Spirital Atelier

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This is largely a placeholder until I get everything written down. I am simply amazed at sheer volume of activity this trip has presented. It has been somewhat daunting, but this is an exciting and invigorating process. I can almost say that with a straight face, but I am a bit tired.

So you have an idea of what’s coming:

Bethesda Fountain
MoMA
Drama Book Shop

—
Fashion Ave
Sabrett’s Hot Dog
Papaya King
Christopher Street
Empire State
Bryant Park
—
The Seagull
Next to Normal
Grace
Legally Blonde
Gypsy
Macbeth
The Homecoming
August: Osage C.
—
Lauren Reinhard-Tiongson and Rapscallion Theatre
John Miller
Edith O’Hara

Far Away is done. It’s been done since Sunday. Nearly a week. The reason I bring it up is because it feels so strange to not be doing anything for it. There’s a part of me, I feel, that grew to exist purely as a part of the show. I know there were things I didn’t do as well as I would like to have, but I am proud of the show and I am grateful I got to work with the text.

We watched Spring Awakening tonight. It fulfilled everything I had heard about it, and more. Amazing pace, powerful voice, nearly excessive energy and talent… anything I could ask for, it had.

The reason I bring them up at the same time is because I had a hard time wrapping my head around both of them. I’ve gotten closer in recent days, though - particularly thanks to T.S. Eliot. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men” as a response to post-WWI Europe, evoking Guy Fawkes and Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz. Part V is particularly poignant for me (listed below). In the end, the fact that there isn’t a clear definition is what makes these works vital and important.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

That’s what I’ve done today.

Nothing. No classes, no research, no homework, no studying, no stressing about next week. Nothing. I have accomplished Nothing, and I see myself doing Nothing. If this were a strange occurence, I might be compelled to dismiss it. But I do Nothing far too often, and thus it’s a state of being.

I’ve done Something before. It’s hard to be a junior in college without having done Something at some point. But Nothing, to me, just has an appeal to it. It’s far more comfortable. Like a second skin. Like a shirt and shoes. Like singing should sound.

Nothing moves me, I feel. I am driven to do Nothing quite regularly; it’s part of who I am. And this scares me.

You see, Nothing is frivolous. Nothing is a waste of time. Nothing is a spit in the face of forces beyond us that enable us. Nothing is everything my friends and family want me to not be. But here’s the catch - if I were to choose Nothing, I would get Nothing. There’s no misunderstanding. There’s no ambiguity. Just exactly what I asked for.

Something can means something. Something can lasts longer than the last. Something can affirm anything and everything we want it to. Something can be wonderful. But Something is variable. Random. Fickle, on occasion. If I choose to do Something, I don’t get Something all the time. I can get a lot more Something than I put in; I can get a fraction of Something; I can get Nothing.

And you can get away with Nothing now and again in other fields. Theatre requires that you do Something because it sets itself up as Something. English doesn’t promise to be Something. It promises to work, to express ideas. Political Science doesn’t guarantee that it is Something. It guarantees that it works, that it describes power and government. Mathematics doesn’t prove that it is Something. It proves that it works, that it establishes numerical relationships. Theatre sets itself up as Something, as a transcendental experience that expresses ideas, describes power, establishes relationships, and anything else we can think for it to do.

Something is harder to do than Nothing - a world harder. To do Something, you have to compel yourself. You have to do. You don’t have to do anything to do Nothing. Nothing is, as I said, a state of being, an inert existence. It’s not doing Something. But you can’t do Nothing and expect Something. It’s just stupid.

So my fear is - am I stupid?

It’s a marvel what capitalization can let you do.

One of the things that I can honestly say I’m proud of is my vocabulary. Though it may fail me time to time, I have a vast and expanding reserve of phrases and expressions I can unsheathe as needed. A great deal of this comes from my love of knowing words. I took Latin for five years, working of Caesar and Virgil for great portions of that time. Last semester, I got a B in Greek despite an atrocious attendance record that did get better over time.

