Group Meeting 22 February

I feel like everybody is scatter-brained, so we need to take more effort into making our work possible. It’s a fragile point in our process – we’ve gone through so many weeks, where are we? Next week I will not give you any extra reading and this is the moment when you don’t read and we continue what we started. I found the poem exercise very meaningful and very useful where it works. And where it doesn’t work, I still would like it to open up as a possibility for your work. I’m discovering that by asking you this, I can read in the way you write the poem the problems you have inside and outside of the process. I can read your trouble by the way you write your poem. I want to use that to help you. There are actually two processes going on, that’s why this is an acting class – it’s not that you are just working on the project to stage an experiment, you are also working on your craft and art as a performer. There is an intimate connection that opens up between you and me, you and your colleagues, you and your directors and everybody else. It has something to do with the project but is also an independent project. Without my interfering, I also insist on an interaction with the level of your artistic growth with me. With some of you, I had an interactive moment with the poem. One sentence or a lot. It’s fascinating. I would like that to happen with most of you. Those of you who have not heard from me, I either haven’t found the place where it’s serving you or I’m thinking that you do not need me yet, which is also a possibility. With Zac – I don’t need to work with your poem. We have a good understanding right now – it’s not the place where you can learn something more – check with me. That’s why next week, no reading assignment, but I still want to interact on that level with you. Andd I was very clear in answering your poems, right? Free myself from rhyming, etc. Did it make sense to you? Make yourself free to the poem – in which way? You are very good verbal performer – and it is sometimes also your weapon that shoots you in the foot because you rely upon it so much and you become comfortable and block other ways of communicating. The form choked the poem – I read his poem as a cry, but since he constructed it in a methodical way, made it fit a form, it’s a choked cry, so work on it so it is a liberated cry. Makes sense in terms of acting. I like to develop scores, my detail gets too structured for my own good, too methodical with my work, and it gets a little forced/cute. You know it and are still choked by it – this is exactly on what level your imaginations are being employed. What is blocking you? Via Negativa. We all want the actor to tell the truth – that’s positiva. Via Negativa. Do not LIE. Do you see how it changes the way you work? No, I am going to question every time you lie – and that’s how you have to accept it – as people you lie all the time – catch yourself in the lie and examine it – that’s the Via Negativa. At one point, someone asked about Theatre of Cruelty – does it mean literally violence? Yes and no – in more clarification – for me, and for many people, the most cruel, the most violent act is when somebody tells the truth and doesn’t lie. That’s violence. Dare on that level – do it on that level. You were talking about telling the truth and do not lie – hearing it – you can find ways around telling vulnerable parts by packaging the truth – ways to word things that are safer. If you take that word – that claim – to the extreme – do not lie – that a clever way of telling the truth is lying because it’s making something set. A way of telling a story that doesn’t tell how it hurts you is actually a lie. Protecting yourself is a lie. You are in the department to tell the truth and not lie. Good amazing poems already happening and I am so moved. This is just phenomenal. Not the level of poetry, but the freer form of verbal expression – some articulation of feelings that you need to be articulating in your work. Good work is absolutely happening – keep doing that during this week. Reply and have an exchange. Those of you who are challenged to change your poem, continue.

I asked you to read this very important article because this is a moment in which you feel a little tired, form the semester and the process, etc. We’re into the game and almost halfway there and where am I and what’s going on. This is a moment where you see what is happening and don’t lie and what place, what source, this revelation, testimony comes and tells you the agony of the creative process. It doesn’t have to be that every process that you do is agony, but you can feel that if it’s all fun and pleasure, it’s not good. Every art department has pain built into it. Pulled from your quotes to see what from the article is meaningful to you. You found places meaningful to you and I also found them very meaningful. Maybe we are very much alike in the way we care about this.

--The most important quotation: “What do we look for in the actor?...”

Thinking about that is very meaningful. Think of your colleague as a mystery that you are fascinated by, you have a sincere curiosity about him and you are also a mystery for him or her. I don’t mean that you hold a secret, but I mean that you are full of secrets for your own self- you don’t know yourself. That process can help to bring that mystery up and it can become an event for all of us. A festival of human possibility.

--“I had then only one…”

The idea is that always what you do in connection to the text that you’re working with - you are looking for a place where you make personal connections and investments and something beautiful can happen. That place may not be immediately connected to the text, but they know it, all your colleagues know it – that moment of this amazing opportunity of expression. That moment of liveness is ultimately your key and your way into working with that text.

--Actual most important. “Create as if it were the last time, as if one were to die immediately after.”

Take that seriously – we should all do everything with our whole self – if we do it all the way, then life really is beautiful. If this project is the most important thing you do, you do it as if you were to die tomorrow. You’re not holding back. Not only is it amazingly beautiful, but I think that’s the only way of doing the creative process. NO conversation about the text. You replies to me are telling me that you read it on many levels, it is a moment of contemplation about you in your process.

Candy rips the band-aid off and creates an act of violence.

All this talk of poetry, shall we hear a poem?

“A mother lost in time, time too late”

“You all fall down.”

Mirror – some moment that has no connection becomes alive and meaningful to you, doesn’t come out of concept, it makes perfect sense in terms of fitting the essence of the play. It makes sense to me. An element introduced in an improv, there’s a narcissism of Pentheus, and temptation behind this from the other side – who’s holding the mirror? Of course Dionysus, he loves your self-love, he uses it – and when the kiss happens? It’s the kiss. Because Dionysus is of both genders, for him – he’s probably capable of all kinds of sex by himself. Something about masturbation. Yup.

I really like the rhythm and how the words propelled and bounced via rhyme or same word, a chain of events that’s unstoppable, and I also am curious why it’s “you all fall down.” There’s losses on both sides – both parties, the two opposing screams are because there are losses on both sides – it puts the poem in the perspective of someone in the middle. Gives the people of Thebes who are affected the most and have no voice – it gives them a point of view – the Maenads are a tool and the people of Thebes are a tool and the middleman is always the one that’s forgotten.

I like the idea of taking something familiar like nursery rhymes and Snow White and making it very unfamiliar – I felt that kind of loss looking at something that used to make us happy, turning it in on itself and making it ugly, the loss of innocent perspective. And there’s more into it – there is a possibility of any Greek play that ever we know somehow is symptomatically emerging in tales and storytelling and children’s storytelling or all kinds of folk elements in the Western history, therefore of course bringing that children’s story into it is acknowledging the fact that some narcissistic element in the Bacchae finds its way into the story – part of the story can be bought into the play. This is a reference point that also makes it very much yours. You grew up thinking about that story somehow. As far as from what I could hear, it’s very interesting that it had violent imagery to it and reminded me how we are all capable of destroying things and it seems like a world that isn’t permanent. We’ve revisited that theme I don’t know how many times – the development of new skin, scabs forming over a wound, rip off that band-aid. You see how from the moment we ask the directors to tell us the first fable that things are really far away from a storytelling in terms of catching up the logic for the events – it is all becoming saturated with a dominant image of them coming from you and actually more poetic – theatre is staged poetry, that is how it emerged, as poetry. The Greeks were called poets. And so was Shakespeare, your buddy. Theatre is poetry.