Monthly Archives: June 2010

the chorus, yoga

incidentally

I don’t blog about yoga much, but for those of you who practice, too, you might want to try setting “reawakening” as your intention. Think about bringing back everything that you feel has been lost or lessened.

You’d better be ready for it, though. I was doing yoga to a sound recording of an unfinished old chorus production of mine, and about fifteen minutes in, I realized what was reawakening in me–the desire to make not just this production more complete, but to make, oh, I don’t know, six more complete audio productions of Greek chorus plays with music. The number six seemed especially important. I was so shocked by this that I jumped out of the pose and said “Are you crazy?” out loud. Do you have any idea how hard it was to make one? You want more!?

Of course, I am crazy. And, also of course, that is what I want to do, and the past couple of years of pretending that’s not what I want to do have been like living with my head under a blanket. And if you’re going to think about reawakening, you’re going to find something like that out.

Anyway, reawakening. Try it. It’s a great intention: I haven’t had such strong results since I used “forgiveness.” It works really well for balance poses, too.

Also, I came out of savasana feeling as if I could have any body whatsoever, any physical form, and was surprised, but relieved, to see my own arms and legs.

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the chorus

we heard the cows breathing

Getting to use chorus techniques as part of a callback session on Sunday (for someone else’s callbacks) was great. There were 16 people there, with this text memorized from Gao Xingjiang’s THE OTHER SHORE:

“We set off before dawn. The morning dew was thick and in the dark we heard the cows breathing while they were chewing grass on a small hill nearby. In the distance, the river bend was enveloped in a shade of deep blue light brighter than the sky. ”

This is how we proceeded:

90 minutes: broke into groups of 3-4 people and focused on vocals only, developing both a good unison and a good non-unison variation version for a previously memorized 8-line piece of text. They each got 15 minutes. We had a musician there but he didn’t play for this part.

30-40 minutes: enlarged groups to 5-7 people and added movement and music, building towards a larger chorus. Specific intention. Repeating text once or twice, still in linear narrative form.

last 30 minutes: megachorus with entire group, both text and movement. With music. At very end, abandoning linearity of text and permitting other pieces of text, too.

These things happened that had never happened before:
– The director encouraging me to ask for feedback at the halfway point, which is a great rehearsal technique. I should use it more, instead of just saying “Questions?” People told me how helpful it was to have circumstances, which I should remember. I wrote down these words from the responses:
deconstruct (how difficult it is to work like this)
situation (need one)
different groups (how quickly the personality of one chorus vs. another forms)
present/responsive (you have to be)
and subconscious (it taps into that.)

– An actress was at the callbacks who had done my chorus work before, but not with me — she’d actually learned it from someone else. This was awesome.

– One particular setup. A four-person chorus going through the text in linear unison with a two-person chorus next to them overlapping/doubling/echoing. You’d think I’d have thought of this before, but I haven’t. (And I didn’t think of it this time–the actors did.) I’ve always jumped to “Anyone can overlap, anyone can be in linear unison.” But incorporating the restriction by group helps.

It was good work. I was exhausted at the end of it, and I’m sure the actors were, too. Reminded me of how rewarding and draining the MOH&H rehearsals were.

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books, fiction, quotes

breeding living fiction exempt from all the subjugations of the page

“…During the four days away, his answering service had taken no message from either an ominous palooka or an addled Alvin Pepler. Had his landsman spent into Zuckerman’s handkerchief the last of his enraged and hate-filled adoration? Was that the end of this barrage? Or would Zuckerman’s imagination beget still other Peplers conjuring up novels out of his–novels disguising themselves as actuality itself, as nothing less than real? Zuckerman the stupendous sublimator spawning Zuckermaniacs! A book, a piece of fiction bound between two covers, breeding living fiction exempt from all the subjugations of the page, breeding fiction unwritten, unreadable, unaccountable, and uncontainable, instead of doing what Aristotle promised from art in Humanities 2 and offering moral perceptions to supply us with the knowledge of what is good or bad. Oh, if only Alvin had studied Aristotle with him at Chicago! If only he could understand that it is the writers who are supposed to move the readers to pity and fear, not the other way around!”

– Philip Roth, “Look Homeward, Angel,” Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman Unbound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985, New York: The Library of America (2007): 245.

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Baltimore, the chorus

chorus weekend

Yesterday, I led a small Parallel Octave / chorus workshop with the text of an Allen Ginsberg poem being read to a new instrument one of our members has created, a laser harp.

Today, this afternoon, I’m going to collaborate on some audition / callbacks and use choral techniques as an audition requirement. This will be the first time I’ve done this for auditions that are not for my own production. We have a large group and an improvising guitarist. I’m very excited about it.

It’s wonderful to have a theatrical activity on both days of the weekend.

I’ve been spending some time this weekend helping an incoming writer in the program look at potential locations for rent, which has meant exploring parts of Baltimore I hadn’t seen before. I thought I was pretty familiar with all the areas around the campus, but you turn a corner and it’s a different planet, around here. Even from one block to the next, the width of a street may double. There may be absolutely no trees, and then a tree in front of every house.

Today is also the seventh day of getting up and walking before working, and although the temptation is great to skip it (it’s later, it’s hot out) I’m going to do it.

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gradschool, the academy, workstyle, writing

“Are you getting somewhere…

or did you get lost in Amsterdam?”
– Guster

I have been mounting a lot of defenses of creative writing programs lately. It’s come up when talking to Harvard lawyers, to Hopkins grad students, even to complete strangers. May and June of 2010 seems to be defend-your-workshop season.

