people theatre #2: connections
I imagine people who act or direct regularly and connections they make with other actors or directors. As a mostly backstage worker in the past- there's a connection but it's different, it's much less- I don't know- visceral. Do these connections last? Or do they fade away and become awkward nostalgia, like so many personal connections do with time and distance? How depressing. I am never moving again. Well, eventually.
Do these connections bleed something into us internally, forever effecting our character, our personality, or at least our social self, our perspective? What will my connections from this show become? Will they morph into something else? Can friendships such as these last? Can spiritual siblinghood endure? Does it want to? Do I want it to? How much more cryptic and annoying can I be with this endless stream of questions? Should I rename my blog to indicate said endless steam of questions? Would that inspire me to think of answers? Or just more questions?
theatre people and people theatre
The only thing that's really been going on with me lately is theatre. Theatre, theatre, and more theatre. Pity, because now that I've actually got a bit of a holiday, it's the last bloody thing I want to think about. So, really, what else can I say but that?
It's not that I'm sick of it, mind you. It's just exhausting. It's the people thing, mainly. (Plus the theory thing, but that's another post entirely.) I'm too much of an introvert. I disappear a lot. To recharge. I've been used to being able to disappear whenever I wanted to. It's one freedom I always made sure I had. But now... It's still there, I suppose, just not so readily accessible. And even when I leave, my mind doesn't. It's the last thing I want to think about, yet it's the only thing I can think about. Theatre. And people. Theatre, people, and more people.
The weekend before last saw me as the lead role of "Spinning Into Butter" by Rebecca Gilman. (They're making a movie out of it; Sarah Jessica Parker will play my role; I don't know how I feel about that; well actually I do but since it's not nice I won't say it.) Then the
Open Stage Variety Show and particularly a sketch that me and Jill as
The Pathological Upstagers performed took over the following week. Plus there's a plan for an additional Open Stage event, the last week of class, in another space on campus, as a collaboration between the theatre (well, me) and the Dean of Students and Wellness departments. The show I'm stage-managing is in full-swing-mode. And tomorrow I'm meeting with a fellow student who's putting on
The Vagina Monologues next term; I'm directing it. And I must start thinking more about my senior project soon. My advisor returns from Africa next week, we're supposedly having a meeting about it.
So yea. Theatre.
Artaud, Grotowski, Brook, Me
from "Artaud, Grotowski, Brook, Me", a paper for Directing Seminar:In studying these directors and their philosophies on theatre in class, and in particular during the research for this paper, I have begun to develop my own ideas and ideals and ideology about directing. Though, the only chance I have had to apply them is as one half of The Pathological Upstagers, a comedy duo which features as the other half fellow theatre student Jill Summerville. I feel that, in the creation and execution of our sketches traces of Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook have crept through. These traces may have been invisible influences (as many claim: what theatre is not inspired by them?), but by learning about their respective philosophies I have come to understand how they influence and also to allow them to inspire quite directly, using their techniques more intentionally.
Artaud's desire to affect the audience viscerally is definitely something I go for in my comedy and plan to go for in my directing: but in general, the visceral reaction I'd like to achieve is for the audience to lose themselves with laughter, to laugh so hard it hurts. Talk about cathartic: to me it matters little what is actually on the stage, as it did for Artaud and Grotowski. I believe that any number of things can get the audience both thinking and hurting; it depends primarily on the delivery: is it comic? tragic? tongue-in-cheek? slapstick? Allowing the audience to lose themselves in laughter purges them of their every-day stress and puts them in a better mood, the effects of which can last for quite some time afterward, and may even allow them to laugh at other things in life. This is the cleansing I hope to achieve.
Grotowski's "poor" theatre has also been an inspiration, but perhaps for different reasons than what he had intended. As one who grew up actually poor and who is a communist at heart, I strive to reclaim theatre as a tool for the people: both as theatre-makers and theatre-goers. As a theatre-maker I want theatre to be cheap to make- using Grotowski's focus on the actor-spectator relationship and downplay of the other, often costly aspects of the theatre. As a theatre-goer I want theatre to be accessible; which, perhaps, none of the three went out of their way to stress, but that's the beauty of Marx's dialectics: I can create a synthesis between their methods of theatre-making and my own ideals. A synthesis which, when approached by another good idea down the road, can morph into synthesis #2, which brings us back to Brook's ideal of embracing constant change.
Artaud, Grotowski, and Brook all wanted (or, in Brook's case, wants) theatre to be something new, something refreshing, some beautifully revolutionary. So do I. And though I may not agree with all of their methods and philosophies, this common objective will always allow me to think of them as my contemporaries, my comrades. It will also always inspire me to believe that this type of theatre is possible: other people have thought it, and done it, successfully, so why can't I? The theatre allows us to never feel alone, to never despair.
On Being On The Generational Cusp
I've been thinking a lot my and my age group's position on the generational cusp. Thinking- I've been kind of obsessed. Lately I relate so much in my life to the exact years I grew up and in particular what pop culture I remember.
It started this summer, but the spark was planted when I entered Antioch over 3 years ago. I was talking to a fellow student, one day my senior, about how I was finding how little i could relate to the other 1st years, 3 years my junior. I said that maybe it was the just-out-of-high-school thing, but it seemed more that than- after all, I'd related to just-out-of-high-school kids at City Year for the past 2 years- they who were 1 and 2 years younger than me. This gap seemed to specifically be with people born in or after 1984.
