Thursday, May 13, 2010
acting is fun
Have enjoyed realizing what discoveries can come from making small observations these last few rehearsals. When directing, once things are sort of up and staged, you're looking to fix and make better based on what you see not working as a part of the big picture, then you have to work with the actor to hopefully find something they can adjust in what they're doing internally that will read externally the way you want it to. I feel like Katie and I have been able to communicate really well/ she's really been able to help me a lot at this stage, looking for these minute inner work adjustments to make. They seem like really silly little things, but what I'm working on or having trouble with now are issues of like where my gaze is falling, how if I pick a point really far away one day, like yesterday, the quality of my concentration gets a lot fuzzier. And does that mean I'm too much in the world/ gaze not soft enough, or is that just something to be aware of, control for in performance. Or it will be a gloomy, rainy day, and suddenly the piece will feel all drowsy (ps-Katie, I realized the drowsiness might also be a result of listening to it every night before I go to sleep. Oh well. Too late. Now I'm addicted.) It's great to be able to let it be a little bit different every time I do it, sometimes as a choice, sometimes just letting different environmental/emotional factors present that day creep in and color it. And not needing to have like an intellectual justification for each choice, or whim. Letting Katie read the stuff that comes out of me, discussing together the implications of various possible choices that present themselves and agreeing about which directions we're comfortable exploring in, from a dramaturgical point of view. Then I just sort of have to trust Katie as we go back and forth, chasing down and refining the good, letting the bad fall away, speculating together about whether I might be able to keep my eyes open for longer in strong light if I didn't spend so much time reading in the dark. But I think this is helping me develop a better sense of what the ideal actor-director conversation/relationship ought to be. While I've always felt it was nice to pause occasionally, however far along in the process, to ask the actor "How was that for you?" sometimes it's perfunctory.. or even a placeholder for the brilliant note you've yet to articulate for yourself. It's been helpful to spend some time thinking about what's really most helpful for the actor to hear back after they finish sharing, pouring out this unfiltered stream of impressions and physical sensations. If the director can really engage the actor on that level, as Katie's been so great about doing with me, just climb into their head, their body, a little bit, talk with them on that level about the actor's immediate reality, which is a sensory one at this point, and the actor's able to talk about it also, that's the way they're going to be of most use to one another.
Monday, May 10, 2010
catch up not ketchup
We haven't reported in a few days but work down the ROCKABY path is trekking steadily and fruitfully. In the last two rehearsals I've been working with Jessica on figuring out ways to release tension in the face/ keep eyes alive/ and find the right verbs in our mores. After a long rehearsal Friday, Jessica fell into a really nice hyper-aware place. The unblinking gaze was piercing yet neutral, desperate yet cocky and ready for death. After running it consecutively so many times we really came to a very deep place. We erased all color and kept the eyes and body solely disconnected from the mind/the recording. However, as we dug deeper and deeper (which really means becoming more and more naked or bare) we realized that there has to be some connection to the mind and body because otherwise it seems like this woman is just listening to somebody, not herself (or perhaps her mother.) Therefore, after falling into cycle after cycle of neutrality, I asked Jessica to regain consciousness when lifting certain images or words. The result was great and now we can even do more of this.
We've been playing around with this idea of not being prematurely old, not being the perfect woman for this role that Beckett would have wanted and trying to understand how our approach is different than we originally intended. Jessica talked about this a bit in the last post but it's something we've been talking A LOT about. We were trying to stick so closely to the text, to the stage directions and to what would be most Beckettian (as we coo over Billie and her rendition.) Then we realized, as J said, that we'd strayed into our own way of approaching this that is very not Beckett. Confidence in approaching death, yes, that's in Billie/Sam/Us (not to put ourselves in the same category as those people...) but for us being 20 and naive we're looking at her going to die as this amazingly confident/fuck you all gesture to the world. What we ran into the last rehearsal was that this cockiness can easily turn into masochistic which is NOT what we want. Again, it's all in the idea of shading rather than coloring.
Also, the last two rehearsals (Friday and today) I made Jessica do "actory" things. Working through ways to release tension in the body--particularly in the face. We worked on breath (doing some gratowski exercises) and talked at length about the connection between the rocking and the breath. They have to be in sync or at least connected because when the chair stops rocking off, the breath stops and she's dead. But as long as we're rocking, we're still breathing. I didn't tell this to Jessica in rehearsal but one thing I loved about the last few runs was her hands. Grasping the arms of the chair, your fingers delicately yet sturdily suggest many of the key images/verbs/nouns we've been throwing around (fear, desparation, confidence, cockiness, discovery, search, etc.) Your lovely long appendages grasping this chair are almost scary/creepy (in all good ways.)
We also finally figured out the rocking technicalities. I've attached a rope to the back of our (janky) rocking chair and feed it through the back window of the common room. As Jessica (gently and secretly) helps press back and forth, we've created a decent rocking motion. We now need to find a slave to help us out OR decide if Jessica can rock herself secretly and effortlessly than just have her do it... This could be a big mistake because the mechanical passiveness of the woman needs to be there and it may be that in order to that we really need the chair pulled by me. We'll see and keep working tomorrow evening.
Go team.
We've been playing around with this idea of not being prematurely old, not being the perfect woman for this role that Beckett would have wanted and trying to understand how our approach is different than we originally intended. Jessica talked about this a bit in the last post but it's something we've been talking A LOT about. We were trying to stick so closely to the text, to the stage directions and to what would be most Beckettian (as we coo over Billie and her rendition.) Then we realized, as J said, that we'd strayed into our own way of approaching this that is very not Beckett. Confidence in approaching death, yes, that's in Billie/Sam/Us (not to put ourselves in the same category as those people...) but for us being 20 and naive we're looking at her going to die as this amazingly confident/fuck you all gesture to the world. What we ran into the last rehearsal was that this cockiness can easily turn into masochistic which is NOT what we want. Again, it's all in the idea of shading rather than coloring.
Also, the last two rehearsals (Friday and today) I made Jessica do "actory" things. Working through ways to release tension in the body--particularly in the face. We worked on breath (doing some gratowski exercises) and talked at length about the connection between the rocking and the breath. They have to be in sync or at least connected because when the chair stops rocking off, the breath stops and she's dead. But as long as we're rocking, we're still breathing. I didn't tell this to Jessica in rehearsal but one thing I loved about the last few runs was her hands. Grasping the arms of the chair, your fingers delicately yet sturdily suggest many of the key images/verbs/nouns we've been throwing around (fear, desparation, confidence, cockiness, discovery, search, etc.) Your lovely long appendages grasping this chair are almost scary/creepy (in all good ways.)
We also finally figured out the rocking technicalities. I've attached a rope to the back of our (janky) rocking chair and feed it through the back window of the common room. As Jessica (gently and secretly) helps press back and forth, we've created a decent rocking motion. We now need to find a slave to help us out OR decide if Jessica can rock herself secretly and effortlessly than just have her do it... This could be a big mistake because the mechanical passiveness of the woman needs to be there and it may be that in order to that we really need the chair pulled by me. We'll see and keep working tomorrow evening.
Go team.
Friday, May 7, 2010
shavasana
Okay so Katie, by the way- if theater doesn't work out, let's build a business around selling podcasts of this recording to insomniacs who can listen to it as they go to bed. I'm two for two on sleeping through the night.
So thursday we began rehearsal with a discussion about the below-posted Beckett on Film performance and why we do not like it very much. We were both surprised/irritated by its macabre, horror movie feel. And surprised by how manic it seemed, both the zippy rocking and the tense, abrasive performance. This woman was terrified, angry, fighting death all the way through. In connection with this, there was little regard shown for the soothing rhythms that we've been working to bring out. So it didn't feel like she's singing a lullaby to herself at all, more like she's shaking her fist at the universe.
But we realized that though most of what we're doing has been all about following Beckett's instructions as precisely as we can, there's a way we've already gone pretty far away from what he probably would have wanted. And we felt good about this pretty different version we were coming up with. Noted that since I'm twenty, not fifty, though "prematurely old" doesn't feel like the biggest stretch of my illustrious career, it's bound to be a very different piece than the one imagined with Billie. And some of the differences were kind of surprising, we realized while taking stock.
