Juliet's Economy

In the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s most famous love story, Juliet confesses to the dark night her love for the man she’s just met. Little does she know, Romeo is there in the bushes, gazing up at her with heart also blazing. In the scene that follows, the surprised Juliet elaborates a theory of love that has been interpreted for centuries as naïve and idealistic. What happens if we take seriously the model of love articulated by this young girl from Verona? What if love is an economy that operates not on scarcity but on abundance?

Blame teenage insecurity, blame the patriarchy, blame his aching heart still reeling from Rosaline’s refusal, in any case, Romeo’s model of love is grounded in a traditional economy of exchange. He wants to receive and give in equal measure, at an agreed-upon time. Love is trade, and the trade must be fair.

When Juliet tries to leave, saying that this is all happening too fast, Romeo stops her, saying like so many men before and after him: “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”

“What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” asks Juliet

“The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine,” he says.

She laughs at his pedantry: “I gave thee mine before thou didst request it!”

Juliet needed no guarantees before she confessed her love. She required no certainty of exchange. She gave because there was nothing else to do with her overflowing love but give it – to the night sky, to the vision of Romeo she held in her heart, to whoever was listening in the garden.

“And yet I would it were to give again.” She continues.

This worries Romeo: “Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?”

“But to be frank, and give it thee again.” Juliet knows that it isn’t the having or the getting of love that is the most pleasurable, but the giving of it. She wants to give, and give again; reaping repeatedly the pleasure of the gift.

She laughs again (at least in the production in my head): “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.”

There is nothing stopping her from giving her love endlessly. She need not await exchange. She need not play coy with her devotion until she’s received certainty that he will give his back.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”

In Juliet’s economy, there is no scarcity. Giving love only generates more.

Fire in my Belly: Watch Now!

Take four minutes out of your day.

Give them to the painful and soulful vision of artist/activist David Wojnarowicz, who recently ascended to renewed prominence after the Smithsonian pulled his super-8 film Fire in my Belly from their exhibit entitled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Apparently Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1992, was showing too much of his difference, and not hiding his desire well enough for some tastes.

The film was made in 1986/87 in honor of a friend and fellow artist who had recently died of AIDS. For those of us who don't remember that time, this was before AZT and cocktail drugs, when a diagnosis was a death sentence. The government was ignoring the plight of thousands living with HIV, viewing them as more of a threat to be managed than a populace to be cared for. Death was close by, and Wojnarowicz's haunting film captures the urgency and intimacy of this very recent time in history that some would prefer to forget.

Go all out. Full-screen it. Give yourself the experience.

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" - Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery Edit from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

Note that the original film was silent, and 13 minutes in length. The above version, which was pulled from the Smithsonian, has been edited and supplemented with a soundtrack of original recordings from ACT UP! protests in the 1980s.

Also, lets all take a moment to remember that the HIV/AIDS crisis is not over. Worldwide, 2 million people die every year from AIDS-related illnesses and each year 3 million more acquire the disease. While many of these new cases are far removed from New York's West Village, the call to action is still as important as it was in 1986. ACT UP! FIGHT AIDS!

Buy More Stuff

With Christmas less than a week away, it’s Buy More Stuff season!

Trying to define or describe Buy More Stuff is complicated.

Call it street performance, call it culture-jamming, call it schizophrenic capitalism at its finest, Buy More Stuff looks like a very polite protest attended by earnest, young, well-dressed professionals. Here and there, a head of bright pink hair or particularly prominent facial piercings make you wonder exactly what slice of the Seattle populace these protesters might represent.

The group stations itself in the heart of the shopping district at peak hours of holiday gift-buying frenzy with their iconic signs and fliers. Their message is clear, succinct, and limited to a few phrases: “Buy More Stuff!” “Hurry!” “Or else they’ll run out of stuff!” “Or you’ll run out of time!”

Passersby stop, confused.

Some ask who the protesters are working for: Does the mall pay you to do this?

> No, just here to get the message out. Buy More Stuff!

Some are angry: What are you, like, die-hard capitalists or something?

> No, just want to encourage everyone to Buy More Stuff!

Others are sure they’ve seen through the irony: You’re being sarcastic, right?

> No sir! 'Tis the season to Buy More Stuff!

My favorites are the smug passersby who act like they’re in on the joke. They smile or raise an awkward fist in solidarity with what they’re reading as a progressive, performance-art commentary on the state of American consumerism. They get it. They're hip. And then they walk into Macy’s. To Buy More Stuff.

Freud describes the phenomenon of “disavowal” as a compromise made within the human psyche when it becomes necessary to believe two contradicting things at one time. I don’t actually believe that something bad will happen if I say “Macbeth” while inside a theatre. And still, I never say it. And I chide anyone who does. Disavowal.

We accomplish the act of disavowal by splitting our ego in two. One part serves what Freud calls the “reality principle” and the other serves the “pleasure principle.” Hence the “there are no calories in cookie crumbs” scene of disavowal. I know better, but I do it anyway. The fantasy is not actually believed. But it’s not not believed either.

The Buy More Stuff protest is so potent because it takes aim at the fantasy-producing disavowal at the heart of the western capitalist project. We know that stuff will not make us happy. We know that buying more stuff will not fill the holes in our lives. We know that buying more stuff for our loved ones will not make them love us more or defend us from abandonment. And yet, we walk into Macy’s.

The embodiment of sobriety and reason in their three-piece suits with professionally lettered signs, the Buy More Stuff protesters are not ironic. They are not, in fact, trying to get people to Buy Less Stuff through some sort of reverse psychology street ministry.

Instead, Buy More Stuff asks us to hold our fantasies accountable. In doing so, the protesters reveal the sometimes uncomfortable disavowal that is subtly taking place within each of us as we indulge in the pleasure principle of consumption.

Now excuse me, I have to go to Macy’s…

The Tempest: Provocative but incomplete

Provocative but ultimately uninspiring, Julie Taymor's film The Tempest was full of "incomplete gestures."

If memory serves, I borrowed this expression from one of my mentors, Robert Woodruff, years ago. Sometimes in art-making practice, audiences accept aesthetic choices that seem unjustified or erratic if the piece itself experiments with form in such a way that generally ignores or transcends traditional causal relationships. Robert – a director with a truly unique vision and no love of traditionalism in the theatre – encouraged formal innovation in his classroom but would never let us get away with what Homer Simpson describes as "weird for the sake of weird."

