“More Americans identify their primary occupation as artist than as lawyer, doctor, police officer or farm worker.”
(NEA census on who and where the artists are. CA and NY, no surprise.) Created a category for “art” with this post.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
WCX day 13-14
Day 13, Weds 6/11
I stayed up all night the night before and finished the rewrite of TO DIE IN ATHENS, and spend the day dazzled with colors and sleeplessness. I start furiously casting it. This rewrite is good enough that I can tell the reading is really going to happen.
The afternoon in San Francisco: TJT, visiting Audrey’s studio (orange and rainbow-based computer-generated art) 826 Valencia, taxidermy store, GoodVibes, Dolores Park, WeBe Sushi. Home and the final Scrabble rematch. (NEATH, HOARY.) A great meeting at TJT, and hopes for future collaboration.
Day 14, Thurs 6/12
Last day in the Bay. I go to the Stanford bookstore and buy the blue notebooks I can’t live without. 2 final meetings with Stanford professors, including one with a classicist who tells me that every single Greek choral passage has a different meter. I go through the entire script of TO DIE IN ATHENS with him. He tells me about a Pindar chorus which is supposed to be so “difficult” rhythmically that classicists contend that it couldn’t possibly be performed by a chorus – that it has to be a single actor “pretending to be a chorus.” I vow to disprove this.
Tomorrow we head for the mountains, to be in Los Angeles by Tuesday.
don’t call it a rewrite
more like a makeover. The play formerly known as 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS is now definitely called TO DIE IN ATHENS, and there’s an ending-chorus of all the short ending choruses I have on hand from both Euripides and Sophocles. The ending to end all endings.
That’s the solution. Take away this man.
I want to make sure that our kings are cleared
Of all responsibility in this.
I can hear the play breathing now – it’s such a relief.
you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough
The luxury of having your possessions around you, long alienated from the road. I see my books and they almost don’t seem to know me. It’s good to know you can live without your library, or that I can, having been, before this year, as attached to it as to any of my limbs. But I don’t particularly want to go on living without it.
I’ve been rereading some old friends since coming back to Menlo Park, including, with great delight and familiarity, the old proverbs from Blake’s MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL. This book knows me, at least, because it was my play once. What an amazing show that was to work on. What a ride.
Sometimes I wish I could ask Blake where I should go next, what do next, but I know what he’d say:
What is now proved was once only imagin’d.
WCX, days 6 – 12
Day 6, Weds 6/4 – Day 8, Fri 6/6
Ashland, Ashland, Ashland. There’s never enough time. I have nothing more to add to what I said in my previous post – only that I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see, due to being really under the weather for most of this stop. I will definitely be coming back for CLAY CART, OTHELLO and the other shows I missed as soon as I can. It’s a great season this year. I also saw some old friends. Not enough of those, either. I have to go back. It’s so frustrating to have getting sick correspond with your most beautiful outdoor stop on the trip. Mountains and rivers and theater, all missed. Still, did get to see one very heated political Shakespearean tragedy, and that worth all the trouble.
What? Coriolanus in Corioles?
Day 9, Sat 6/7
Feeling much better. We rent a car and drive the most scenic route possible from Ashland to the San Jose airport, dropping off the car five minutes before the cutoff. Highlights of the trip: the 101, the 1, the Humboldt redwoods, Confusion Hill, Whiskey Creek Road, and a gas station in Mendocino that sells organic wine. Cisco picks us up at the airport and we talk about old friends.
Day 10, Sun 6/8
Brunch and an enormous Stanford/Mirlo reunion at Stacks in Menlo Park, complete with an RA! I get to meet Quentin (of Megan) and Ben (of Romina), two husbands of my freshman dormmates. The evening is composed of Scrabble and Laphroaig. I get to play “GYRE.”
Day 11, Mon 6/9
We drive around Sausalito and Marin County with an old friend of a friend. The evening is, again, composed of Scrabble. I begin the next pass of the rewrite of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS during the Scrabble game. I get to play “DIPTYCHS” off of “DIP,” the highest-scoring Scrabble play I’ve ever accomplished, 60 points. Cisco attempts to play “ANBOGUS,” which, in case you’re wondering, is not a word – although both “QAT” and “FORGAT” are. I feel the rewrite energy swamping me and I know I’m not going to be able to rest again until the play has a Draft 6. And a new title.
