The departed Mailer, remembered by Louis Menand.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Having just
watched the first two episodes of Quarterlife, the Internet TV series from the producers of My So-Called Life, all I can say is that television on the Internet is still television.
But at least it’s replete with gratuitous women lounging around in their underwear.
“I don’t have to wear clothes around my own house if I don’t want to.”
I wonder if this is really what my generation seems like to other people. If so, we have an enormous image problem.
I have a lot of respect for the producers as producers, and I admire their wish to break free of the constraints of the medium. I just want them to break free of more of them.
Amina showed me Clark And Michael as an example of the medium working better.
Open Ithaca
In Ithaca, staying with Amina and David. It’s so beautiful here. We had brunch, then walked up the path from the gorges to Collegetown and were overwhelmed by the color yellow. I’m going to do that walk again today, I think, up to the Cornell library to get some chorus information for the Convergence.
I observed part of a Meisner-based acting class yesterday, with all sorts of exercises – the repetition one and the open scene in particular. I was pretty happy to hear beginning actors ask questions like “How ARE you supposed to make your lines sound natural?” and “What’s blocking?”
(In an open scene, you use the lines of a scene to just respond to your partner, and you aren’t supposed to worry about playing the action of the scene or the meaning of the lines. The one I saw reminded me of the technique where you ask actors to burlesque a scene – to play it at a much faster and funnier pace.) I saw Peter do a burlesque run of one of the seduction scenes in Tartuffe, and I’ve seen Ted do it in his acting class, too, but an open scene is a more extreme version of that.
Amina and I discussed, afterwards, what the uses of the “open scene” would be in working on a process with professional actors. We thought of three:
– at the beginning of a process
– at a blocked place in a process
– at an exhausted place (like you’ve been rehearsing a very sad scene for weeks)
All three to help relax the actors, get them listening again, and perhaps discover new areas of blocking.
Amina is considering Converging in February, as is David (her roommate, a filmmaker and actor).
Thirteen Ways Of Looking At The Chorus
Here’s a sample from what I wrote about the Umbrella Project in process, for the 2008 Indy Convergence. It’s going to be an exploration of the chorus.
“The texts to be used are still under discussion, but will probably include one chorus from each of the major Greek playwrights – Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – and one chorus created out of a text which is not a traditional chorus.
We will explore the nature of the chorus in all the different art forms represented by the Converging artists, with lots of emphasis on dance, music, and character acting – but also on using visual art and multimedia to stage the choruses.”
If anyone reading has opinions about what the best Greek choruses are to experiment with, for these purposes, please comment on the wiki for the project. Thanks!
Don’t Be A Stranger
I fly to Ithaca this morning. Like Odysseus. I’ll never return to Ithaca without thinking about him, and the way that he takes so long to return. My pilgrimages aren’t quite twenty years apart, but every time I go back there, it feels like it’s been too long. I have nothing but pleasant anticipation about all of it, except for transferring between airlines when I switch planes.
Packing gets easier every time – if you never unpack, you never have to pack.
Here’s something interesting my Gmail text-ads popped up: Six Sentences, a weblog of very short stories. I’m going to submit one soon.
Blogging in Broadripple
I drove Caitlin to work at DK this morning, and am writing from the kitchen in Broadripple, a suburb of Indianapolis. It’s gorgeous outside – enormous trees covering all the streets with fall leaves, and tall houses that look like bricks and gingerbread and Little Midwestern Riding Hood.
I’m working on a personal statement for Middlebury about why I want to learn German this summer. When I was twenty-one, a group of German actors asked me to direct a play in Berlin, and I didn’t know the language. I was scrambling to finish a major I’d switched to late in my career, and decided (stupidly) that I didn’t have room to add the language classes. It’s time to learn it now, and to go back, as soon as I can.
I also just made a “Get Involved” page for the Convergence’s new PBwiki. (It’s under construction, but let me know what you think – indyconvergence.pbwiki.com)
I hate it when theaters, or other arts organizations, don’t have an obvious “Get Involved” link right there on their front page, telling you who to contact if you want to be part of their work. It may be that a lot of organizations in this country don’t actually want a flood of college students emailing them. But how are you supposed to get the next generation to come find you? What’s the continuity of the things you believe in?
Even the ones that do have “Get Involved” often just have a link for volunteers, and nothing about what actors and designers are supposed to do. I suppose they think if you can’t figure it out, can’t get your foot in the door, you don’t deserve to be part of the in-crowd. But speaking as someone who has “figured it out,” or part of it – I don’t think we gain anything by keeping the doors to our theatres more closed than they already are.
Dara Weinberg 