Perhaps most telling is that I am addicted to Dictionary.com (and the sister site, Thesaurus.com). Something about going to the site and scrutinizing words I know and discovering words I don’t gives me a rush that very few things in life do. The sense of accomplishment is enough to override whatever mood I may be in, and I feel as though I am better for having done so. I think it’s the only sort of academic pursuit I don’t have to force myself to undergo.

On a whim, I sought out the Word of the Day (a wonderful part of the site) for my birthday. Here’s the listing:

atelier \at-l-YAY\, noun:
A workshop; a studio.
Atelier comes from French, from Old French astelier, “carpenter’s shop,” from astele, “splinter,” from Late Latin astella, alteration of Latin astula, itself an alteration of assula, “a shaving, a chip,” diminutive of assis, “board.”

It’s a provocative word for me in several veins:

First, I am posting for a class which requires me to build a story from self-obtained resources and research. How I look at my future beyond Mary Washington hinges specifically how I craft my work and what I provide myself. And it’s never complete - to me, the point of the class is that it’s never complete. We’ll never be done looking up what we can do, and we’ll never be done deciding what will be done to reach our goals. We’re simply focusing in on a specific question so we can learn what we’re doing. I anticipate that the reading and discussion of materials in a personally driven fashion will continue to my dying days. This is just a singular workshop for us to get our feet wet.

Second, I am admittedly not a great student. Something about going to a class and sitting in a seat for fifty or seventy-five minutes fills me with anxiety, not to mention the four-hour block for this class. I have never done well with homework, and my study skills are laughable. And yet, outside of an academic field, I don’t mind going to obscene lengths to do what I’m interested in. I’ve written poems and plays with words and themes given to me. I’ve gotten very good at DDR, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, etc. I’ve done statistical analyses of various and sundry observances. At Wegmans, I received a work review that put me as among the most diligent workers in the store. As far as I can tell, I have two possible explanations.

I might fear failure to such a degree that I don’t try at anything of consequence; either it’s a video game or a seasonal job or just words on a piece of paper, but it’s not my education and it’s not my vocation. Or I might fare better in environments where I feel I am an active participant who receives tangible, correlative results for my actions; I want to do something, and classrooms suppress this urge. Both and neither may be right - I still can’t decide.

Third and lastly, I’m in a production where I begin in a workshop for hats. A great deal of my definition comes from my experience there. A great deal of who I am comes from the environment. For the production, it’s vital that the place is a workshop - a place of effort, of strain, and of perpetual turnover.

This last connection means the most to me. We currently are at the stage of the production where all the aural and visual elements of the world are coming together and consequently we have to integrate it. I’m still a work in progress, but I will get there. The world is speaking, and I now have to listen to what it says, both through noises and silences. Additionally, what has been most difficult to me so far is the language of conversation and invitation. It’s all Caryl Churchill has given me, and I don’t seem to hear it quite yet, nevertheless speak it. I confess it’s almost a foreign tongue. I use it, but not intentionally and not masterfully. But I love words, and these are simply new words for me to learn.

I have learned this new word. As I use it, I hope more inspire such discourse within me.

Today, according to NASA’s SkyWatch, Fredericksburg citizens will be able to see the International Space Station in the sky for three minutes as it passes in its orbit. At first, this was only garnered passing interest from me - it’s not as though I couldn’t look the ISS up online whenever I wanted. But something about it kept drawing my focus, so I did some research into it.

A massive endeavor, the ISS was started at the end of the Cold War, when American astronautical engineers were at their most industrious. They found that since there was no competition anymore, their energies were waning. Instead of letting themselves atrophy, they called nations around the world and proposed a collaborative project to surpass all other individual works. Planning and drafting took until 1998, when work formally began. It’s on track to be completed in 2010, and will stay in orbit until 2016. It currently weighs approximately 500,000lbs., and spans 191ft. by 240ft. by 90ft. - as you saw above, bigger than a Boeing 747. Click here to see scale drawings (Note they are in 1/100 scale).

