Robert Cohen for the Guardian:
“This was how a number of Jewish-American writers of my own generation started out. We’d read enough of our forebears to see that we were coming in late, and would be only back-row singers in the diaspora chorus, fashioning our cunning little fugues of internal exile, turning Kafka’s lament – “What have I in common with the Jews? I have nothing in common even with myself” – into our own (anti-)national anthem.”
I’m in Pendleton at Robert’s brother’s house this morning. Geese are squawking out the window, over a frozen lake.
Yesterday’s postmortem of the Convergence was difficult. I had to come to terms with the truth that I have, in many ways, let Rob and Caitlin down by not being completely clear with them about what I could take on for this conference. I promised to do a lot of things, and many of them didn’t happen.
In the light of this we have restructured our organization a bit, so that they are co-artistic directors, and I’m an associate artistic director with a focus on development & grantwriting. This reflects that they are local and I’m never going to live here, and also that they have about ten times more time to spend on the project than I do.
This is a good agreement, but I just wish that I had known how to make this clear to all of us before I started.
There were also some hard truths to learn about the way I handled the Umbrella Project, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS. I didn’t have the music ready soon enough, or the script. I created a script that was far too ambitious for the people and the time we had. I pitched the project to them as an exploration, not a presentation of a finished script – but it kept getting more grandiose – and soon we were in a situation where I was trying to force dancers to sing and act. Not a good place to be. They stepped up to it, but it was really tough for all of us.
As a result of THIS, we have restructured the concept of the Umbrella Project, so that it’ll never again be about someone trying to workshop a finished script. Instead, it’ll be about having open rehearsal time to explore a theme or concept, and taking all of the artists involved under that Umbrella – performing in the art form in which they are most comfortable.
This is also a good way to move forward, but I wish I had had the self-knowledge to foresee this, too.
“I wish I knew now
what I didn’t know then…”
It is a humbling experience to realize that your
1) lack of communication
2) over-ambitious expectations
combined to create an untenable situation for people you love and respect.
I want to learn how to work so these situations don’t arise. Or learn how to deal with them better when they do. I feel like my year of assistant directing has taught me a lot about how to work with actors, how to run a rehearsal, but not so much about how to not expect the impossible from creative teams.
Robert and Caitlin are both very clear that they want me to stay working with them, and that it’s just about restructuring all of our expectations. I’m grateful for that. After all, we all made mistakes this year, and the first year of starting a new arts conference is bound to be earth-shatteringly difficult.
But I made it more difficult than it had to be, and then none of us did a good job of talking about that.
I’m, of course, glad I had the opportunity to work on this script in the first place. But I should have been workshopping it as a written piece, rather than trying to write a new play with music and stage it with a cast of people who don’t sing. The fact that we pulled it off doesn’t make it right.
I had a lot of warnings that this was happening. I spent most of the month of January in Denver feeling like “This is all going terribly wrong.” Maybe none of us knew exactly how to fix it, having committed to something untenable, no one wants to be the first to back out. But I wish, so much, that I had had the courage to be that one.
At any rate, we’ll do better next year, I guess. It’s a weird feeling to know that your incompetence led to a better organization being created. Incompetence isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s stubbornness.
Yesterday Robert and I met with a composer who writes vocal and other art music, who wants to put her dissertation music together with a ballet in next year’s Convergence.
And last night I saw a performance at Butler Ballet of five short works, including Cynthia Pratt’s RAINMAKERS and Paul Taylor’s CLOVEN KINGDOM. This was the first time in my life I’d ever sat down for an entire evening of ballet. I was blown away by it. Halfway through RAINMAKERS, I had renounced words and spoken vocabulary. I’ve never had so much visual stimulus in my life. Where have I been that I haven’t seen this yet?
I have very few words about this experience, I feel like I should be dancing about it, instead of writing, but here’s a try: the conventions are so different – the lighting so aesthetic as opposed to narrative. The transitions, which I care so much about, seem so insignificant. ‘
The permeable stage, with the wings as flimsy as air, with endless streams of dancers rushing in and out.
The use of the body. The arm is the quotation mark of the word-body – it is much less significant than I want it to be.
The foot is the face, meaning emanates from there, and the face might as well be masked.
And finally, dance got there first. Before we (theater) did.
Then I got to meet some local Indy folks from the ballet community, including a gentleman who kills his own deer (to eat) with a bow and arrow, and has a quiver made out of a coyote he also hunted himself. We sat around a fire talking about fighting hummingbirds, dance, hip replacement surgery, and poetry till morning. One of the people there was writing her first sonnets. I’m going to send her these two poems.