A play doesn't necessarily have to have a story, he told us, but it does require the evolution of an idea. The cause and effect relationships within a play need bear no resemblance to those of the outside world, but they do need to work together to build a world with internal logic, stakes and circumstances.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest poses many rich questions about the nature of power. From whence does power flow, and does its earned or unearned derivation affect how it should be used? How should one wield the power one possesses, and under what circumstances should one exert power over another? How does feeling powerful, or powerless, change the shape of your world?

Taymor is clearly drawn to the magnetism of these questions and how they relate to active identity markers in our current era. Casting Helen Mirren, a woman of approximately her own age and popular acclaim, in the role of Prospero (a role often considered the aging Shakespeare’s self-portrait) is an invitation to consider the state of the female artist, scholar, and culture-shaper today. But to what end? Mirren’s performance is strong, but feels shoehorned into an idea of Prospero that Taymor doesn’t relate to the rest of her production.

Her Caliban, played by Djimon Hounsou, is similarly problematic. Clearly West African in appearance, consistently half-naked and sometimes in chains, his character evokes the Atlantic slave trade. Prospero’s castle strongly resembles Elmina Castle, a slave-holding fort in Ghana where dehumanizing conditions were forced upon prisoners before they crossed through the “door of no return” onto slave ships. To what end? How does this idea evolve over the course of the play? Where does Caliban go when he exits the castle dramatically at the play’s end? I just hope he doesn’t end up in the colonies tending tobacco fields.

Slightly more successful but still incomplete is Taymor’s vision of the airy spirit Ariel. Played by a pale-painted Ben Whishaw, Ariel is, in this production, a genderqueer shape-shifter whose pectoral muscles sometimes soften into small breasts. In Ariel’s strongest and most frightening scene, s/he takes the form of a huge harpy, the angriest of female monsters. Are we to read Ariel-as-Harpy as the dangerous familiar of our female Prospero, who stakes a strong claim on traditionally masculine forms of power? Are we being asked to imagine gender as the cloven pine from whence this genderless creature dreams of escape? Once again the connections are almost there, but the internal logic doesn’t hold.

All of these gestures are promising but partial. As the time ticks by and the imperative of plot must be obeyed, the ideas contained in the bodies and costumes of Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel are dropped like unreturned serves on a tennis court. Of course, the film is not required to answer all the questions about race, gender, and sexual expression posed by both Shakespeare’s script and Taymor’s vision. Answers are boring! However, the practice of posing deep questions with rigorous engagement is vital. The incomplete nature of the otherwise interesting gestures disappointed at least this viewer, who hoped for a richer, more internally coherent and productive world.

Juliet, short and muscular

When I was 17, I played Juliet in a community theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. This was nearing the end of the phase in which I considered myself an actress. The year before, I'd played Madge in William Inge's mediocre play Picnic, a young pageant-winner described as "the prettiest girl in town." I was not an unpretty teen, but it was dawning on me that with my broad shoulders and square jaw, I wasn't quite pretty enough to be a professional actress. I felt like a fraud playing Madge, a role that Gwyneth Paltrow had played a few years before, but felt slightly more comfortable in Juliet's skin. Juliet is, after all, a tomboy. The consummate ingenue, she's also a rule-thwarting, death-unfazed badass who really, really wants to get laid.

The reviews were generally complimentary, but I couldn't get over the first few words of one critic's response: "Fairfield's Juliet, short and muscular..." What the reviewer was wrestling with wasn't my height (I'm not that short) or my unjustifiably sculpted deltoids, but the subtle genderqueerness of my teen persona. It was latent over a decade ago, but, like Juliet's lupine sexuality, was ready to pounce given the least provocation.

The lack of variety in gender expression of female actors in mainstream theatre is appalling. Blame for this can be scattered widely (and accurately) on agents, graduate schools, playwrights, heteronorm audiences, wary producers, and more. As a director, I'd like to personally call out directors for their painfully limited creativity when it comes to what versions of womanhood take center stage.

We need more dykes onstage. More tomboys and tough girls. More bois and butches and trannyboys and andros and genderfuckers. We need more subtly non-normative girls with square features and strong frames. We need tall women and deep-voiced women and short-haired women. And not just in ensemble-generated dance-theatre pieces in NYC and SF! We need butch Juliets, boyish Cozettes and dyky Blanche DuBois' on stages across the country. And we need brave directors - who trust audiences to welcome nature's spectrum of gender variance - to cast them.

Here's the deal. Under-representation of lesbian characters onstage is a serious matter, but a different one. We definitely need more stories of women loving women (playwrights: get on it, and directors: cross-gender casting, STAT!). But until the classical canon is toppled and filled with queer characters, let's remember that gender expression and sexual object-choice are not inherently linked. You can have a broad-shouldered, genderqueer female-identified ingenue pair beautifully with a leading man of any shape and size without sacrificing chemistry or believability. This short muscular Juliet was certainly in love with her sweet-faced, long-haired Romeo, but that's another story...

Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

Bakhtin and Santarchy

So every year I await, with glee, this event.

Since winter of 2005, I have thrown in my lot with ho-ho-hoardes of manic Santas who pick a Saturday in December to gallivant though bars, clubs, and public spaces in the cities of their choice, spreading holiday cheer and purging late-winter angst. Clad in my homemade in-your-face-sexual-gender-queer-faux-cowgirl-fuzzy-raver Santa Suit (google image search "Santa Chaps" for proof), I hit the streets with my friends, feeling as though we're taking part in a contemporary version of the Bakhtinian "Carnival" - the secular social festivals of the European Middle Ages in which traditional class structures were temporarily inverted:

"One might say carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order. It marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed" (Bahktin, Rabelais and his World).

During Santarchy, everyone dressed as Santa is kin. Names dissolve into the sea of intersubjective Saint Nicks, and a strange secular sense of collective power is felt. A red mass united sans political program, Santas hug and make small talk, share spiked cocoa and discuss the intricacies of unique suit-construction. Santas fuck gently with the "muggles" (citizens and bar-goers that generally resemble them on any other day of the week), but have clear policies against fucking with kids or the police.

