Category Archives: the chorus

Baltimore, film, the chorus

In a wrestling match, nobody bites like Gaston

It has been raining here for the last two days. Not constantly, but violently and intermittently. I have my Poland gear with me all the time now – raincoat, umbrella.

Today, I learned more about a Hopkins program where graduate students tutor undergrads who are having trouble adjusting to college academic work. I saw a posting for it and wanted to check it out. Speaking of checkouts, then I checked my first book out of the library, with my now-working new ID card. It was the DVD of the Disney BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, which I have really wanted to watch for awhile now – and I wasn’t sure why.

Well, I watched it, plus the special features, and I learned the following things which I did not know when I was nine years old:

– Walt Disney tried to develop the story in the 30s and also in the 50s, but never got past the drawing board. (Hey, this is the context in which “the drawing board” is being used properly!)
– Jerry Orbach from LAW AND ORDER played (and sang) Lumiere, the talking candlestick. There was a great all-round voice cast, but that one really blew me away.
– The enchanted objects were thought of as, variously (and I am quoting people here): “having the audience’s experience.” “the interlocutor.” “A Greek chorus.”
– The art director pitched the design concept as “Bambi with interiors.”
– The composers, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, structured the songs and the music in the film “like a Broadway musical,” with turning points in the plot happening during songs.
– The lighting was consciously designed to be “theatrical.”

I have always felt a little self-conscious about the influence that LITTLE MERMAID and BATB have on my chorus stuff. I’ve been very aware of the animation in “Kiss The Girl” in particular. But now, with the knowledge that Menken/Ashman were thinking in those terms – and with more context for the way theater permeated those productions – it seems entirely appropriate. Henceforth, I will cite this movie as an influence without confusion or embarassment.

And then I wrote a poem from the point of view of the guy who runs the asylum where they’re going to lock up Belle’s father, just because he has the best line in the whole movie:

“I don’t usually leave the asylum at night, but he said you would make it worth my while.”

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directing, the chorus

set another before you

When I was working on THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, at the Met Theater, at the end of 2006, I asked the producers to let us have six weeks of workshop time many months out before the actual rehearsal/production process.

A fun group of people drifted in and out of the process, including some very talented people whose schedules wouldn’t have permitted them to commit to the full calendar of rehearsals and performances. One woman only came to one workshop, but she made a big impact on my methods.

Somehow, I had also planned things far enough out in advance that, through Craigslist, I found two very talented videographer/directors who taped all the workshops. We used some of the footage later as background imagery during the production itself. I also watched it, when I had enough time to do so, at home, to go over what I had and hadn’t learned from the rehearsals.

I still have the tapes of the workshops, and I haven’t watched them since then. But I salvaged a little television with a VHS deck built in from the street, months ago, and plugged it in now – and popped one in.

There they were, and there I was, my hair wrapped in a bandanna (definitely hadn’t showered, definitely was running late that day) their legs in sweat pants and knees padded to protect from the improvisations. We were working in a theater that was maybe fifteen feet square, for the stage, and had twenty seats, for the audience. It was the truest black box I’ve ever seen. I am right on top of them. They are reciting William Blake and breaking the line into nothingness through repetition. They are dripping sweat. I am watching them like I know what it all means. I don’t.

“The most sublime act is to set another before you.
Set another before you.
Set another before you.
Before, before…”

And I am trying to figure it out, and so are they.

It was so nice to find this footage. I’ll be able to watch it, when I’m old and withered and have no more hair to put in bandannas, and be like “See? See? I used to have hair!” (And actors…)

I think that I have to do a better job of being my own archivist, of maintaining the records of the things I’ve done. It’s not that they will be significant to other people – it’s that they continue to be significant to me. I seem to be taking a break from directing choruses for the present. But if I ever do, again, I would want to know where these tapes were.

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the chorus, theater

well, you said you liked puns.

Channel-surfed, recently, to the Hand Jive scene from GREASE, and insisted that it be watched, despite the presence of a less-than-choreography-loving friend.

A: You have to understand – this movie – and this scene in this movie – has made my work what it is. This may be the most influential source I have.
B: (incredulously) Really?
A: (proudly) You don’t know this, but right before I got to Chicago, I spent almost ten years working on the chorus in theater.
B: That’s a different kind of Greece.

All part of the same chorus.

What I didn’t say, and could have, is that I once made a very experienced actor perform the hand gestures from the Hand Jive throughout an entire serious monologue of Agamemnon’s. At the time, I was entirely hung up on having one gesture per line. I wasn’t working with a choreographer, and I had run out of gestures.

If you look at this Broadway clip of the Hand Jive, perhaps you can see why I thought some good might come of this choice. See how automatically the movements come out of their arms. When you’re doing the dance, you become focused completely, like some kind of weird pat-your-head-rub-your-tummy sensation. It strips away facades. It’s an “activity,” for goodness’ sake, like Meisner.

