollling indeed. Rolling with the punches.

Standard
interviews, UpstageProject, workstyle

Are you volunteering to do that?

I spent today revising the Bylaws and Practices pages for UpstageProject, in preparation for another collaboration session with Amina tonight. I was surprised in doing it to find myself more interested in being editor of the Reviews & Interviews section than of the Articles. Part of this is probably from having had such a good experience doing the Crossover Interviews earlier this year, but I realized that I just have way too many opinions about what constitutes good or self-indulgent reviewing and interviewing in theater.

I remember a woman who I had some meetings with at Stanford who said that her standard response to people who suggested doing new things was:

“Are you volunteering to do that?”

She took a lot of pleasure in saying it in a really nasty tone of voice, to shoot them down, but I think it is a good principle – sometimes when you care about it that much, you should do it yourself.

Or else stay as far away from it as possible. I sometimes think I get in my own way. Excessive passion for something can be the enemy of getting it done. I spent too much time before this retreat with Amina agonizing about HOW to make the bylaws perfect, and not enough on actual revision.

Amina has suggested that it might be better to have me floating as an editor-at-large, to fill in gaps and/or be able to take over for people if needed. She’s probably right. I will remain open to any permutation on this.

We are using GoogleGroups, for the moment, to maintain our documents in progress. I still find PBWiki easier to use, and it loads faster, but in their respective free versions, GoogleGroups is a more powerful tool.

Standard
acting, directing

Last night, in a studio in Collegetown,

I got to observe more of Amina’s Meisner class at the Actors’ Workshop of Ithaca, and the very good direction of her teacher Eliza. Some useful things:

1) Feeling-into-line: such as directing an actor to say “You’re so wonderful” before each the lines of the script, as an exercise. I’ve never seen this before. It was spectacular.

2) The word “pinch” instead of “impulse.” It just sounds right. We discussed, afterwards, if the word “pinch” only makes you think of Meisner molesting his female students – but perhaps, that only emphasizes how much a pinch is something that the other actor does to you.

3) The quality of the repetition exercise mid-class as opposed to at the beginning – the value of warming up.

Standard
UpstageProject

The UpstateProject retreat

began officially last night, at the Cayuga Street location of Gimme! Coffee in Ithaca. Amina had copies of the bylaws and the responses of the rest of the Editorial Board to that first draft, and we revised them. We worked on paper (which is such a satisfying way to edit) and we wore name tags that said “Hello, my name is Dave Julavits” and “Hello, my name is Heidi Eggers,” in respectful homage to MIGHT, MCSWEENEY’S, and especially THE BELIEVER.

I have been dreading this task ever since I sent out the first draft of said bylaws, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. I couldn’t have done it without Amina. We got through it in less than an hour. Drafting a “Procedures” document will be more complicated.

UpstageProject.com, when launched, is something I’ve wanted to get going ever since seeing Bookslut on the Internet and wondering why there was nothing like that for theater We’re trying to put together an ambitious website for theater opinion and blogging, with a group of editors – with room for articles, longer reviews, commentary, and analysis.

It’s going to grow organically – we want to take time to set up a good structure for it, and we want to establish a group of people who feel collective responsibility. There’s no lead editor. Decisions are made unanimously.

How on earth have I gotten to this point in my life without starting a magazine? I hope I can learn from whatever mistakes I made in starting theater companies. I don’t want to start any more founder-driven organizations where responsibility falls to one person. I think one of the reasons that the Convergence retreat went so well last week, and that work on it continues to go well (Caitlin and Robert are having lots of meetings) is that it was collective work.

Standard
L'Internet, TV

In for a Quarter –

in for a Life.

I have been excessively disturbed by what I see to be the flaws in Quarterlife and have been considering writing an open letter to the creators about what could be done to improve the show. I find myself composing this letter when I’m supposed to be working on other things.

It really bothers me. Its formulaic television representation of the people who are me – my friends – is nothing more than more of the same.

Why be so formally radical, why start your own Internet TV series and publicly speak out against network television, if you’re not going to have the content be innovative? Why write about the limitations of network TV if your show, network-free, is equally limited?

I do have a lot of faith in the producers as artists, but I’m not sure what a difference it would make my writing to them. I just think my hopes were very high for this. I was imagining what the show could be, not what it is.

For the moment, I’ve decided to watch at least one more episode before responding, and hope they develop it more.

Standard
metablog, poetry

I have decided

to steal the way I’m titling posts from Ellen, who has a series of poems where the poem’s title begins the first sentence of the poem – sometimes the character name, as in,

Jennifer

is sitting alone, by the wall.

She does it better than I do, and I don’t want to steal it from her poetically. But as a stylistic device, I think this blog can use it as a homage.

(Can’t believe I didn’t have a poetry category before this.)

Standard