Action First, Beat Yourself Up Later

I'm losing years.  Months.  Days.  Still losing them to inaction.  I'm moving so fast I'm standing still.

I do too much, people say.  I'm so busy.  I need a hobby.  Three projects, I say.  I have five right now, but what of that?  What does it matter if I'm not moving forward?

It feeds me, my friend says.  All ways but intimately.

He's right.  For all I try to say I don't care, I don't want, I don't need... It's not true.  I got used to having, whatever that was.  But I also know that I... Or do I know?  How many times have I heard that I needed to be kind and understanding of someone who didn't deserve it?  Why do I still believe that I'm the problem?  That if I had only been good enough or whatever else I wasn't, that I wouldn't have caused so many problems.

I have so much to learn of love.

Work.  Work in the meanwhile.  To fulfill expectations and to be the things I can be.  To fill the days as best I can with action, if not meaning.  To pretend I'm making progress, to run while standing still.

I've lost time, forgotten it spun by.  For someone as afraid of death and drunkenness as I am, I've got gaps where I can't recall one thing from the next.  So now I fill up on experience.  I try.

I'm So Tired

It keeps turning out, if you audition, unlike in high school and college, you get cast.  

If you get cast, you have to act.  

Acting is hard.  

I barely express human emotions anyway.  But to do it on command and in the moment and in reaction to someone else...?  I forgot this part.  

I'm tense.  Holding my breath and clenching my jaw and holding myself together.  

But this is enough, for a while.  

This is not an argument with myself I'm going to win.  Sometimes, mediocrity seems like a fine thing to resign myself to, because I've never cared about my best, so why try to be anything other than what you've always been?  Trying to be anything other than that hasn't done you any favours so far.  

Speak the Speech, I Pray You

I auditioned for Shakespeare last week.  It was OK.  I was less confident than I pretended to be, and that sunk the prepared solo read.

They told us callbacks would be choreography, and that didn't happen because of a large number of new auditionees, for which I am grateful.

Lots of kids, so my role, after not making too big a fool of myself on the text and pronunciation section, is just to make the kids look good.

Last week, that was improving a scene with guy who is probably actually two or three years graduated, but I put him down as a high school junior or senior.  Whoops.  He put the idea together and I directed the scene and tried to be the straight man, and picked up all the laughs.  Maybe because there's a room full of people who know me, but haven't seen me perform.

This week for callbacks, high school senior.  Same thing, she presented the idea and I blocked and directed it, but she wanted to be the straight man.  We got a shit-tonne of applause for that, because we had, you know, character beats and goals and stuff.  It was successful.

Callbacks were interesting.  He wasn't looking for an ensemble, he was looking for versatility in his actors, which means he didn't get that information from the audition.  I can tell him why; he keeps saying the show isn't about the text or the poetry, it's about the story.  So, dude, it's ENTIRELY about the text and the poetry.  That's why you do close reading.  But he set out the monologues intended to catch an actor; all of them required research to do correctly.  If you wanted to see what an actor can do, and you don't care about text but about story, you want to see them make choices, and because they're largely middle and high school kids, you have to give them the framework to make choices within.  You've got to set the challenge and let them blow you away.

My high schoolers have taught me that if I want to see them work, I don't watch them audition, I watch them watch the audition.  I watch them play games and warm up before auditions.  That process is way more valuable to me as a director than having them stand up and confirm for me that, yes, they are high school actors.  I know that already.  I know what the challenges are, and I can teach any of them to act.  It's harder to teach them to focus in rehearsal, and care about what's going on, and not to be afraid.  

I do better the less I care.  Which isn't accurate.  I do better when I feel confident about my abilities.  Not about my work, but about the playing ground I walk in on.  When I figured out I was going to get to play around and try to make other people look successful, I thought, "good, I'm a director, I devise theatre, I can direct someone in such a way as to make it look collaborative, and it's in messing around with Shakespeare text, this is the role I was born to play no matter how they cast me."  

There's a role I don't want.  Actually, there are several roles I don't want- the ones due to me by my age and gender.  I'll acknowledge that's weird, especially when the roles for the opposite gender aren't really any much better, but I think there's more chances I'd get to do some stage combat if I go opposite gender.