As mentioned before, our Woman's attitude towards death feels so much gentler because we've really been thinking about it as an embrace. Katie pointed out after one run that the development of my "more"s seemed to be about coming closer and closer to be able to taste something the woman anticipates to be the most exquisitely ecstatic experience she'll ever have. There's a little fear at first, but I think of it more as little by little coaxing your dumb body to stop having these reflexes, survival instincts, that puts it in conflict with what your mind wants to do. Katie also pointed out that there was something kind of cocky about saying yes, this is the right choice, everybody else is wrong, but they just keep hanging around because they're too weak, about saying okay, so this is life, this is the world, alright seen it, not quite worth sticking around for. I'm out of here. if there's arrogance in that choice, it's really underscored when you have a younger actress. Almost like saying "I'm too good for this. See ya." This tone, we decided, was probably quite different from what Beckett had in mind, but we think we might keep going in that direction anyway and see what's yielded. Death as an existential "correction" of the mistake that is being alive. She gets it. Everyone else is just wrong.
Being directed by Katie is great. Was learning all about little unconscious physical habits I have that one needs to have pointed out by somebody else. I was the one, surprisingly, that introduced the shavasana metaphor, the corpse pose that comes at the end of a yoga class. Just letting yourself be fully supported by the floor, totally relaxed like you might just sink in. As the mind is sharpening, becoming more and more focused, ready, resolute, the body needs to be going correspondingly slack. That's how we show that/what she is able to achieve. I had a tendency to tense up my face in anticipation or concentration or dreamy wonder to correspond with an inner state. Working to notice and be aware of holding or showing tension so I can let it go. Still trying to find a soft gaze that doesn't feel like I'm peering at something in particular, one that I can comfortably sustain for twelve minutes. But I feel like getting control of my face at the place it needs to be by next week I'd need to have been doing something analogous to the crazy mandible-strengthening excercises Billie did to build her jaws up for NOT I. We'll see how far we get.
So thursday we began rehearsal with a discussion about the below-posted Beckett on Film performance and why we do not like it very much. We were both surprised/irritated by its macabre, horror movie feel. And surprised by how manic it seemed, both the zippy rocking and the tense, abrasive performance. This woman was terrified, angry, fighting death all the way through. In connection with this, there was little regard shown for the soothing rhythms that we've been working to bring out. So it didn't feel like she's singing a lullaby to herself at all, more like she's shaking her fist at the universe.
But we realized that though most of what we're doing has been all about following Beckett's instructions as precisely as we can, there's a way we've already gone pretty far away from what he probably would have wanted. And we felt good about this pretty different version we were coming up with. Noted that since I'm twenty, not fifty, though "prematurely old" doesn't feel like the biggest stretch of my illustrious career, it's bound to be a very different piece than the one imagined with Billie. And some of the differences were kind of surprising, we realized while taking stock.
As mentioned before, our Woman's attitude towards death feels so much gentler because we've really been thinking about it as an embrace. Katie pointed out after one run that the development of my "more"s seemed to be about coming closer and closer to be able to taste something the woman anticipates to be the most exquisitely ecstatic experience she'll ever have. There's a little fear at first, but I think of it more as little by little coaxing your dumb body to stop having these reflexes, survival instincts, that puts it in conflict with what your mind wants to do. Katie also pointed out that there was something kind of cocky about saying yes, this is the right choice, everybody else is wrong, but they just keep hanging around because they're too weak, about saying okay, so this is life, this is the world, alright seen it, not quite worth sticking around for. I'm out of here. if there's arrogance in that choice, it's really underscored when you have a younger actress. Almost like saying "I'm too good for this. See ya." This tone, we decided, was probably quite different from what Beckett had in mind, but we think we might keep going in that direction anyway and see what's yielded. Death as an existential "correction" of the mistake that is being alive. She gets it. Everyone else is just wrong.
Being directed by Katie is great. Was learning all about little unconscious physical habits I have that one needs to have pointed out by somebody else. I was the one, surprisingly, that introduced the shavasana metaphor, the corpse pose that comes at the end of a yoga class. Just letting yourself be fully supported by the floor, totally relaxed like you might just sink in. As the mind is sharpening, becoming more and more focused, ready, resolute, the body needs to be going correspondingly slack. That's how we show that/what she is able to achieve. I had a tendency to tense up my face in anticipation or concentration or dreamy wonder to correspond with an inner state. Working to notice and be aware of holding or showing tension so I can let it go. Still trying to find a soft gaze that doesn't feel like I'm peering at something in particular, one that I can comfortably sustain for twelve minutes. But I feel like getting control of my face at the place it needs to be by next week I'd need to have been doing something analogous to the crazy mandible-strengthening excercises Billie did to build her jaws up for NOT I. We'll see how far we get.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Hey, I know I told you to stop watching video of other performances, but I found these. BECKETT ON FILM parts one and two. Don't know who this actress is, but I think this version is awful. Do you agree? Let's discuss.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZPiTirNIOk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_g96aj5Whk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZPiTirNIOk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_g96aj5Whk&feature=related
we need a chair/unblinking gaze
Yesterday afternoon Jessica and I wandered into the common room and set down to work. Using our quick and dirty cut of the recording the rehearsal was focused around two majors things: 1) the eyes and spheres 2) the rocking. I'll talk about the first because the second is mostly that of complaining. Beckett's stage directions are specific enough to include the details about how the eyes should open and close and when. "Now closed, now open. Unblinking gaze. The eyes begin to close more and more throughout the sections and half way in section four the eyes close completely. " I asked Jessica to pick a point of reference to hang out in an uber concentrated first sphere. If it felt too removed, to inwards and incapable of being open and available to others than we would try changing the hyper aware concentration into a larger sphere-place. Here's what happened. Well, first, Jessica laughed at herself in the recording. Hearing your own voice is unsettling, disconcerting and rough. We have talked about this in our very early rehearsals almost two weeks ago. The idea of seeing your own self for the first time, like the woman does, is perhaps vaguely similar. It's like catching a glimpse of yourself in mid-conversation with someone in a mirror reflection and how odd that it. You don't feel like you but rather the character of yourself...or maybe the character thing is just me. Anyways, off this tangent, Jessica dealt beauitfully with adjusting to hearing herself in our purring/scratchy/janky (like that, J?) recording and proceeding to dig deep into her sphere work. We got some really great things out of the run. Jessica's ability to concentrate in first sphere was what we needed to hone into the work.
What's amazing to me (and we both talked about for a long time) is that although we're in this completely inward- first sphere of concentration, I felt as an audience member and Jessica said as a performer completely in sync, aware and deep into the rhtyhm of the piece. I was drawn INTO the eyes. I was drawn INTO the hyper aware bubble that we classify as only for ourselves. I know in acting classes I'm told while doing certain exercises to OPEN up my sphere larger and larger and reach third sphere because we have to 'share' ourselves with the audience. Being is first sphere up on stage is no go (all the time...) BUT here, it was perfect. That complete inwardness was vulnerable and exposing. We see the woman completely striped down, bare and naked. She's ready to die by the end and although this is an individual process (as Hiediegger reminds us) she has exposed herself completely with us by being in with herself.
Things that we needed to work on: the intention of the eyes. Sometimes, and this is having a lot to do with the whole UNBLINKING thing, Jessica's eye 'shuts' (I'll call them eye shuts...weird.) Felt unfocused or unmotivated. I'm not sure if necessary want them to motivated, however, I need to see the woman be confident in the places she shuts her eyes and opens them. Sometimes when we open them, we find ourselves deeper into the pool of Jessica's eyes. We see behind the eyes, we see the mind clicking and working and it's a beautiful thing. We need to be careful, again, that when we see the woman's fear, remembrances, images that it doesn't read too much...back to this whole shading v. coloring thing. We got to a really nice place yesterday where we could see the tiniest of shifts in Jessica's face/eyes at certain points in the piece (the mother and off her head.) Jessica asked if this was too much? I don't think so. Things need to lift. The variation and movement and purity behind the eyes is SO SMALL that maybe because we know each other so well I'm the only one who can see what you're doing. It's something to keep working with. I told Jessica that we should try next time to do it completely without any shading at all. To be hyper aware in one sphere with in one reference place-just to see if stripping it down even more brings out or lifts the wrods by themselves.