The trap of counter-cultural rituals like these is that the inversions are only temporary. As every Master's Thesis on the Burning Man Festival must contend with, Santarchy makes us wonder whether impermanent upswellings of culture-jamming collectivity actually challenge the authority of prevailing powers or ultimately reinforce them. Santarchy is of course guilty of most of the charges of contemporary pop culture events: reliance on internet access, unapologetic commercialism, racial-homogeneity, and latent sexism (while fiesty female Santaclowns abound, there are still a few exploitative gropey Santas).

Bahktin maintained faith that the wicked mirth generated by Carnival could ripple outwards and help to expose the "gay relativity" of all human cultural products. My Santarchy apologia relies similarly on my belief that sometimes we are what we pretend to be. Or rather, we have the potential to become more like those versions of ourselves that we strategically assume. My red-suited avatar is a sexually-liberated, gender-queer, loud-mouthed social muse that believes in the power of singing together, drinking together, and momentarily releasing the given name that binds me inside a claustrophobically singular identity. My Santa isn't afraid of death or final papers or Gropey McDrunkenClaus or the surprisingly aggressive SFPD because she has her bearded tribe at her back and peppermint schnapps in her flask.

Unsuited now, I return to my law-abiding, sobriety-favoring, responsibility-bearing graduate student life. Till next year, Santa.

Towns Like Ours End in Fire

Please enjoy Towns Like Ours End in Fire.

This piece was directed by me with sound design by Beth Hersh (in collaboration with Sigur Ros) and video by Joe Moore (in collaboration with San Francisco weather).

It was shot on location at 84 Athens Street.

It is dedicated to Emmanuelle.

The video is six minutes long and starts with twenty seconds of black. Keep watching! It's paced more like a modern dance piece than like a Youtube video. Thanks for viewing.

The Glance of Lot's Wife

Looking back is dangerous.

In Greek mythology, the musician Orpheus sings open the gates of hell to save his wife Eurydice, only to kill her again, accidentally, by looking back at her before she'd made it back to the land of the living.

Genesis 19 tells us that, after escaping Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's (nameless) wife "looked back at the calamity of the city" and was turned into a pillar of salt.

Contemporary feminist scholarship has been particularly involved in unveiling the inherent power dynamics of looking. Vision is, for humans, the sense that travels the farthest. To touch or taste something, the body must make physical contact. Smelling and hearing reach farther away from the self. But sight can travel miles on a clear day. With distance comes the illusion of perspective. In that empty space between seer and seen, power relations rush in to fill the void.

The notion of "The Gaze" as having the power to affect the subjectivity of both the viewer and the viewed was brought into critical discourse by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the notion of "The Male Gaze" in cinema to describe the way that the audience, regardless of sex/gender/orientation, is catapulted into the subject position of the straight male viewer who has mastery over the fetished female bodies onscreen. This male gaze also functions outside the movie theatre, dangerously coding "woman as image, man as bearer of the look" (Mulvey,1975).

Feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, citing the Orpheus and Eurydice story, describes the "Orphic gaze" as a potentially dangerous way of looking at photographs of past traumas that were not your own. Debate has arisen around the potentially Orphic quality of "looking back" at holocaust photography, pictures of dead U.S. soldiers in the New York Times, as well as the notorious photographs of Abu Ghraib. Why do we want to look? What do we gain from looking? Who might suffer? The line between witnessing and fetishizing can be so thin. How can we avoid "the backwards look that kills again?" (Pollock, 1996a)

Unlike Orpheus, who kills another, the glance of Lot's wife is a suicidal glance that brings her own body to a sudden halt while others move onwards without her. She decides to take a moment -- ever-so-briefly! --to witness and mourn the past, and in so doing her body is frozen forever in the gesture of that single choice.

If I were to theorize "The Glance of Lot's Wife," I would describe it as the calcifying pain that the minoritarian subject feels when she looks back at the long history of oppression against people who look and feel and act like her. The dawning awareness of the past's heaviness can be immobilizing. The attempt to bear witness to shared trauma can leave you unable to see or feel anything other than that trauma's endless aftermath.

I sometimes feel like this, feet and form stuck in place, salty tears running down my hard, salty cheeks. I can't give up my backward glances, yet neither can I give up my gaze towards the distant horizon. I guess that leaves me shuffling forward, trying not to trip over my feet.

Play Dangerously with the Body

Yesterday I attended a football game, a highly rare occurrence for me. I still don't understand the rules of the game (and seriously, don't bother trying to explain; what I don't care about just doesn't stick), but I enjoyed the pageant and virtuosity of all the performances: the players, the coaches, the referees, the cheerleaders, the band, the fans.

In honor of the game (and Stanford's crushing victory, ahem, "Go Cards!"), I offer forth some of Richard Schechner's words on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the body through performance training:

"In preparing performers to perform, rigorous exercises reshape their bodies. This is as true of kathakali as it is of football, of ballet as it is of shamanism...Each genre deforms and reforms the body by introducing disequilibrium, a problem to be solved by a new balancing specific to the action: ballet's way of unbalancing-rebalancing is not football's is not a Huichol shaman's is not noh drama's and so forth. But each form needs to play dangerously with the body, to deconstruct and reconstruct it according to its own plan of action. The body is deconstructed--opened, made provisional, uncreated, enters Brahma's night--so that it can be recreated according to plan. The plans are not fixed. They change, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. Ballet's body, and football's, and so on, are each a maya-lila of possibility. And as many genres as exist, untold others could exist: of natural balancing there may be limits, but no such limit hinders the invention of new unbalancing-rebalancing cycles according to not-yet-known codes." (The Future of Ritual, p. 40)

The bodies created by the practice of football training and competition are beautiful and graceful in their own right. But I'm even more excited about the forms of embodiment that await as we continue to invent new ways to unbalance and rebalance ourselves against the weight of the ever-shifting world.

"Stages of Decay"

Check out this link for a slideshow of beautiful photographs of abandoned and decaying theatres by Julia Solis.

All theatres are haunted. Abandoned theatres seem extra haunted.

Conscious Spectatorship

Yesterday I woke before the sun to attend the Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Ceremony on Alcatraz Island, an annual sunrise gathering that honors the traditions of Native American tribes as well as indigenous people the world over. Blessed with a gorgeously clear morning, the event, which included guest speakers, musicians, drumming, and dancing, was a powerful way to celebrate an ever-problematic national holiday.

