Day Two

Day Two: 25 January 2010
[my thoughts are in BOLD, fragments of texts are in italics]

We have not met in two weeks because of MLKJ Day. And I somehow managed not to make it to any of the rehearsals – what with my visitor, etc. That will, of course, change. I am eager to begin attending rehearsals, especially after reviewing the Grotowski reading for this week. I was actually stunned when reading these selections. I suppose because I am so in awe that these young actors (I’m not sure why I am so focused on their youth – perhaps I am feeling my age these days…) are willing to be so vulnerable with each other, with themselves, with spectators. Every time I read Grotowski, I am intimidated and impressed and stunned by the revolutionary idea of theatre as a re/turn to knowing oneself. The idea that theatre can show us who we are, stripped bare of masks and self-performativity. All of our foibles – all of the things we hate about ourselves – free and bare, along with all of the things we love. Which is more terrifying?
We are creating a circle that is not a circle. :)

Things to tell, things to ask, you need to work. Almost everyone has received an email that confused the heck out of you. Less direction exposes your individual responses. Some of the assignments were a misreading of the task; some responses opening places to explore – indications where process begins. Relationship between thinking and work as an actor is always problematic. Don’t want to be driven just by concepts, relying only on what you understand about a play, then becomes a literary exercise and not an acting work. What you think and how you conceptualize the place in which your work starts to happen is essential. You are a thinking person in a world that is full of shit, confusing, the way it unveils itself to you. The world is trivial is on some level and immensely complicated on another. You are walking through it, trying to find your path, trying to make sense. You are also a human being who is closed off and operating in a safety zone. Theatre needs to undo all the damage the world does to you, find in theatre a place in which your entire relationship with the world becomes truly examined. In a way, you become your full engaged self in the world within the world with the world [through theatre]. Not just with the world the way it is, but the world from its very beginning. Mentally reaching back to the beginning of the human race and the people who came up with the first words, songs, dances. They still exist – there are traces of the beginning of manhood/womanhood before the division happened. Before we think of race, gender, sexuality, before all of this – before all of these divisions, we are all coming from some sort of place. Theatre is a sphere in which that connection can be attempted, be made. A whole person – body, soul, brain – and being in the world, connected with reality and history.

These big words mean something and nothing at the same time.

The way you connect to these texts – archetypes of culture – they touch something essential in our culture. The way YOU respond to these texts creates the place where your work as an actor can start. Your first response was to respond to the text using Grotowski as an inspiration. The next exercise, which is going to be articulated exactly the same way, is going to involve a text – an article that is related to the text you are working with. Texts related to the plays. Provocative and interesting. All three are already uploaded on Blackboard. Find your article and read that article. You will never forget the handout I gave you last time. Replying to your text through the article. The article is an exploration that someone else does within the body of the text. You read that explanation but your response is your own. Ultimately, we are searching for a place of authentic curiosity, elemental curiosity, that you have. It better be a serious and deep curiosity. An anchor from somewhere deep in you.

I have chosen small fragments from those replies that made sense to me as a place to work. A beginning of something I understand, taken out of context, as a possible place to begin the reading of the text in which the text reads you. This is really not what you do in your other classes. This is a writing exercise that does not belong to play analysis. It is an exercise you are going to do in a creative and shameless and painful way. Your only destination is not to create a piece that is a nice essay; your writing can be dirty, awkward, it doesn’t have to have a good beginning and end – it better have a good middle, a good something. I read 50-60 pages of stuff and cut maybe two pages. That tells you how much of the formal is taking place, and how little of the working place is happening. Give me a good reading- read it as if they were your own words. These words are already truthful. Someone is opening some place in their hearts to these words. When you read them read them as your own heart opening. This should give you all, encourage you to – no, no – it’ll actually show you the taste of what we want more of. We want a meal. This is a sampler of an appetizer.

--Titus delves into that part of ourselves that wants to do evil toward another while also searching for that part of us that makes us pick up the pieces when we are harmed by another. It’s often difficult for us to admit to the former, but yet we hope that beyond all else we have the latter. However, without the inherent evil, our resilience would be unnecessary. Titus forces us to confront both parts of us, ultimately checking our strength against ourselves. It causes us to examine our actions in regard to those around us, showing that the ultimate result of our allowance of evil and the perpetuation of animosity by our “healing” revenge is destruction of ourselves and others.
*****What I like in this is the articulation of evil in us. I was watching a documentary on Auschwitz. I’m never going to stop being curious about what motivates people to do this. SS men talking about their work as their duty and still see it as no regret. You hear that and you really wonder about the way evil articulates itself in you, in your daily existence. How much of it exists in you as a possibility? We all have the capacity – we choose not to. This play about revenge and blood – how is it connected to the entire history of humankind? What I didn’t like was the word “we.” Think I. Lyotard – said that after Auschwitz, there is very little I in the word we. Any pronouncement of “we” does not contain the I. There is an exclusion necessary. When we say we, we cheat ourselves. Do not include the we of the audience, the we of the theatre people. It is meaningful to YOU. If it is meaningful to you, people will come.

