November fourteenth, two thousand nine

Things to remember while making work.

Number seven: You have to earn the trust of your audience. (I'll get to this in a minute....)

And, Try things before saying no to them.

I know you don't always time for this. But, when you have the time, agree to look at things before dismissing them.

This week was spent working with Julian Maynard Smith of Station House Opera. In our de-brief after the showings he mentioned a scene that, in description did not work for him. But then when we saw it, he was more than persuaded.


Two people sitting in chairs with balloons tied to them, seen from the window, having an argument over the phone? It doesn't sound like much but seeing is believing.

I may or may not have thought the whole scene was compelling but what was undeniably thrilling was sitting down in front of a window and then discovering two fellow students seated outside, well-lit, and then suddenly we hear them on the phone with each other. It was beautiful, surprising, and best of delightful.


At the end of the scene we get up and turn around to find to similar chairs behind us. Who knew something could be so lovely.

Why did this work for me? I'm not sure. I think it was a constellation of factors. First, we the audience had the joy of the discovery. We were only told to sit at the window, not that there were performers out there. Second, it was a striking composition. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture so you'll just have to trust me - Kudos to the lighting designer on the piece.

Sometimes all you can say is that it just worked. It instilled a trust in me immediately. They could have done anything after that.

This leads me to my first point of the blog: You have to earn the trust of the audience. but once you do, they will go wherever you take them.

The bulk middle of this piece could have used a lot of work - I realize this isn't the point, it was a workshop meant to explore means of telematic performace. I bring it up only to highlight the fact that the opening moments worked so well for me I was willing to go through an event that I otherwise might not have.

The first picture above is from my notebook and illustrates the work of my group prior to rehearsal. We took a long time to get to this stage but in a sense it worked out better than I expected.

The idea of the scene was, I believe, quite well crafted. However, I think we failed to gain the trust of the audience in the first moments. We were under-rehearsed - plagued by technology problems and this made the event a little flaccid. Had we devoted a bit more energy to the beginning we may very well have come up with a better opener.

There were a lot of other ideas in the room that, in hindsight, we should have tried. Maybe they would have worked as well as the people seated outside. We'll never know.

november tenth, two thousand nine

Things to remember while making work

Number six: Developing collaborative relationships takes time.

I have, for many years, been a fierce advocate for collaboratively devised theatre. Today that belief was challenged more profoundly than I thought possible.

I have had the great pleasure of a collaborative partner with whom I shared a certain mysterious connection. I'm not sure I could ever explain why we were able to make work together. We certainly had our disagreements but we always had faith in the other's vision.

Today I was reminded, very harshly, that you cannot jump into a room with strangers and expect that connection, or any fraction thereof, to be present.

We are trying to work together, but we have no idea how. We have no model to base ourselves on and no time to talk through the process before jumping in. If we throw out the old hierarchical structures, what replaces them? I had a method in my company in San Francisco but I'm having a hard time adapting it to these short projects.

We worked with a variety of artists from different mediums and had them all respond to the same stimuli - space. Then we asked them all to develop scenes in response. That scene could be anything, action, object, or music, as long as it had a beginning, middle, and end.

That way, each collaborator was responsible for a certain portion of the show, then we, the co-directors, wove the scenes together with theatrical action and from that characters and narrative began to emerge.

In these shorter projects, however, we're essentially being asked to create a whole piece in one scene.

So how do seven people make one scene?

Should seven people make one scene?

Can seven different sets of politics and tastes be made to fit together?

Today, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm having a bad day, I don't think this is wise, productive, or advisable. here's why:

Ideas rarely get the time they should to grow into something fruitful.

Groups are often forced to use a majority-rules democracy, which votes out good ideas simply because one idea has to win and one idea has to lose.

People are incapable, including myself, of hearing someone out completely before jumping in with their own variations or substitutions.

Ideas are extensions of our person and so it is nearly impossible not to take it personally when an idea is shot down.

People often sit at the table with different levels of investment, but assume everyone has the same level of investment.

Questions of style and politics rarely get the time they deserve - everyone has different thoughts on what's important but we don't take the time to address our differences.

Making decisions collectively is extremely difficult. When an idea is proposed and discussed and one person says "ok, can we agree on that?" and they get some blank stares, a yes, a no, and someone else seems to be texting..... what can you do?

(by the way - if any of my classmates are reading this - this is not my exact description of what happened today. it is a collection of things I've been thinking about since we started 5 weeks ago.)

this list could go on and on but I'll try to summarize by saying that if we persevere and develop these relationships over time, things will get better.