The event made me very aware of my own spectatorship. Descended quite literally from settlers who appropriated land from indigenous people, my participation in the ceremony is colored by a sad awareness of my own implication in our current cultural scenario. As an ally to oppressed cultures, I watch and listen with reverence, bearing witness to the traditions that remain vibrant in Native communities. My gaze is attentive, appreciative, and also, I hope, ultimately generative. Rather than watching with the hungry eyes of a tourist or the analytic eyes of an anthropologist, I try to watch in a way that is simultaneously aware of the past yet looking imaginatively towards the future. How can my work as an artist and scholar contribute to the flourishing of intercultural dialogue? Can I, through conscious spectatorship, learn from and help further the vibratory movements of embodied knowledges of cultures that are not my own?

As the sunlight hits the crumbling barracks on the top of Alcatraz, I can't help but think of the rise and fall of cultures. Despite the attempts of the dominant power to control and subordinate any elements that threaten that power, nothing that is built by human hands lasts forever. Sometimes I feel comforted remembering that everything, given enough time, crumbles.

Devising the Bible, Myself

This week in my directing seminar we presented short devised works based on the King James Bible. With such a wide-open field of possibility, each piece was unique and deeply reflective of its maker and his or her relationship to spirituality, organized religion, and the human encounter with greater-than-human elements like death, love, or a divine power. Much more so than in traditional scenework, in devised work the passions and obsessions of the director spring forth shamelessly. Faced with the empty space of script-less-ness, one's own internal conflicts and pleasures must twist themselves into new and original forms.

Initially overwhelmed with my options (should I work on Adam and Eve? Revelations? Mary Magdalene?), I eventually found inspiration in a Grotowski text I was reading, titled coincidentally, "The Theatre's New Testament."

"The spectator understands that such an act [the actor's rigorous self-exposure] is an invitation to him to do the same thing, and this often arouses opposition or indignation, because our daily efforts are intended to hide the truth about ourselves not only from the world, but also from ourselves. We try to escape the truth about ourselves, whereas here we are invited to stop and take a close look. We are afraid of being changed into pillars of salt if we turn around, like Lot's wife." (Towards a Poor Theatre, p. 37)

Suddenly hit by the lightning bolt of creative excitement, I jumped online and found Lot's wife nestled into Genesis 19. Nameless and powerless (like too many Biblical women) she is punished for embodying -- in a single backwards glance -- her sense of grief at God's wrathful destruction of the notoriously queer desert cities Sodom and Gomorrah.

Like the actor who reveals herself onstage, devising is a place in which the director can look closely at herself through the scalpel of someone else's story. In my case I used Lot's wife as a vehicle for self-exposure and self-reflection. Like Lot's wife, I desire to look back: to take time to contemplate and mourn the pain I've witnessed both first and secondhand. Like Lot's wife, I am not ashamed of my connection to people and places that a vengeful God might deem sinful. In her story I feel rumblings of my fear of calcification, my longing for transformation, and my ambiguous relationship with the power of flight.

All art can be considered a calcification of experience - the bringing into solid form what was once awash in undulating formlessness. While no one wants to be turned into a pillar of salt, sometimes bearing witness to pain and destruction means taking the risk of turning around anyway.

Why?

"Why are we concerned with art? To cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness, fulfill ourselves. This is not a condition but a process in which what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent. In this struggle with one's own truth, this effort to peel off the life-mask, the theatre, with its full fleshed perceptivity, has always seemed to me a place of provocation." - Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre

Oh Sister Ismene

I played Antigone once in my sixth grade production. I still remember the first line and the pleading look on my eleven-year-old face when I said it: "Oh sister Ismene! Unhappiness, calamity, disgrace, and dishonor have fallen upon us!"

Researching the play today, I tumbled into an internet rabbit-hole trying to pin down the meaning of Antigone's name. Like all etymological slip-and-slides, definitiveness is impossible, but the multivalent possibilities of those four little syllables are quite provocative.

We're all familiar with the prefix "Anti," which means against, opposed to, or the opposite of.

The second part of her name, however, poses more questions. Some sources claim it's related to the Greek word "gnomos" which means opinion or thought. An interpretation of this version or her name would be "one who goes against the opinions of others."

Another interpretation claims that the "gone" derives from the word "gonia" which means angle or bend (as in polygon). This gives us a vision of an Antigone who is unbending or unyielding.

Finally, there could be a relationship with the word "gonos," which means seed or semen, and is related to procreation as well as motherhood. This is the tricky interpretation. Was Antigone the first "man-hating feminist" of anti-feminist lore? Was she opposing motherhood and the "natural" flow of generations in the way she took on the masculine responsibility of defending her family's honor?

Oh Sister Ismene, for at least 2400 years, women who go against the opinions of others and hold to their beliefs in unbending ways have risked being seen as the enemy of mankind. All we want to do is bury our brother's body.

Marcus, or the Secret of Onstage Sex Scenes

Marcus, or, The Secret of Sweet is the conclusion of Tarell Alvin McCraney's powerful Brothers/Sisters Trilogy. It plays for two more weekends at ACT and if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to get tickets immediately and DON'T READ the rest of this post!

Marcus is a character you haven't seen before on the regional theatre circuit. Sixteen, gay, and increasingly "out" in the rural Louisiana projects, he is simultaneously a visionary and a horny teenager. He's a powerful character, who, in my opinion, is betrayed in this production by the director's lack of innovation at specific moments of onstage sexuality.

Over the course of the play, three potentially sexual moments between men unfold onstage: a kiss, the prelude to a blow-job, and a thwarted rape. These moments are full of possibility for the character as well as our own culture. What does it mean for the audience to witness Marcus in these moments of queer black male desire?

In contemporary American culture, black male sexuality remains fraught. Overdetermined by threatening "thug" stereotypes, black male bodies are seen as dangerous at the same time as they are objectified and idealized (like the Old Spice superbowl commercial now gone viral). McCraney's scenes of queer desire place black male sexuality not in relationship to a fearing or fetishizing other, but to itself. "Two black men loving each other," said McCraney in an interview, quoting Essex Hemphill, "is always a revolutionary act."

Ultimately, the director misses these opportunities. Unnecessarily loyal to realistic conventions, he rushes through these queer moments as though ashamed to let them breathe. Because of this hesitancy as well as his reliance on the theatrical equivalent of the cinematic "pan to the windblown curtains," ACT's production doesn't find the specificity onstage that McCraney's language invites.