--Before deciding what is wrong and what is
right
first we must find out what we are
I
do not know myself
No sooner have I discovered something
than I begin to doubt it
and I have to destroy it again
What we do is just a shadow of what we want
to do
and the only truths we can point to
are the ever-changing truths of our own experience
I do not know if I am hangman or victim
for I can imagine the most horrible tortures
and as I describe them I suffer them myself
There is nothing that I could not do and everything
fills me with horror
And I see that other people also
suddenly change themselves into strangers
and are driven to unpredictable acts
*****Meaningful because we do not know ourselves. We have dark parts of us that exist. I do not know myself. To what degree do I not know myself? To what degree do I see others do horrible things – others who I thought were like me?

--I think that we are in a way asked to examine the systems of imprisonment that we as artists use to define our work and through these text liberate ourselves from previous conceptions of what theatre should be. So in a very real way the cast of the Bacchae will be undergoing a transformation from imprisonment to freedom as we seek to discus these very ideas. Our work and process will in a way answer many of the questions we have already begun to ask ourselves as we confront this text. What is freedom? What is prison? What kind of prisons do we create for ourselves? Are we ever truly free? How much of being imprisoned is defined by our choices? How do we escape the prisons we create for ourselves? Is the quest for freedom in its own way a prison? I think in trying to answer these questions theatrically we will find the answers as they relate to our own work. So while our piece of theatre may ask an audience these questions, our process will ask us a similar set of questions. What is freedom in art? What is a prison to our work? What kind of limitations do we place on our own theatrical expression? Are we ever really completely free as artists? How much of being limited in out art is a mater of perspective defined by our choices? How do we escape from the patterns, conventions and habits that limit us theatrically? Is the search for free theatrical expression limiting to the actual creation of theatre?
*****This is a beginning in which there is a possibility of working. For many people I get the prison question – an echo of a discussion that happened in group. I would like this discussion to be very personal. Imprisonment and what it means to you – in what way am I imprisoned by the power of language/concept/daily duties/religion and morality? Difference between morality and conscience? What is ethical on the elemental level in me?

--Do we need to edit the text to be profane? Do we need to transpose the Greek lyricism of The Bacchae to the modern day speech for it to be accessible, our speech what we generally classify as less poetic than that of our ancestors? Does our language today necessarily lack the music we hear in this play by Euripides? I don’t believe so. And when we commit ‘profane’ acts, are we doing it just to feel the exhilaration of changing history, regardless of what it does for us? Or are we truly trying to see ourselves in the story, in an attempt to find out what is making survival such a struggle? Either way, is it really profanation?
*****This is a very important thing – profane. The insult we give to something sacred [Theatre as sacred – does what we do here equal profanity?]. Flag-burners who burn the flag because of disappointment. Deeply devorted Catholics who are repulsed by the church and then are offensive to the church, because they are searching for the true driving of the religion and they felt betrayed. That act of profanation could be an act of reorigination. Something that became stale needing to find it fresh again. In that way, you can be charmed by the image of the Virgin Mary, but you can also see in that person a woman who is giving milk, an animal who is being milked. It may be profane, but it uncovers the brutal physicality of the act of feeding. But we take it as an icon and cease to see it in other ways that may be seeing fresh, seeing new, giving life, restoring baby Jesus into symbolic code in a new way. Approach to classical texts needs to be harsh and brutal.

--Okay so I am not sure what I am looking at. I do not know what is in the mirror, or how this serves as a mirror. I do not know if Dionysus is doing this because he is hurt or because he can and it pleases him to fuck with people. I am trying to think of how my ancestors viewed this play. Did they agree with Dionysus? When reading the play I am drawn to his side over Pentheus’. But what good is Dionysus doing? I see women being used. I do not see any kind of freedom here. If they were doing it out of their own will…maybe. I guess I can see how women are powerful even though objectified because without women the human race ends. Women in Greece took care of the homes, of raising children, setting examples, maintained an important role in the structure of Greek society. Maybe it is that women have more power than men or women see. These women are capable of ripping people to shreds of causing a mini-revolution within this Greek society and their power cannot be messed with. Or maybe this transcends gender. Maybe it is just the power of groups of people.
*****An honest account of “what the fuck” about The Bacchae. You read the play and have just no idea. You have to acknowledge it. It needs to go inside of you and you need to be wondering what the fuck. That’s a place where honesty begins.

