Fuck Yeah, Awkwardness!

So I’m trying to start a movement. I think I’ll call it the awkwardness appreciation movement. In short, I believe that the emotional/affective/psychic experience that we often call awkwardness is beneficial, necessary for personal growth as well as social change, and should be courted rather than avoided.

In critical theory, much attention has been paid to the experience of shame. Shame, theorists say, is a moment of intense awareness of how you are different from other people, often accompanied by the fear that your difference is unacceptable. In this way, shame simultaneously creates the sense of differentiated individuality and the desire to re-aggregate with the whole. In shame’s hot intensity, you see yourself from a new angle. Your perspective on yourself expands to include the shared context of others.

The problem is that shame has a stopping force. It can freeze you like a wild animal sensing the rifle sights. It’s hard to let your perspective on your own significance shift when you’re afraid you’re going to be annihilated. In the face of shame, childhood defense mechanisms (however useless) rush in to protect you: fight, flight, freeze, play dead.

Awkwardness, however, is shame lite. If shame is the terrifying fall into the cavernous gap between self and other, awkwardness is the giggly, heart-racing fear you feel when peering over the edge. There is space to move and breathe inside awkwardness, but it is still a meditation on the sometimes-precarious experience of being a self surrounded by other selves that are constantly affecting you and being affected by you.

In awkward experiences, we sense the precariousness of our ego boundaries as well as the sheer randomness of the social conventions that regulate our interactions with each other. In that heightened sphere of awareness, you wonder how else you could be, other than the way you are right now, and how else we could be together within the grip of this strangely funny, embarrassing, uncomfortable moment.

Awkwardness is vulnerability with its fly unzipped.

Awkwardness is a prologue to transformation and invitation to grace.

Performance Notion: Malinowski’s Diary

I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.

An ensemble show using as source material the writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, the influential Polish anthropologist from the early 20th century who was well-respected for his thorough research on indigenous Melanesian culture. Malinowski was a major supporter of enduring, in-depth participant observation, and as such got very involved in the lives of the people he studied. While a contemporary reader may be suspicious of the colonialist tone and the firm belief in the possibility of objectivity, his work is still taught in anthropology courses today.

His personal record of his time doing fieldwork was recently published. Titled A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, the text reveals the disturbing thoughts, feelings, and desires previously hidden under ostensibly-objective descriptions of the world around him. He lusted after indigenous women, insulted his closest native informants, and mocked the very cultures he was there to study. Overall, the diaries paint a picture of a narcissistic, judgmental westerner with a fetishistic fascination for people that he sees as different.

This piece would be about how hard it is to understand difference and how thrilling it is to try. It would be about the potentially annihilating gaze of the so-called-objective observer, and about how any time you attempt to describe something else, you always end up describing yourself. I have a hunch that taking the time to reflect, 100 years later, on the blind spots of early anthropological discourse would result in a timely, urgent and engaging piece of theatre for contemporary audiences.

Performance Notion: Beckett & Bion

I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.

A two-person piece about Samuel Beckett’s relationship with his psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. At age 27, Beckett was in a deep depression after the death of his father and had an uncomfortable relationship with his strict mother. As psychoanalysis was illegal in Ireland, he traveled to London where he became Bion’s second patient ever. There’s ample source material (Beckett wrote about Bion and Bion wrote several essays that some speculate were about Beckett), and as long as I could keep the Beckett estate out of it, it could be a really beautiful, strange piece – genius, melancholy, friendship, healing, and the murky workings of the unconscious mind.

Thin as Foil

“Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.” (Beckett, The Unnamables)

Erotophronesis

Like Shakespeare, I like to invent words. However, unlike his, I don’t think mine will catch on. Like this one:

EROTOPHRONESIS

Go ahead. Try to say it. Rolls right off the tongue.

The word “philosophy” as you probably know, comes from the roots philia and sophia and is usually translated as “love of wisdom.”

But those clever Greeks had other words for love and wisdom.

Eros, as you also probably know, is the kind of love that lies in the body. Unlike philia, which is an abstract, transcendental form of affection, eros is sexually-charged desire with the potential to incite change, growth, or chaos.

Related to the word for light, sophia is the kind of wisdom that you gain through looking; it’s the result of outside observation paired with thoughtful consideration. Phronesis, however, was used by ancient Greeks to describe knowledge that develops through first-hand experience. While sophia helps you contemplate the nature of the world, phronesis must be used to determine a course of action that will generate change. Phronesis is something that comes with age and practice and that can’t be explained through words or pictures.

Erotophronesis. Erotic love of embodied knowledge.

The term isn’t very catchy. But the concept is a virus that I’d like to spread.

Creation Myths

In theatre and performance studies, we have a story that we tell about the origins of drama. In the misty pre-history of humanity, rituals were performed to the gods incorporating song, dance, special apparel, manipulation of props, and the recitation of intentional language.

