A day spent reading creepy/unusual stories on Reddit. Ghosts are traditional to Christmas, you know. The barrier between this world and the others is thinnest on the Solstice and ghosts may still linger in the long nights after it.
I remind myself that celebrations are when and what we make them.
I didn't do as much theatre as I would have liked to do this year. Or rather, I missed devised theatre. This is, of course, problematic. My comfortable opportunities to do that work are limited.
American Theatre Magazine had an article with a playwright about my age who went to the same physical theatre school as friends. I've seen the difference it makes. And the article sums up why it's not for me. My drive has never been to be a performer, and it's always my least favourite part of the process. I would much rather help make it happen and then not have to perform.
Why does devised theatre *have* to be physical theatre and mask? And I presume the reason is that to build that kind of company, that's how you have to work. Separating off the skills of the performers leaves you with a group of people who are learning one set of skills and another set of people learning another set of skills and you're back to the traditional theatre model which doesn't rely on everyone coming from the same place and thinking in the same way. Of course, once you learn that and go out in the world in to traditional theatres, that's where the difference is obvious. Or so I think.
But I'm not interested in learning clown or tai-chi or any of those hard physical skills. And I definitely don't want to learn it in a highly disciplined, insular environment. If I were capable of that, my movement teacher wouldn't have thrown me out of his class. My acting teacher wouldn't, in a fit of frustration, have asked me, "How the hell I thought I was going to be an actor?" My response was that I didn't intend to be. I don't.
The process is appealing because it is comprehensive. I never wanted to have a BFA, because I never wanted to have to choose one thing. My degree is a general degree, neither Technical nor Performance nor Education. I took directing classes and design and acting and education. I took a Theatre Management course. I took a course on Musical Theatre. In spite of taking Playwrighting three times, there's no specialisation in my transcript at all. I did what I wanted. Devised, collaborative performance lets me do everything I want, but I can't pursue it because I'm not to the place where I want to do everything.
A friend mentioned pursuing grad school on Facebook, because he wants the networking and experience, but is discouraged by the price. I told him, if he wants to gain experience and network, that doesn't require grad school, that requires doing it on your own. If you can't do it on your own and you need the framework of grad school to force you to commit to it, maybe that's not a bad idea. But the only real reason to go to grad school is because you want a specific experience that will help you fulfill a specific goal. I've seen people who only want the MFA as a piece of paper so they can go back to the working world and say, "OK, pay me more." It used to irritate me, but I've come to see that that's what they wanted, and determined that paying for the experience was better than merely putting in the years of professional work to equal that paid experience.
For me, I didn't really have a goal. Grad school didn't work out; it was specialised and I'm not. This is why I shouldn't even try to get a Theatre Studies or Performance Studies degree, because I would miss designing and building and directing and writing and everything else at the expense of just learning how and why those things happen. And then I start looking up Devised Theatre degrees, and I see mask and clown and dance and pull back, because I don't want those skills.
The answer, of course, is to make revolutionary change to the landscape and figure out how to turn the application in to a theory and teach it. I struggle to teach representational acting to ninth graders. Reforming the entire collaborative theatre around my personal need to avoid wearing a red nose and doing a lot of self-discovery is probably not something I'm capable of.
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