The fellow student said that the generational shift occured in 1984, that kids born that year technically came from the generation after us. These '84 babies (strange irony of "1984" intended or not, I don't know, but it can hardly be ignored) were the children of '80s yuppies or faux-hippies, and grew up with the Internet much more than me (I got online in '95, when I was 14, and that was early for kids my age). She said that she felt that bridge with the '84 babies more than with other younger students herself. I always meant to look more into it but never did. I kind of got used to it, being the older one, when in most other places I was (and still am) the baby.
Fast forward to this summer, the term before I returned to campus to greet a group of 1st years now 6 years younger than me. My mom had cable and I got addicted to all those VH1 and E! list shows on the '90s, child stars of the '80s, etc. Not to mention the whole
Anthony Michael Hall thing and rediscovery (or in some cases, discovery) of the John Hughes films that I so remarkably did not really grow up with.
The day I spent watching
"I Love The '90s" on VH1 was the beginning and in many ways the most telling and significant. Each year was given its own hour- I did not leave that couch except to occasionally get food or check my email during the commercial breaks for most of the day. I was quite vocal about it, reminiscing about things I hadn't thought about in years, singing along to songs I thought I'd forgotten, frightening my mother who came and went several times during my stationery pilgrimage (gone for several hours and then: "You're still here? It's only on 1994?").
The telling part was how I began to lost interest starting in 1996 or so. It wasn't because I was bored or sore (my backside can handle sitting on a couch all day on occasion, as Adrian LeDuc so eloquently put it), it was because the pop culture items covered were now bringing me back to high school years which, though a fair chunk of my life behind me, failed to offer the enchanting nostalgia of a forgotten childhood. Sometime during 1997- which also marked the time period I began to opt out of pop culture almost entirely- the TV was turned off.
So it was these early years that, fascinatingly, I was fascinated by. And these are the years when even a few years' age difference- say, 3- make a huge difference in one's consciousness of the environment and particularly- my particular area of fascination- the entertainment directed at one. And so it naturally stands that while the New Kids On The Block do not necessarily continue to influence my life and my character (if they ever did to a substantial degree), I will feel somewhat alienated from people who do not remember them- them that I have taken for granted as an unequivocal part of the formative years of myself and them who I have traditionally thought of as my peers. Forget something like "The X-Files", which, though was certainly on long enough to catch younger kids later on, they will not remember when it premiered. "The X-Files" was hugely significant in my life, and I bet it helped to shape my character, and a big part of that was as my self-given title as one of the original X-philes (if not
the original- it was, after all, infamously, my favorite show even before it came out- which is another story entirely. But it's true).
It works the other way too, obviously. But not getting the references of my older friends is nothing new to me. When I was 17 my best friend was 25 and so not relating to her relationship to '80s alternative music was a given. More recently, one of my closest friends is 4 years older than me- and though the age gap has narrowed, many of the references remain foreign. Even more recently, this year in fact, a 28-year-old friend- in reference to
my blog post about "I Love The '90s", went on about how hooked he was on "I Love The '80s". Four years and yet our cultural identity is divided by a decade.
But again- that is nothing new. The other day I was talking to a friend who was born in 1985. She did not remember the New Kids On The Block. Or even later things like Sublime which brought me through high school. She told me that instead, her NKOTB was The Spice Girls and her Sublime was Britney Spears. Musical tastes aside, it's the fact that I was too old to consider her things anything more than teenybopper stuff that we found interesting.
I'm sure it's to do largely with my having older friends growing up, but not many younger ones. I have often been friends with '82 babies, but my first (and only) friend any younger than that before entering college was when I was in 11th grade ('97-'98) and she was in 9th. I never did ask her if she knew the New Kids On The Block, but maybe I should have.
This was all reinforced by my purchase and reading voraciously of
"Generation Ecch!", which all happened during my holiday in between these past summer and fall terms. I remember when the whole Gen-X thing was happening, though I knew I was too young for it and my attempts to identify with college-aged and college-graduated people at the age of 14 was futile.
But this book made me refine my relationship with the "twentysomething" "slackers" of the '90s (after all, I loved OK soda and called 1-800-I-FEEL-OK daily): I was the kid sister of Gen-X. I was an only child with a single parent who intentionally did not bring me up with any particular ideology because she wanted me to "just be myself"- so naturally I had to look into the world-at-large for influence, especially when compounded with being such a loner and moving too much to have much steady influence in my immediate environment. So it was all about TV. And movies. And music. And magazines. And these were filled with the phenomenon of the Gen-X'ers. They were it, they were making it, but I was being nursed on and raised by it. It was that that ultimately shaped my life and my character. This is something that proper Gen-Y'ers cannot say.
These is no consensus about when Generation X ends. I have seen the years 1978 through 1984 given as the "official" end. But most commonly I see the year right in the middle- 1981- which also happens to be the year I was born.
Bill Brown's Paradise Planet
"The whole time I daydream about a paradise planet where everyone lives forever, and their primary pursuit is falling in love with each other and then saying goodby and going away for a million years. They'd say the saddest, sweetest so-longs. In fact, saying goodbye would be this planet's most popular art form. Then a million years later, they'd meet up again and, you know, it'd be great, and people would spend a few thousand years just catching up." - -Bill Brown, Dreamwhip #13
I could very well apply this to Ri Ra. Except only for a million years it's once again for a short visit every thousand or so years until a million years have passed...