In this legend, these transpersonal, spiritual events eventually shifted to interpersonal, social events. While retaining ritual-like techniques, theatre became a forum in which citizens told stories to other citizens about issues of shared import. Speaking to one another instead of to the gods, we no longer expected our rituals to actually work, but instead to represent. Rather than attempting real-world transformation, theatre tried to show us what transformation looks like.

This origin myth is a necessary foundation for many revolutionaries in the theatre and performing arts. They say – sometimes in a hushed whisper – let’s return drama to its roots in ritual. Let’s forgo the gaudy illustrations of human suffering, joy, and healing. Instead, let’s actually experience suffering and joy onstage. Let’s actually enact healing rites inside the charmed circle of spectators.

With deep appreciation I welcome these innovations to the imagined community of Western Drama. Without them we’d remain mired in the fantasy of objective rationality inherited from the Greeks or obsessed with the irrefutable authority of the text as truth inherited from our Judeo-Christian traditions. Yet I am always skeptical about quests for origins. The reality you find is never as good as the dream you sought, and looking towards an idealized past is often just a rejection of the present.

What if we turned the myth around? What if rather than ritual begetting theatre, what if theatre begat ritual? Perhaps a pre-historic human got up on a rock and began to wail and flail the felt forms of her personal experience across the fire to her watching friend. Perhaps the friend understood, perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps the performer was changed by her attempt to share with an attentive other the infinity she felt within her.

Maybe the next night the friend was gone and the pre-historic performer repeated the wail and flail, looking up into the night sky and hoping that some distant, invisible friend might see her. Perhaps she did it the next night, and the next, or on every full moon or every time she saw a shooting star or just every time she felt alone. Performance is pleasurable. Pleasure wants to repeat itself. Repetition begats ritual.

If pre-historic performance art as the precursor to organized religion is too much of a stretch, at least let's consider ritual and theatre side by side rather than parent and child. Both give form to the baffling sensations that rattle around inside the human body and pierce its permeable border. Whether sharing those forms with close friends, the majesty of the empty night sky, or an obeisance-requesting deity, we enact the shapes of our striving and - in hushed whispers - hope that this enactment will yield transformation.

The Rosenberg Project

This quarter in my dramaturgy class we’re developing performance pieces based on the court transcripts from the Rosenberg Trial. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as you probably remember from high school history class, were executed in June 1953 for passing along nuclear information to Soviet Russia. Our source material for the project is two-thousand pages of stenographers notes released in 2008.

With this as inspiration, I now begin development of a one-act group performance piece that will include movement, dialogue, music and possibly projections. Rather than creating a full script, I’ll be building an aesthetic and thematic foundation for the piece, and sketching out a roadmap for the methods I could take into a collaborative rehearsal process.

In my prior experience with devised and ensemble-generated work I’ve entered the process with only preliminary ideas and relied on the creativity of the group to flesh everything out. While I love this mode of production, I’m not always lucky enough to have a throng of willing collaborators able to start a project from scratch. Developing a process through which I can get halfway down the road myself will be practically useful to my future work.

In addition to doing dramaturgical research for this project, I’ll also be doing embodied research as part of my weekly solo training practice. Working with song, movement, recorded and memorized texts, images and objects, I’ll begin building a world for this piece in the space of my body and the rehearsal studio.

I’ve just begun to sift through the stenographer’s notes, not to mention the bountiful secondary sources available, so I have no idea at this moment where this research will take me. But I keep thinking about Bradley Manning, the soldier who’s currently in solitary confinement for passing information Wikileaks. The Rosenbergs passed classified information to the Soviets, but Bradley placed it someplace even more dangerous – in the hands of the public.

Stalking the Dramaturg

Few people in the United States who are not directly involved with making theatre know what a dramaturg is, and many of us who are devoted to the craft still have a hard time understanding or describing what exactly the job entails.

It’s a confusing term! The awkward “turg” (or “turge” if you’re French) comes from the Greek word for “making.” But isn’t everyone who works on a show somehow responsible for its making? Why is the dramaturg etymologically saddled with such a heavy task?

As part of the beauty of the position lies in its flexibility, dramaturgs themselves are loathe to over-define their role. Generalizing grandly, dramaturgs are charged with the duty of thinking critically about the historical and aesthetic world of a performance (both before and throughout the rehearsal process) and collaborating with others to help integrate that information into what the audience experiences.

A famous dramaturg was asked once what exactly he did and his response was simply: “I question.”

On the first day of my dramaturgy class, we brainstormed alternative answers to this question. The list we made reminds me why I love dramaturgy.

I visualize
I gather
I make connections
I research
I probe
I challenge
I support
I provoke
I remind
I stimulate
I translate
I adapt
I inspire
I refocus
I synthesize
I chronicle
I witness
I record
I remember

All of these actions seem powerful, productive, and truly necessary for engaged art-making practice. Dramaturgs in the (blogospherical) house, do you have any additions that we forgot? Anything on this list you’d like to question?