How It Feels: Writing Edition

I Am Jack's Aching Nostalgia: Source Material for Dumb Puppy

I've been thinking about the idea of nostalgia lately - the idealization of the past or the longing for home.

Oops. Marshall hit a key and this posted too soon. Chaos has erupted.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses / those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence. - Richard Ford

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden. Provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had. - Robert Hughes

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice – there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. - Frank Zappa

I don't play nostalgia acts. I don't play nostalgia shows. - David Cassidy

Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves? - Andy Warhol

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.

Trip My Wire

Can I tell you about Portishead? Third came in the mail today. I've just started listening, but I'm hooked. A foregone conclusion. Portishead is one of those groups who register time and place for me. Back in 1996, I bought Dummy at some cramped indie record store off the main street in Saratoga Springs while I was doing the SITI intensive. I bought Portishead the following year. Together they formed the soundtrack for a grueling weekend spent driving through the Sierras crewing for a friend of mine who was running the Western States 100. Beth Gibbons' sultry voice and that wall of sound encompassed the highs and lows of uphill climbs and heat and rain and 24 hours without sleep and hypothermia and torn ligaments and giving up 23 miles from the finish.

Third is a fine fuel: distortion commensurate to a time when my nerves are frayed and my consciousness is split by a year of sleeping in two hour increments and I feel like a snake eating its tail. So much unknown personally, artistically and globally. There are coyotes in my backyard.

Big List of Theater, Performance, Film

It's been over a year since I put together a list like this. Hoping to get out and see more theater now that #3 is 13 months old. So here's my wishlist for the upcoming month.

April 25 - May 25
Curse of the Starving Class - Family gone way wrong by Sam Shepard.

May 9 - June 27
The Rape of the Sabine Women - Rufus Corporation at SFMOMA

May 7
The Dance Discourse Project #3 - Dancers Debate the Body Politic

Check out the third installment of a lively series of discussions about topics in Bay Area dance, moderator Jessica Robinson invites Jo Kreiter, Ledoh, Sara Shelton Mann, Miguel Gutierrez and Rob Bailis to discuss the multiple layers of the political in their work, how bodies are politicized through movement, and how activism plays a unique role in the Bay Area dance scene. Co-presented by ODC, CounterPULSE, and Dancers' Group. Event is at Project Artaud.

May 1 – June 7, 2008
Attack of the Killer B-Movies: A Thrillogy of Low-Budget Terror! - The Dark Room Theater. Most of the funniest people I know are in this show. You can take that to the bank as they say.

May 14
The Rosenbach Company - Pop opera by Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy




May 14 - June 15
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage - Banana Bag and Bodice/Shotgun Players
The rest of the funniest people I know are in this show.


June 1
The Anderson Project - Robert Lepage/Ex Machina at Zellerbach in Berkeley




June 21
Cinderella - The Zanzibar Puppet Theater in the Starlight Room at Harry Denton's. Why? Hmmm?