But today I really just feel like having a glass of wine and turning on the television.

november sixth, two thousand nine

Things to remember while making work.

Number 5: pursue the ideas you are passionate about.

After spending a week with Analogue and listening to Liam and Hannah talk about their process, I'm reminded of how damn hard it is to make theatre.

They'll spend two years on a project. Have I ever been passionate about something enough that I would spend two years working on it?

Someone once told me that ideas are like children. They have to be nurtured, fed, and raised to maturity. I think I disagree. I'd never kill my own child, but sometimes, often, ideas need to die. Maybe ideas are more like trees. Some have to be cleared so there can be new growth.

I recommend a book called "free Play" by a violinist named Stephen Nachmanovich. (sp?) he talks beautifully about freeing yourself from inhibition in order to let creative impulses rise to the surface. Interestingly, once you start getting good at that, having the ideas is no longer the hard part, its deciding which ones to pursue that can kill you.

So - if you are going to go through all the effort of making a performance, finding the resources, going through the headaches, getting into the fights, struggling with yourself, your collaborators, your loved ones - then its worth taking a minute to ask yourself - how do I feel about this idea? Am I passionate about it? Do I love it? Do just not have anything better to do during the day?

I'm intrigued by the idea that Analogue might spend two years on an idea for one performer and one audience member. I'm not sure I'd ever do that.

But I'm glad they are. They've been a lot of fun to work with and I'm glad they had fun, as well.

october twnety-ninth, two thousand nine

Things to remember while making work

Number four: always, always, always document

It's a pain, it takes time, and energy, it requires forethought, and it never looks as good in the documentation as it did live on stage...

This is just a short list of the excuses I've been making for why I'm not better at documenting my work.

One of the many things this year is about is getting out of old ruts and over old prejudices.

So no more excuses - time to start documenting!

Thanks so much to Alex Eisenberg for his inspiring look into the world of documentation.



Now it's time for a little sound experiment....

Lecture1 by jampatmulligan

So now that I know I can do it and I have the technology - all I need is a process to document...

hmm.... where am I going to find one of those?

October 24th, two thousand nine

Things to remember while making work

Number three: Details matter

It was one of the great pleasures of the last three weeks to attend the scenographer's exhibition yesterday.

I was enthralled by the minutiae...
Yellow yarn tied in a bow holding cardboard to a metal frame
Bubble-wrap leaves outlined in chalk
blue liquid draining through medical tubing
a perfect perspective illustration of the upper-deck bus seating.
a carefully repeated curve of white paper

Each new world offered a myriad of theatrical possibilities. It was difficult for me to perceive them as finished because I've been conditioned to respond to space, add to it, and develop scenes from it. I know this is unfair of me but it is how I see the work.

(all work, in fact. When I saw the weather project in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern I almost immediately began devising a performative event within it. I guess this is my version of Hitchcock's "exercising the story muscle.")

During our peers presentation, I found myself engaging in a journalist's game - who, what, when, where, and why? Not in any realistic, or naturalistic way, but in a more mysterious way. In our wrighting cluster we've been re-investigating some basics of story and it was a joy to go back to a place dominated by the unfamiliar.

who's face is this?
where is this light coming from
what is this smell?
when is this image taking place?
why....oh there are so many wonderful WHY's to ask...

!

And those questions arise, in my opinion, from the details. When we encounter a new space it is our instinct to begin by absorbing the macrocosm and then to work progressively toward the microcosm. The most exciting work I've ever seen is compelling on both scales - the work of people like Jackson Pollock or the sculptor Tom Friedman.

I have a theory that work will sustain interest as long as the viewer can continually observe ever-deepening layers of detail.

Two weeks ago I visited Eltham Palace. I happen to be a fan of Art Deco and this home, located in southeast London is one of the best examples of the form in the UK.



This is the main entrance hall. When you first walk in, the center dome, made of hundreds of circular glass blocks, overwhelms the viewer. It's sparsely furnished and leaves copious empty space (to be filled by cocktail party-goers, I'm sure!) but if you look at the far wall, you'll see a delicate wood-paneled wall filled with some excellent modern-era marquetry ( a wood inlay technique.) And then, if you haven't had too many gin and tonics, you'll notice a small clock, built into the wall over one of the staircases. It has small and delicate brass numbers laid directly onto the wall and needle-thin arms that still tell the correct time.

And don't even get me started on the light switches!

As I wondered from installation to installation I found myself being engaged in a similar way. Each layer yielded a new set of questions - or "asks" as Hannah Ringham might say.

