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.

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.”

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.

Day 3: February 2
Introductory chorus workshops for the ensemble. No matter how many times I do that exercise, it always terrifies and thrills me to see the moment when the chorus starts thinking as a unit.

Music rehearsal with our composer, Chris. We couldn’t be more on the same page if it was the only page in both of our books. I have all these little jingle-type melodies in mind for the choruses, and he orchestrates them on the guitar with medieval open intervals, with blues-rock progressions, with Celtic-sounding arpeggios, with everything. I’ve never heard my bad ideas sound so good.

It’s like all those years of mindless rhyme practice are paying off, finally the form is serving the story instead of just itself.

Day 4: February 3
Very successful readthrough with full music this morning. I’m so happy about the large amount of singing in this show. Oh, and there is no better place to watch that particular Super Bowl than with a roomful of Peyton Manning / Colts fans.

Day 5: February 4
We staged the Prologue and “What Is Your Name, Old Man?”

We learned that the way we’re going to stage Oedipus’s “blindness” is that he’s going to enter with his eyes closed, and open them when he begins speaking, to be “blind.” He can make eye contact with the Antigones (who are playing a character-chorus) but not with the larger Chorus.

You know you’re in the Indy Convergence when you’ve written four (FOUR) new drafts of your script in one week, been to the airport twice, hung curtains, had a music meeting, duplicated keys, loaded speaker equipment, and located the source for clear vinyl dance-floor tape. (If such a thing as clear gaff tape exists, it’s not in this town.)

As I keep saying to Robert every time I walk into a room with him in it, “Robert! Welcome to Indianapolis!”

Yesterday we picked up Ashley, a visiting choreographer from New York, and spent time configuring the space, hanging newspapers and newsprint curtains, laying Marley dance floor on the gray side.

This morning, I took Ashley to renew her license at the Indianapolis DMV. There was no line. She was seen immediately. We walked out of there with a brand-new license for her less than five minutes after we entered. There’s also no such thing as traffic in this town. Snow, yes, but no traffic.

I’m on my way to the airport to pick up Tony, who’s playing Oedipus. We have a small-group readthrough of Draft 5 of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS tonight, and our first open community workshop tomorrow.