Choruses have to be moving. Stylized text requires stylized movement. I knew there was something about the Hand Jive that worked to make individual actors behave like parts of a chorus – to unite discrete individuals into the swarm-of-bees mentality. It builds ensemble between the dancers.

Did I make this clear, to myself, the actor, or any audience member? Probably not. But it’s clear to me now.

In the light of B’s comment, perhaps, although I didn’t know it, I was making some kind of mash-up chorus-on-chorus commentary. GREASE meets Greece. These are the kinds of things that it’s best not to know about yourself, but knowing them is so satisfying.

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the chorus, writing

derevision

There is no use in continuing to pretend that I am, in any way, still actively revising the script of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS, TO DIE IN ATHENS, or whatever on earth you want to call one chorus from every Greek playwright plus a few extra mashed up into an Oedipus v. Medea plot. I’m not. Or, rather, it’s not – and we’re not. The only word for that project is “not” right now. Every time I log onto this site and see, under “Ongoing Projects,” something about revising that script, I become discouraged. So I’m taking it down. The reading we had in Los Angeles was so successful that it seems a shame to not be able to work on it any more. But, for whatever reason, it’s not happening. I am only interested in writing more poetry these days. A lot of first drafts.

A revision is, I think, like a first draft – an impetus for it has to come to you. Barring that, there ought to be some kind of incentive to revise, like public opinion, an impending rehearsal, someone’s reading of it, or, (ha!) money. Or a sense that you know where you’re going. Or a sense that there is somewhere to be gone. Direction. Without that, you’re just messing around with the parts that already work, often making them worse.

There have been flickerings of interest in the script since the reading. People check in with me about it. One of the audience members even recommended me to a literary manager at a theater. But it’s simply not where my heart is at this moment.

I listen to it often, the recording. When I first had it, I listened to it daily, sometimes twice a day. These days I only play through it when my Ipod shuffles it to the top. I’m very proud of what we did. I don’t yet know how to do more. Worse yet, I don’t know why. What more is there to do? I proved the point I wanted to prove to myself, which was that the project was Possible. Whether or not it can, or should, be Produced, is a different kettle of P’s and R’s altogether.

I have less and less interest these days in bringing theater to a full realization, to staging, and more in simply writing. If there was some other collaborator on this project, someone who wanted to see it move forward, I think I would work on it day and night until it was perfect. But for both the composer and I, we have achieved what we set out to do. In the absence of a director, or something, there is no more to be done.

That’s kind of sad.

I’m sure I will work on it again one day, though I don’t know how. This, in a way, is a goodbye letter. Almost a breakup.

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quotes, the chorus

the slaughter of the chorus

The chorus does everything in Greek theater except become a main character – kill or be killed, love or fall in love. Zack’s friend and mine, Sumana, sent me this Socrates quote a couple weeks ago and I only just looked at it:

“Do you regret that we have not become important, like the kings we see in tragedy, men like Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, and Aegisthus? They are always portrayed as victims of murder, as figures to be lamented, as preparing and eating evil banquets. No tragic poet has had the audacity or lack of decency to introduce into his play the slaughter of the chorus.”

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the chorus, theater

the pierced mask scene

Last night, after watching the Senators for an hour and a half, (“That’s just not true.” “That’s not true.” “That’s Senate inside baseball”…) and drinking Smirnoff mixed with something that contained 15% cranberry juice, I crawled into bed and dreamt a fully staged version of a scene which doesn’t exist.

I was in the lobby of the auditorium of Q School, where I taught LYSISTRATA workshops two weeks ago, hanging out with my friend and co-teacher JF and some of our high school classmates. The next scene to be presented was the pierced mask scene from King Lear (there is no such scene) and the director was our former teacher and mentor, Ted W. I was bantering with friends, other teachers, and laughing – and suddenly I decided I couldn’t miss Ted’s staging of this famous scene.

Distracted and drunk in the dream as I was in sleep, I rushed into the auditorium (proscenium with raked seating) late, almost disrupting the scene, and to the extreme disapproval of the students’ parents sitting around me. I slid down in my seat.

Two seated narrator birds in white beak masks spoke in a synchronized unison whisper, one from the back center of house right, one from the stage. Their lips were amplified visually somehow – I could see nothing else. The whisper, like feathers or snakeskin, was present in every corner of the auditorium, which had house lights up and the stage dimmed. They spoke in verse, which I cannot remember.

I was annoyed that they already knew how to do choral speaking – why had we bothered with the workshops? They were so good.