Watching people stick arms and faces into the path of the projectors reminded me that anytime a human form enters a physical form a dynamic tension is present. Sometimes that tension is mild, perhaps even a bit sagging - for example, a well dressed man in a clean and neat living room - this holds a low level of tension. In simple terms, he belongs there. But if you were to insert that well-dressed man into the installation pictured above, there would be a very different tension present.

There's that saying - how does it go? The devil is in the details - is that it? I'll have to remember that.

October eighteenth, two thousand nine

Number two: things learned from a week-long workshop about how audiences hear in the theatre.

1. That recorded sound is different than live sound, and that amplified sound is different than un-amplified sound.

If a sound comes through a speaker it is a different thing than a sound that comes directly from its source to the ear.

I'm sure there are sound engineers who will argue this point, coming armed with all sorts of anecdotal evidence about audiences who were fooled by a well placed speaker or another cleverly used piece of technology. For me it is beside the point. Yes, I know that I have the power to fool an audience if I choose, but isn't that deceit?

In the last few years I've been developing a prejudice against recorded music. Now I find that prejudice expanding to include all pre-recorded sound (and video, possibly.) Theatre is a medium who's primary attribute is its live-ness. It is crucial, I believe, to exploit that live-ness at every opportunity.

I may easily be accused of being judgmental but I find the choice to use pre-existing, recorded music to be an especially lazy choice.

(The question of whether its better to have no music or recorded music is a fair one. I understand that budgets rarely permit musicians. To that I can only say that it is up to the artist to decide if they're willing to mount a production that is fundamentally compromised. I've certainly done it, but, the more I do it, the more I regret it.)

2. There is good reason to use the words "noise" or "music" or "sound" as specifically as possible.

I worked with a sound designer once who was annoyed when I asked for a piece to be "less noise, more music" He argued that that noise and music were the same thing looked at through different lenses. I appreciate the thought but in the context of making work, I believe its useful to have different words to express different things. I'd rather argue for hours about whether a particular piece is music or noise than to throw them both into the same pool and pretend that they are the same thing.

3. If a scene is made, and then scored, it's already dead.

The sound of an event is not an after thought.

I went to Soho Theatre to see Orphans by Dennis Kelly. The production had some serious flaws, chiefly among them was the music. There was, for me, an enormous and tangible gap between the event on stage and the music being piped in through the speakers. It was crystal clear at this moment that a director and cast created a scene and then sometime later a composer came along and added some music on top of it.

Not that this is always a recipe for disaster - Nino Rota's music for Fellini's Amacord stands out as an example of music so deeply ingrained in the scene that it is difficult to imagine them separately.

In the Soho Theatre production, sadly, this was not the case. I wish I was sophisticated enough to understand why this was the case. I think it had to do with a few things: First: the music was a kind of generic, cinematic suspense theme that droned on and on in a repetitive loop while the scene progressed. Second the music had, built into it, a kind of thunder-clap effect, heavily laden with reverb, that clearly didn't belong in the room with the scene because nothing else in the scene was drenched in the same effect. Third, the music was played through speakers hung from the grid. This is not atypical in anyway but somehow, in this space, it has the effect of the music coming from a very different place than the voices - both literally and figuratively.

And so I move forward with a renewed interest in collaborating with composers and artists in a way that eliminates the traditional hierarchy. I'm developing an idea that artists should all be responding to directly to the stimuli, without extra degrees of separation. If a production begins with a space, then both performers and composers should be responding directly to the space. It should not be the case that a writer responds to the space, then the actors respond to a writer, then a composer responds to the actors. In that situation there are a full two degrees of separation between stimulus and aural event.

October fourteenth, two thousand nine

This blog is, for the time being, a list of things I'd like to remember while making work.

Number one: Collaboration is hard.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, collaboration is hard. It requires patience, perseverance, humility, an open-mind, and an ability to listen to an extent rarely used in daily life.

Even if you know the people you are working with well, its still extremely difficult. I have worked with a collaborator in San Francisco since 2002 and while I grew increasingly capable throughout the years of partnership, it never became "easy."

Now trying being thrown into a room with eight people you've known for two weeks and try making a ten minute event in three hours.

This is really difficult work requiring muscles I haven't flexed in a long time and the prospect of doing this for the next year is exciting and terrifying.

What if I don't click with anyone? What if I come off as over-bearing? What if my ideas don't resonate with the others? What if I talk too much? Or too little? What if I try to assert my directorial instincts where they aren't welcome? What if I don't meet other people who share my aesthetics? What if I'm not able to make work that excites me because I compromise too many of my own principles?

On the other hand: There are so many opportunities ahead of us. There are so many perspectives amongst our class to learn from. There is a tangible energy and thrust in our group and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.