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.

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.)

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."

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.

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