A diagonal chorus of four, one man and three women, in gold half-masks ran down the house right aisle, all facing the house right wall, all with the skin of their torsos gleaming under red cloth. They announced the arrival of the king, I think, also in verse and in unison. Their spacing was beautiful. Mechanical. Each head was a foot lower than the next.

The young king appeared from the same aisle entrance I had used. He was being played by a student I taught last year. He was elaborately made up, but unmasked. He was cloaked.

He called, in verse, for the appearance of the pastries (I am not making this up!) and a conveyor belt carrying syrup-oozing golden stacks of hexagonal sponge cakes, topped with raspberries, ran behind the chorus, through the center seating block of the audience. The cakes kept moving, and the chorus speaking.

Suddenly there was a lighting shift. House lights went dark, and there was abrupt movement and sound on stage. (In the dream, I remember not understanding how the actors got from the aisles onto stage, but in my reconstruction it’s clear that there must have been a second, identical group of actors on stage, and the instant darkness created the illusion of their transport.)

A terrifying pattern of light which looked like an enormous staple, or a 3-sided rectangular gate, moved through the darkness from upstage left to downstage center/right, with a sound like a screech.

The gate stopped and revealed the young king, immobilized, bolted to a chair like that Bacon painting, and screaming. In the dim light all you could see was that he wearing a grotesque mask, grey-white, bulbous, and with eye-slits. The mask was like half of a white pumpkin turned on its side.

It was as if the moving gate had been his chair being pushed out.

Above his head and stage right of him, on a pole, or midair, was a fool/Dionysos/trickster character, an actor combined from a friend of mine in LA and another former student, shrieking and laughing at him.

Dionysos began his monologue, which I knew was to tell the king that the pierced mask would never come off his face again, and I woke up.

This dream certainly owes a lot to Richard Foreman’s WHAT TO WEAR, which I saw with Chris Danowski in Los Angeles at REDCAT, and I think the “pierced mask” as a group of words is somehow taken from the “pierced chair” that the Popes were supposed to have to sit on to have their gender checked. But otherwise, I think I may have finally had an original idea. If by original, you mean Dionysian.

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the chorus

morus chorus

Back from the week-long workshop at Q School on all the choruses in Lysistrata. As I did when I was directing the play myself, in 1998, I forgot to include the final Spartan celebration-chorus until the end. Something about it just keeps slipping my mind.

The students of Q were very eager, and up to the hardest passages in the play – those two instances where the Chorus of Men and Women unite to address the audience. They were able to improvise both vocally and physically within choruses by the end of the week. Really, they were doing it after the first couple of hours, but they were rock stars by Friday. Made me so proud.

It was very nice to be a guest teacher, and also to have the luxury of exploring choruses through the lens of one text. We had almost fifteen hours of workshop time.

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the chorus

“Your mother’ll hardly know you, you’ve grown so bold…” – Women’s Chorus, LYSISTRATA

Today is the end of the Minneapolis mini-trip.

I touch down in Chicago this evening and then prepare for next week’s set of chorus workshops at Q School. I’m coming in for a full week to focus on the LYSISTRATA choruses. Three days with the full cast (20 girls & 8 boys), and one day each with girls or with boys only.

Our goal for the week is, by the end of it, to empower the actors with confidence in choral work. We want to have the students comfortable enough with working in choruses that they can use improvisation while blocking and rehearsing chorus scenes for the rest of the process. We’ve built a schedule that touches on each chorus in the play at least once. I’m excited to be working as a chorus consultant on someone else’s production! It’s going to be lots of fun.

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the chorus

pattern

I’m still trying to answer the question of why I care about the chorus, which was asked of me by a 13 WAYS/TDIA audience member in Los Angeles. To this end, I’ve been trying to answer a larger question, of why I care about the many aesthetic sub-groups of things that I like. What connects our interests? What is the spider’s saliva on the web of belief, of practice, of obsession?

Yesterday. I meet with an actress. I ask her to graph herself, not in so many words, or maybe in many more. She does. She does so in relation to style, and picks these axes: mime, puppetry, physical theatre, children’s theatre, spectacle, awe-ful moments that make you lose your breath. What connects them, for her, is a sense of openness. Accessibility. She is interested in the branches of our profession that welcome rather than exclude.

The exercise makes me think about my own list: rhyme, the chorus, and so on. But I think what connects all of them for me is the sense of pattern. Connection through repetition. There was a moment when we were working on the verse structure for a chorus in 13Ways/TDIA and worked a mathematical pattern, one based on an additive triangle, into the poetry of it. I have rarely been happier.

One of the poem-things I picked up last evening at the Printer’s Ball was called “Verses Without Choruses” (collected within SAY IT WITH SILENCE, by Zebulun, published by Seven Ten Bishop) – which is all poetry since the Greeks, I suppose – but an interesting exercise, isolated sad verses, four lines on a page. So very individual. The verse, like the cheese in the nursery rhyme, stands alone. The chorus stands together.