2.) The rocking. We just need a better chair. I found some rope and made a dinky little pulling device but Jessica's legs are far to long to rock in this meak little chair. She found a rhythm by herself using her feet but for me the real rhythm, motion and heat of this piece comes from the mechincal rocking of the chair while the woman sits back passively (awaiting death.) The pieces revolves around the up and down of the boat in the waves. We need a better chair. Any suggestions, Mark? We're thinking of scavenging around Wyndham and other "nice" places on campus... Or we could go to a cheap vintage store to find an old chair. Or we were thinking we could just cut off Jessica's legs. What do you think? At my house we have a chair that would work wonderfully, if that's where we go Jess we'll use that. We also need a slave to help us while I watch Jessica instead of pulling the rope behind her. Eventually, wherever and if ever we do this, I would want to be the one controlling the rocking.
Today we're chair hunting and re-cording on a quieter computer. Also, another personal side note: South Marshall street in south SOUTH philly is a) scary b) unsafe c) no where near a coffee shop d) NOT cute e) devoid of a new york times within a 5 miles radius. Not the place for Jessica Rizzo. We'll never go back there again.
The adventures continue...
K
What's amazing to me (and we both talked about for a long time) is that although we're in this completely inward- first sphere of concentration, I felt as an audience member and Jessica said as a performer completely in sync, aware and deep into the rhtyhm of the piece. I was drawn INTO the eyes. I was drawn INTO the hyper aware bubble that we classify as only for ourselves. I know in acting classes I'm told while doing certain exercises to OPEN up my sphere larger and larger and reach third sphere because we have to 'share' ourselves with the audience. Being is first sphere up on stage is no go (all the time...) BUT here, it was perfect. That complete inwardness was vulnerable and exposing. We see the woman completely striped down, bare and naked. She's ready to die by the end and although this is an individual process (as Hiediegger reminds us) she has exposed herself completely with us by being in with herself.
Things that we needed to work on: the intention of the eyes. Sometimes, and this is having a lot to do with the whole UNBLINKING thing, Jessica's eye 'shuts' (I'll call them eye shuts...weird.) Felt unfocused or unmotivated. I'm not sure if necessary want them to motivated, however, I need to see the woman be confident in the places she shuts her eyes and opens them. Sometimes when we open them, we find ourselves deeper into the pool of Jessica's eyes. We see behind the eyes, we see the mind clicking and working and it's a beautiful thing. We need to be careful, again, that when we see the woman's fear, remembrances, images that it doesn't read too much...back to this whole shading v. coloring thing. We got to a really nice place yesterday where we could see the tiniest of shifts in Jessica's face/eyes at certain points in the piece (the mother and off her head.) Jessica asked if this was too much? I don't think so. Things need to lift. The variation and movement and purity behind the eyes is SO SMALL that maybe because we know each other so well I'm the only one who can see what you're doing. It's something to keep working with. I told Jessica that we should try next time to do it completely without any shading at all. To be hyper aware in one sphere with in one reference place-just to see if stripping it down even more brings out or lifts the wrods by themselves.
2.) The rocking. We just need a better chair. I found some rope and made a dinky little pulling device but Jessica's legs are far to long to rock in this meak little chair. She found a rhythm by herself using her feet but for me the real rhythm, motion and heat of this piece comes from the mechincal rocking of the chair while the woman sits back passively (awaiting death.) The pieces revolves around the up and down of the boat in the waves. We need a better chair. Any suggestions, Mark? We're thinking of scavenging around Wyndham and other "nice" places on campus... Or we could go to a cheap vintage store to find an old chair. Or we were thinking we could just cut off Jessica's legs. What do you think? At my house we have a chair that would work wonderfully, if that's where we go Jess we'll use that. We also need a slave to help us while I watch Jessica instead of pulling the rope behind her. Eventually, wherever and if ever we do this, I would want to be the one controlling the rocking.
Today we're chair hunting and re-cording on a quieter computer. Also, another personal side note: South Marshall street in south SOUTH philly is a) scary b) unsafe c) no where near a coffee shop d) NOT cute e) devoid of a new york times within a 5 miles radius. Not the place for Jessica Rizzo. We'll never go back there again.
The adventures continue...
K
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Quick and Dirty
Saturday Jessica and I laid down the quick and dirty version of the voice. We both read and recorded but made the big decision to have Jessica read and be the woman while I’ll take the ‘rocking’ role. I’m really excited about this actually. Jessica was better at finding the colorless place in which this piece has to fall. The asymptote that we had found in the rehearsals before may have too much variation. We lose the rhythmic motion and melody of the piece if we let (even the smallest pigmentation in.) Where we go from here is finding HOW to shade in order to find the neutral beckttian movement of the piece.
The first PERIOD is what we’re having to the most trouble with. Especially in figuring out how to hone in and dig deep from right off the bat. What I think we’ll do is run the piece at least three times before going into the actually recording. The monotonous style is found as we define our sphere and plough deeper into the thickness, which takes a few times running it.
What we found surprising is that as you work more and more on a piece you tend to find more and more in it. It gets thicker and muckier as you trek through. Yet with Beckett we’ve found that the deeper we get into it the LESS we want. We’ve been stripping down more and more each time—attempting to find the naked truth of the words. Let the words do it themselves. Again, like Beckett said, the perfect play would be without any actors. We’re now attempting in the latter half of our work with this piece to find the bare minimum, to expose ourselves through this woman completely.
After a May Day break we're back--More rehearsal today paired with sublet hunting for Jessica. Fun.
Go team.
The first PERIOD is what we’re having to the most trouble with. Especially in figuring out how to hone in and dig deep from right off the bat. What I think we’ll do is run the piece at least three times before going into the actually recording. The monotonous style is found as we define our sphere and plough deeper into the thickness, which takes a few times running it.
What we found surprising is that as you work more and more on a piece you tend to find more and more in it. It gets thicker and muckier as you trek through. Yet with Beckett we’ve found that the deeper we get into it the LESS we want. We’ve been stripping down more and more each time—attempting to find the naked truth of the words. Let the words do it themselves. Again, like Beckett said, the perfect play would be without any actors. We’re now attempting in the latter half of our work with this piece to find the bare minimum, to expose ourselves through this woman completely.
After a May Day break we're back--More rehearsal today paired with sublet hunting for Jessica. Fun.
Go team.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
wednesday report
Having come away from our last rehearsal with what seemed like a useful model, the asymptote, in our heads, we began with Katie reading this morning, feeling around for the place to begin that gently sloping downward curve. Now, fond as we are of appropriating math terminology when and wherever possible, we discovered that, alas, quantitative evaluation had proven, and not for the first time, insufficient. We had already decided that it would be wise to back off from thinking about the woman's change or journey in terms of moving from louder/more present to quieter/fainter. At least for now. Since these are ways to describe what the audience sees, and they don't really correspond to her inner journey at all. More the opposite, I think. But not just the opposite.
The first time Katie read through, it took a little while for things to feel like they were starting to get focused, click, dig, hone in. If you're on an asymptote and things can only get smaller and smaller, it's going to be super important where you start, and this run it was really diffuse, which didn't feel quite right, but gradually worked its way into a tighter and tighter focus, which did feel right. The asymptote Katie was riding was one measuring more and more radical isolation, so we were beginning with a trace of her actually being in the world, even if only in a half remembered, echo, ice walking kind of way. But it wasn't specific. It was something we were choosing to set us up for the nice contrast of achieving a kind of laser beam focus at the end. We talked about the fact that the piece begins with the woman's call for "More." If there was some kind of "decision" moment or a beginning of the inexorable slide towards the in-most, it happened before we see the woman, so we recommitted ourselves to meeting her already mid-process.
