Collaboration

         So dramaturgy.  Weird term right? What is that?  We know that for any piece that isn't super recent, dramaturgy encompasses the act of fact checking.  So the length of the skirt, the colors of the clothes, the set.  IF you wanna make it period in some way, or if you just wanna do the time period of the playwright or the play some sort of visual, sonic or idealistic justice.
         I just saw Persephone last night.  It is interesting for a few reasons.  First off the music was gorgeous and not just because I'm a sucker for electronica and digitally harmonized voices.  Björk is my homegirl BUT it was good.  Lots of aspects were fantastic.  What made it interesting and what really landed the idea of collaboration was the dramaturgical aspects.  Modern and classical.
        So there's the idea of the dramaturg for new work.  For this the dramaturg seems to be sort of the body guard for the heart of the work, the person who listens allot and then hits you in the face with a one sentence idea and/or the person who makes sure everyone is on the same page.  In all these aspects the play was... intriguing.
       You don't always have a dramaturg.  Allot of the things they do can easily be done by the playwright and the director.  But sometimes its too much and two heads are always better than one.  But the idea of the piece needs one head.  If it doesn't things can go awry.  As it seems happened in this piece.
       But before I get on that train.  I wanna say the piece had the potential to be stunning.  The set design was off the chain.  Giant 19th century metal frames, a rotating green stone-ish piece in the center with a spring and winter side.  The set was made to shift.  You saw a backstage and proscenium from the front.  The piece was about a 19th century company on the cusp of "modern" theater performing the myth of persephone.  It was an odd take given the electronic music but buy-able.  You saw the backstage drama and the piece from the front.  The orchestra was filled with the tables and props and dressings of the "actors".  Interesting.
        Back to the piece itself.  So the first thing to be conceived in this piece was the music.  It wasn't written with the intent of being made into a performance piece necessarily.  The musicians in the company just felt inspired to write this music.  The music tended to center on the ideas of motherhood.  A dramaturg heard the stuff in passing and said that the idea of Persephone would fit the music quite well.  I think this is where things might have started to go funky.  So the core form is music.  The core theme is motherhood.  Now we introduce a narrative; Persephone.  The company has two projectionists, a director, a playwright, a set designer, and we'll call the two musicians a composer and a librettist/vocalist.
        So you have aaaaall these people working on the same project.  They all have to communicate and follow the same core idea.  I feel like they also need to cater to the core form, the music.  The styles clashed.  This was part of the problem.  There wasn't communication between the projectionists as far as a uniform style or idea to adhere to. It seemed like they jumped in with their styles and ran headlong with them.  But the bigger problem seemed to happen before that.  The core form was the music.  To that we fit the myth of Persephone.  Obviously music not directly concerned with Persephone won't fit and communicate perfectly, so we introduce the play within a play aspect.  The issue comes after this.  I wonder if it is a blessing and a curse in western theater that we place a great deal of weight on the narrative.  What may have happened here is that once persephone was introduced, it then became the concentration of the piece.  The core music, which still held the piece together had its weight removed and the piece collapsed in meaning.
       Just a thought.  So then what is the lesson?  Don't lose the idea of collaboration yes, but also don't lose the core theme, the core ideal.  The two are intertwined the collaboration and the ideal.  We need to agree on one ideal and pursue that together with full knowledge of one another in the process.
     

Write in negative space.

Peter

says use loop station to represent double mindedness, many voices in the head.  Voices of many people?  Ideas of opinions?  An opportunity to bare the soul.

Tape recorder
Projection
Frequencies are confusion.  Voices too battered, smeared apart to distinguish in the haze of alone.



Wabi(-sabi) represents a comprehensive aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete"

Drive, Craft, God The Form Moving Up In Us From Below.

It is a paradox, an act of momentary idiocy at times to try to attack a core emotion, fulfillment, from the right brain.  To plan is unnatural to me.  That is exactly why I am unprepared.  It is why my work is a pond.  A stagnant vibration.  At times maybe beautiful.  But it stops at an atmosphere.

I am ruled by my emotion.  This summer has taught me to gain some control over myself, or rather to allow God to take some of my weight.  It is an ongoing battle to give it all over to him.  But there is freedom in form.  This is the beauty of operatic singing, this is the beauty of mastering an instrument, this is the beauty of great acting, this is the beauty of any technical mastery, this is the beauty of craft. 

