Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Sir Christémas redux

Posted on by Dale

You may recall, if you’ve been a faithful reader, that last year about this time I sent off a choral piece called “Sir Christémas” to the Welcome Christmas competition. Last year, the required accompaniment was celeste. (This year it was French horn, and I didn’t get anything written.)

You may also recall, or maybe I never shared, that after it didn’t win I tinkered around with it and reset it with organ. It’s been floating around out there, untouched since last fall, and now I have dusted it off for another round. I have added percussion this time to the organ accompaniment: tambourine, glockenspiel, tom-toms, and bass drum.

Here’s the score, and here’s the mp3.

I’m submitting it to the Masterworks Chorale for our Christmas concert. After reading through the stuff we’re considering last night, I figured that mine’s not as strange as a couple of them, as long as we’re being adventurous.

Also, today I put A Visit to William Blake’s Inn in the mail to George Contini at UGA.

I’ll keep you posted on both items.

William Blake’s Inn

Posted on by Dale

The University of Georgia Department of Theatre and Film Studies will be considering A Visit to William Blake’s Inn for their 2009-2010 season. I haven’t blogged about this and haven’t even really mentioned it anywhere, except at some point over on the Lichtenbergian site someone blew my cover and I had to respond. I haven’t even told Nancy Willard about it yet.

George Contini is a professor at UGA who moderated the panel on regional/community theatre that I spoke at last fall, and I jokingly suggested that his interest in computer graphics and projections made him a natural for William Blake’s Inn. I sent him a CD and a cover letter, and this past summer, he emailed me and told me he was submitting it.

The old gang got together last week at Craig Humphrey’s studio to record the work for UGA’s consideration. The committee requires some form of performance recording; it’s easier to hear it sung, even if shakily, than to try to figure it out by reading the piano/vocal score. I’ll submit the CD, the vocal score, the orchestral score, and a cover letter with all kinds of details from Lacuna Group’s exploration of the work last year.

I have to do this next week.

And then… I just have to wait to hear.

Everyone says this is exciting. I am not excited. I’ve had this piece shot down before, and I’m not holding my breath. If they choose to do it, then I’ll be excited. But getting excited about the possibility would be completely pointless, unless I enjoyed the agony of suspense and disappointment.

So there you go. I’ll print everything up on Monday, get the CD ready, and mail it all out sometime during the week. Then I can return to my current status as a non-composer, wondering if I’ll ever sit down with score paper in front of me again.

Acting

Posted on by Dale

I’m in the back yard, sucking down life-giving beverages as Bertie Wooster might say, and learning Valeria’s lines for Coriolanus. I love Valeria. She’s a total butterfly.

There are several challenges to her, however. One is the fact that she precedes nearly every line with a silly oath: “O’ my word,” “O’ my troth,” “Indeed, la,” “Verily,” and on and on. It’s never the same twice. Since she’s in prose and not iambic pentameter, I don’t suppose it matters which one I use when.

The more interesting thing I’ve observed as I’ve walked to and fro about the labyrinth between sips of my vodka and tonic is how inflections will creep into my delivery which are absolutely right and absolutely hysterical. I stop to try to analyze the emotional/social impulse which caused that delivery, and while it may be blameable on the vodka tonics but is more likely to be attributable to my general inability to define emotional impulses, I find those impulses to be very slippery. Mostly what I find myself thinking about is the craft of acting.

These inflections are subtle and comically apt, and I can’t think that I would be able to hit them by musing ahead of time on the social impulses that created them. Instead, I think it comes of observing people and knowing the kind of person Valeria is and linking her to similar people I’ve seen, either in life or in performance. And in either case, the lady in question is still “performing,” so her delivery is always a bit arch, a bit “on.” So the social impulse I find myself following most often in her speech is “society performer.”

I don’t think that’s bad acting, either, actually. If the vocalization feels right, then, like Larry Olivier, I can develop the physical stance and the inner life to match. Outside in. If it works, use it.

Labyrinth, 9/11/08

Posted on by Dale

Yesterday, at 6:40 a.m., the paving stones for the labyrinth were delivered. That’s right, just as I stepped out of the shower, our doorbell rang. It seems that the forklift was not going to fit through the carport. Sheesh. We had the guy put it down on the side of the carport, in our neighbor’s yard.

Ginny had been fretting in a negative way since I had told her I’d ordered the stones, and now she fretted about it being in Sue’s yard. Since she enjoys fretting, I helped her by refusing to fill her in with any details about my plans, since each time I tried I was greeted with more negative fretting.

But my plan was to move the stones down to the back yard anyway, no matter where they had been delivered. True, if they’d been put down in the driveway, I actually wouldn’t have had to move them until I was installing them, but no matter.

