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.

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!

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...

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.

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.

"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.

"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.