Overt sexuality in theatre is always complicated. The director's challenge is to strive for an externalized vision of the character's internal experience. Is the sexual moment jolting? Languid? Terrifying? Surreal? Does time slow down or speed up? Does space contract or expand? Moments of embodied desire are always moments out of time, out of space, and sometimes out of the limits of the body itself. These edges of expressibility should be where theatre thrives.

Sexuality is not ancillary to Marcus's story, rather it's very close to the young, beating heart of the character and the play. While I'm happy to see him onstage at ACT, I feel like only half Marcus's heart made it into this production.

The Urge to Act, or Why I Love Actors

This weekend I saw three very different performance events: a student production of All's Well that Ends Well at Stanford University, Ampey! a contemporary dance piece by Adia Whitaker at Counterpulse in San Francisco, and the weekly student work showing at Dell' Arte School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California which focused on masked performance. These three pieces couldn't have been more different in style, substance, and circumstance, yet I left all three evenings with a similar sense of deep appreciation.

I'll confess it now. I love actors. I feel like I should say "performers" rather than actors, in order to fully encompass the musicians, dancers, and mimes that moved before me. But what I saw was people onstage, lending their flesh towards acts of import and difficulty. Acting. More specifically, I love the urge to act. I love the choice to go onstage and say: "Go ahead, look at me! I am willing and prepared to bear, for some time, the weight of your gaze."

The storytelling urge is more direct: "I want to tell you THIS. Listen to THIS." The urge to act, however, is indirect. It's the willingness to be a vehicle between a story and an audience. It's a kind of active passivity, an openness to exposure that could more likely result in shame than glory. The performer lets herself be seen so that something else might be seen through her. It’s not surprising that over centuries of anti-theatrical bias in a misogynistic culture, the male actor has been condescendingly associated with femininity and passivity. In many cultures it is women who are watched, who allow themselves to be watched and who sometimes even derive pleasure from being watched.

Actors get a lot of criticism for being narcissistic, egocentric creatures who shrivel without the heat of the lights and the eyes of the audience. But perhaps actors just have the bravery to face head-on the truths that the rest of us want to deny - that identity is always an illusion, that our personality is always a guise, that selfhood only exists in concert with other selves, and that it's always the light and heat of other bodies that turns our own light on.

Theatre Marathon: The Great Game

I recently saw Tricycle Theatre's production of The Great Game: Afganistan at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Depending on how you classify it, The Great Game is a single day-long play, three full-length plays, or nineteen short pieces on the topic of Afghanistan's history and politics. I attended one of the "marathon performances," in which a full day - 11:00 AM to 10:30 PM - was surrendered to the act of audiencing.

Submitting to a full-day play requires great trust: in the company, the director, the playwright, and the actors. You hope they'll take good care of you, both artistically and physically, and that your investment in this illusory world will be worthwhile. The Great Game definitely was. While I try to stay engaged in global politics, it's hard to understand the present without the historical context, and CNN rarely takes the time to explain the myriad effects of the last 150 years of colonialism in Central Asia. The production educated me in that alchemical way that only art can, and raised as many questions as it answered, putting the responsibility in my hands to deepen my own understanding of this country about which I know only little.

The theatre marathon format is growing increasingly common. Elevator Repair Service's 7-hr Gatz is at the Public right now, and a marathon version of Tarell Alvin MacCraney's Brother/Sister Plays was produced there last year. I saw Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Ephemeres last summer at Lincoln Center, and Signature Theatre is reviving Kushner's Angels in America in marathon-format next spring.

Personally, I love the experience of giving myself over to a day of near-passive observation. My intense critical eye usually gets tired after the first few hours and my way of viewing changes. It's not so much that I get wrapped up in the action of the play, but I begin to feel like this life in the darkened theatre, surrounded by a temporary community of quiet, watchful viewers, is my new reality. In the shared space of the audience, my ego boundaries start to soften like food over the heat of a fire.

The meditative time signature of the theatre marathon allows me the luxuries of observation, contemplation, and openness to difference that seem impossible in the active rumble of life itself. My obsession with my own small dramas is subsumed into the grand, shared pageant passing before me, and in that shifting experience of time, self, and community, I can't help but sense, at the corners of my tired vision, the overwhelming beauty of the enormous, ultimately unknowable world.

Alternative Economics

In Vajrayana Buddhism, there's a preliminary practice sometimes prescribed to those of us who need help developing generosity. You hold in one hand a gemstone, a gold coin, or, nowadays, perhaps some small and surprisingly valuable piece of technological equipment like an iPhone. Slowly and simply, you pass it from your right hand to your left, then back again. You give. You receive. You give again.

In addition to rehearsing the baby steps of generosity, this practice is also a beginner’s guide to letting go. It’s the kind of letting go that doesn’t end in utter loss, disappearance, or death. It’s peek-a-boo light. It’s Freud’s fort-da game where the spool never rolls too far away.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the psychoanalytic description of subject-formation. How we become the selves we feel ourselves to be. According to Freud, "the ego is the precipitate of the abandoned object cathexis,"(On Narcissism). In other words, who we are is a collage crafted from our emotional attachments to people we've loved and lost. It's my policy to take Freud with a grain of salt, but this description rings true. On quiet days I can feel the people I've loved moving around inside my psyche, or at least the familiar rumblings of their memories.

But the loss part is hard to stomach. Must we lose people we love to build our own individual subjectivities? I'm lucky enough to still have vibrant, loving, living parents and ongoing, caring relationships with many of my previous partners. I know that nothing lasts forever, but I here I am, enriched by their existence. Haven't these people nested themselves into the muddled montage of my self-image without being completely abandoned or lost?

I don't think the economy of the heart burns the same fuel as the economic engine of late capitalism. I don't think gain and loss need be tied together in such mechanistic union. I believe there is a way to lose without catastrophic trauma and other foundations to build upon than the corpses of those lost.

To me, performance seems like a version of this Buddhist practice of giving from one hand to the other. The communication -- even communion -- possible in the performance event challenges the gain/loss model of giving and receiving. Transformation rather than exchange can take place between subjects. If the energy of this could be harnessed, we might find that perpetual motion machine dreamed about by theoretical physicists. I imagine the heart and psyche pay as little heed to the laws of thermodynamics as they do to systems of economic modeling.