After another reading, the first section, or period (more math!) made more sense. We lost a good bit of the feeling of randomness or singsongy boredom that can creep in if we're not rigorous about treating repeated lines identically. Also got away from the impulse to start in a kind of loose natural, "neutral," which is always going to be so much more colorful than the place Beckett wants to take you that, even if we manage to steam it out by the end, that beginning is never going to be anything but... rumpled. And we think this piece wants to be more nattily dressed than that.
And yet. As Katie had noticed before while listening to me read, as you get smaller and more constricted, anything that is allowed to reach up and out at all reads as incongruously huge. We liked some of the places where Katie was sort of activitating the words most, where you could feel her trying, searching for something, for the face, really reconstructing the image of her own famished eyes for herself, or the view the famished eyes had from the window. But we thought maybe this was just because we liked the feeling of specificity and full engagement. She starts in the chair. She talks to the rocker. The rocker rocks her. She rocks nothing. It rocks her off. We needed to embrace the passivity called for by the situation. I asked Katie to really scale back, to try forcing her intonation, her rythms into something as close to uniformity as possible. This was hard to do, but once we were able to listen to what this kind of standardization did to the piece, we agreed that it really had the effect of ironing out all the creases. Felt restricting, mechanical, and we wondered if this approach would sand away all meaning, all nuance, along with the affect. To be continued, but we agreed to explore in this direction next time. I suspect that we'll be taken care of if we let the words do their work. Beckett said that the perfect play would be one in which there are no actors, so I think it might be productive to see what it feels like if we understand our job to be just getting out of his way. Which is hard. But I think we were already rewarded by observing what happens to the lines of kind of irregular length in the piece. Things get a little stretched out, or a little twisted, or sort of buffered by silence even if the actor's doing her best to treat the lines as equals. We can fret and make choices about what we'd like to emphasize, but any emphasis we add ourselves is ultimately going to seem crass. And there's the effect of its accretion, which I think we'll only interfere with if we tinker. So for next time... total self-erasure. I volunteer to go first.
Was also thinking about this project in the context of today's discussion in class re: the end of modern drama and the future of theater. One way in which, I think I have to admit, I'm personally a little bit of a modernist holdout in our postmodern world is my persistance in going to the theater in search of "meaning." Not that I want a message, or an endorsement of this or that fixed system of values. And I don't want to devalue pure presence, live bodies, live voices sharing space. Those are our materials. That's a big part of what's theatrical about theater, which is something we ought to be interested in if we're going to be able to justify our existence in a world that also has film and television. But theater has been an alchemical art form since long before the Wooster Group started integrating film projections. It was always words and music, sight and sound, etc... putting new technology on stage is just increasing the density (which, I posit, almost always produces a more shallow theatrical experience, just as our experience of the world gets more shallow as we spend more of our time skimming things.) So presence is where it's at. But I don't know if I agree that presence is it. I get kind of terrified listening to people talk about how this is all they ask of theater or what they find amazing about theater. Because it's this soothing balm for their overstimulated eyeballs. Because for like an hour and a half they were together, with other people, present in a room, paying real attention to something. These people should watch less television. Because I'm not down with my art form being the one responsible for taking you in, at your worst, and giving you a worthless hour of outpatient rehab.
But "meaning?" How embarrasing. My idea with the presence thing is that we all have a kind of equillibrium state. Those of many of us hover at frighteningly low levels, I am learning. Then we can be super distracted, numbed, whatever, on the even lower end of the spectrum. But where art as an experience of engaging with, actually touching the world, actually not feeling alienated happens is on the highly present end of the spectrum. Precisely because we now know that meaning isn't something that can be fixed, packaged, and delivered. It's totally ludicrous to expect to find meaning anywhere, but we still look for it. The way we know that this is just one of many possible ways of organizing or understanding the world, but we can't have all the possibilities at once, can't just swim in chaos, so we agree to just kind of accept one, then maybe another, or we just hang out where we land. Neccesary fictions, Nietzsche called them. So coming back to Beckett, here we have these texts where, as Handke puts it, the conspicuous meaninglessness is precisely what constitutes their meaning. Why does this qualify for me when, for example, an impromptu dance party in Grand Central does not (doesn't not qualify period, just doesn't qualify as a thing that's relevant/essential for me)? In Beckett we get to experience an individual consciousness trying to organize and give intelligible, if idiosyncratic, form to his inner world. His psycho-spiritual inner landscape. The measure of its success is just the faithfulness of the translation. Responding to art is a subjective experience partly because you're going to like the work of artists who are on your presence wavelength. Prime presence is naked, is being aware that any outside structures that start imposing themselves on consciousness are "neccesary fictions." So Beckett tries to empty it all out. Or he makes the subject/content of the work purgation. Which is is why the artist can only "fail better," because total emptiness, total honesty is something we can never achieve while still conscious, still percieving. You can let things in to the work/world too... it's all in the attitude taken towards them, acknowledging their provisionalness, their absurdity maybe. Richard Foreman's work feels "honest" to me in this way, despite its density... an isolated consciousness trying to sketch itself in space. Same goes for Jelinek, warped and stunted as the consciousness is. If you're warped and stunted, if consciousness is gruesomely cluttered, but you're able to see how and why, it wouldn't be faithful to make a picture of a void like Beckett's. If you're aware, like Jelinek, that the contours of your consciousness have been molded and stamped on a kind of assembly line, your honest projection is not going to exclude those mass produced shapes. You have to draw from what you find in the moments where you're as present with yourself as you can be, because art should ultimately give us the opportunity to see/think differently/more. And the artist guiding or structuring the experience first needs to be able to see/think for herself. To teach, yes. Not what, but how. How to go inward. How to be present in the world by learning how to be present in yourself.
So why is it useful for people to keep going back to Beckett when the theatre is moving away in almost every direction except toward the more Beckettian (how could it)? Because he was a genius, a word I'm okay with, even if it makes me a bad postmodern citizen. Genius meaning supremely capable of being present with himself, capable of witnessing himself, of being his own other, of reporting the truth of what he saw, heard, felt, arranging it in a shape that is comprehensible to others. These are skills that artists (and civilians, to a lesser degree) need to go back to, work at, hone, but Beckett also takes the skills, the processes, as his materials, his subject matter, so there's really no getting away from it. Much less of the work time gets wasted on embroidering, learning tricks, learning choreography, that estranges you from the essential process of it. And the world keeps going after Beckett, and new stuff keeps appearing, along with new structures and cultural scripts and systems of mediation that change the way we're able to understand the world. So we'll keep trying to represent those things in art. Going back to work on Beckett is always kind of about reminding ourselves that "this too shall pass," but it's also about teaching ourselves how to be as here as possible, while we're here. Because your being here, the architecture of your being here, how you're in the world, how the world gets into you, how they filter through one another, means, is the kind of meaning I want to find in my art.
The first time Katie read through, it took a little while for things to feel like they were starting to get focused, click, dig, hone in. If you're on an asymptote and things can only get smaller and smaller, it's going to be super important where you start, and this run it was really diffuse, which didn't feel quite right, but gradually worked its way into a tighter and tighter focus, which did feel right. The asymptote Katie was riding was one measuring more and more radical isolation, so we were beginning with a trace of her actually being in the world, even if only in a half remembered, echo, ice walking kind of way. But it wasn't specific. It was something we were choosing to set us up for the nice contrast of achieving a kind of laser beam focus at the end. We talked about the fact that the piece begins with the woman's call for "More." If there was some kind of "decision" moment or a beginning of the inexorable slide towards the in-most, it happened before we see the woman, so we recommitted ourselves to meeting her already mid-process.
After another reading, the first section, or period (more math!) made more sense. We lost a good bit of the feeling of randomness or singsongy boredom that can creep in if we're not rigorous about treating repeated lines identically. Also got away from the impulse to start in a kind of loose natural, "neutral," which is always going to be so much more colorful than the place Beckett wants to take you that, even if we manage to steam it out by the end, that beginning is never going to be anything but... rumpled. And we think this piece wants to be more nattily dressed than that.