It was beautiful to be in their home, looking at paint samples, eating leftover Dove Valentine’s chocolates with fortunes on the inside (mine was “You will make someone melt today,” but I read it at 11:50 pm) and pretending to have a place I live somewhere in this world. But I was reminded, while touching the coyote’s fur, that I never would have met these people if I were living so stably and simply somewhere. This is part of the journey. Ballet, bittersweet, and all.
If there’s anything in the world of words that can stand up to RAINMAKERS, it’s this poem. Ballet is rhyme, I think – that’s the only compliment I have for it. The repetition of elements chimes the same way.
The Windhover
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
And this link to Harryette Mullen reading THE DIM LADY., her The Dark Lady takeoff.
We did it. It was glorious. We are recovering.
Everyone says the first year is the hardest, and they’re right. But we’re still standing.
I’m printing programs and a new call-script (B.T., I think you’ll be amused to hear that I ended up stage managing 13 WAYS as well) and making my way down to Wheeler to clean the theater this morning. Picking up wine on the way, for our invited audience. The streets are covered with snow.
The Indy Convergence presents its works in progress tonight. An open rehearsal, a laboratory, a culminating presentation. This reminds me of something David said yesterday, to the effect that nothing in our lives is more than an open rehearsal. So we might as well relax about it. Nothing is ever the final version.
There’s always another chance.
I’m going to sweep the stage this afternoon. I go out of my way to sweep whenever I can, and think about when I used to sweep stages for a living at the OFTC, and wonder if I would ever get a chance to direct a play again. That seems so long ago now. Every time I start getting frustrated with my own life or career, I try to remind myself of that. I could always still be sweeping, and in some ways, I still am – we all are – just sweeping the stages of our lives.
As the Chorus says,
“Do not give the grave your love,
It will take you soon enough –
Do not pray again for death,
It will take you nonetheless.
No mortal can escape
His death at last.
It will come to you.
Do not ask.”
Hemingway on playwriting, in a rediscovered letter:
“The making part of a play comes after the writing of it. Other people do all the great detail that you just indicate when you write. Right now I have been working steadily for a year and a month on a novel. In that no one can help you. But in a play the credit for all the really hard work goes to those who stage, direct, and act in it. I had all the fun. They had all the work. Well, that is a nice kind of an exchange for once.”
In the wake of one of the actors having to leave the Convergence for health reasons, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS becomes a staged reading – very heavily staged, but a reading nonetheless. So many people in Indy have stepped up in the last two days to help this play find its footing again. I’m so grateful to them. There is sadness in me about losing the full staging of 13 WAYS, but also some relief in knowing we are now trying to achieve something smaller and more manageable.
Ian G. and David K. came in this weekend for lights and video design respectively, and taught workshops on sustainable theater and projection techniques. I stage managed our tech this weekend, which wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. It’s like riding a bicycle.
And the Convergers had dinner last night at Kim’s, in which we discussed the Klingon Hamlet, “What Is Art,” pseudoscience, “the secret life of cells”, and whether or not Orson Welles should feel bad about killing people with War Of The Worlds. It was so good to have a big Stoppardian intellectual discussion, and to have the time to sit and talk with people again.
when you don’t know whether to go into the basement because of the tornado warnings, or stay out of the basement because it’s flooded, due to rain. This was two nights ago. The weather is much improved now.
There was a moment in our Sunday readthrough where I was explaining to all the dancers that it was okay to sing even though they didn’t sing, because they were in a chorus. I talked about Rocky Horror / Messiah / Buffy: The Musical / Sound Of Music sing-alongs, and religious music, and I eventually said “I want to make a world where I can go see Greek plays and sing along with them, from the audience.” And I had a moment of “Oh, THAT’S why I’ve been working on this for so long.” Because that would be worth any amount of work.
I have seen the chorus, and it has a V on its forehead in lipstick.
(Robert says when you google the Greek chorus, I’m one of the later results. I haven’t been able to replicate that, but just that it happened once made me very happy.)
Angelenos, “Come witness the battle, cheer for your favorite contestant and discover for yourself the terrifying secret of STADIUM DEVILDARE.” It opens Feb. 15.
And the countdown continues:
Only 10 more shopping days till STADIUM DEVILDARE, the glorious theatrical production, opens at NOTE.
Several contestants battle for possession of a mystical suit of armor (the suit of Guts N Glory) that will enable them to defeat America’s greatest enemy known only as G-dzilla X (perhaps the rubber costume, perhaps the the war in the Middle East).
(Yes, I think it’s fantastic that both Rich and I are opening shows in the same week. 13 Ways opens on the 12th.)
Dara Weinberg 