Here is one of Zebulun‘s isolate verses::

McQ

How come everyone knows how
we
feel about each other except for
us

I love his work, but the solitary sadness in its form is exactly why I want to write choruses without verses. For the sake of the pattern.

It represents a pattern which our lives do not have, but which we seek. Hope for that pattern is what makes it beautiful, and also what makes it dangerous. My parents were watching the Olympic opening ceremonies, and they thought of choruses, but they also thought of the Nazi rallies. This is not the first time this comparison has been made to me. Chorus-mob.

Before I worked on 13/TDIA I think I would have been more sickened by that thought, and considered that perhaps, aesthetically, I yearn for totalitarianism on some level. But in the hands of the Greek playwrights the Chorus is the voice of something more than that. It is a voice of reason, of dissent, of logic – also of emotion and passion. It is not merely the tool of the political leaders. It is, of course, as fragmented, momentary, and complex as people are. It’s a group.

It is, I suppose, also my father’s field of study. “Sociology – the study of how people act in groups” – I’ve been rattling that off to friends since I could rattle.

People are all part of temporary, transient groups, formed from connection or for convenience. The chorus of Democrats or Republicans, for example. The chorus of the citizens of Athens. The chorus of women. The chorus of bloggers, if you like. And yet, we are all alone. We are born alone, we live (mostly) alone, and none of us dies with anyone else, either. We spend a lot of time trying to deny that fact, because the less alone we can be, the happier we are.

The chorus, like friendship, marriage, family, and other such forms of art, lets us believe that we are not alone. I think that loneliness is more terrible to me than death. I am less concerned with art making us immortal than I am with art bringing us together. The chorus is the formal representation of the idea that, simply, we are not alone.

Closer? My new thesis of the moment: the chorus is important to me because it means that we are not alone, and that there is a pattern to our lives. Neither of these things is true, but both are beautiful – and the more we believe and practice them, the more true they become. I think that I am also reacting against a pendulum swing in artistic taste towards things like three-character plays, one-person shows, and the theatrical celebration of the individual as opposed to the group.

Entropy is a fact. Chaos is a fact. Order is a lost cause. But we still find meaning and beauty when we learn that the structure of some biological or chemical thing has symmetry to it, or follows a mathematical sequence. It is the same meaning and beauty that we find in the chorus.

Oedipus’s sadness is from being alone. So is Medea’s. “Alone and without a city.” There is nothing more terrible. More, if you will, anti-social. Anti-society.

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the chorus

They’ve occupied the Acropolis!

I had a good conversation this morning with my friend J from Q School, where I’ll be co-leading a week-long workshop on choruses in the play LYSISTRATA in September. J was one of my classmates at Harvard-Westlake, and she played the part of Lampito in the production of LYSISTRATA which I directed. She’s been teaching drama at Q since we graduated, four years ago, from college, and she’s directing LYS as their fall play this year.

We are going to try, in the course of a week, to touch on the following things:
– choruses in unison: how to do this without losing emotion
– choruses in variety/harmony: how to do this without losing the meaning of the text
– building a variety chorus by adding one person at a time to a single speaker
– a separate day of work on the men’s choruses
– a separate day of work on the women’s choruses
– having them show their work to each other
– adding movement in to a selected chorus from each group
– building by the end of a week to a men’s vs. women’s dialogue chorus.

I’m also doing some dramaturgy for J, helping her find the references for various things in the text. It’s really fun to work on this play again, which was the first full-length show I ever directed, and the source of my obsession with choruses.

To return to each of its choruses again is an interesting challenge, and a way for me to check in with how my thinking has developed since 1999. I can hear my seventeen-year-old self commenting and saying things like “You should just cut that!” I am trying to honor J’s intention of sticking with one translation (we are using a really lovely older one, by Patric Dickinson, which has a nice idiomatic flavor despite being Britishized) and, when possible, justifying text rather than changing it. I like Dickinson’s loose use of rhyme and meter – this excerpt below is a good example.

CHORUS OF MEN
Now
Let me tell you a little story
I heard when I was a boy:
How
There once was a youth named Melanion, who
Was so appalled at the prospect of women he flew
To the mountains rather than marry.
And he hunted hares
And he set his snares,
With his dog there,
And never came home for anyone!
That was the way
He detested women
And we’re no less
Wise in our ways than Melanion!

The variation between short and long lines is a nice nod, too, to what would have actually been happening in the Greek.

Although I usually get frustrated with chorus translations that try to maintain the historic varying line lengths, because they become completely free-verse and lose their sense of rhythm, unison, and dance, this is a really good take on the idea. You can imagine it with music. It could work in unison. And so on.

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