And yet. As Katie had noticed before while listening to me read, as you get smaller and more constricted, anything that is allowed to reach up and out at all reads as incongruously huge. We liked some of the places where Katie was sort of activitating the words most, where you could feel her trying, searching for something, for the face, really reconstructing the image of her own famished eyes for herself, or the view the famished eyes had from the window. But we thought maybe this was just because we liked the feeling of specificity and full engagement. She starts in the chair. She talks to the rocker. The rocker rocks her. She rocks nothing. It rocks her off. We needed to embrace the passivity called for by the situation. I asked Katie to really scale back, to try forcing her intonation, her rythms into something as close to uniformity as possible. This was hard to do, but once we were able to listen to what this kind of standardization did to the piece, we agreed that it really had the effect of ironing out all the creases. Felt restricting, mechanical, and we wondered if this approach would sand away all meaning, all nuance, along with the affect. To be continued, but we agreed to explore in this direction next time. I suspect that we'll be taken care of if we let the words do their work. Beckett said that the perfect play would be one in which there are no actors, so I think it might be productive to see what it feels like if we understand our job to be just getting out of his way. Which is hard. But I think we were already rewarded by observing what happens to the lines of kind of irregular length in the piece. Things get a little stretched out, or a little twisted, or sort of buffered by silence even if the actor's doing her best to treat the lines as equals. We can fret and make choices about what we'd like to emphasize, but any emphasis we add ourselves is ultimately going to seem crass. And there's the effect of its accretion, which I think we'll only interfere with if we tinker. So for next time... total self-erasure. I volunteer to go first.
Was also thinking about this project in the context of today's discussion in class re: the end of modern drama and the future of theater. One way in which, I think I have to admit, I'm personally a little bit of a modernist holdout in our postmodern world is my persistance in going to the theater in search of "meaning." Not that I want a message, or an endorsement of this or that fixed system of values. And I don't want to devalue pure presence, live bodies, live voices sharing space. Those are our materials. That's a big part of what's theatrical about theater, which is something we ought to be interested in if we're going to be able to justify our existence in a world that also has film and television. But theater has been an alchemical art form since long before the Wooster Group started integrating film projections. It was always words and music, sight and sound, etc... putting new technology on stage is just increasing the density (which, I posit, almost always produces a more shallow theatrical experience, just as our experience of the world gets more shallow as we spend more of our time skimming things.) So presence is where it's at. But I don't know if I agree that presence is it. I get kind of terrified listening to people talk about how this is all they ask of theater or what they find amazing about theater. Because it's this soothing balm for their overstimulated eyeballs. Because for like an hour and a half they were together, with other people, present in a room, paying real attention to something. These people should watch less television. Because I'm not down with my art form being the one responsible for taking you in, at your worst, and giving you a worthless hour of outpatient rehab.
But "meaning?" How embarrasing. My idea with the presence thing is that we all have a kind of equillibrium state. Those of many of us hover at frighteningly low levels, I am learning. Then we can be super distracted, numbed, whatever, on the even lower end of the spectrum. But where art as an experience of engaging with, actually touching the world, actually not feeling alienated happens is on the highly present end of the spectrum. Precisely because we now know that meaning isn't something that can be fixed, packaged, and delivered. It's totally ludicrous to expect to find meaning anywhere, but we still look for it. The way we know that this is just one of many possible ways of organizing or understanding the world, but we can't have all the possibilities at once, can't just swim in chaos, so we agree to just kind of accept one, then maybe another, or we just hang out where we land. Neccesary fictions, Nietzsche called them. So coming back to Beckett, here we have these texts where, as Handke puts it, the conspicuous meaninglessness is precisely what constitutes their meaning. Why does this qualify for me when, for example, an impromptu dance party in Grand Central does not (doesn't not qualify period, just doesn't qualify as a thing that's relevant/essential for me)? In Beckett we get to experience an individual consciousness trying to organize and give intelligible, if idiosyncratic, form to his inner world. His psycho-spiritual inner landscape. The measure of its success is just the faithfulness of the translation. Responding to art is a subjective experience partly because you're going to like the work of artists who are on your presence wavelength. Prime presence is naked, is being aware that any outside structures that start imposing themselves on consciousness are "neccesary fictions." So Beckett tries to empty it all out. Or he makes the subject/content of the work purgation. Which is is why the artist can only "fail better," because total emptiness, total honesty is something we can never achieve while still conscious, still percieving. You can let things in to the work/world too... it's all in the attitude taken towards them, acknowledging their provisionalness, their absurdity maybe. Richard Foreman's work feels "honest" to me in this way, despite its density... an isolated consciousness trying to sketch itself in space. Same goes for Jelinek, warped and stunted as the consciousness is. If you're warped and stunted, if consciousness is gruesomely cluttered, but you're able to see how and why, it wouldn't be faithful to make a picture of a void like Beckett's. If you're aware, like Jelinek, that the contours of your consciousness have been molded and stamped on a kind of assembly line, your honest projection is not going to exclude those mass produced shapes. You have to draw from what you find in the moments where you're as present with yourself as you can be, because art should ultimately give us the opportunity to see/think differently/more. And the artist guiding or structuring the experience first needs to be able to see/think for herself. To teach, yes. Not what, but how. How to go inward. How to be present in the world by learning how to be present in yourself.
So why is it useful for people to keep going back to Beckett when the theatre is moving away in almost every direction except toward the more Beckettian (how could it)? Because he was a genius, a word I'm okay with, even if it makes me a bad postmodern citizen. Genius meaning supremely capable of being present with himself, capable of witnessing himself, of being his own other, of reporting the truth of what he saw, heard, felt, arranging it in a shape that is comprehensible to others. These are skills that artists (and civilians, to a lesser degree) need to go back to, work at, hone, but Beckett also takes the skills, the processes, as his materials, his subject matter, so there's really no getting away from it. Much less of the work time gets wasted on embroidering, learning tricks, learning choreography, that estranges you from the essential process of it. And the world keeps going after Beckett, and new stuff keeps appearing, along with new structures and cultural scripts and systems of mediation that change the way we're able to understand the world. So we'll keep trying to represent those things in art. Going back to work on Beckett is always kind of about reminding ourselves that "this too shall pass," but it's also about teaching ourselves how to be as here as possible, while we're here. Because your being here, the architecture of your being here, how you're in the world, how the world gets into you, how they filter through one another, means, is the kind of meaning I want to find in my art.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Asymptotes
Great rehearsal today (Saturday night 4/24.) After a large black coffee and a skim cappuccino we set to work. Today was Jessica's day to read for the voice and I took a more direction giving role. Before we dug into the text itself we decided that what would be most fruitful would be the track each section or period of the piece. What happens in each section, why and what sphere are we in? Jessica had found a great quote (insert here... comment box) about the trajectory of spaces the woman goes in each period. We're taking this in terms of spheres. Not a complete 100% Stanislavsky concentration sphere or a Mark Cosmic sphere but a mixture of both in a woman who is in a deep, dark, solemn, void-like room/head space. Here's a little about what we concluded: the first section-more movement (all eyes, all sides), larger sphere (dare we say third? or a larger second) trying to remember the time when she opened herself up to the world, remembering the time when she was out in the world trying to connect with people trying to satiate the famished eyes. Living in her past experiences and trying to sort through that-kind of sphere. Second period: we move to the window. Our sphere is gradually shrinking to a fixed point/place. Still trying to remember the attempt to connect to others and actually doing it in the PRESENT. Third period: closing the blind in order to encounter her own living soul--at first she's encountering the other living creatures as another but here, in this sphere, there is a realization that it is herself, she is the only other she can connect with. In this sphere bringing the image of her living self and her consciousness together. The fourth period: we're now into her head. Going deep down into her cave, into the depths of her mind, down the deep stairs. The big thing to remember is that we're going DOWN. Throughout the period we're gradually reaching zero, gradually getting closer to death and therefore digging deeper and deeper into a first sphere of concentration. The astute quote of the unnamed Beckett critic (insert here...) said that this gradual declination of our notion of sphere was like an asymptote. Gradually coming down the zero, getting more into her head, first sphere.
