Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Next?

Posted on by Dale

The question arose, after Coriolanus, what next?

Other than “sit in my backyard and watch the fire with a life-giving beverage in my hand,” I hadn’t given it an awful lot of thought. But ideas have been bubbling up in my head.

I’m still fascinated by puppets and would love to use them in something. See, as an example, Blair Thomas and Company. The drawback is the time and money; as Thomas says, “It’s such a tall order to spend the time that puppetry needs. If you take shortcuts, it’s the worst-case scenario, and the puppets are treated as props.”

The works of Brecht spring to mind, especially The Good Woman of Setzuan or The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I really like Good Woman/Person and its challenge to morality, and it would be fun to develop either of those scripts.

I’d be really interested in looking at some stuff that I do not understand, and here I can give as an example of the works of Charles Mee. Mee has put all his scripts online, free for the taking/manipulating/deconstruction, and I don’t understand the theatrical impulse behind most of them. So let’s do one. As Picasso says, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

(Although this script by Mee is pretty powerful.)

There’s always Shakespeare. The Tempest could be fun, and of course King Lear is the Everest of them all. Or we could go all the way obscure and look at Timon of Athens or King John or Henry VIII.

I will now ramble.

I’d be interested in just developing something in that way that Marc knows how to do but I don’t.

I really liked performing in the park, the theatre not so much. I felt alive in the park, and merely observed in the theatre.

While the idea of doing a School for Scandal with the Lacuna gang brings a smile to my face, I am no longer excited by the idea of making costumes.

I liked working with all men. It will feel odd to have women in the group.

When I look at stuff like Charles Mee or photos of other company-developed pieces, I often think that I don’t have anything to say in such a piece.

I am also skeptical of the power of non-narrative pieces. I want to be convinced otherwise.

I like the idea of looking at the Neo-Futurists for real.

We could set aside a short period, three or four weeks, Wednesdays only, and study a text, then quit. Ideas and lines of energy might emerge, and that would be fine. Or not.

I need to work on music.

A moderate bittersweetness

Posted on by Dale

As you probably know, because half of you are in it, this weekend is the Lacuna Group’s all-male production of Coriolanus. It’s going to be entertaining. You should probably see it.

But what most of you don’t know is that this weekend was to have been the international world premiere of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. In fact, at this very moment, we’d be at the reception honoring the production team, our international guests, and of course Nancy Willard, after what we can only assume would have been the triumphant opening performance.

Back when we were working to engage the community’s interest in the piece, we had to book the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts eighteen months in advance, and Don Nixon was more than willing to do that, so I found out when would be convenient for Nancy to come down, and this weekend was best. (It is Vassar’s fall break.) I marked it in my iCal. When the whole proposal fell through, I decided to leave it there so that I could watch it go by as time slipped away.

And slip away it has, has it not?

Labyrinth, 10/5/08

Posted on by Dale

Here’s where I picked up today. Actually, I started by pulling out my new cutting thingie and assembling it, reading the directions more carefully than anything I’ve ever read. This thing will put your eye out, if not cut off your leg.

Alas, it only produces a cut that’s less than half an inch deep. What the hell kind of masonry is only half an inch thick? These paving stones are two inches, so the paltry little slice the fairly expensive device made is worthless. It goes back to Home Depot tomorrow.

And now I’m back to where I began: how do I cut the curves for the center?

I decided to forge ahead and start laying the thing out. I can always come back and cut curves later.

I had already figured out east/west/north/south, but now I staked out the whole circle. I cut a piece of wood exactly three stones wide, and began by laying out the three axes:

And then, something that I have never seen before in all my studies of modern labyrinths. I think it might actually be An Innovation.

All right, class, can you see what I’ve done here? Would anyone like to tell me what I’m up to? What is this Innovation of which I am so inordinately proud?

Along the western axis, I have laid out bricks in the circuit:

They’re kind of hard to see in the photo. They actually extend the idea of the Innovation, if you consider its role as a Tolkien reference.

Finally, I began to lay out the circuit:

Here’s the southwestern quadrant, all laid out. I was gratified/amazed to find that the outer circle exactly touched the brick edging. It was absolutely a perfect fit. Here it is from the picnic table area:

It will probably take most of my remaining pavers to do the northwestern quadrant, the other half of the great semicircles that form the top of the labyrinth. I’ll have to order another pallet, have it delivered Friday. Ginny’s going out of town to Virginia again, so I’ll have all weekend to finish laying out the bottom half, with all the turnarounds and switchbacks. That will be the interesting part.

So, has everyone figured out what I’m doing down the middle there?

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!