I am a better performer than I think I am.  I think.  

I've Got the Power?

Talking to a random stranger on the Internet tonight who decided that I was a gregarious, outgoing individual.  Since he was a random Internet stranger, I would have dismissed this entirely but for the fact that I'm finding that, compared to normal people, I am.  

I used to believe that I hated people, I wanted to be left alone.  And this is true, I am an introvert, I need time away from people.  People exhaust me.  

A friend cancelled plans with me today, and I didn't feel relieved.  I talked to a friend online I haven't spoken to in a while, and told them I missed them, and realised it was true.  I miss people.  

I typed that last sentence and then deleted it, because I don't miss people.  But I think that's the difference.  I don't miss people, I miss the idea of one person.  And it's not him I miss, it's that relationship.  I missed it when I was in the relationship with him.  

I miss the feel of someone else.  I miss touch and trust and everything that the combination of those two things can mean.  

I tried so hard not to.  

Risk Is Wearing a Christmas Sweater

Some days, everything looks possible.

Then there are days like these.

Being an adult is when you have to look at a person half your age, having a problem you have never had, and summon the ability to be as strong and competent as they must believe you are.  I've had to do that a lot this year.  There is nothing quite as awful as a 15 year old matter-of-factly telling you the worst thing you have ever heard, except maybe letting the 15 year old know that you're on new ground here.

When I was 15, I dissolved in to tears over book characters, over life and death situations like cast lists and homework projects and the unfairness of a reality where the universe was not subject entirely to my whim.  I was tired and ugly and strange and never good enough, but I was lucky enough not to be too terribly broken, and nothing ever happened to break me.  Very few people actively tried to destroy me.  Why is everyone trying to destroy teenagers?  Why does it immediately get easier once you're out the other side?

I spent most of today worrying about the next 25 years.  Which will sort themselves out as I make decisions.  As I make choices about what I need to do.  2040.  Children will be born and grow up and start their own families and make their own incredibly poor decisions in that time.  It makes everything smaller, more insignificant.

I was sent a Hogwatch Night card this year.  The only holiday card I received, reminding me that invisible things matter.  Invisible things don't matter.  Time.  Death.  Life.  We rely on Truth, Justice, Love and all the rest because of those big three, but we use the others to pretend that the big ones do mean anything and that must be some comfort.

I am an existentialist.

Of course, if that's true, I suppose my role ought to be to look for those other things, not to reject them.  That way lies nihilism.

Sometimes when you fall, you fly.  The rest of the time, I suppose, you die, or maybe you don't.  If you're standing at the edge of the cliff while the avalanche bears down behind you, you have the option to find out what might happen if you jump, or to let the avalanche take you.

I usually let the avalanche take me.  I'm allowed to change that.  Only if I want to.

January Horizons

I was involved in over 26 shows in some capacity last year, either as director, stage manager, coordinator, dramaturge, playwright, designer, technician, and even more if you start to count the shows I worked front of house or box office.

Last year doesn't feel big.  I don't feel I have much to show from that work.  I wasn't doing anything new or different from anything I've done before.  There was a lot of work, but not a lot of growth.  And maybe that's because I've had to grow as a person, and that's the difference.

There is no excuse for being jealous of anyone for doing what you won't do.  Wisdom to live by.  It's time to write.  It's time to admit that no one in this town is going to give me the opportunities I want and look for them elsewhere.

At the same time, if I can create opportunities, I can create them anywhere.  Wasting time here is wasting it anywhere.

I own a house I have no intention of selling, no plans to rent, and I won't even have a hope of paying it off for another 7-8 years.  What am I thinking?

I'm thinking I'm lonely and sort of unfulfilled.  As though going anywhere is going to fix that.

Every time I think I know what I want, something changes.  Focus on being where you are right now and making that work.

There is no excuse for running a playwright's workshop and not working as a playwright.  None.  You need to fix that first.  Which means writing.  Which means having an idea.  Which means getting out of your head and typing.  A play.

That would feel big.

Of the Art and Pigs and Chickens

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.