I keep thinking I need to write more. I keep wanting to write more. But I don’t. Dozens of quick ideas float into and out of my head every day, but I don’t get them out of my head and into the blog. Perhaps I need to do just one-liners until something real pops out.
I’ve been working on a post about Beethoven’s symphonies, but it’s hard to put into words. Maybe this week.
In the meantime, I just came across this poem hidden away on my computer. Weirdly enough, I remembered it earlier in the week and was wondering where I had stashed it. I wrote it when Garrison Keillor had a sonnet contest, and then promptly forgot about it. It was in a program called WriteRoom, a fabulous little program that I used for a while when I had to write without distractions, the purpose of which was to completely blank out your screen with the page. Just you and the words.
And then today I was showing Summer Miller all the little writing programs I had littering my hard drive, and when I opened WriteRoom, up popped all these little notes I had completely forgotten about, including the poem.
So, until I write something real, here’s a poem:
My back yard. Night. The vernal equinox.
We sit, all men, around a fire of oak
and last year’s Christmas tree. Our talk unlocks
our thoughts, and musings sift through light and smoke.
We drink. We talk: our lives, and what’s to do.
We talk of art and music, God and cause.
Someone’s removed his shirt. Now I have too.
I don’t know why this comforts, but it does,
to sit bare-chested, flesh exposed like mind
around the crackling light. Another drink,
I want to know if all these thoughts behind
these other chests can make me see, not think.
These men I love, and more than that, require:
we slowly start to move around the fire.
The last two lines should be indented, of course, but html prevents that.
As promised, photos of the new fern growth:
Over by the stone steps at the northpoint. Autumn ferns, still rust-colored, but really putting forth. These have been there longer than any of the others, I think, so it really gives me hope that the whole garden will eventually be really gorgeous.
Southern wood ferns over where the tree fell. You may recall that they were slow putting out, but I think once they’re established, they’re going to be huge.
Photos cannot do these justice. They’re Japanese painted ghost ferns, and they’re beautiful. I need more of them here at the westpoint. I will have to restrain myself from buying and planting more until I have the stone circle actually installed.
After having been away from the labyrinth all week due to the Objects class at the Alliance, I was hoping to get back out there today. Alas, of course, it is raining. I did take a quick tour around the place right after lunch and am very happy to report that the ferns are becoming magnificent. I’ll have photos tomorrow.
In other news, next Saturday, May 1, is World Labyrinth Day. I can’t decide what, if anything, I want to do to celebrate. Half of me wants to light the candles and sit quietly by myself. The other half wants to throw open the gates.
Discuss.
We spent Thursday night just shaping up the piece, adding bits, sharpening transitions, etc.
Last night (Friday), we ran through it a couple of times, then sat around and debriefed our experience of the week. People were overwhelmingly positive in their responses. The class and its strategies seemed to open up new worlds to everyone in the group. (Thank you, Marc, for making those worlds available to me already, and thank you, Lacuna Group, for continuing to explore those worlds.)
Small but intrigued audience, and we had one of those to-be-dreaded Q&A things afterwards, although everyone seemed interested in our discussion/explanation.
The performance went well, we had a great time, and in the event we created some compelling images. It has given me some ideas to help break up some creative logjams I think I’ve been having in Lacuna. Mostly, it was a good lesson in being bold and not looking back. Leap, don’t look.
Last night (Wednesday) Michael showed us some stills from recent productions: tightly designed, neatly expressed. Then he presented us with a script to play with, made up of about a page and a half of the material we’d generated on Monday and Tuesday.
We worked our way through it, mostly stitching together the pieces that we already knew by dint of having created them. We worked out transitions. Michael had music/sound, and it worked well.
All told, we have about 10-12 minutes of odd but compelling viewing. Some very nice moments indeed. You might be thrilled; you’d probably laugh at several points (a deliberate provocation on our part).