It also travels at 17,240 miles per hour; at that speed and with the distance it is from Earth, this massive structure appears in the sky like this (click to see more):
So why does this mean anything?

As I sat there staring at this blur in the sky at some Idaho house, there was a great disconnect. That is the International Space Station. A crowning achievement in international cooperation and coordination, a paragon in collaborative design and engineering, the current zenith of man’s endeavors to sustain life outside this planet’s atmosphere. But unless you knew that this was the ISS, you would mistake it for a naturally occuring item. It would blip out of your interest as quickly as it came in. And something about that reverberated in me.

A playwright writes a play to communicate an artistic message that came to him or her. A producer reads a play, and finds it suitable to perform for a paying audience. A company contacts directors, designers, stage managers, and any and all stagehands, wardrobe crew, etc. to inform them of this project. A director analyzes the play for its artistic quality and its techncial demands and provisions, eventually conceiving a message to convey. A designer analyzes the play for its technical demands and provisions, eventually conceiving an aesthetic to convey. An actor auditions, either with a prepared monolog or reading the play without time to prepare, and then analyzes the script for its artistic quality and technical demands and provisions, eventually conceiving a series of genuine emotions to convey. A stage manager compiles all this information and his or her own analyses so they are aware of any and all questions or concerns and can answer them knowledgably. At the same time, the company must find ways to present the play to the public in such a way as excites interest and encourages attendance. Labor laws define great portions of the work, and for most of the people listed above, they must start the process anew soon thereafter (if they are not doing more than one production at the time). To describe the process of what we do in theatre to, say, my parents (admitted outsiders to the field), there is little difference in the degree of difficulty between it and building a space station. So much can go wrong in the course of a production, making it a miracle that things go as well as they do. But even when they do go well, what does it mean?

Honestly speaking, an overwhelming majority of people will never see a single thing I do. I will not be remembered by most people, statistically speaking. Most people will also not pay attention as the ISS passes overhead. But for the people that do know, for the people that are looking, it’s a captivating glimpse.

I can say the same with theatre.

It’s an amazing thing we do. We create life onstage, we manifest truths and stories and the worlds we wish we had. No matter what, we have that. And it’s never easy. Creating life is a trying, painful, process. But when it’s done, it’s an amazing sight. And nothing can change that.

So when I’m staring at the six o’clock sky, I’ll have a part of me expand right into that sky, right in time for rehearsal.

A brief summary: Anne Marie Welsh describes the salvation and renovation of the Balboa Theatre, a dual vaudeville/Spanish cinema house with a history of involvement with the San Diego community.

(Click the picture to view the article)

Response: It amazes me to see that how when we talk about the flexibility and versatility of theatre as an art, it’s so easy to forget that the building that holds theatre often is as flexible, if not more so. The fact that this was a movie theatre and vaudeville house is not surprising - that this was also a bordello, a circus, a ice show house, an orchestra house, and even a WWII hotel shocked me. The place additionally was designed with the ability to keep sound alive over great distances, though not initially to be built for theatrical use. Because of this, coupled with its orchestra pit size, touring companies are well-suited for the space.

I suppose the more pressing issue, however, was twofold - why did it take twenty-two years to be considered significant enough to keep, and what changed Centre City Development Corp.’s five years ago? It resonates with our studies in Theatre Management, so that drew me into the article more that if I was not in the course. The building has participated significantly in the history of San Diego, specifically connecting to its Latino population. It has seated between 1600 and 1300, making it a sizeable space. It has changed its core of operations to suit the times, but by 1985 the building was deemed run-down. The planned demolition was stalled by activists until 2002, when Dave Allsbrook, CCDC’s VP of public works, took steps to modernize a building that, according to him, was “nicer” than theatres in most other cities. After five years and $26.5 million dollars, he has the reopening of what Welsh and others describe as a San Diego landmark.