"Directing Shadows:" Artaud's Dreams

I re-read Artaud last week. I'm always inspired by his vision for what theatre could be. Here are a few snippets, along with images of his own artwork:


"For the theatre as for culture, it remains a question of naming and directing shadows: and the theater, not confined to a fixed language and form, not only destroys false shadows but prepares the way for a new generation of shadows around which assembles the true spectacle of life." (The Theatre and its Double, p 12)






"We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being."(The Theatre and its Double, p 13)








"We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly associated with sexual freedom which is also dark, although we do not precisely know why...The theatre releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the theater, but of life." (The Theatre and its Double, p 31)






"The true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves... May it free us, in a Myth in which we have sacrificed our little human individuality...with powers rediscovered in the Past" (The Theatre and its Double, p 116)

"Closer than a brother": The Brothers Size

The epigraph for Tarell Alvin McCraney's powerful play The Brothers Size is a quote from proverbs: "A man that hath friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother" (18:12). Closer even than blood is the relationship between a man and God, the proverb seems to say. Yet a queer reading looms right below the surface, and in fact, some translate the subject of the second clause as "lover" or "beloved," rather than friend: "there is a lover who keeps nearer than a brother." Is the beloved closer than the blood brother? When situations get sticky, when your neck is on the line, who knows you better? Who will be there when you cry out in the dark? And ultimately, who will be willing to sacrifice their happiness for your own?

These questions roil just beneath the surface of McCraney's play like the queerness inside the proverb. The Brothers Size tells the story of three men, two bound by blood brothership and two bound by an intimate fraternity borne in prison. The hinge of both of these relationships is Oshoosi Size, named after the Yoruba deity associated with justice, the hunt, and imprisonment. Oshoosi has recently been released from prison and has moved in with his big brother Ogun, who runs a garage. His best friend Elegba, who he met in prison, is happy to see him released from jail and the two re-connect on the outside, only to run into trouble with the law again.

The nature of their intimacy while behind bars is an open question - it was a love that lived in the darkness, and we see it reflected in Oshoosi's dreamscapes and hear it in between the lines of their sparse conversations: "We was like brothers" says Elegba, "Brothers in need." Indeed, the love between Oshoosi and Elegba is palpable (as is Oshoosi's fear of what that love could mean) but the words "gay" "homosexual" or "queer" never cross the lips of any character in this play.

In interviews, McCraney quotes Essex Hemphill, the African-American poet and activist, who said “Two black men loving one another is a revolutionary act." McCraney points out that "He didn’t say ‘two black gay men’, he just said ‘two black men’. It’s something we don’t see. I wanted to put it on stage – these men, in all forms of colour, trying to figure out how to love themselves and each other.”

Both Elegba and Ogun love the childlike, open-hearted Oshoosi. Both try to give him the freedom he craves - literally, both give him cars, that 20th century symbol of "ultimate freedom." But sometimes our ability to give generously to the person we love is limited by the experience of love itself. Sometimes our desire to keep him close overpowers our desire to set him free. Though Elegba's tortured devotion to Oshoosi is strong, it almost lands them both back in the prison they just left.

Near the end of the play, the sometimes-hard big brother Ogun stands on the porch of his house. Speaking his stage directions (as they frequently do in this play) he says "Ogun Size / stands alone in the night / staring." In the fantastic production I saw at the Magic Theatre, this was followed by an intense, attenuated moment of stillness and silence. One of those silences that releases into the audience waves of shifting experience: confusion, then worry that something has gone wrong, then curious attention, then tentative acceptance. Ogun's presence in this long moment was penetrating but impenetrable. It was as though he was simultaneously looking back into the dense, shared past of brotherhood and forward into the delicate tendrils of possible futures that could lie ahead. After this long pause Ogun decides to push his brother forward into the unknown.

The gift he gives Oshoosi at the play's end is the gift of flight. Leaving the elder brother Size alone again on the porch facing the stillness and solitude of his own life. Elegba was at Oshoosi's side when he cried out in the darkened prison; he was the "friend that sticketh closer than a brother." But Ogun makes the choice to unstick in order to set his brother free.

Deterritorializing Directing

When I first began directing, I spent a lot of time looking for the right way to do it. I directed my first full length show before ever taking a directing class, so my sheer bewilderment about the job description wasn't that surprising. For a long time I thought that somewhere, somehow, there was a right way to do this strange task that I'd suddenly fallen in love with. If only someone could tell me how!

I've been feeling the pain of Platonism a lot lately. About 2500 years ago, Plato spread a nasty rumor that ideal, perfect forms existed somewhere out there and that we should live our lives in their pursuit. In his vision, every material thing is ghosted by an ideal version of that thing. In the Platonic model, failure is basically guaranteed, because shorn of the responsibility of actual existence, the imaginary, ideal thing is always superior. The material manifestation of it, striving towards but never reaching the ideal, is always inferior.

If I were the "ideal" director, I would come to every rehearsal with a perfect vision of the scene and have an impeccable structure for getting us to that result. I would know exactly how to communicate with my actors and designers. I would rarely be lost or despairing, but even if I was, I'd have the ideal method for dealing with that anxiety.

Oh Plato. What have you wrought?

Deleuze and Guattari's vision of the world is perhaps more useful for the theatre director. For D&G, "Forms and subjects, organs and functions are 'strata' or relationships between strata" (1KP, 297). Our interpretation of the world builds up in layers like the layers of rock you can see in a cliff wall. These interpretations harden into stratified systems that seem so real they can trap us inside them. We believe in these systems, and suddenly the maps that we've drawn to help us understand the utter un-mapability of the world become more real than the territory they attempt to contain.

Directing is a messy art form. Each time I do it, I go in with a plan: a certain relationship between forms and subjects that I hope might produce the play I want to see. And each time I find myself re-inventing the wheel. Deleuze and Guattari describe deterritorialization as the process that breaks up stratification. It's a movement in an unexpected direction that disregards existing strata. Deterritorializing forces scratch out and re-write the map, not based on a destructive urge, but out of desire and necessity. They make new forms and new modes as they move in a new way through the old territory.

"Flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new" (1KP, 60).

Everytime I direct, my core notion of what it is to be a director - what it means to make art collaboratively yet in pursuit of a specific vision - changes. This constant flux is the pleasure and the challenge of this work.