A couple of thoughts about the class/process so far: First, as Michael was showing his stuff and how it correlated to some of the strategies he’s worked with us on, people were sharing their own experiences in productions that used similar strategies. I kept to my purpose of flying under the radar and just listened, but folks, NCTC has done it all. Yes, it seems that little ol’ Newnan has seen theatre as adventurous and inventive as anything Atlanta has to offer.
It also has become clear that while I have found the class to be invigorating and provocative, it has not been overwhelmingly revelatory: Lacuna has been using the same strategies, and on a much larger scale, of course, as we blunder our way through the “Creativity/Bear/whatever” performance piece. We may have thought we were at a loss, but I have every reason to believe that “real theatre people” would be intrigued by everything we’ve done.
Finally, the class has stirred up my brain to the point that I have had a scathingly brilliant idea for moving forward with King Lear over at Lacuna. All I need is fifteen people who want to blow it all out.
Interesting night (Tuesday). People brought in all kinds of apples and witty takes on apples. I had printed out several paintings of the expulsion of Adam and Eve, and we spent the night playing with literal tableau vivants, posing the two central figures in each of the paintings, then messing with the setup.
The most effective moment came when we were working with the Masaccio fresco. We had one Eve in the center, and three Adams around her. We linked the Adams (who were all female) together with a rope, then dropped that idea. Michael directed them to “switch” poses, with the Adams slowing looking up and Eve turning to look “back.”
It was strikingly frightening. We toyed with that awhile. I suggested the Adams then kneel (just to get some new levels into it), then Michael had them prostrate themselves. I added extended arms, one forward, one back. Michael added an apple to the rear hand (which the Adams concealed beforehand.)
It was cool. Then I “complained” that it looked like a feminist statement; could we try it with the three males in the class playing Adam? We did, and lo! it was better.
More later.
I decided to take this theatre class up at the Alliance Theatre called “Devising from Object,” taught by puppeteer Michael Haverty. The blurb was very vague, but it sounded very process oriented and performance art bound, and since my email from the Dramatists Guild also gave me a code for a 50% discount, I signed up.
Last night (Monday) was the first night. A last-minute e-mail from Michael told us:
We will be devising a short performance beginning with the theme of CRAVING or DESIRE. We will begin working with objects which both you and I will provide. On Monday please bring TWO objects to the workshop which symbolize, inspire, or are inspired by craving or desire in you. The objects can be of any sort: a piece of clothing, a book, a toy, a letter, a picture, a piece of furniture, trash, or food. You may take the theme as broadly as you like – desire for fame, pleasure, long life, supremacy, world peace, vacation – craving for food, drugs, love, connection, success, disaster – the possibilities are endless. The objects should hold a certain sort of power for you.
We will be working in a style based upon Tableau Vivant or ‘Living Pictures’ – an artform of the 18th and early 19th century involving the staging of popular paintings by live performers. We will modernize this form using movement, text, sound, and dynamic visual mise-en-scene. I thought you all might be interested in reading a little bit about Tableau Vivant and the artforms it inspired, including photography, silent film, and magic lantern shows. The wikipedia entry is a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableau_vivant
Okay, I thought, this could be interesting. Or it could be hideously lame. Who cares? I’m taking the plunge.
So what to take? I did a lot of thinking, and one thing I finally decided was that I was going to go under the radar with this experience. No one was going to know anything about me in terms of my extensive theatre experience, my ambitions or accomplishments in art or music or education, none of that.
I took a paving stone from the back yard, symbolizing the construction of the labyrinth and my desire for centering and self-knowledge.
And I took this book. I’ve owned it for probably 25 years. It had disappeared into the detritus that is our home, but recently my lovely first wife unearthed it and left it lying out in prominent places. It is full of toothsome young lads, demonstrating with their smooth long shanks , broad balanced chests, and offensively flat and rippled stomachs how to master the simple moves required to make one’s body look just like theirs.
Whatever.