I believe a plumber can look at the work of another and call him/her an artist.  There is an ability to improvise over a melody.  A common communication which can then be elaborated upon.  Jazz, the great improvised art, stems each piece from a common tune over which elaboration, conversation occurs.  The elaboration is our soul in the idea.   This is when craft becomes art.  For an actor, for many, in repeated work, the soul may not breathe every moment, this is why Richard Digby-Day said that "acting is a craft which we very much hope to be an art".  The art doesn't always happen.  Our souls still quiver separate from them.  We will continue to create.  We will continue to love.

When God is the base.  The art over the craft is God speaking through us.  In a way this entire thing is an analogy for our walk with God and Christ.  We have the craft.  The inspiration and want to do good, to be different, to please God out of love for him and what he has done for us.  Our identity is not lost in this.  God is the base, he breathes through it all.  He is the reason our art, our lives move.  Our singular voices resound from this.  Our Father living a single relationship with each of us, speaks through that.  We react and move.  At times with him and at times without.  That is a beauty.

First Poems.

-Sonnet 113-

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function, and is partly blind;
Seems seeing, but effectually is out:
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch;
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch:
For if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight,
The most sweet-favoured or deformed'st creature,
The mountain, or the sea, the day, or night,
The crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
    Incapable of more, replete with you,
    My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue

Shakespeare is straight forward.  He cannot wrest the image of his beloved from his mind.  All connections drawn from objects are related back to her.
It feels like an opening chapter.
I wonder to write myself.  If I pay attention to detail. In describing this emotional state.  I get this state.  I think we all do.  Well... that's why shakespeare is timeless.  But I want to capture and relate to it.  Pull words directly from some underlying concept in my love that was.  It feels huge to try to use Shakespeare in a piece.  The man was a genius.  There's no harm in trying.
 
-The Paradox- (Donne)
No lover saith, I love, nor any other
      Can judge a perfect lover;
He thinks that else none can, nor will agree
      That any loves but he:
I cannot say I loved, for who can say
      He was killed yesterday?
Love with excess of heat, more young than old,
      Death kills with too much cold;
We die but once, and who loved last did die,
      He that saith twice, doth lie:
For though he seems to move, and stir a while,
      It doth the sense beguile.
Such life is like the light which bideth yet
      When the light's life is set
Or like the heat, which fire in solid matter
     Leaves behind, two hours after.
Once I loved and died; and am now become
     Mine epitaph and tomb.
Here dead men speak their last, and so do I;
     Love-slain, lo, here I lie.

Donne is harder for me.  This feeling.  Is it that we love, but cannot or will not relate our love to another.  Donne talks about one love.  Seems to talk about absolute monogomy here.  We will have romantic, fulfilled love once.  Or is it that when our one love dies we cannot love truly again.  This wants more thought.  There is a fear with God planning a single part for you that you will miss the chance.  He or she will be right in front of you.  Your one love.  You might let it pass you by and it would be over.  How then do we wait?  How will we know?

Craft

Craft.  You bastard.  You cost $200,000 dollars and years of study to learn. But you will embody joy and a relaxed creation when I use you.

Craft is the knowledge of how to mix blue with yellow
on my palette, but art is the courage to dip the brush
into the paint and lay it on the canvas in my own way.
Craft is knowing when to revise a manuscript and when
to leave it alone, but art is the fire in the mind that put
the the story on the page in the first place.  To grow
in craft is to increase that breadth of what I do, but
art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage
to be myself and myself alone, to communicate what
I and only I can communicate: that which I have
experienced or imagine.

Pat Schneider

Thoughts On Performance & Procrastination

Energy must not stem from fear.  It must stem at best from utter excitement and interest.  Find what holds you, ask if you can say something through this.

You must experience life, take a shower with your eyes closed.  Eat with your fork in the other hand.

Plug into the present and allow the past to simply happen to you.

Specifics-Look at something for a moment, take in one specific, do this ten times with the same something.  Try a person.  Your partner.

There are 3 aspects of unspoken performance; reactions, thinking and eye talk.

In realizing a character there are some things they, and in turn you must have opinions on: religion, politics, marriage/children, money, sex, death, beauty, time.

Thoughts On Solo Work

Things I've heard in the past two days.

On Writing:
You cannot plan each detail.
The work emanates from inquiry which emanates from the ache.
Good work is a total baring of the soul.  It evokes flashes of human.
The more personal a work the more universally it will communicate.
It is wise to pull from outside sources.

Technique - Passion - Something To Say

First

This will be something to document or organize thoughts.
I think I'll realize or find ensam here and people can say what they think.

There will be a yell and a whisper.