We also talked through a few other heat things that lifted for us in the reading in last rehearsal. We spent a long time talking about the role of the Mother, why she recalls the death experience in this particular moment at this particular time. We made a decision that YES, the mother really did die in that exact rocking chair. It's not just a metaphor but we're going to go with it as fact, as a memory from her past. To rock off in this same chair is appropriate, it's cyclical. The same death as her mother although they lead (we're assuming) very different lives in different generations. It kind of invalidates any difference between them because they are both coming to the same end, in the same place. Death in general is a measure of equality. This iconic memory of death is scorched into her head (how could it not be?)
Famished eyes. This pops and lifts every time we read. The famished eyes are constantly all sides, assumming the same for all living creatures behind his or hers own window. Therefore, for eyes to be satiated and "feed" they must connect with other open and inviting eyes. They always have to remain open. We then starting thinking-if our eyes are open our entire lives we're constantly searching/striving/hungering for that human connectivity. The woman's way to fix this problem is to close her eyes--to rock off. This doesn't fulfill the desires of the famished eyes, it doesn't satisfied them but it's how she deals with it. "No, I'm done with that." They aren't feed but this is how i'll be done with it. We also concluded that she's done adding "stuff" or experiences to her whole self and therefore can only NOW discover and judge/take stock of her entire living soul (as seen through the reflection in the window.) And realize that this is it. Now, here's the most triumphant thing about this and the most dark and depressing thing: realizing that it's only herself that she can find she realizes that she doesn't need this human connection. She's done with it--that's the real Truth. We spend our lives trying to satisfy this craving for human connection when really, Mr. Beckett says, it's impossible. Therefore, we can't see the woman's failure to connect as inadequacy but ah ha has the truth. Everyone suffers this way--none of us can connect.
We read through twice. First read through I worked with Jessica on paying close attention to the mentioned journey of the spheres as well as the images we'd conjured up before--NYC apartment complex, the stairs, etc. We got a lot of good things out of the first run-words lifting that we were unaware of (i.e. GONE BACK IN, FACE, DEAD) and felt/tasted the rhythm of the words. A few things I/Jessica thought we should attempt the next time through: understanding that the concentration sphere needn't be so heady that we cannot hear what's going on. We also talking for a long time about SHADING vs. COLORING. With the world in which we're knee deep in is HYPERaware and super tiny the words or images that she tried lifting up or coloring became a little too colorful. We're in shades of grey here--and the tiniest and smallest adjustment can be seen as glaring or neon just because of the context of the super small place we're in. For example, colored the DEAD lines with the mother came off as a little sinister and scary. So the direction I gave Jessica revolved around keeping within the confines of the no color world. That the tiniest shading will speak loudly. [We also decided we want to get a quick and dirty recorded version asap so that we can start working on physicality and concentration OUT instead of down at the paper. Also, a direction trick I want to try is using a fixed point as a concentration sphere tool. This way Jessica can try gradually changing sphere inwardly.] The second rethrough was great. Jessica made some great adjustments. We did get caught up in going low too quick which lead to the discussion of volume and sphere. Then came our eureka moment. If this is all starting at a very deep, dark, head space of her inner life and monologue and THIS is in her head THEN it should be totally clear. Volume shouldn't decrease or be affected by changing to a smaller sphere because here we are already! The recorded voice is in her head and in her head everything is clear.
I have more notes that we can talk about in our next rehearsal. We're trying to figure out HOW to keep rehearsing this. It seems almost impossible to cut it into chunks and work it in small ways without running the full thing over and over again. Mark, do you have any suggestions about how to rehearse it? Would it be silly to break it up into smaller section and work on each one?
Lots of good stuff, lots of progress, lots to do. Can we find a better rocking chair? When we rehearse again we'll continue to engage in this dancing of sphere work, understanding of the notion of human connectivity, life only leading up to death (at least Beckett is prepared.)
We also talked through a few other heat things that lifted for us in the reading in last rehearsal. We spent a long time talking about the role of the Mother, why she recalls the death experience in this particular moment at this particular time. We made a decision that YES, the mother really did die in that exact rocking chair. It's not just a metaphor but we're going to go with it as fact, as a memory from her past. To rock off in this same chair is appropriate, it's cyclical. The same death as her mother although they lead (we're assuming) very different lives in different generations. It kind of invalidates any difference between them because they are both coming to the same end, in the same place. Death in general is a measure of equality. This iconic memory of death is scorched into her head (how could it not be?)
Famished eyes. This pops and lifts every time we read. The famished eyes are constantly all sides, assumming the same for all living creatures behind his or hers own window. Therefore, for eyes to be satiated and "feed" they must connect with other open and inviting eyes. They always have to remain open. We then starting thinking-if our eyes are open our entire lives we're constantly searching/striving/hungering for that human connectivity. The woman's way to fix this problem is to close her eyes--to rock off. This doesn't fulfill the desires of the famished eyes, it doesn't satisfied them but it's how she deals with it. "No, I'm done with that." They aren't feed but this is how i'll be done with it. We also concluded that she's done adding "stuff" or experiences to her whole self and therefore can only NOW discover and judge/take stock of her entire living soul (as seen through the reflection in the window.) And realize that this is it. Now, here's the most triumphant thing about this and the most dark and depressing thing: realizing that it's only herself that she can find she realizes that she doesn't need this human connection. She's done with it--that's the real Truth. We spend our lives trying to satisfy this craving for human connection when really, Mr. Beckett says, it's impossible. Therefore, we can't see the woman's failure to connect as inadequacy but ah ha has the truth. Everyone suffers this way--none of us can connect.
We read through twice. First read through I worked with Jessica on paying close attention to the mentioned journey of the spheres as well as the images we'd conjured up before--NYC apartment complex, the stairs, etc. We got a lot of good things out of the first run-words lifting that we were unaware of (i.e. GONE BACK IN, FACE, DEAD) and felt/tasted the rhythm of the words. A few things I/Jessica thought we should attempt the next time through: understanding that the concentration sphere needn't be so heady that we cannot hear what's going on. We also talking for a long time about SHADING vs. COLORING. With the world in which we're knee deep in is HYPERaware and super tiny the words or images that she tried lifting up or coloring became a little too colorful. We're in shades of grey here--and the tiniest and smallest adjustment can be seen as glaring or neon just because of the context of the super small place we're in. For example, colored the DEAD lines with the mother came off as a little sinister and scary. So the direction I gave Jessica revolved around keeping within the confines of the no color world. That the tiniest shading will speak loudly. [We also decided we want to get a quick and dirty recorded version asap so that we can start working on physicality and concentration OUT instead of down at the paper. Also, a direction trick I want to try is using a fixed point as a concentration sphere tool. This way Jessica can try gradually changing sphere inwardly.] The second rethrough was great. Jessica made some great adjustments. We did get caught up in going low too quick which lead to the discussion of volume and sphere. Then came our eureka moment. If this is all starting at a very deep, dark, head space of her inner life and monologue and THIS is in her head THEN it should be totally clear. Volume shouldn't decrease or be affected by changing to a smaller sphere because here we are already! The recorded voice is in her head and in her head everything is clear.
I have more notes that we can talk about in our next rehearsal. We're trying to figure out HOW to keep rehearsing this. It seems almost impossible to cut it into chunks and work it in small ways without running the full thing over and over again. Mark, do you have any suggestions about how to rehearse it? Would it be silly to break it up into smaller section and work on each one?
Lots of good stuff, lots of progress, lots to do. Can we find a better rocking chair? When we rehearse again we'll continue to engage in this dancing of sphere work, understanding of the notion of human connectivity, life only leading up to death (at least Beckett is prepared.)
