We’re coming to the end of Term 2. Just a week to go. I need some perspective on all of this and hope to get an outside eye on it through conversations with other students and a teacher or two between now and the beginning of Term 3. We get a two-week break between terms. Maybe I’ll find a way to get out of town for a few days, too, though even more time by myself isn’t specifically a goal right now. I’m hoping the break will afford me some time and separation to get a better look at things. It’s been a hard term. Quite discouraging at times.
In my “previous life” (back in Minneapolis, in ministry), I had a pretty good sense of what I was good at and what I wasn’t. Much better than here, anyway (though an appreciation of my own gifts and efforts has never been my strong suit). Here, so often, I just can’t tell if I’m doing anything well. Almost all my efforts feel poorly executed, poorly received. If that previous quote from Beckett (Samuel, not Thomas) is a saying to live by, I’m certainly achieving my dose of failure, but I don't feel like I’m “failing better,” whatever that might mean. It’s disheartening, sometimes depressing. Today I took myself aside on the lunch break (literally, finding a place alone way off in a remote corner of Three Mills) just to give myself some distance and avoid conversations for a bit while I tried to work through my reactions to something that happened this morning. Going off alone isn’t always helpful, I’ll admit, but today it helped me get back in touch with an awareness that was helpful last fall: I didn’t come here as an actor, and I won’t leave here as one. (That’s even clearer to me now than it was when I arrived!) Remembering that can help me draw more general learnings from things here rather than getting too down on myself for doing poorly. For example, I rarely choose to put myself in the center of an ensemble improv. I feel better suited to supporting and responding than to leading and proposing. Today I did step into the center with a proposition in a group improv, and apparently did it poorly. Or at least that’s how I understood the feedback, which was all about how nothing held together, with one cryptic comment about how I in particular hadn’t appreciated the impact that one small thing can have. (The feedback I usually get is that I’m doing things too small, too internally. Go figure.) I too could feel that things hadn’t gone well, and the whole thing reinforced my feelings of incompetence. Which made me even less confident about stepping into that kind of role again. Which will probably undermine my ability to do it any better the next time. (Which may not be soon!)
If I can pull my ego out of it a bit, though, and try not to give too much weight to what I see as the repeatedly lukewarm (at best) responses to my efforts, both from teachers and my fellow students, then I can redirect my focus to more constructive learning—about dramatic structure, for example, or storytelling. Otherwise I simply replow the overly tilled ground of my own feelings of inadequacy. This is a really hard discipline for me, trying to redirect my inclinations like that (and it’s yet another thing I haven’t been good at it over the past several weeks!). But it’s certainly a more productive path for me while I’m here.
When creating flows freely
Thursday brought one of the rare occasions when I felt that something I’d done truly found affirmation—and damned if I even knew exactly what it was I did! It would take too long to describe exactly what the exercise in Voice class was, but it put us in a place where we were doing free-form vocalizing, alone and in front of a group. When Simon first described what it was we’d be doing, and then demonstrated it, I thought for sure this was something I’d be just as happy not getting a turn at. But something about the way we went onto it brought me to a place where, when it was my turn, I could hear the surprising quality of what was coming out of me. The problem was I wasn’t in a frame of mind really to take note of exactly what it was I was doing! So how to replicate it?
I asked Simon about it afterward, and he said it has to do with creating an environment where you’re so relaxed that your creating freely flows. And that what you need to figure out, over time—and then demand—are the conditions you need in order to work from that place of trust and safety. I know what some of those conditions are, and I recognized some of them in the build-up to the time of vocal improv—but there’s just not the time (or indulgence) to incorporate those all the time. Still I do recognize that confidence and creativity and … something else—it’s not really comfort, but that’s the word that’s coming to mind now—go hand in hand.
So in the midst of all of this I’m back to trying to figure out what it is I want to create. And how to go about it. And what I need in order to be able to do it.
