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.

entropy. redress.

My friend and collaborator Rhonda Soikowski, who works on the edge of performance practice, embodied research, and pedagogical innovation, recently asked me to participate in her current project titled entropy. redress.

Rhonda invited collaborators to create short video pieces incorporating a single red dress that criss-crossed the globe. Shortly before I got my hot little hands on it, the dress was ripped untimely from the land and disappeared into the Mediterranean. Our small constraint reduced to none, myself and my collaborators Joe Moore and Beth Hersh took to the beach to try to reach towards the lost object.

Click on the image below to see the results of our work. How Rhonda will incorporate it into her piece is still unknown, but it was a privilege and a pleasure to be a part of the journey.

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 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.

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.