Friday, April 23, 2010
Billie Whitelaw interview
"...when I worked on Winnie, it took me three months to learn the part... You know how we work. We sit and stare into each other's eyes and say the lines. It was very hard to learn; there were so many 'Oh, well's and 'Ah, well's. Sam would say, 'Oh, you missed something there.' He would keep reminding me, 'No color.' If I told him that I thought I sounded boring, he would say, 'Let it be boring.' You know it takes courage to go slow, to be boring. You have to have courage to work that way. Yet it it is so important to get the music right in Beckett, and I do think of the parts in terms of music. Beckett sometimes conducts me, something like a metronome. For example, I remember when we started working on HAPPY DAYS, I thought Winnie would say 'Another happy day,' sprightly. And Sam said [flat monotone] 'A-no-ther hap-py day." And in brackets I put in, 'Oh, Christ, here we go. Another sodding twelve hours to get through. Right. Off we go. Christ, okay, sun is up, we've got till sundown to get through.' And that is very different from the way I had originally heard it... "
On the Rockaby woman:
"Terribly lonely. I don't know why... but I thought of the loneliness of apartment dwellers, the desperate loneliness of New York, people sitting at their windows. I wrote on the margin of my copy of the play the words 'solitary,' 'monotonous,' 'lullaby.' She is again a disembodied voice. There I was working for a certain inflexion, a certain pitch in order to get that 'no color.' Different shades of grey."
Not helpful, but worth sharing:
"-Whenever I've read anything of Beckett's that I've been asked to do, the first thing that I've always wondered is how is it that everything he writes seems to be about my life. When I read HAPPY DAYS, I thought, what the hell was this man doing writing about me? He didn't even know me. Now having said that, Beckett's women are me, and therefore I don't know how I can discuss these women because they are all about me.
-...Do you find that the other women stay with you as Winnie has?
-Because these characters are me, there is no alternative.
-Can that be disturbing?
-Yes."
On the Rockaby woman:
"Terribly lonely. I don't know why... but I thought of the loneliness of apartment dwellers, the desperate loneliness of New York, people sitting at their windows. I wrote on the margin of my copy of the play the words 'solitary,' 'monotonous,' 'lullaby.' She is again a disembodied voice. There I was working for a certain inflexion, a certain pitch in order to get that 'no color.' Different shades of grey."
Not helpful, but worth sharing:
"-Whenever I've read anything of Beckett's that I've been asked to do, the first thing that I've always wondered is how is it that everything he writes seems to be about my life. When I read HAPPY DAYS, I thought, what the hell was this man doing writing about me? He didn't even know me. Now having said that, Beckett's women are me, and therefore I don't know how I can discuss these women because they are all about me.
-...Do you find that the other women stay with you as Winnie has?
-Because these characters are me, there is no alternative.
-Can that be disturbing?
-Yes."
Thursday, April 22, 2010
the noodling begins
To recap what we started digging into tonight...
One of the reasons why we felt like doing a performance-oriented final project was this funny "density" phenomenon that we first articulated while working on Brigid's monologues when Katie asked me if I saw all of the movements and moments we were tussling with in their specificity, ahead of time, like when writing that piece. The answer was yes and no, because even the speeches, words, moments I felt I had the clearest sense/picture of before having an actor read the lines seemed to expand exponentially once we started working on them together. Meaning there's more/different in the moment, or could be more/different in the moment, than one's neccesarily aware of when the words are encountered as this isolated, unchallenged voice in your head or on the page. So we're pretty well convinced that this is the best way to really get to know a play. Some of that discovery happens, I think, because of the inevitable "disagreements" between collaborators. On a super basic level, if we read something through, and A doesn't like a choice B makes, A has to figure out why that is. Having to articulate this for oneself or for the team can only lead to good things. Either A adjusts her original assumption about the moment, revises it, or comes to a superior awareness of what her first imagining of it was about. Has to become critical about her assumption once she's confronted with otherwises, so she's able to say why she saw it the way she saw it in the first place. Everything has to be negotiated. Nothing is taken for granted, "obvious," and left, hence, unaddressed, sometimes ununderstood.
Katie had been watching Billie's version (which she oughtn't do too much more of...) and talked about the relatively low percentage of words you can really hear, the things that really lift up. We worked plenty on this with Brigid's monologues, knowing that not everything can be of equal weight, at least if you want to give the audience a purchase, a way to latch on. Otherwise its like asking them to climb up a smooth, crevice-free cliff face. And the same principle applies, but with Beckett it's like the whole thing's done in pencil and some places are just shaded a touch darker than others.
When she read through tonight we asked about what felt like it wanted more shading, and about the "triumph" of the "fuck life" moment. The success achieved through failure, the ultimate and inevitable "failure." Last meeting we talked a little bit about being towards one's "ownmost nonrelational possibility not-to-be-bypassed" (give or take a few hyphens). Nonrelational because even while it's the great equalizer, it has to be yours and yours alone. No one can experience it for you. Ownmost for these individuating reasons and because, maybe in this scenario, its proximity forces you to retreat into and get to know all the contours of just yourself. Recognizing the ephemerality of this consciousness, the only thing that's been a constant so far. But not I don't think letting yourself extrapolate to the world outside. "The world" is always experienced as other, monolithic, impenetrable, if not hostile, and I think pretty static compared to the undulating contours of inwardness. This is the authentic, knowable reality.
Anyway, we were thinking about how failure and success and their association with human "connection" gets redefined by the end of Rockaby... how the always at least doubly mediated hypothetical experience of connecting with "another living soul" another pair of famished eyes one might see through windows, yours and theirs, is this kind of impossible dream/delusion that get's put to bed in this piece. The point she gets to when she's able to say "fuck life" and mean it, not going to get up tomorrow and be again, be again, has to become her own other to get there. We thought about the four sections, how we move from looking out for somebody else's eyes to being with ourself in the dark room with the shades drawn. In between there maybe being the moment of seeing herself reflected in the glass. Katie brought up experiencing yourself as other when you accidentally catch yourself in a mirror or hear your recorded voice (let's make sure to talk more there). Lacan and the "mirror stage," the beginning of understanding yourself as a discrete thing in a universe that doesn't have unmediated access to your inner life (which you experience as something much more fluid and inconsistent than that body that makes you look like a unity. Connection, communication as an approximation, a losing of things in translation, a compromise, a failure. Our Woman is weaning herself off of the illusion that connection with an other besides yourself is possible. Being one's own almost resolves the subject/object thing. With the hypothetical other creatures in other windows, you'd always be either seeing or being seen. Maybe you don't totally escape this with yourself, but the perceiver and the perceived are one and the same. And this lets you close the system. Which is peace, which is success here I think. I don't think death in Beckett is always death, literally. I think it's this imagined blissful closing of the system. Birth is the beginning of death. We forget sometimes and think that birth is the beginning of life, but life is the distraction. Heidegger is big on "authentic" v "inauthentic" modes of being, and "being-towards-death" is authenticity for him. I don't know if the woman's about to actually die. She does, I think, get to a place where she can give up this outward connection seeking impulse as the illusion/distraction it is and turn to resolute inwardness... which, like you said, Katie, is a little bit crazy or off, the way all of the syllabus playwrights' pictures of the world must be since they're so different. But I want to say it's crazy like Kierkegaard's madman with the "excess" of interiority like we talked about for Brigid, rather than the Gianna madman with the glass eyes and hair of carpet rags, right? Or maybe that's where the vaudeville humor in his other work comes from. Dunno. Let's talk about where she's at during/just before/just after the "more!" moments next time, more clearly sketch out what "happens" in each section.
One of the reasons why we felt like doing a performance-oriented final project was this funny "density" phenomenon that we first articulated while working on Brigid's monologues when Katie asked me if I saw all of the movements and moments we were tussling with in their specificity, ahead of time, like when writing that piece. The answer was yes and no, because even the speeches, words, moments I felt I had the clearest sense/picture of before having an actor read the lines seemed to expand exponentially once we started working on them together. Meaning there's more/different in the moment, or could be more/different in the moment, than one's neccesarily aware of when the words are encountered as this isolated, unchallenged voice in your head or on the page. So we're pretty well convinced that this is the best way to really get to know a play. Some of that discovery happens, I think, because of the inevitable "disagreements" between collaborators. On a super basic level, if we read something through, and A doesn't like a choice B makes, A has to figure out why that is. Having to articulate this for oneself or for the team can only lead to good things. Either A adjusts her original assumption about the moment, revises it, or comes to a superior awareness of what her first imagining of it was about. Has to become critical about her assumption once she's confronted with otherwises, so she's able to say why she saw it the way she saw it in the first place. Everything has to be negotiated. Nothing is taken for granted, "obvious," and left, hence, unaddressed, sometimes ununderstood.