So Plato - I hope you're listening! I'm releasing the notion of the ideal directoral technique! If you're looking for me, you'll find me bumbling about in the rehearsal room half-lost, half-inspired, trying to hold on to the reins of these Deleuzian forces of deterritorialization.

"Be Friends!" Or, love and collaboration

Beckett's radio play Words and Music concerns the collaboration between the titular characters, who work together to satisfy the musical desires of their lord. Commissioned by the BBC in 1962, it was a collaboration between Beckett and his cousin, the composer John Beckett. The project was apparently somewhat fraught, and after the original recording, John withdrew his score.

My girlfriend, who also happens to be one of my closest artistic collaborators, spent eight hours today remixing excerpts from Holst's "The Planets" into 33 distinct sound cues for our version of Words and Music. Sometimes I count the number of hours she spends designing and wonder why the director gets top billing. At 10pm, we tech'd through the cues. Despite the late hour and our limited vocabulary discussing symphonic music, we fell into a productive and pleasurable rhythm: "I think it should cut off after the 'dum dum dum!'" "The first 'dum dum dum' or the second one?" "Well, definitely before that xylophone comes in," "Yeah, there's no xylophone in Beckett."

For me, love and collaboration go hand in hand. Finding someone I click with creatively is like finding a new lover. When I feel that spark lit, I start fantasizing about when we can next work together and on what source text. Like with a romantic relationship, you can't fake a good collaboration. Trust and communication can be built over time, but it all starts with a recognition and a pull, the thrill of similarity glimpsed across difference.

Words says to Music at the top of the play: "How much longer cooped up here in the dark? With you!" But by the middle of the piece they are singing together, breathing meaning into sound, improvising a new path through the dark space between them.

Speaking of Shakespeare...

I'm looking forward to seeing Julie Taymor's film version of The Tempest when it hits theaters in December.

(Here's the trailer in case you missed it)

It isn't getting great reviews so far at the festivals, but Shakespeare is notoriously difficult to translate to film, and I respect Taymor for being brave enough to try.

Her film version of Titus was fantastic, and while Across the Universe had some issues, I still admire the strange theatricality of her cinematic vision. And really, how can you NOT be excited about Helen Mirren as Prospero?

Shakespeare, finally.

I became a director during my undergrad years at Harvard, where you can't actually major in theatre but nevertheless approximately 25 shows are put up every semester, most student-directed and student-produced.

This results in a lot of well-meaning, over-educated, under-trained wanna-be directors flailing about beautifully and boldly, taking on absurdly challenging (and sometimes misguided) projects right out of the gate. I know, I was one of them. And I loved it.

Undergrad directors often have limited access to new scripts as well as a fascination with the classics they're studying in their literature classes. This means a lot of productions of Hamlet, Streetcar, and Oedipus directed by 19-year-olds who have never blocked a scene before.

After sitting through one too many evenings of what Joanna Settle calls "punitive Shakespeare" directed by cocky undergrads (whose virtuosic textual grasp of the verse and deep connection with the struggle of the character didn't actually result in something enjoyable to watch), I made a vow.

I decided that I wouldn't direct Shakespeare until I was 30. Surely by age 30 (that then-distant shore!) I would have gained both the directing skills and the psychological maturity to take on the Bard.

Thirty is now fast approaching, and along with it, my first time directing Shakespeare. It's just a scene for class (from All's Well that Ends Well), but I'm happy to be finally breaking my ten-year ban. Perhaps a full production will follow.

Chekhov, however, has to wait til I'm 40.

Beckett & Nietzsche

As a director, the moment a play is hovering in my consciousness, it becomes the filter for the whole world. All the input flowing towards me is somehow in dialogue with the text (or textlessness) of the project I'm working on. Slightly paranoia-inducing at times, it can feel like everything in the world is speaking directly to me.

I suppose since I'm working on Beckett, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Nietzsche seems to be telling me how to direct the play. Nietzsche did, after all, announce the death of God and Beckett put his characters in endless limbo waiting for his return. They are both poets of the void. Bards of the ceaseless cycle. Cynics whose philosophies of emptiness seem at odds with their heartsick love for humanity.

Beckett's short play "Words and Music," which I'm directing next week, concerns the two titular characters (otherwise known as Joe and Bob) who struggle with each other as they strive to create music and words that will please their lord and master, Croak. Reading Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, I stumble across his notions of the "Apollonian" and the "Dionysian." Suddenly the duality embodied in the figures of Beckett's play seem to dance together on Nietzsche's page.

The Apollonian creative drive is the quest for image, form, and the meaning that coalesces around clear lines and boundaries. It concerns the individual and his or her comprehensible vision of self. It's aligned with the arts of sculpture and epic poetry and the aesthetics of distance and clarity.

The Dionysian drive is the aesthetic urge towards excess, creative destruction, and the loss of ego that comes with drinking, fucking, and joining voices together in song. It is the formlessness to Apollo's form, always threatening to unravel.

While he's clearly a Dionysian spirit, Nietzsche does not privilege one drive over the other, but rather describes the task of the artist as the attempt to get the two into a productive relationship with each other.

This is the story of Beckett's play as well. Words/Bob speaks to Croak, and fails, Music/Joe plays for Croak, and it fails. "Together!" he intones. "Together!" They begin to link their forms, putting words and music together in unison and in canon. They lead each other and follow, weaving the twin beauties of words and music together until their creation is actually too successful, and Croak shuffles off, unable to bear it.

Nietzsche described the successful intertwining of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as “the supreme goal of tragedy, and indeed all art.” Tragedy is both hard to do and hard to bear. Beckett doesn't always provide the cathartic emotional release that makes the pain feel, for a moment, worthwhile. Sometimes after the music ends, all that's left is the sound of feet shuffling off into the darkness.

Akin to Death: Mary Stuart

I recently saw a fantastic production of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Adapted and directed by Mark Jackson, the language was clear and direct without losing the dense, poetic force of the 19th century original. It was blessed with a slick contemporary design and actors to die for, and so expertly paced that the two hours traffic never lost its urgency.

This play chronicles the last few days in the life of Mary Queen of Scots before she's put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. The confrontation between two immensely powerful queens in a deeply patriarchal world is fascinating, and the one scene in which they share the stage is the keystone of any production of this play. Lucky to even get an audience with Elizabeth in the first place, the imprisoned Mary's passionate nature gets the better of her. Instead of begging for mercy, she calls her cousin the Queen a bastard and reiterates her claim for the English throne saying, in Jackson's powerful translation: "I am your king!"