--How many different types of prisons are there? Can a prison only be physical? Can a prison be preferred? A good thing? Can a prison be safer than the outside world? Is there really even an outside world, or just a different, less physical prison?
*****Questions that need to be explored further.

--Theatre is, always is, an escape; an escape from the mundane routine we call our lives, and from our comfort zone. An opportunity to experience great moments of love or violence that many people go there entire lives too afraid or too unable to achieve. Titus questions the importance of civic duty. The decisions we all must make, deciding for ourselves what is right and what is easy may be hard to identify
and harder still to follow.
*****

--When thinking of prison, we can connect it to the idea of natural order where certain boundaries are laid out for those involved. Boundaries can even be literal, such as a gated community. Prison may also refer to preserving ideals much like today’s hot topic of legalizing gay marriage. Many students might even feel that school is its own form of prison where they are highly encouraged to attend class on a certain day or certain time and are penalized if they don’t do so.
*****Things we need to stand by – the liberation from one type of morality, including other people of the Others gain the right to be free. At the same time, it cannot be still based only on the way we divide ourselves and protect Otherness. What is, before the division, what is there before you define yourself as a person of a particular type of sexuality? Even bisexuality does not address the essence of what love may be.

--Given this existential view of Frankenstein and his monster as individuals shrinking away from moral responsibility, I now question the purpose of the individual in my every day surroundings. How much of our lives do we shape as individuals? How much do we allow external influences to shape us? Are we free to choose our actions or do we rely on other people and circumstances to choose for us? And when we do choose, do we make the right decisions? What if we fail?
*****Much stronger if it represented the I. The we tries to play both – it is the beginning.

--we’re yelling and screaming
and crawling on the ground, but that’s what theatre is supposed to be.
What we can’t do outside.
What we can’t do with our façades on.
What even the sorority girl across the street is secretly
doing inside, underneath it all. S
creaming. Crying. Laughing.
Living
*****Depth and pain and beauty and love and joy are all covered by our surfaces. That space that’s around here – should be where we can touch it – this stage.

--We are all animals, all of us. We have all felt alone. I have cried myself to sleep, yelled at strangers as they drove past me, punched walls, verbally and physically attacked my fellow man, locked myself away in my room, caused myself physical harm, drank myself into a stupor, and sagged in a friends arms, all on account of this feeling of ‘otherness.’ And yet I know I’m not alone in my loneliness.
*****I am not alone in my otherness.

If I did not choose yours, it doesn’t mean you didn’t say anything meaningful. What I’m trying to focus on – in the work – the place in which your personal self becomes the space where we start working. Now you know what to do for your next assignment – due next week. Response does not have to be long, it could be three sentences, but they better be full of words.
With this exercise – I manipulated you into believing that one of the texts that you heard was yours, but it was Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade). A longer fragment is available on Blackboard. You should read it because in that discussion a lot of the issues you are wondering about are actually present. If you read that in addition to your text, it could be a way in which your writing could be liberated into a different form. You could be already writing a monologue, dialogue, poem, narrative, whatever. It can be anything – it doesn’t have to be academic. Responses are on blog.
One more piece of business – talking about Grotowski’s principles. Tell us what is the purpose, the true purpose, of this carefully defined set of circumstances? Why is he doing that?

“Art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.” This is trying to illuminate that part of theatre towards which we gravitate, but it’s so hard to get to. Not making it easy, but making it accessible – it is a challenge to go and do and explore. We all want our work to be amazing, right? Meaningful to us and others. How to work? How Grotowski is setting us up, he is telling us how not to work. He knows how not to work. One of these things is to be trivial about what we see done. If colleague works and something brilliant happens, we respond with laughter – and it’s wrong. You should shut up. You should not acknowledge, judge, or color anything that is happening. The work is subtle and the work needs to be let happen in a territory that’s not guided/moved by the reaction. Immediately the actor’s work is a response to the laughter. You work for cues and become a little circus puppet. And the work then gets hurt. The work you’re doing is very fragile on so many levels.
Attraction to ensemble – when I read him, in order for me to put it in perspective, I have to think of the group. What can I do, it’s a response we’re doing, we’re creating always, the physical theatre that is for playing. He’s focused on ensemble and responding to each other. Shortcuts last year was very group-oriented and when we were all part of the same energy – I am supporting your speech in this, it didn’t matter, the text spoken through all of our energy. When I say responses need to have an individual stance, it can also be misread as an egotistic act of showing about how this whole thing is me – it is essentially that it needs to touch you deeply, but that touch is nothing if not supported by some others who are as lonely as I am – reaching out to others – I only go deep into me because I want to meet you – I don’t care about my self-0expression as much as I care about the work itself – the work is for our capacity as human being who meet – the work is everybody’s work, where everybody contributes – it is the third entity in the room.