My favorite strategy, hitherto only used in my head, is the one where I quote song lyrics as if they mean something. “As Ray LaMontagne writes in ‘Hannah,’ ‘I lost all of my vanity when I peered into the pool,’ which I think we can use as a metaphor for the workshop process.’ ” Like that. I’ve started to view everything as a potential defense for creative writing programs, since every occasion becomes an occasion for defending them.

I’ve thought of putting one up here, or writing a kind of point-by-point rebuttal to all the questions I’ve gotten since doing a year at this program, as well as to the objections made in print. It seems like it might be of interest. What might be of more interest would be a bad satirical defense of creative writing programs, in the manner of the “Dr. Grant Swinger” character, invented by Daniel S. Greenberg*, from the mythical Institute for the Appropriation of Federal Funds. Perhaps both.

“SWINGER: …Actually, our people have an advantage. They aren’t torn between research and teaching. They’ve resolved that conflict.
GREENBERG: How?
SWINGER: By doing neither.”
– from a mock interview in the 2002 Science

Not right now, though. I’m going to go for a walk, as I have for the last five days running. First thing in the morning, before trying to get any work done. Blogging beforehand is cheating, a bit. But rules were made to be bent.

* Heard about Greenberg & Swinger from this NYT review of Greenberg’s new campus satire, “Tech Transfer,” in which Nicholas Wade writes:

“…“Tech Transfer” is the world of Dr. Swinger writ large, populated by scientific entrepreneurs who have learned how to absorb federal funds, suppress charges of malfeasance and live high off the hog. When Dr. Winner assumes the presidency of Kershaw University, he learns the folly of challenging the tenured faculty on any of their sacrosanct, non-negotiable issues:

“These included annual pay increases, lax to near-non-existent conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment regulations, and ample pools of powerless grad students, postdocs and adjuncts to minimize professorial workloads. As a safety net, the faculty favored disciplinary procedures that virtually assured acquittal of members accused of abusing subordinates, seducing students, committing plagiarism, fabricating data, or violating the one-day-a-week limit on money-making outside dealings.”

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Uncategorized

Three places in Baltimore

(1) Two days ago, heading north to campus on St. Paul, just outside Eddie’s, two bodybuilders in tank tops and sweat, drinking hot coffee on a summer morning. One to the other: "See, that’s what makes it different from witchcraft."

(2) Last night, at TASTER at 2640, hearing experimental music put on by the Normals/Red Room/High Zero folks. It was a sampler: each act played for only ten minutes, and there were five or six of them.

The MC of the evening, one of the Normals organizers, claimed in his introduction that Baltimore artist / musicians are uniquely Baltimorean in three things, which I think–can’t quite remember–were quirkiness, collaborativeness, and sophistication. In other words, pretty out there, working with one another, and not really caring about money.

There was a quadrangle of my favorite shades-of-AVW folding chairs in the middle of a huge church, and the acts were arranged all around the outskirts. In between each act, the audience was asked to pick up their chairs and rotate them. The music was varied: it contained acts of profound emotional intensity, from pedal steel guitar to cello, and other acts that were more difficult to interpret. But that difficulty was part of the experience. I loved the evening, but I was almost as much in love with the chair rotation business.

(3) This morning, on 29th, a stand full of free newspapers has blown open, and the pages are all over the street. Two men in T-shirts, standing on the open pages while talking, with one foot on each page, as if they were in the middle of a game of hopscotch. When I walk by, they look a little embarrassed, but don’t move.

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books

a bad dream from the grandparental past

“To read “The Man Who Loved Children” would be an especially frivolous use of your time, since, even by novelistic standards, it’s about nothing of world-historical consequence. It’s about a family, and a very extreme and singular family at that, and the few parts of it that aren’t about this family are the least compelling parts. The novel is also rather long, sometimes repetitious and undeniably slow in the middle. It requires you, moreover, to learn to read the family’s private language, a language created and imposed by the eponymous father, and though the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Joyce or Faulkner, you’re still basically being asked to learn a language good for absolutely nothing but enjoying this one particular book.

Even the word “enjoying”: is that the right word? Although its prose ranges from good to fabulously good — is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity — and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes “Revolutionary Road” look like “Everybody Loves Raymond.” And, worse yet, can never stop laughing at that violence! Who needs to read this kind of thing? […] The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours.

And then there’s your e-mail: shouldn’t you be dealing with your e-mail?”

– Jonathan Franzen in the NYT on Christina Stead’s 1940 novel, The Man Who Loved Children.

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art

historically limited palettes

“…how should an artist cope with color deficiencies?

Most of my color deficient readers recommend the use of a limited palette, in particular a selection of paints that creates minimally confusing color mixtures. It’s worth considering the fact that traditional easel painters, because of their historically limited palettes, rendered colors with gamut limitations that are easily as extreme as many types of color deficiency.” (emphasis mine)

– from Bruce MacEvoy’s Handprint essay on color deficiency (colorblindness)

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art

aesthetic fire

“Although I never attended one of Louise Bourgeois’s Sunday Salons held in her Chelsea townhouse, they were reportedly psychic-artistic battlegrounds. Open to anyone, artists could bring their work, wait their turn, and then get feedback from Bourgeois, who was said to preside over the proceedings like a queen. Some were made to cry; more shook in anticipation. But all seemed to leave with the sense of having passed through some sort of aesthetic fire.”

– NY Magazine article on Bourgeois’s critique sessions.

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