So when I got home from school, I stripped down for action and got to work. An army of one, I scooped them up six at a time and walked them down the driveway. I had set up the iPhone/speaker combo, so Pandora was giving me the beat with my Tosca channel, and it was one of those fun times when you just sweat and do the work.

Here’s the new pile, down by the house. I figured it would be out of the way of anything we were doing back there until the stones were all installed.

That’s 672 stones, by the way, at 4.4 pounds apiece, which works out to about 3,000 pounds. So yes, I moved a ton and a half of paving stones yesterday afternoon. And yet I am somehow not buff this morning. Maybe it takes a day or two to show up.

My dilemma is now increased multifold: pave the path, or pave the outline? It would be unconscionable for me to pave the path, just in terms of cost. I have no right to spend that kind of money on this project, even spread out over a year or two. But it would be an amazing thing to have done, and to have. If I pave the outline, then I could probably have the whole thing done by the Lichtenbergian annual meeting in December. But then as a matter of aesthetics, what do I do about the path? It’s all scrubby grass and weeds, and I could easily spend half the total cost of paving the path on treating the soil and growing grass.

The other aspect of it, as I laid out a circle of stones in the center last night by candlelight, is just how attractive a path paved by me would be. We’re not talking closely fitted cobblestones here.

So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m going to lay out the center, then lay out a couple of the tight turns, just to see if it would be attractive at all. If not, then I’m going to go with the outline instead.

Discuss.

Meditation: From separation to serenity

Posted on by Dale

One reason I have not been faithful to the “daily meditation” thing is that the meditations in A Quiet Strength are just so sappy. I knew they were, and I figured I would either react to the sentiment therein or just use the title for my own purposes. But the overwhelming blue-ness of it all gets to me.

I know everyone is wondering how much I accomplished on the labyrinth today, and the answer is nothing. Coriolanus rehearsal all morning, of course, and then I got home and realized that there’s nothing more to do until I learn how to lay paving bricks.

Sure, Home Depot has instructions, but they’re mostly for nice, rectangular areas. Plus which, the actual installation, rectangular or not, involves skills and equipment I don’t have yet. One has to excavate the earth to a depth of two and a half inches, how exactly does one do that? The paving stone catalog says you then till the soil to mix in concrete to form a base. I’m not going to do that: too expensive, too permanent. Then everyone agrees you add an inch of sand, pounding into place with a pounder thingie.

I am under no illusion that this is a one, two or even three-day job. This is a year-and-a-half job. Either I pound that sand with a pec-inducing hand pounder, or I find a way to buy or rent a machine to do that. You can see the rental fees mounting up, but buy one? Sheesh.

Then the circularity of the thing. I know I have to buy/rent a bandsaw to cut curved stones. Again, sheesh.

Then there’s the actual purchase of heaven knows how many tons of paving stones. Yes, tons. One pallet of stones will cover 144 square feet, and it weighs over 2,000 pounds. I don’t have the math skills even to estimate how many square feet this thing is. Kevin?

My interior argument is to go ahead and get started, and by October 25, I can play freaking Aufidius with my shirt off. Let’s see if that happens.

So, anyway, today’s meditation.

The gist of the book’s little screed is that we’re all wounded fellows, don’t you know, who have been abandoned or left to die or something, and that if we just stand tall, and I mean that as a Shakespearean pun, so snicker away, we can all avoid the trap of drugs and destructive behavior. Or something.

You see what I mean?

All right, let’s give this a shot. Grown ups, in the Lylesian sense of the word, figure out soon into their adolescence, if not before, that we’re all alone in this together. Further, it does no one any good to bewail our lonely state in the universe. After all, what does the universe care for our wailing?

(Side note: if there is a God, the same applies. What does s/he care for our wailing? Even if she’s an all-loving God, her attitude would have to be like those of us who have slept through our baby’s insistent screams. At some point, God figures, we have to figure out for ourselves how to get through the night.)

Yes, we’re alone, and yes, it hurts. That’s why I have my family, my kitchen, my music, my blog, Lacuna, the Lichtenbergians. That’s why we have Art. We can amuse ourselves with these connections while waiting for the universe to come to our rescue. Which, as grown ups, we know is not going to happen.

So that “serenity” arrived at by the poor hurt creatures in A Quiet Strength should be the natural state for all of us grown up men. It’s false, of course. I don’t think we can ever shake that sense of wanting to be whole with the universe, but as long as we know that we can pass the time with all these distractions, and that that’s what they are, then I think we can figure out how to get through the night.

Now I think I’ll go light a fire in the labyrinth and sip my martini.

Labyrinth, 9/5/08

Posted on by Dale

Here’s a photo of what I’ve laid out this as of afternoon:

It’s nearly 9:00 pm now, and I’m sitting out here by the fire in the center of the labyrinth, candles all round, appropriately new age music playing in the background, margaritas at my elbow. I’m supposedly learning lines, but of course it’s too dark to see anything.