Quite a task, all in all. But perhaps we each have our own version of it.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Beauty and brutality
Took a day off this week and went to Kew Gardens, a huge botanical park west of London. I'd mistakenly assumed it would be among London's extensive free offerings, but it's not--£13 admission. (Student concession reduces it by all the way to £12!) Still, since it took me so long to get there, I wasn't going to turn around and head right back to East London. I ended up enjoyed it so much I became a member. I'm now a Friend of Kew. I hope to go back regularly. It's good for my soul to get out of the city and stroll in open spaces. The indoor areas at Kew (the word "greenhouses" doesn't do them justice) are remarkable. One room in the facility dedicated to the Princess of Wales has stunning cascades of orchids. Another small building is an ingeniously designed shelter for alpine plants. The palm house is like a well ordered jungle. (That has to be as glaring an oxymoron as I've written in a while!) I spent most of a day at Kew and saw only a small portion of the Gardens. Among my favorite parts was the patch of witch hazels, one of the first outdoor flowering plants. (Across the street from my house a bush has been in bloom since New Years, but most everything is still dormant. I do see daffodil spikes standing in some garden plots though.) I'm sure there will be new things to see at Kew the next time I go.
I took the day off because I've been quite discouraged of late. I won't go into much of that here, but it's been hard. A combination of the classes, my other work schedule, the weather, my continuing sense of isolation, and living in a cold damp house that just isn't a place I'm inclined to go back to to relax. There's mold growing in my bedroom, I discovered yesterday. But I also read that February is the coldest month in London, and Isabel says the second term is the hardest one, so hopefully some of this will lift soon.
In class we've moved from paintings to poetry and back to painting. I think I mentioned that our final Creation project is to present a painting--my group chose a cubist painting by Braque (a painting I really don't like but am having some fun working with anyway)--and somehow to incorporate music and poetry into our presentation, or at least into our preparation. How, of course, is left up to us. A lot of what we've been doing is listening to a piece of music, or observing a painting, or working with the sounds of a poem, and then setting the music or painting or poem aside and continuing to work out our expression through movement without the presence of the piece of art that inspired it. So what you would see or hear us do in class doesn't include the painting or poem or musical piece itself; but is rather the interpretation of it. It's not exactly modern dance, but that's probably the easiest way to describe it. That makes it sound pretty dreadful to some, I know. And maybe it is dreadful--it's really hard for me to tell, which is part of my discouragement these days.
The poetry section was close to my heart. I enjoyed much of it, especially the search for a poem to work with. I knew they wouldn't really want me to work with this one, but I chose to share Billy Collins' "The Lanyard" with my classmates anyway. Several asked about it afterward. It's just so accessible, and beneath the humor, subtly lovely. Spurred to find another poem, I came across several by James Wright. It was hard to choose among them. I settled on one that latched onto me quite slowly, but I really came to love it. It has something to do with the stretched yearning of the long vowels ("dreaming of heroes") and the tragic, almost fatalistic imagery of the last verse, bending back on the opening lines and the boys' fathers' lost and ruptured youth.
Next week we move on to architecture. One of the teachers wants us to visit St. Paul's cathedral, so I went there for Evensong yesterday. Another place and time to which I'll return. I do find that there's something in the artfulness of that kind of liturgy, sound, and space that I miss.
London wants for beauty. Yes, there are great collections of art in museums you can visit for free, and some of the buildings are beautifully proportioned, but much of the time this city feels cold and brutal. Or if not brutal, then certainly impersonal. I'm rediscovering my need for courses of beauty in my life's diet. I'm not getting enough of it. Interesting that the poem I found so moving ends with such battering images, perhaps redeeming or reclaiming them in some way.
I took the day off because I've been quite discouraged of late. I won't go into much of that here, but it's been hard. A combination of the classes, my other work schedule, the weather, my continuing sense of isolation, and living in a cold damp house that just isn't a place I'm inclined to go back to to relax. There's mold growing in my bedroom, I discovered yesterday. But I also read that February is the coldest month in London, and Isabel says the second term is the hardest one, so hopefully some of this will lift soon.
In class we've moved from paintings to poetry and back to painting. I think I mentioned that our final Creation project is to present a painting--my group chose a cubist painting by Braque (a painting I really don't like but am having some fun working with anyway)--and somehow to incorporate music and poetry into our presentation, or at least into our preparation. How, of course, is left up to us. A lot of what we've been doing is listening to a piece of music, or observing a painting, or working with the sounds of a poem, and then setting the music or painting or poem aside and continuing to work out our expression through movement without the presence of the piece of art that inspired it. So what you would see or hear us do in class doesn't include the painting or poem or musical piece itself; but is rather the interpretation of it. It's not exactly modern dance, but that's probably the easiest way to describe it. That makes it sound pretty dreadful to some, I know. And maybe it is dreadful--it's really hard for me to tell, which is part of my discouragement these days.
