We Are Living in a Material World...

Relational Aesthetics is a term coined by art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe the kind of art wherein the medium of creativity is not marble or paint or sound or even words, but the interaction between human beings. It's not a completely new idea; Duchamp was talking about it in the 1950s: "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world."

But Bourriaud takes it a step further, questioning even the importance of a legible "work" at all. What if all that is made is a convivial, participatory experience? The notion of Relational Aesthetics makes even blurrier the line we sometimes draw between life and art, and is ultimately aligned with the project of collectively sculpting culture itself: "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist" (Bourriaud).

Responses to this provocative idea are manifold. Jacques Ranciere, a French philosopher, believes Bourriaud sells short the importance of the audience's act of viewing. In his book The Emancipated Spectator, Ranciere asks whether or not complete entanglement of audience, artist, and artwork is necessary for a real engagement to take place. Isn't watching, thinking, and considering a work of art also a shared experience? Are we ignoring the very real, if subtle, labor performed by the attentive spectator by demanding that she jump into the active space of convivial relationship? What would we lose in giving up the quiet receptivity of watching?

I find both of these positions compelling. I can't choose between them. I want a world filled with art that does both. I want art that demands I engage completely with it (like this, this and this) and I also want works that invite me to surrender to the experience of viewing, where I can fall into the sea of perception - not just the sea they've crafted for me, but the deeper waters of my own experiences, ideas, beliefs, and feelings to which I compare the world that they present to me.

I offer to you a snippet of a performance piece I made with some of my favorite collaborators in response to my readings on Relational Aesthetics and its discontents. This is only a portion of our piece, which involved fishing good-luck coins from a fountain, financial negotiations with our audience over rental of their footwear, and ritualistic foot-washing in preparation for performance. Playful and presentational, our silly dance number was a prefabricated gift to the audience as well as an attempt to collaborate on the continuous project of coexistence.

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...

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.

"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)

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.

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.

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.