This term at Lispa we're working with color and paintings. Apparently Jacques Lecoq, from whom this school's approach to theatre grows, had his own theories of color, and so following his language we speak of how fast colors are, what are their dynamics, how much space they take up. For example, according to Lecoq, red is the smallest color or the most compact. Blue might be the biggest? Green has its own distinctive sense of direction. On some of this I'd agree. On other bits I'm not so sure. Anyway, as you might guess, it's all quite abstract. Much more so than when we were observing how a piece of paper reacts when crumpled and released, or how a balloon inflates. And so when we work in Improv class and move as we think green moves, or make sounds to express how we think the yellow in a Van Gogh sounds, well, this is an entirely different level of challenge.
Off the cuff the other day I said in a conversation that I have a clear and definite idea of what I'm trying to express in Improv maybe 3 times out of 10. These days I'd say that ratio is a bit optimistic.
And, you might ask, what use is all this? I can't give an answer right now. But I can't help but ask the question, too, even though I keep telling myself I need to allow more time before I impose those questions on this experience.
Maybe it's having turned the corner on the new year, but the questions of where all this is going--what it's opening up for me--are more present than they were last fall. Surely some of this has to do with conversations Robin and I had when I was home for Christmas--in particular, questions about whether she can or will join me for the second year. Frankly this whole thing is a struggle--financially as well as in terms of relationship and coordinating with each other's plans. So there are lots of reasons why I might be increasingly concerned over where all this is leading. There's little justification for staying the second year if it won't help me get to wherever I want to go afterward. And Robin in particular needs to know whether to plan on coming for Year 2 because that decision determines whether she looks for arts residencies for the fall and for a renter for the house. Those things just can't wait till I finish the school year in July.
In short, I'm feeling pretty weighed down with all of these indefinites. And working with such abstract subject matter ... I was going to say that it doesn't help, but maybe it's an apt reflection of these other things I'm dealing with. Thomas warned (or promised?) that this term would take us into darker emotional territory. This is my shade of it for now, or part of my experience anyway. And I'm coming up against challenges (again) of how much of what I'm going through I'm willing to share with my others, which furthers my feelings of isolation and marginalization. Emotionally, this is a hard time.
I skipped out of school early on Thursday and took Friday off today, too, hoping that constructing a long weekend for myself would help me get a handle on some of this, or at least re-establish enough distance that I can work with it more productively. Before leaving school Thursday, rather than just sending word with a classmate, I decided to go tell Amy I'd be skipping her class. It seemed the more appropriate way to go about it. On the way over to Studio B (in a different section of Three Mills) I ran into a fellow student whom I don't know well. She asked how I was doing, etc., and when I indicated that I might skip the afternoon class she asked, "Is it the age thing?"--which I thought a very surprising question, coming from someone I've only talked with 2 or 3 times and have never had a class with. Am I that transparent? Or are others as aware of this as I am? (I'm afraid it's more the former than the latter.) She also told me what we'd be doing in class, just coming from it herself: viewing and doing improvs on a painting by Francis Bacon. Which one I'm not sure, but this is the kind of image that comes to mind. (What my classmate described could have been a painting like this one or one of Bacon's others that include images of flayed bodies.)
Part of me thought, well, this is exactly what could be helpful right now, to give expression to this kind of darkness. But I still decided to pass for the day. That kind of expression is where I think I'm headed, but I want to develop my skills a bit more first. Otherwise I think it might be too much like a beginning swimmer jumping into the middle of the English Channel in the midst of a storm. There is a bit of a therapeutic element to this school, but I don't want to use it that way too much. Self-absorption isn't the route to go. I've seen a bit of that in others here (though not too awfully much) and I really don't want to go there myself.
What lies beneath
One aspect of the program that's different this term is watching films with Thomas on Monday evenings. There've been two thus far--"Rivers and Tides" about environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy and "Touch the Sound," a documentary about deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie. I'd seen both before and skipped Evelyn Glennie this time around, but watching "Rivers and Tides" the other night reminded me of how you see different things in a good film when you see it again in a different context. Just one example was when Goldsworthy spoke about how what you see on the surface is affected by what's beneath it. Two images that accompanied that were watching a river flow over a rock and a wood-and-clay installation he made in a village in France. The installation looked at first just like a wall that was being plastered with local mud, but as the mud dried, a pattern emerged in the cracks that echoed a serpentine pattern he'd built in underneath.
Artistic expression is like that, of course, always influenced by what's going on below the surface. And (having stepped out of the practice of ministry myself, I'm more willing to reveal) the little secret that ministers seldom speak of publicly is the worry over the nakedness of their own preaching. They so often preach the message that they themselves long to hear. Faith is so personal, so autobiographical, so often formed by need, desire, and circumstance. It's a crime when people bleed it dry.
So I come back to the question of how much of my own soul and emotion to pour into my work here--and how much to reveal. At the foundational level, I think we all have to draw from what lies beneath the surface. But if expression is too self-referencing, it's not enough of a communal event and experience. I think the task is in large part to give expression to what is honest and personal in such a way that others can read themselves into it. (I always thought that was the best preaching, too.) But these days I feel like my awareness of my own inner state is too out of balance with my capacity to express it with the combination of power and subtlety that I want. Yes, I know that adage "practice makes perfect" as well as anyone, but with so much of this being so intensely personal, it's not quite like staying late after baseball practice to take some extra grounders. I'm trying to find my way here in what is still new territory for me. And sometimes it feels a bit like venturing onto thin ice.
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