The poetry section was close to my heart. I enjoyed much of it, especially the search for a poem to work with. I knew they wouldn't really want me to work with this one, but I chose to share Billy Collins' "The Lanyard" with my classmates anyway. Several asked about it afterward. It's just so accessible, and beneath the humor, subtly lovely. Spurred to find another poem, I came across several by James Wright. It was hard to choose among them. I settled on one that latched onto me quite slowly, but I really came to love it. It has something to do with the stretched yearning of the long vowels ("dreaming of heroes") and the tragic, almost fatalistic imagery of the last verse, bending back on the opening lines and the boys' fathers' lost and ruptured youth.
Next week we move on to architecture. One of the teachers wants us to visit St. Paul's cathedral, so I went there for Evensong yesterday. Another place and time to which I'll return. I do find that there's something in the artfulness of that kind of liturgy, sound, and space that I miss.
London wants for beauty. Yes, there are great collections of art in museums you can visit for free, and some of the buildings are beautifully proportioned, but much of the time this city feels cold and brutal. Or if not brutal, then certainly impersonal. I'm rediscovering my need for courses of beauty in my life's diet. I'm not getting enough of it. Interesting that the poem I found so moving ends with such battering images, perhaps redeeming or reclaiming them in some way.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Fado night and Giacometti
Since last I blogged, I've been to Portugal to see Isabel, who was spending time with Diogo. (This was after Isabel got turned away from entry into the UK. She flew into Heathrow and they wouldn't let her past customs and immigration. Put her on the next plane back to Newark. Long and frustrating story. You can find some of it on Isabel's blog.)
So, since she couldn't get into the country--and they wouldn't even let me see her at the airport--I went to Portugal to spend a few days with her. One highlight of the trip (besides seeing Isabel and enjoying the hospitality of Diogo and his parents) was going into Porto for a fado night. Fado is perhaps the characteristic Portuguese music (from what little I know)--very soulful, full of heartache, much like the blues but without any blame on whoever done you wrong. It's more like whatever happened was simply fated, and loss and grief are as much a part of life as breathing. What we heard was Lisbon fado, ("the real fado," I'm told), sad to the point of heartbreak, even to those of us who couldn't understand the words.
This was in a small cafe, crammed with maybe 40 people. All the singers that night were mid-40s and over, but several folks in their 20s came to listen. Fado is making a comeback, though there is some tension between traditionalists and some innovative stylists. One Portuguese guitar (it looks like a big, teardrop-shaped mandolin with six pairs of strings) and two "regular" guitars accompanied a series of solo singers. If the setting had been Sicilian, it would have looked Mafia. It seemed pretty blue-collar. One singer wore a shiny gray suit with big pinstripes. The men who wore suits (fewer than half) had the kind of wardrobe where the shades get darker from the tie to the suit to the shirt. This guy's companion--a bald man dressed completely in dark brown--flashed a little gold jewelry. Most of the singers were men. One was a woman in a fur coat with an amazing tenor voice. This is the kind of music that people sing with their eyes closed and brow creased, hands and head punctuating the words with tight gestures. It's passionate as flamenco, but if flamenco is fire, fado is the slow inextinguishable burn that goes deeper and deeper and never lets you go.
If, as we keep trying to achieve in our classes at Lispa, the voice can truly come from the belly, this is the kind of music that's rooted there.
Had my flight back from Porto had been a couple of hours later, I might have gotten an extra day or two with Isabel and Diogo. During my bus back into London from Stansted, it started to snow. And it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. And snowed. All night and the next day. This wasn't just little rainy snow, this was big flurries. It even felt like Minnesota for a while. The airports closed that evening. Then buses and the Tubes stopped running. On Monday, London took a snow day. Pretty much all of Britain did, I think.
Our school day was canceled for one day, shortened for the next two. Then we got back to what is our new regular schedule.
We’ve now had a week in our permanent facilities at Three Mills. Before this, half of our classes were in a lovely wooden room with a high ceiling and skylights which, unfortunately, was really too small to have 20-25 people moving around in. Our other classes were in what felt like an airplane hangar with a hugely loud heating system that had to be on full blow almost all the time to keep the chill down. The two spaces were separated by a 5-minute walk and a security gate. Now we’re in two large renovated spaces separated by a short cold hallway. They don’t quite feel homey yet, but they’ll probably start to when they get a few scars on them.