A disclaimer. If you’re going to work in this capacity, you have to adopt these principles. I connect with what you’re saying – exploration of yourself – almost religious – if told what to do, I get scared and think of how to do things – I can’t answer it – it’s through being okay with yourself and being vulnerable and working as hard as you can through person associations or whatever – let that be what the work is instead of pushing/conceptualizing what it is. The text isn’t working you, you’re working the text – you find your own way to express it. It is what you need to do, I do it because I care. Why the fuck am I doing what I’m doing? Sometimes don’t have the answer – the more I pry, examining self through work, and getting to examine other people and if they’re willing to be a gift for themselves and others, there are possibilities of having language. It makes you think about the origins of your language – why do you speak the way you do? How am I connected with Greek texts? Has made me think about myself and evaluate myself. It is not my job – it is looking at and exploring me and making more meaning out of my life and other people’s lives.

We see that in Grotowski’s principles it is important what you are trying to do. Musicians show up, practice 8 hours, etc. These are the ethical principles my actors have to have, which sculptors and painters don’t have to have. The work of art goes on the wall – but this art form requires so much effort in order to define it some ethical way so it stands on its own as an ethical art form. Because it is so fragile and like a flame. It is about that essential quality of meeting that it is like a flame. It’s the hardest thing to capture the essence of what fire actually is. It is a substance that is nothing and everything at the moment it happens and there is only smoke and the fire is consumed, gone. No trivial acts can be representing your art, some accidental half-assed not-well-thought-out cannot claim that it is representing you in it. You need to create a situation in which the entire code is involved, in which you say that you have designated a place that is special. It needs more care because the product is so whimsical, ethereal. These principles are solid things that you can take as prescriptive aspect of our world. Try to employ them in your own understanding of your world and your work.

FABLES: asked directors to give us a little bit of the fable of the way they read their text, the way they want to tell their text, a little window into how they want to tell the story. I don’t know what’s going to happen – they will probably just do something. Those of you who are interested in directing – tell and retell a fable, Brecht would tell the fable, then he would tell it a month later after doing some of the work with them, he would retell and retell and find that in retelling, a refinding of a particular flavor in which something else is taking place, instead of what was there in the first place. Our transitions will go really crazy – can go from a simple summary of the plot to I don’t know, I don’t know – it can go away from the text, it can catch on one aspect of the play and just dwell in that one aspect that is maybe only loosely connected.

JOEL: [as a city changes, so too do the Goths change. They will pay with their lives. Tamora looks to her children. Is the family a kind of state? Does the state invade the family? How can we create a family that is a place of intervention – how does the state, the culture, work to separate us within our families? Why do we strive to link together when we are to be ripped apart, constantly? How does loyalty work?]
THOUGHTS: Revenge, just outside the city walls, family justice honor mother any damage is good sets wheels in motion flesh he is no fool when she tastes the flesh until he raises an army there is no peace constant war always everywhere.

ANNE: [begins in 1791 in Paris – civil war – France is torn apart by a citizenry unhappy with their government – in Geneva – Victor is preparing to travel to begin university training. He wants to be a scientist – Mom has just died and he is becoming obsessed with the scientific possibility of reanimation and creation – as Victor begins, Austria joins the war. Victor, obsessed with the notion of creating life without the help of a woman or God – pays no attention to the events of the world and begins to create a Gollum without creating the name on the forehead – creates creature only with science. Creature is enormous with sinews and tendons strong enough to equal the power of ten men – Victor gives the creature knowledge but is unhappy with the result. Victor hides. When his brother is killed, Victor hides. When adopted sister is accused, Victor hides. Even as he pursues the creature, Victor hides – from family, conscience, the world in which he lives.]
THOUGHTS: Obsessed Victor hides sinews and tendons without help of woman or God only science a hundred miles to the south he is unhappy where they were and where he was going I felt like the world was big being crushed down into two people him ignoring the outside world bery absorbed in what he was doing or trying to avoid chasing him through a wasteland looking at a mirror and being afraid of it. The beginning of the story has a lot of promise – young life with promise and everything is going to happen, and then hiding happens – shame and disappointment. French revolution is concurrent – I don’t like Victor right now – reading about the gollums – I have a lot of hate for Victor and the fact that he is trying to defy and create without women or God – a selfish act that excludes the woman from the process. In what way we are all in this business we are all Victor, wanting to create life onstage, life that is fully living and we kind of are creating a monster? Ignorance is bliss – only use 10% of the brain – through own eagerness and trying to be everything, he fears –we are comfortable in not exploring – maybe there’s a reason. Responsibility that we all have and the fact that Victor takes on this huge responsibility and then shirks it because he doesn’t like what he created – like a father abandoning a child – and yea. No excuse. You’re supposed to take responsibility for those actions and you have to do that. Imperfection doesn’t have to be caused by science – can be present in nature – taking care of an imperfection. Excluding monster focus and way of seeing it. Novels have so many focal possibilities and so many plays you can write from one – novels have many layers. Has more potential for dramatic structure. Might be about the creator.