Katie had been watching Billie's version (which she oughtn't do too much more of...) and talked about the relatively low percentage of words you can really hear, the things that really lift up. We worked plenty on this with Brigid's monologues, knowing that not everything can be of equal weight, at least if you want to give the audience a purchase, a way to latch on. Otherwise its like asking them to climb up a smooth, crevice-free cliff face. And the same principle applies, but with Beckett it's like the whole thing's done in pencil and some places are just shaded a touch darker than others.
When she read through tonight we asked about what felt like it wanted more shading, and about the "triumph" of the "fuck life" moment. The success achieved through failure, the ultimate and inevitable "failure." Last meeting we talked a little bit about being towards one's "ownmost nonrelational possibility not-to-be-bypassed" (give or take a few hyphens). Nonrelational because even while it's the great equalizer, it has to be yours and yours alone. No one can experience it for you. Ownmost for these individuating reasons and because, maybe in this scenario, its proximity forces you to retreat into and get to know all the contours of just yourself. Recognizing the ephemerality of this consciousness, the only thing that's been a constant so far. But not I don't think letting yourself extrapolate to the world outside. "The world" is always experienced as other, monolithic, impenetrable, if not hostile, and I think pretty static compared to the undulating contours of inwardness. This is the authentic, knowable reality.
Anyway, we were thinking about how failure and success and their association with human "connection" gets redefined by the end of Rockaby... how the always at least doubly mediated hypothetical experience of connecting with "another living soul" another pair of famished eyes one might see through windows, yours and theirs, is this kind of impossible dream/delusion that get's put to bed in this piece. The point she gets to when she's able to say "fuck life" and mean it, not going to get up tomorrow and be again, be again, has to become her own other to get there. We thought about the four sections, how we move from looking out for somebody else's eyes to being with ourself in the dark room with the shades drawn. In between there maybe being the moment of seeing herself reflected in the glass. Katie brought up experiencing yourself as other when you accidentally catch yourself in a mirror or hear your recorded voice (let's make sure to talk more there). Lacan and the "mirror stage," the beginning of understanding yourself as a discrete thing in a universe that doesn't have unmediated access to your inner life (which you experience as something much more fluid and inconsistent than that body that makes you look like a unity. Connection, communication as an approximation, a losing of things in translation, a compromise, a failure. Our Woman is weaning herself off of the illusion that connection with an other besides yourself is possible. Being one's own almost resolves the subject/object thing. With the hypothetical other creatures in other windows, you'd always be either seeing or being seen. Maybe you don't totally escape this with yourself, but the perceiver and the perceived are one and the same. And this lets you close the system. Which is peace, which is success here I think. I don't think death in Beckett is always death, literally. I think it's this imagined blissful closing of the system. Birth is the beginning of death. We forget sometimes and think that birth is the beginning of life, but life is the distraction. Heidegger is big on "authentic" v "inauthentic" modes of being, and "being-towards-death" is authenticity for him. I don't know if the woman's about to actually die. She does, I think, get to a place where she can give up this outward connection seeking impulse as the illusion/distraction it is and turn to resolute inwardness... which, like you said, Katie, is a little bit crazy or off, the way all of the syllabus playwrights' pictures of the world must be since they're so different. But I want to say it's crazy like Kierkegaard's madman with the "excess" of interiority like we talked about for Brigid, rather than the Gianna madman with the glass eyes and hair of carpet rags, right? Or maybe that's where the vaudeville humor in his other work comes from. Dunno. Let's talk about where she's at during/just before/just after the "more!" moments next time, more clearly sketch out what "happens" in each section.
Ok, here it is
I officially call this blog to order.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be exploring, discovering, creating and discussing Beckett's ROCKABY. We're already off to a great start. Yesterday, Jessica and I met in the common room (for old times sake) and spent a good hour or two setting goals for ourselves (Mark, you would be proud), talking about the piece: what confuses us, interests us, where we feel HEAT and how much we love Billie Whitelaw. Over the next week or so, we'll both be reading for the Voice/W. Both taking a collaborative stab at this character/both taking a stab at getting the other to better understand the character. Once we've hashed out a little more about Beckett, Heidegger, Death, Technological logistics of rocking motion, and figuring out how to tape record... we'll decide on who will take what part of this first attempt to understand this work and see it lifted to performance.
NEWS FLASH: we found a rocking chair. It's pretty wobbly and doesn't have much "rock-span" but we'll make due. Anyone know where we could find a better rocking chair?
Before I sign off, Jessica and I spent a lot of time talking about WHY we wanted to do this. A few of our reasons: a) tackling the rigor of this piece. The challenges of performing the piece come from the naked simplicity coupled with the density of each moment: it's hard. Fun. b) reading through it once it's so apparent to us that this piece NEEDS to be performed. Hearing the words flow rhythmically and melodically in a "rocking" motion is the key to realizing the work. c) We're both interested in where to go from Beckett in a larger modern drama context. There is something DIFFERENT here and I know I (I don't want to speak for Jessica) want to lay my tentacles down in it in order understand it better. The hyperawareness of something like ROCKABY frightens me but also excites me (from a performer point of view.) Finally, working on ROCKABY seems like a fluid and compelling way to continue the work we've been doing this entire semester on BAW and a perfect cherry on top to a sundae of a semester... I hope.
I'm lucky to be working with J who has been working her way through all of Beckett's work and will be the token dramaturg through this process. I believe that we (as proven by our latest rehearsal) are able to ENGAGE each other fully and ask big questions. Not just about Rockaby but about Beckett, the future of modern drama, acting technique, what next and how much we want to be like Billie Whitelaw... te he he.
Over and out team.
K
Over the next few weeks, we'll be exploring, discovering, creating and discussing Beckett's ROCKABY. We're already off to a great start. Yesterday, Jessica and I met in the common room (for old times sake) and spent a good hour or two setting goals for ourselves (Mark, you would be proud), talking about the piece: what confuses us, interests us, where we feel HEAT and how much we love Billie Whitelaw. Over the next week or so, we'll both be reading for the Voice/W. Both taking a collaborative stab at this character/both taking a stab at getting the other to better understand the character. Once we've hashed out a little more about Beckett, Heidegger, Death, Technological logistics of rocking motion, and figuring out how to tape record... we'll decide on who will take what part of this first attempt to understand this work and see it lifted to performance.
NEWS FLASH: we found a rocking chair. It's pretty wobbly and doesn't have much "rock-span" but we'll make due. Anyone know where we could find a better rocking chair?
Before I sign off, Jessica and I spent a lot of time talking about WHY we wanted to do this. A few of our reasons: a) tackling the rigor of this piece. The challenges of performing the piece come from the naked simplicity coupled with the density of each moment: it's hard. Fun. b) reading through it once it's so apparent to us that this piece NEEDS to be performed. Hearing the words flow rhythmically and melodically in a "rocking" motion is the key to realizing the work. c) We're both interested in where to go from Beckett in a larger modern drama context. There is something DIFFERENT here and I know I (I don't want to speak for Jessica) want to lay my tentacles down in it in order understand it better. The hyperawareness of something like ROCKABY frightens me but also excites me (from a performer point of view.) Finally, working on ROCKABY seems like a fluid and compelling way to continue the work we've been doing this entire semester on BAW and a perfect cherry on top to a sundae of a semester... I hope.
I'm lucky to be working with J who has been working her way through all of Beckett's work and will be the token dramaturg through this process. I believe that we (as proven by our latest rehearsal) are able to ENGAGE each other fully and ask big questions. Not just about Rockaby but about Beckett, the future of modern drama, acting technique, what next and how much we want to be like Billie Whitelaw... te he he.
Over and out team.
K
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