Ooops. Not the way to avoid a beheading.

From that moment on, while our sympathies lie with Mary and we hope for her rescue, we know she's doomed. Death, like the presence of the actress who never leaves stage, looms.

Playwright Jean Genet, in his letters to his director Robert Blin, says, "If we maintain that life and the stage are opposites, it is because we strongly suspect that the stage is a site closely akin to death, a place where all liberties are possible."

Schiller's play is about bondage and freedom. The chains that bind us sometimes take the form of politics, sometimes of patriarchal systems, sometimes of the will of the public, and sometimes they're just the outcome of the tangled mess we've made of our life. Death is sometimes a gateway to freedom, to a place where "all liberties are possible."

In Schiller's version, Mary is given her last rites in secret from her Lord Chamberlain, who has been ordained as a priest, before she mounts the scaffold. In Jackson's production however, all of Mary's attendants have been cut, leaving her desperately alone in Elizabeth's world. The last rites scene is done solo: this passionate, beautiful force that is about to be extinguished plays her own father confessor.

The hope for absolution - the dream of utter grace - lies somewhere at the border of death. At this boundary between the freedom offered by the void and the meaning that only exists in the land of life's living interpreters, forgiveness is possible.

I'm not a Catholic, so no personal mystic associations arise for me as I watch the actress playing Mary take the imaginary host into her mouth. But I feel the dream of transubstantiation as I'm held spellbound by her performance. In the mouth of the stage, the host of the actress's body becomes Mary Stuart, becomes Christ, resonates with every person facing the imminent truth of their own death, overcome with longing to return to communion with the dark quiet everything that grows closer and closer with each breath.

Genet called for a theatre that was "so strong and dense that it will, by its implications and ramifications, illuminate the world of the dead." He called on his artistic collaborators to "break down whatever separates us from the dead." I believe he'd be proud of how this beautiful production reaches a quivering hand out across that boundary.

First Impressions

As mature, compassionate, considerate adults, we're encouraged not to put too much faith in our first impressions. Judging a book by its cover is bad form.

But I find in directing theatre that paying attention to my first impressions is essential. Most actors know that their audition begins the second they walk in the door. Playwrights know that the professionalism of their title page --even their font!-- will reflect on their script.

In my directing seminar at Stanford I was recently asked to read a book of short plays by Beckett and pick one to direct. As any fan of Beckett knows, his plays are dense and can take a long time to fully digest. The book arrived late in the mail and class was rapidly approaching. I found myself speeding through these impossibly complex plays, searching for a foothold on what they meant, wondering how in God's name I'd choose without really understanding.

Then I flipped by one in particular. Words and phrases started jumping out at me: "love," "age," "a gleam of tooth biting on the under," "all dark no begging /no giving no words." I had no idea what it meant. And as a PhD student, I really like to know what things mean.

But class was looming and it was time to commit. I grabbed this first impression with all my strength and proclaimed my intention to direct Beckett's radio play Words and Music for my first assignment.

Sometimes it seems like the rational mind can justify anything: "No, it's good that the scenic carpenters messed up on the construction of the banister, the wobbliness symbolizes the fragility of the entire society!" First impressions, like the reflexes that help us pull our hand away from a hot stove, don't allow the time for justification. The reflex arc moves energy and information from your body straight to your spine and back (bypassing the brain entirely) in order to take quick action.

In terms of aesthetics, who can say what instant personal psychic calculus results in that reflexive flash of interest? Why did this play feel hot in my hands when the ones before and after it just confused me? All I know is that when I went home that evening and read the play thoroughly, I fell in love. It's deeper and stranger and funnier and harder than I'd have guessed upon first impression. But the challenge feels like the right challenge.

I've found that trusting this flash of interest, of desire, of excitement --however subtle-- often puts me on a path that my rational mind only partially understands. Careful consideration is important and the ability to question one's initial assumptions is certainly key to being a good human being, but I consider it part of my artistic practice to attend to that flashing fish of desire as it breaks the surface of the lake.

Parapraxis: through, beside, beyond...

The word "parapraxis" was invented by Sigmund Freud's English translators in the 1930s as a latinate (and therefore official-sounding) replacement for the German term Fehlleistung, which simply means "faulty action." More commonly known as a "Freudian Slip," common parapraxes include slips of the tongue, mistakes in writing, odd moments of forgetfulness, and misplacement of objects. These faulty actions, while accidental, are perhaps not as faulty as they seem, as they can bring to the surface wishes or attitudes previously held secret in the unconscious mind.

Looking at the word from an etymological perspective, its meaning becomes slipperier. The heart of the term invokes the Greek word "praxis," which means practice, action, or simply "doing." The other Greek word for action or deed is slightly more familiar: "drama."

The prefix "para," can mean any number of seemingly contradictory things, including "through," "beside," "beyond," and "contrary to." It is this last meaning Freud's translators had in mind when they coined the term -- as in, "Contrary to my desired action, I said my mother's name in place of my girlfriend's while we were making love."

The other interpretations of "para", however, are equally provocative. Parapraxis interpreted as "through practice" invokes the development that can take place through dedicated, regular training in a specific method: "Through practice, I have gained new insights and abilities."

"Beside practice" makes me ask what else might be needed in addition to the required training: "Beside football practice, players are encouraged to take ballet lessons to increase their agility on the field."

"Beyond practice" implies that there is an edge of action beyond which something else transpires. Thinkers might argue that beyond practice lies its contemplation, or the theory that can arise from it.

As a theatre-director, all of these meanings thrill me. I believe deeply in the power of practice. Doing something regularly and with dedication (through practice), while being open to additional, complementary modes (beside practice), and extrapolating from what you know towards the unknown realms of what you don't yet know (beyond practice) is a potent recipe for growth and change.

But no degree of dedicated practice will keep you from occasional slips!

For me, art-making depends on embracing these slips as essential and exhilarating parts of the process. While embarrassing, parapraxes open doorways to meanings you didn't know you meant. Actors are encouraged to learn to trust their actions and reactions onstage. So too directors can learn to trust both the measured steps of their well-considered choices as well as their accidental responses to the world around them.