I don’t manage to do much rewriting, only to psych myself out about the need to do it. I do, however, discover a very confusing note in my OED. AT COLONUS edition, indicating that one of the most dramatic sections is “similar to a dirge.” I consult with a Stanford classicist. A dirge? Really?
Day 12, Tues 6/10
Morning in Mountain View. Today is a major work day, making up for all the fun over the weekend. We spend about 6 hours at 2319 working on the piano – CF transfers all the guitar music he’s written. It amazes me how much pieces of music that I thought were so attached to one instrument shift flawlessly into another. He was completely right about many of them, esp. the MEDEA sections, being better suited to piano.
We also demo techniques for integrating his music into the HW choral voice workshop. I read a variety of choruses out loud and he plays along with them. Some bumps in the road at first – I don’t know exactly what it is I’m trying to do, only what doesn’t work. After some false starts, we end up choosing a chorus section which I’ve adapted myself, which is more rhythmical than some of the other translations out there, for the first unison exercise.
Child, child, child of Oedipus,
Miserable child of unhappy Oedipus,
We pity you in your despair,
Just as we pity him for his misfortune –
But we tremble to think of what the gods may do.
We cannot risk helping you.
We will not kill him – that is enough.
But you must leave our city at once.
We’re very well prepared for the first day of the chorus workshop, I think. We will have to do some new preparation after we see where the students are at in responding to our work. But we’re ready for Day One – and I have lots of directions it can go after that.
During the day, I also meet with two old friends and Stanford professors – a computer scientist and a humanist. I talk theater with both of them. One of them tells me that I’m doing something meaningful with my life. I hope she’s right.
After a brief stop for sandwiches and a mid-rewrite crisis of confidence, we go to a Mountain View coffeehouse and I plow ahead on the rewrite. Suddenly, the play opens itself up to me again. I add new characters – a Messenger and Darius – and a mixed-up ending composed of the ending of seven different plays. I’m still working on it now.
Zeus in Olympus is the overseer
Of many doings. Many things the gods
Achieve beyond our judgment. What we thought
Is not confirmed and what we thought not, the gods
Contrive. And so it happens in this story.
The play is now tentatively titled TO DIE IN ATHENS.
WCX, day 5
Day 5, Tues 6/3 (cont.)
Bus from Vancouver, BC, to Seattle.
Train from Seattle, WA, to Eugene, OR.
Bus from Eugene, OR, to Medford, OR.
Car from Medford to Ashland.
17 hours of travel: over 600 miles.
We spent a good 3 hours of the train ride having a preliminary meeting for this go-round on 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS – we went through the entire script, scene by scene, and talked about what did and didn’t work. We’re staying with different friends in Ashland, and I’m going to use the break to bring the draft of 13 CHORUS up to date from our meeting. The next round of changes is about the text, not the music, so the ball is in my court. The play needs two new scenes, a style overhaul (like redesigning your company’s branding, I guess) and a new title. Piece of cake.
We made one really exciting breakthrough on a chorus of 3 verses which incorporates a round – we added more repetitions so that each verse got a chance to pop out from the muddle of simultaneity. It was a bit like making a 12-tone matrix. I love being able to be mathematical with text, sometimes.
I can’t go through Eugene, OR without some kind of horrible bug bite-related incident: otherwise, it’s a lovely town. Pizza and beer down the street from the station in Eugene, and my first Greyhound by night: playing DJ with each other’s Ipods. A long and weary ride in the darkness.
But when we got to the Rogue Valley and the landscape changed to those open skies and soft hills, I felt a year of memories rushing over me. No place in the world looks like this place. The air is so liquid. The hills are the darkest, most merciless green. And everywhere you look, there’s a slope of low-lying mountains covered with trees. It couldn’t be more beautiful, or it’d kill you. If this isn’t the forest of Arden, I don’t know what is. And although I have greatly overused the opening lines of 12th Night in this blog, I can’t help but think about the willow cabin at the gate.
I think that Ashland being as beautiful as it is was part of what assured me I was making the right choice in leaving LA and taking on a year of freelance assistant directing. Although this year has been marked by crisis, poverty, and more travel than anyone really wants to do, I’ve seen more and more beauty each place I’ve gone. And what’s being young and stupid in theater for, if you can’t see the most gorgeous places this country has?
