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.