We’ve moved on to poetry as the thing to move us, physically and emotionally. The sounds of poetry in particular at this point. (How do you move each sound in the word “crack,” for example? Or “dozing”? and then how do you move the whole word?) In our Creation small groups we’ve set about choosing a painting to develop a piece around, eventually to include musical and poetic elements as well. If I can, I’ll post a link to the painting we settle on next week if I can. How all this will come together I have no idea. But we’ll develop something. Stay tuned.
I'd mentioned the Andy Goldsworthy film we saw a few weeks ago. The series continues. One film was about Evelyn Glennie, the percussionist who hears through her body. Another was about Alberto Giacometti--he of the spindly spectral sculptural figures. The most recent was a Brazilian film about different ways of seeing, including interviews with blind visual artists. I liked the Giacometti film the least and not surprisingly, it's stuck with me the most. I'd always liked his sculptures, but after the film I had less appreciation for them (and more for his paintings). Part of the problem with the film was the self-consciousness of its construction of the image of the Great Artist, which was a bit comical as well as frustrating. But more to the point, Giacometti says at several points that his obsession sculpting comes from his really not understanding sculpture. I don't understand sculpture either, I'm sure, but after listening to him and seeing the same kinds of forms from him over and over and over again, I think he's right. Not that that's a fault. But it occurred to me that what he seemed to be doing with one sculpture after another was the equivalent of a singer singing scales. They were all practice, in a way. Necessary exercises for one who's working on his or her craft (or art--where's the line, I wonder sometimes). But is that enough?
Which got me to thinking: Mightn't the same be said for a lot of Picasso's works? The other day I went to the Tate Modern. Enshrined on the walls there are a quick pencil drawing Picasso did (the card next to it mentions several other known drawings he did the same day) and a cubist painting that looks unfinished. OK, maybe intentionally, maybe not. Or maybe it doesn't matter how it looks to me. It's not a new insight to say there's a cult-like fascination with anything created by certain artists after a certain point in their careers--probably more so with visual artists than with writers, directors, or performers, or maybe this is more a sign of how things were in the art world several decades ago--but this all has gotten me thinking. It used to be, for example, that music was more of a participatory art than it became with the advent of recording. How embarrassing to falteringly play an instrument in front of your family or friends when you could hear perfection on an LP or CD. And so experimentation became discouraged. Maybe the same could be said for drawing and painting in an age of mass publication of high-quality color images, and the mass copying of sculptures. Buy your favorite Rodin in any dimension you want in the museum shop. And so perfection and some kind of critical authority squelch the showing of any kind of exploration. With the internet and GarageBand, maybe that pendulum has reversed, but with the huge budgets needed in the main current of dramatic arts like theatre and film, the same danger has shifted to another arena. This is some of what Lispa seeks to counter, I suppose. Long live the experimental artist. And here's to iconoclasts breaking the idol of perfection, I suppose. Go off-balance, as they'd say here. Discover something that's more than you could plan or strategize. And then have the discipline to refine it while also keeping it open.
(Yes, I know. Blogs are supposed to be short. But this is what I get for not writing more often.)
So, since she couldn't get into the country--and they wouldn't even let me see her at the airport--I went to Portugal to spend a few days with her. One highlight of the trip (besides seeing Isabel and enjoying the hospitality of Diogo and his parents) was going into Porto for a fado night. Fado is perhaps the characteristic Portuguese music (from what little I know)--very soulful, full of heartache, much like the blues but without any blame on whoever done you wrong. It's more like whatever happened was simply fated, and loss and grief are as much a part of life as breathing. What we heard was Lisbon fado, ("the real fado," I'm told), sad to the point of heartbreak, even to those of us who couldn't understand the words.
This was in a small cafe, crammed with maybe 40 people. All the singers that night were mid-40s and over, but several folks in their 20s came to listen. Fado is making a comeback, though there is some tension between traditionalists and some innovative stylists. One Portuguese guitar (it looks like a big, teardrop-shaped mandolin with six pairs of strings) and two "regular" guitars accompanied a series of solo singers. If the setting had been Sicilian, it would have looked Mafia. It seemed pretty blue-collar. One singer wore a shiny gray suit with big pinstripes. The men who wore suits (fewer than half) had the kind of wardrobe where the shades get darker from the tie to the suit to the shirt. This guy's companion--a bald man dressed completely in dark brown--flashed a little gold jewelry. Most of the singers were men. One was a woman in a fur coat with an amazing tenor voice. This is the kind of music that people sing with their eyes closed and brow creased, hands and head punctuating the words with tight gestures. It's passionate as flamenco, but if flamenco is fire, fado is the slow inextinguishable burn that goes deeper and deeper and never lets you go.