But it also makes me think of Ashland like a kind of Helen of Troy, dragging the young and idealistic theater people to their own destruction on the rocks of its breathtaking physical beauty. I know so many people who got into this profession, or stuck it out in spite of hardship, because of the charms of Ashland and OSF. And I guess though I’m not one of them – it was the Theatricum Botanicum, and Puck swinging in on a rope from the trees, that really did me in first – Ashland has increased my mania for this profession. So I have to thank, but also distrust, this unreliable and heartbreaking valley of theater.
O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me!
Day 5 ends with hydrogen peroxide and “Death and his brother Sleep.”
WCX, day 1-5
This post begins the 2008 West Coast Xtravaganza Tour, otherwise known as WCX – over three weeks of traveling down the west coast of the US from Vancouver to Los Angeles, mostly by train. It’s the end of my year of freelance assistant directing, and the end of the completely itinerant, apartment-free lifestyle. We’re going by train, and stopping in Seattle, Vancouver, Ashland, San Francisco and LA. I’m traveling with a composer from Indianapolis who created the music for 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS in February’s Indy Convergence. We’re using the traveling portion of the trip as a way to revise the script, and we’ll workshop it in LA. I’ll also be teaching a new workshop on the choral voice in Los Angeles, and directing another reading.
Day 1:
Fly to Seattle. Rent a car (they stick us with a white PT Cruiser with a plastic-lollipop gearshift) Pick up CF at airport. Make a pilgrimage to the Pacific Ocean and get to the 75th Avenue overlook in Ballard as the sun is going down. Dine with the Miners, my aunt and uncle. At night, we hike through a road down to the beach where there’s been a collapse, and almost fall into a huge hole. We make it to the ocean. I never should have left the West Coast. Well, maybe you have to leave to know how strongly you want to come back.
Day 2, Sat 5/31
Walking and trail-running with my family. Afternoon with relatives: houseboat tour, lunch at Horizon House, Goodwill shopping with my cousin who helps me find my rock-concert jacket. Armed with an atlas, a map, and Google directions, and with the two best lattes in the galaxy (from the Java Bean in Ballard) we drive three hours in the Lollipop Mobile to the Gorge Ampitheatre in George, WA – where we watch Rush perform with the backdrop of a river. I am completely won over by both the music and the location. Lighting instruments sway in the wind above the stage. The drive back to Seattle after the concert is brutal, but we make it alive.
Day 3, Sun 6/1
Sleep for an hour and a half. Cornmeal variation pancakes with the Miners in the morning, and a four-hour bus ride from Seattle’s Union Station to Vancouver. We bought Swiss chocolate and spoke French at customs. Arrive in Vancouver, and walk down Commercial Drive with Mike and Kristel (Vera’s meat can’t be beat…) We meet up with Dasz. We watch a documentary on the history of metal.
Day 4, Mon 6/2
Much needed sleeping in – we meet Kristel for lunch at Canada Place and sit looking over the waters. The ocean in Canada is slate-colored. We take the ferry to Granville Island and wander in and out of the theater companies, the silk stores, the open-air markets. We careen in a bus down Broadway, and buy a twelve-pack to make up for last night. (Friendliest beer store in the world.) We watch overtime hockey, eat Panago pizza, drink Alexander Keith ale and talk about making animated movies out of the dreams in EINSTEIN’S DREAMS. CF and Mike experiment with the oscillator. (Really.) Kristel and I gmail-chat and talk at the same time and it’s still as if we will never be able to say all the things we are thinking to each other.
Caitlin calls to tell us that we/the Indy Convergence have made it to round 2 of Creative Capital. This is extraordinary news – I remember writing that grant as I was sitting in between rehearsals at PCS. I’m very happy.
Day 5, Tues 6/3
We wake up early and take the bus from Seattle to Vancouver.
Blogging from Seattle, at the Tully’s round the corner from Union Station.
We go from here on train to Eugene, then via bus to Ashland. Ashland is where this entire odyssey started for me, and it’ll be interesting – it’ll be difficult, but important – to see what I feel like going back there.
See you in Oregon.
Dara Weinberg 