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?

Tiny Imaginary Play #8

A giant velvet curtain covers the stage.

A particularly fantastic portion of Handel's messiah plays and the curtain begins to rise.

A woman is revealed standing onstage atop a small pedestal.

She is wearing a corset cinched around her middle and a long petticoat and would look like a half-dressed Elizabethan but for the dark sunglasses.

CORSET: I am here to tell you something very important. Thank you for coming, I was afraid no one was going to make it on account of all the rain. The message I bring you is not just from myself, it's a gift from the beyond, no, not God, and not aliens either, though I'm sure there's more life out there somewhere, aren't you? I am talking about history -- all of those that have come before, whose flesh begat ours, who've strutted and fretted their lives upon this planet, they're still here, no, not ghosts, though I'm sure ghosts exist also -- but more like cellular memories that inhabit me and you and that chair and that curtain. We are all vessels for that which has been, and today I'm going to speak, because that chair cannot and today you're attending to me, for which, did I mention thanks? So. Anyway. Here I go.

She takes a deep breath.

CORSET: Hold on, I think I have to take this off. Hard to breathe.

With expert hands she unlaces the corset rapidly, creating satisfying whipping noises. She pulls the laces all the way out of the eyelets.

In the moment the corset drops off her body, the woman's image wavers, then, in an instant, dissolves completely, leaving only a few sparking atoms in the air where she once stood.

The curtain falls.

(Written 3/5/11, after Solo Training Session #8)

The Imaginary Spectator: Interior Scroll

(In this new series, "The Imaginary Spectator," I narrate from an imaginary first-person perspective certain famous performances across history that I wish I'd actually seen.)

August 29th, 1975 – Dispatch from the "Women Here and Now" Festival in East Hampton, Long Island.

This evening I had the privilege of witnessing a unique performance by artist Carolee Schneeman. About twenty of us, mostly female artists from New York City, convened in the large exhibition hall to see each other’s work - primarily paintings and sculptures. In the corner, there was an empty table dimly lit by two spotlights. Schneeman entered wrapped in white sheets, carrying a paperback book and a white paint bucket filled with an unknown substance.

She placed one sheet over the table then got up on top of it, announcing that she was going to read for us from her book. She then unwrapped herself from the second sheet, revealing her costume – a small white apron covering only her lap.

Schneeman reached into the bucket and began painting the contours of her body with a mud-like substance. As it dried, the markings changed colors and crackled, transforming her image into something simultaneously wretched and ritualistic. She then performed a series of gestural poses as though she were the model at a figure drawing class.

Her anatomy was both emphasized and abstracted by the paint marks on her skin and I kept thinking about the frustrating endurance of the notion of the woman-as-ideal-form. It’s embarrassing how attached we still are –in 1975!— to the image of woman as art object. Can we not, at this late date in history, apprehend the female body as more than just something to be looked at, desired and guarded?

Moving through the poses, she read to us from her book entitled Cezanne, She was a Great Painter. The book begins something like this: "At age twelve, I knew only a few names of the great artists of history...I chose a painter named Cézanne for my mascot; I assumed unquestionably that Cézanne was a woman."

Schneeman then put down the book, stood up, and removed her apron. While full frontal nudity has become increasingly common in performance art these days, what came next was a surprise to all of us. She reached between her legs and began to extract, from her vagina, a piece of long brown paper. Hunched forward in a wide stance, she looked like she was birthing the crinkled scroll with her hands alone as midwife, nurse and doctor. As she pulled it out, she read from the text typed on the paper. I’m recreating it solely from memory, but I believe it began like this:

I met a happy man - A Structuralist filmmaker
who said, you know we like you
We think you're lovely
But don't ask us to watch your films
We don’t want to see your personal clutter, your persistence of emotions,
your hand-touch sensibility, your journalistic indulgence,
your disgusting mess, your angry gestalt.

He said do it like me – just take one thing, and follow it through
Create a system, a set, like Pythagoras!

We can be friends, he said, equally
But we cannot be artists equally

He told me he had lived once with a sculptress
I asked, does that make me a “filmmakeress?”
He said no, we think of you as a dancer.

We all watched intently, small noises erupting from the mouths of other female artists in the room, many of whom can sympathize with this feeling. The women at this conference are tired of being cast always in the role of art muse and fighting to be seen as legitimate art makers. Are the aesthetic products of our bodies, minds, and life experiences never to be valued equally with the work of our male compatriots, who seem to deny that their work too emerges from the dense soil of their bodies?

Finally, Schneeman dropped the scroll, climbed off the table and walked out, covered only by the mud-like residue of her struggle. The audience applauded thoughtfully then stood in silence for a while, looking at the detritus of this intimate performance: the book, the sheets, the crumpled brown paper.

This short performance was one of the most affective I have ever witnessed. None of us in that room will ever forget it, and I hope that Schneeman will have the opportunity to present it again. I’d like her structuralist filmmaker to experience this piece. I wonder if he’d consider it a dance recital.