I took it as a symbol of my desire to look like those toothsome boys, even though I never have and never will. As I said last night, since I cannot hope for youth and beauty, I will shoot for simple good health. And a flat stomach.
Anyway, there are an even dozen of us in the class, and everyone brought objects that were sometimes whimsical, sometimes serious, but nearly always evocative of deep desires that resonated with everyone in the room. A couple of themes emerged, one of which was that of escapism: most of us had the urge to be somewhere else, to be someone else, to be Other.
We began with one of the objects, an apple, and began playing with it. Michael put the apple on a black rehearsal box in the center of the stage. We added Rebecca pressed up against the black box wall, in fear/desire/something. We added a rope from the apple over to Holly, who knelt menacingly at the opposite corner. We had me crossing in super slomo from stage L to stage R with a hatchet upraised in my outstretched arms. We had Beau popping out from stage L with an envelope, whispering in Rebecca’s ear.
You can see how weird this is going to be. So far, so good.
Tonight I am taking construction paper cutouts of apples: red, yellow, green. White, purple, orange, blue, black. I’ve printed out multiple images of the expulsion of Adam and Eve. I’m taking cutouts of leaves (for modesty, of course). I’m taking the altar bell I bought last weekend in Greensboro.
More later.
Go read.
http://juanitajean.com/2010/04/01/hummm/
It’s short, and if you don’t click on the Previous or Next button, you’ll back here in a few seconds. Don’t close that window, though, because you’ll want to go back and read one of Juanita Jean’s real tirades.
I came across this blog via alicublog.blogspot.com, who is always entertaining in a snarky kind of way. Juanita Jean is not quite Molly Ivins, and don’t you think Molly Ivins is kicking at the gates of heaven to be allowed back?, but she’s ‘pert-near close,’ as we say in Lubbock.
I spent most of yesterday prepping the piano/vocal score of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn to go out to a competition. Most of it was easy, and it forced me to make the title page of each piece consistent within the suite. (It’s weird that I only recently learned to input all the title/composer/lyricist stuff into the Info box, and then use Text Inserts to handle them.)
A couple of difficulties, but nothing major. I had to generate a piano score for “The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives,” because it was composed straight for trumpet trio and wads of percussion. And I had to create a piano reduction of “Epilogue,” because I had slammed that together overnight and just done it straight to orchestra. I ended up leaving the abysmal “piano reduction” of the sunflower waltz in place, because, you know, if they actually select it, I’ll do something about it.
Likewise the actual orchestration. There’s a limit on 20 players for the orchestra in this competition, and I posited 2/2/2/2/1 strings; 4 “winds,” meaning four players who could switch instruments as needed; 2 percussionists; 2 horns; 1 piano, 1 harp, 1 synth, who would cover trumpets and whatever else I had to leave out. Needless to say, this is a false lie. The thing is scored for an orchestra twice that size, and I confessed that while claiming that it could be reorchestrated in the event of its being selected.
Which we all know is not very likely to happen. Leaving aside the curse on my music, it’s not really an opera, is it? It’s charming, and it would be a huge draw for any opera company, but it’s not fashionably atonal and there’s no plot. My experience has been that people listen to it and think it’s pretty, but shouldn’t we write a script to embed the songs in? No one seems to have the vision necessary to turn it into a performance.
All of which is to say, I love this piece. I love Nancy Willard’s poetry, and I love my music. It arcs, it delights, it inspires. I haven’t listened to it for a while, mostly I think because it reminds me painfully that it will probably never have a real performance, but this week I’ve had it in the CD player in the van, and it is at least a comfort to discover that I still love it. It hasn’t fallen apart in the dark while I wasn’t looking, if that makes any sense. It’s still my masterpiece.
It is a comfort, too, that Nancy Willard loves it as well. She reiterated that this week when I contacted her about sending me something official in writing that I had permission to use her work. I am not being disingenuous when I say that I yearn for a performance of this work more for her than for me.
Oh well.