CANDACE: In a point of transition about what I think this play is about. I don’t know what it comes from – rehearsals and conversations and all. My interpretation in transition of the plot or fable of The Bacchae. Dionysus returns to Thebes and wants to be claimed as a god – born in Thebes of the royal family in current control – wants to be god and owner – mother cast out by royal family and Dionysus would like to be recognized as a god and mother recognized as a woman of Zeus. When Dionysus does not get what he wants from Pentheus (current king) he drives all of the women mad in Thebes and sends them to the mountain – all of the women include his aunts Ino, Agave, Atone – sisters of mother, family drama – getting wine from the leaves [Tantallus] and honey from water and milk from the ground and ripping animals to shreds and nursing bears at their breasts. Pentheus does not agree with what has happened – Pentheus tries to control the women – but Dionysus has entered the city as a human and Dionysus says “you can arrest me,” P says BS, etc. Everyone is going to jail or dying – then Dionysus as the stranger says that they will be free – women are freed and chains Pentheus puts over Dionysus cannot claim him. The stranger asks if Pentheus is sure – P says he will do anything to get them back, even though he doesn’t want to see them drunk and having sex. D says if you become the other you hate, you can go to the mountain and see them and learn about them. P does. D tricks P into dressing like a woman walking through Thebes going up to the mountain. Then D calls to the Maenads (all of the women) and calls P a traitor, this is the other and then D puts P on top of a tree and calls the Maenads to the tree and they try to shake it to get P down – they rip the tree out of the ground and then rip P into pieces and scatter his body across the world and put his head on a stake. Person mainly responsible is P’s mother – think P is not a man but a lion – they are delusioned into thinking they have conquered an animal without weapons, but then Agave (P’s mom) goes into Thebes with P’s head on stick and presents it to her father – the once king of Thebes – aren’t I strong? Cadmus is horrified – and proceeds to bring Agave back to reality and take away the veil of illusion/intoxication. Sees P ripped to shreds and weeps for her loss and they are cast out – Dionysus says “you see what you get when you fuck with me.” Because you denied me as a god and denied my mother. The end.
THOUGHTS: family affair voyeurism chains because of this you will suffer disillusionment cast out lesson other the veil stranger sex nature drugs milk from the ground imagined paradise where everything is consumed and you take the substance, world in, the wallpaper in Willy Wonka. [I am in a I walk the line between Pentheus and Dionysus – a question I have asked them, and me – do I side with D or P? Is there a reason to do so? Is that how we should conceive the play? Is it an entity to entity conflict? The battle of opposing screams – they are of equal force and related and cousins and of the same family – and one is godless and one is a god] Something in that play defies the way we understand classic tragedy and the tragic hero and the internal conflict and conflict with the world – it’s really not necessarily the case – Euripides is maybe already questioning the very structure of tragedy – he is playing with us a little bit – I am more drawn to them women and what they do – it is all offstage – we can only create what they do through the power of our own desire and imagination – actions women do are delivered by male messengers, not by women firsthand – [can it only be witnessed? Can this revelry – the physicality only be told because it must be experienced] the feminine world that is articulated by the male – how can we go into the untold aspect, the implied aspect of the possibility, the sensibility of the female storyteller/actor/person. Humanity is always gendered here. Drugs. Lesson. Lessons to learn – look how quickly we would like to put on the moral code of our society upon the play – do not have drugs and sex or you will kill your family members. Christian understanding confuses the play.

Go on with your next fable – but you are so free – free from any form – it can be that you want to dance it – or something else – next time when we share (next week), do it already informed by what you do throughout the week – something that happens between today and next Monday.