Solo: Practice Imperfect

It's become clear to me that I cannot write a solo show. I've tried three times in the past two years. So deceptively simple - unless you're given to impulses that include having the likes of 30 people on stage. That. That. Is the problem. I can't be thirty people. Can I? Or more importantly am I? Like Walt, do I contain multitudes? So it would seem. I've written and directed solos for others. But even then - there wasn't one single character. At times there were several characters in seconds. It seems that as soon as I start writing a solo I feel the urge to frustrate understanding and narrative to the point of insanity.

In developing a show for myself, I've tried various methodologies attempting to constrain the impulse. For the performance I gave last month, I finally had to be parental about it - imposing limits to the number of people I could perform. Got it down to five and then in the last hour to four. Not bad.

My concern is not with the impulse. But it's important to understand and refine the impulse or else it's simply a habit. I took off in the opposite direction - breaking the narrative down into components and devising spare movement/vocal phrases that I could edit and interchange like film. I wanted to slow down - stretch and expand time instead of trying to fill it up. Then, I played with the idea of failure - inspired by Andy Kaufman's Foreign Man. I practiced bombing, screwing up, and forgetting. Then I played with uncertainty - the question of not being in on the joke, of not being entirely comfortable with what I'm doing. Without an audience it really is like talking to a wall. But I found that it boiled down to creating states of presence - making room for being painfully, awkwardly present. In performance, this translated into a strong connection to the audience.

I also can't say I like solo work. It's an imperfect form. There's no one to collaborate with. Unless you count the pilates instructor and her clients who wandered through my rehearsal at random moments (giving me a new perspective on the idea of open rehearsals). If anything we formed a collaboration of inconvenience - she seemingly perturbed that I was babbling to myself, not to mention the David Byrne, Brian Eno music and me never knowing when the audience would show up and walk through. Next, the utter subjectivity of the experience - there is no outside perspective other than the audience's. It took awhile but I finally found a way to embrace the circumstances and go with it - a good lesson for any performance.

What I did find was that playing in the studio is its own reward and I want to continue that practice. It's nice to experiment and to not be bound by a deadline. I like taking one element of a piece and just examining it from a variety of perspectives over an extended period. I was able to find a number of different ways to perform a single text and to experiment and change aspects of the performance while I was refining other elements. Not that this doesn't happen in the course of any other production. But I found more room for failure working this way and failure takes on a different texture when it's not infused with paranoia about time (as in we open next week time) and thoughts of product.