The reason this speaks to me is summed up by Paul Westlake, the architect behind the renovation: “It’s like something you’d find in Seville or other areas of Moorish Spain. The building thus feels anchored to San Diego’s climate and history - and that creates its sense of meaning for the city.” DC has had Arena Stage as a long-standing building that manifests an intimate connection to the city; New York has Broadway as a district that continues to define a great deal of the cultural standards of not only the city itself, but the modern world; San Diego, though probably not as prolific a theatre region, still has a past that lives largely because there is still a phyiscal area that links the past, present, and now futre.

A brief summary: Kirsten Tagami discusses the homegrown roots of “Cold Sassy Tree,” an opera opening Saturday in Atlanta.

(Click the picture to view the article)

Reaction: Before anything else, it just seems odd that an opera about Northern Georgia and the life of a writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was premiered in Houston, over 700 miles and entire histories segregated from the source.

This article affected me on two levels. First, I was amazed that Betty Guffin, a close friend to original author Olive Ann Burns, made a point to describe the production as “do[ing] justice” to the essence of the book. As someone who does not watch operas or has not at any point, I cannot reconcile an opera and a episodic, slice-of-life set of stories sharing a spirit. The word “opera” (for me) carries an onus of prestige, sophistication - even of class. An opera tells an epic story using grand orchestration and powerful vocal lives. An opera does not describe a great-grandfather owning a store and a father remarrying. It does not tell a pastoral memory piece akin to Annie Dillard. But this works on a biased view of opera; an opera is a performance, just as a play, so it can tell any story. An opera is, in fact, just a vessel - nothing more, nothing less.

Secondly, the production of this opera uses theatre to tell the story of a place and a people that otherwise would not get represented. Had this opera not existed, there would be a generation that knew nothing about the (fictional) town of Cold Sassy and how it stood as microcosm for life in (actual) Commerce and surrounding areas. I can say that I personally have not heard of the book prior to this article, at least. It brings to mind The Laramie Project - had Kaufmann not decided to spend a year speaking to and interviewing the inhabitants, the city itself and the citizens therein would be one-dimensional figures in a two-dimensional report of the death of Matthew Shepherd. I guess what this comes to is that there is never a shortage of stories to tell. You will never run out of things to talk about, as long as you look for things to talk about.

A brief summary: In honor of an upcoming production of Samuel Beckett’s “Fragments,” (opening today), Sid Smith describes the playwright’s resonance with the mood of modern audiences.

 
(Click the picture to see the article)

Reaction: Once again, the disussion of voice drew me to read an article. The three pioneers of the Theatre of the Absurd - Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter - have captivated me; the power of their writing transcends much of the literature, making it seem futuristic even today. Interestingly, they wrote in a very similar voice despite their geographical differences (Irish, Romanian/French, and British, respectively). The main segregation that I find between the three is: Ionesco is defined by what he said; Pinter is defined by what he didn’t say; Becket is defined by how he said what he said.

Beckett truly is stylistically singular. Others can use repetition, others can write compelling stage directions, others can even debate the world. But Beckett does all three. Waiting for Godot is among the greatest plays written, but it is possible that no action ever occurs - we are left with no resolution, no sense of accomplishment, nothing. While Pinter pioneered the modern use of meaningful silence and Ionesco established the skeleton of the anti-play, Beckett left us with an existential darkness that means echoes our growing discontent.

The main reason I chose to post this story was that the mood consistenty referred to in the article is ever-present in the production I’m involved in at the moment, Far Away. Caryl Churchill manifests a great deal of Absurdist practices in this play - politically charged, surreal realism mirrors Ionesco’s Rhinocerous, and the workshop vignettes feature the haunting paucity of words that gets labeled Pinter silences today. Most important, however, is that this work offers us a discussion of what happens if what we fear is true. Beckett was obsessed with the presence of God or lack thereof; for Churchill, God is hope and the question remains.