Notice the successive approximations at the entrance at the bottom of the photo. I’m sure there’s some way to make that accurate. I’ve found that the problem is making the center larger than the width of the course of the path. That throws everything else off, which is OK, because I’ve also found that the irregularities of the labyrinth are part of what give it its power. If it were geometrically perfect, it wouldn’t attract us, I don’t think.

The irony of that is that it can be demonstrated (although I can’t find the link) that the entire pattern is a variation of the Greek key (meander) pattern, a purely geometric function if there ever was one. Perhaps there’s something about moving from the paternal grid to the maternal circle that throws everything off.

Now it’s all a matter of deciding how I want to do this. What stones, how well-built, how much money, how much time?

Jazz class

Posted on by Dale

Jazz dancers, download your instructions here.

Yes, it’s true, I’m taking the adult jazz class on Tuesday nights at the Newnan School of Dance. Marc talked me into it, he’s also taking it, although he was nowhere to be seen last night and I hope it takes him weeks to catch up with the new choreography, and it’s of course a lot of fun.

I’ve never taken jazz before. I was a ballet guy twenty-five years ago, and I wasn’t bad at all. Precision and passion were my fortes. Extension was not. But I loved it a lot. I would have taken classes a lot longer, but Bettina rescheduled the advanced classes for the evenings, rather than the afternoons, and NCTC had the prior claim. So I had to give it up.

I think I’d still rather be in a ballet or modern class, but for the moment I’m in jazz and having a good time.

Are there body issues? Well, naturally. When I was in ballet, I was too thin. Now I’m too fat. I never had a lean, lithe, sleek dancer’s body, and while I keep pretending that dance is for all of us, the truth is that a lean, lithe, sleek body just is exciting to watch and mine is, well, not as.

I’ve been surprised and pleased at a) how quickly I’ve been able to pick up the choreography; and b) how sore I am not the day after class. That really surprised me: I thought I would be completely sore and hobbled for at least three days after the first class, but I felt nothing. Perhaps this is due to my moderately increased activity level recently. I have, since April, lost 20 pounds, and I can tell the difference in many aspects of my life: pants don’t fit, I’m not out of breath, and jazz class doesn’t leave me sore after warmups and choreography.

The class puts me out of the house on Tuesday nights, so that’s Monday (Masterworks), Tuesday (dance), and Wednesdays (Coriolanus) that are not available to me for composing. I think I will devote Thursday nights to that effort, which should begin next week.

Excelsior!

Musings

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I know I said I’d write every day, but you didn’t actually believe me, did you?

The Lacuna Group has had two work sessions, I hesitate to call them rehearsals, on our production of Coriolanus, and I have to say that I’m very excited.

It’s not that I’m confident, yet, about our chances of success, although things are looking very positive that we’re going to show up on October 25 at the Greenville Street Park with something worth watching. It’s just that the sheer brainpower in the room is exhilarating. It’s like being at GHP twice a week: ideas flow, textual analysis just happens, and there are mad skillz all round.

One of the rather interesting things about the group is their willingness to play. We have not cast any roles (although we keep putting Marc as Volumnia); we’re not planning on casting the show for another week. We’re just playing with scenes, solving problems (Can we keep the fickle Citizens from getting laughed at? How mean is Volumnia? How can we point up the tempo changes in this scene? How do we show Romans being routed on the battlefield?), switching out roles, exploring.

Somehow, out of all this, ideas happen, and eventually, we trust, decisions will be made.

I say “somehow,” but that suggests we don’t know how it works. We do know how it works. It works as advertised: you play without concern about result, and results come without concern. It is a marvelous way to pass one’s time.

It’s also rather wonderful to be reunited with such great actors from my past: Greg Lee, Dan Coleman, Jeff Bishop, Kevin McInturff, Marc Honea. (Matthew Bailey and Jeff Allen join us… Saturday, guys?) I only wish the others whom we’d invited to join us had the time to do so. To hear those familiar voices tackle Shakespeare’s language with even greater assurance than the last time we were all together is heartwarming. I’m verklempt.

Meditation: Questions

Posted on by Dale

Why would anyone vote for George W. Bush? Twice?

How can we create art?

How do we create art?

What is art?

Why is it so hard to exercise?

Why is the sky blue?

Why are LOLCats just so darn precious?

Where do babies come from?

Why do we think we love someone?

Why do we think they love us?

Why are words like oint and flammivomous so cool?

Who is this God person anyway?

What is your quest?

Why is the internet down?

Why does Windows suck so bad?

Would you rather have the body of an Olympian swimmer, gymnast, water polo player, or sculler?

Why am I not king?

When can I win the lottery?

How were Shakespeare and Mozart and Bach, to name three, even possible?

Will Coriolanus make it to the stage?

What will my son do with the rest of his life?

How long will I live?

What’s for supper?