If, as we keep trying to achieve in our classes at Lispa, the voice can truly come from the belly, this is the kind of music that's rooted there.
Had my flight back from Porto had been a couple of hours later, I might have gotten an extra day or two with Isabel and Diogo. During my bus back into London from Stansted, it started to snow. And it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. And snowed. All night and the next day. This wasn't just little rainy snow, this was big flurries. It even felt like Minnesota for a while. The airports closed that evening. Then buses and the Tubes stopped running. On Monday, London took a snow day. Pretty much all of Britain did, I think.
Our school day was canceled for one day, shortened for the next two. Then we got back to what is our new regular schedule.
We’ve now had a week in our permanent facilities at Three Mills. Before this, half of our classes were in a lovely wooden room with a high ceiling and skylights which, unfortunately, was really too small to have 20-25 people moving around in. Our other classes were in what felt like an airplane hangar with a hugely loud heating system that had to be on full blow almost all the time to keep the chill down. The two spaces were separated by a 5-minute walk and a security gate. Now we’re in two large renovated spaces separated by a short cold hallway. They don’t quite feel homey yet, but they’ll probably start to when they get a few scars on them.
We’ve moved on to poetry as the thing to move us, physically and emotionally. The sounds of poetry in particular at this point. (How do you move each sound in the word “crack,” for example? Or “dozing”? and then how do you move the whole word?) In our Creation small groups we’ve set about choosing a painting to develop a piece around, eventually to include musical and poetic elements as well. If I can, I’ll post a link to the painting we settle on next week if I can. How all this will come together I have no idea. But we’ll develop something. Stay tuned.
I'd mentioned the Andy Goldsworthy film we saw a few weeks ago. The series continues. One film was about Evelyn Glennie, the percussionist who hears through her body. Another was about Alberto Giacometti--he of the spindly spectral sculptural figures. The most recent was a Brazilian film about different ways of seeing, including interviews with blind visual artists. I liked the Giacometti film the least and not surprisingly, it's stuck with me the most. I'd always liked his sculptures, but after the film I had less appreciation for them (and more for his paintings). Part of the problem with the film was the self-consciousness of its construction of the image of the Great Artist, which was a bit comical as well as frustrating. But more to the point, Giacometti says at several points that his obsession sculpting comes from his really not understanding sculpture. I don't understand sculpture either, I'm sure, but after listening to him and seeing the same kinds of forms from him over and over and over again, I think he's right. Not that that's a fault. But it occurred to me that what he seemed to be doing with one sculpture after another was the equivalent of a singer singing scales. They were all practice, in a way. Necessary exercises for one who's working on his or her craft (or art--where's the line, I wonder sometimes). But is that enough?
Which got me to thinking: Mightn't the same be said for a lot of Picasso's works? The other day I went to the Tate Modern. Enshrined on the walls there are a quick pencil drawing Picasso did (the card next to it mentions several other known drawings he did the same day) and a cubist painting that looks unfinished. OK, maybe intentionally, maybe not. Or maybe it doesn't matter how it looks to me. It's not a new insight to say there's a cult-like fascination with anything created by certain artists after a certain point in their careers--probably more so with visual artists than with writers, directors, or performers, or maybe this is more a sign of how things were in the art world several decades ago--but this all has gotten me thinking. It used to be, for example, that music was more of a participatory art than it became with the advent of recording. How embarrassing to falteringly play an instrument in front of your family or friends when you could hear perfection on an LP or CD. And so experimentation became discouraged. Maybe the same could be said for drawing and painting in an age of mass publication of high-quality color images, and the mass copying of sculptures. Buy your favorite Rodin in any dimension you want in the museum shop. And so perfection and some kind of critical authority squelch the showing of any kind of exploration. With the internet and GarageBand, maybe that pendulum has reversed, but with the huge budgets needed in the main current of dramatic arts like theatre and film, the same danger has shifted to another arena. This is some of what Lispa seeks to counter, I suppose. Long live the experimental artist. And here's to iconoclasts breaking the idol of perfection, I suppose. Go off-balance, as they'd say here. Discover something that's more than you could plan or strategize. And then have the discipline to refine it while also keeping it open.
(Yes, I know. Blogs are supposed to be short. But this is what I get for not writing more often.)
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