Tuesday, June 30, 2009

 

SMALL KINDNESSES

1. Sausages

Last night I was hungry.  I'm on this high-protein/low-carb diet, so basically my options are meat or cheese.  While cooking up a pan of breakfast sausages, I had this memory from my childhood of my mother doing the same thing.  My father loved sausages - any kind, but especially pork breakfast sausages.  My mother spent a lot of time feeding my father, despite everything.  And I had this image of her standing patiently by the stove, turning over the links little by little so that they would brown evenly on all sides.  Given that sausages are round, and that they wiggle and jump in the pan, this endeavor takes constant attention for a good 20 minutes.  And as I turned my own sausages last night, I imagined my mother, spatula in hand, hovering over the pan, gently coaxing each pork finger toward a perfect state of brownness, so that my father could relish every bite.  


2. Gladys

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of our return to San Francisco after our London sojourn.  I marked the occasion by making a phonecall I've been avoiding for months.  I called the once familiar world of 020 and spoke to Pat, the daughter of Gladys, the 85-year old woman who lived in the flat below our in Flanders Mansions.  Visiting Gladys and playing with trucks in her peeling yellow kitchen is one of the few memories my son still has of his London home.  Gladys was always happy to see us, always happy for small kindnesses like a 1/2 pint of strawberries we couldn't use, or the offer to pick up a few things from the shops when her supplies were low.  Gladys lived on the same road for 65 years, in the same town all her life.  She knew much about the details of the place - how the Tube workers used to plant wild-flowers on the berm below the tracks, the ages of the postman's children, how hot the summers used to be.  When we knew her, she had not left her house in over 2 years.  And so her world was 6 rooms - 4 of them shut in winter - and the views out the front and back windows.  Everyday she would walk down the passage to see what was happening on the road - who was going to school, who was late for work, what cars were parked where.  Gladys was important to me, and yet I visited her less often that I meant to.  In the first 6 months after we returned to SF, I only wrote her once - a Christmas card with a pack of chocolates and a GG Bridge magnet to join the collection of birds on her fridge.  She passed in February - thankfully in the hospital and not alone in her flat as she feared she would.  I know her life was better for knowing us, and ours for knowing her.  And yet, I still feel the weight of all the moments I could have spent with her balled up like a knot in my chest.


3. Monster

My son has been walking around terrified for the last week.  He keeps remembering this dream he had.  In it, he sees a monster, and while he watches, the monster's body breaks apart and his head begins to bounce toward my son.  It never reaches him, because he always wakes up.  But the terror of the nights has now invaded the daytimes to the point where Gman won't even go down the hall to his room to get dressed at 8am.  He's been saying 50 times a day "I'm scared.  I'm so scared of my dream."  We've talked about the difference between real and pretend.  We've discussed strategies for distracting himself, for redirecting his imagination.  But the fear remains.  And it is really getting in the way of our daily operations - he is literally hanging onto my leg, following me from room to room.  And after days of this, I find myself deeply impatient with him.  "Come on!" I think, "Snap out of it!"  Even though I remember how frightened I was of pictures in my head when I was a child.  Even though I recognize that the monster must represent some deeper and more inexpressible fear about a part of his life he is afraid might break or dissolve before his eyes.  It seems that he needs constant little doses of love and kindness to get through the day now.  And honestly, who doesn't.

Be well.


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Sunday, June 21, 2009

 



HEART


For the 3 of you who have RSS feeds and will know to look for this post after a 6-month hiatus - thank you for reading!  Future posts will cover the gap, but in the meantime, a love letter to Anne Bogart that I wrote this morning.  Happy Summer Solstice!



Dear Anne,


I was sitting in my kitchen this morning reading the intro to and then, you act while my children climbed all over me.  This seemed an apt metaphor for my experience of making art these days, which is less like that of the balletic diver on the cover of your book and more like that of the Hungarian strong man dragging his family in pyramid formation on his back slowly across the ring.


Nonetheless, your book is inspiring - encouraging - a source of sustenance and solace.  


You have been on my radar a lot in the past few weeks.  We literally kept bumping into each other at the TCG conference - you were on the stairs of the shuttle bus as I tried to back down from a full bus - we got squeezed into the same corner in the lobby - rubbed elbows at the food table at the party.  I kept trying to work up the courage to speak to you, but never managed it.  And there were so many people there who wanted to talk you (as I'm sure there always are).  And you looked tired to me, maybe in need of some silence.


This past weekend, I attended the NET conference which was housed at the university where I now teach.  I attended a session where one of your company members described the current Ensemble/University partnership that SITI Company is seeking to broker with Columbia, and she shared that your endgame in this endeavor is to train a slew of "Warrior Artists" who can help reshape American culture.  Hearing her say that took my breath away, because that exact phrase has been ricocheting around my brain of late.


These recent encounters and the force of the truth on the page this morning made me feel I needed to write to you to express my intense gratitude for your presence and leadership in the theater field.


We've met before, a few times.  I was one of 30 hopeful directing MFA candidates at a weekend workshop in 1995.  Then I was a participant in two separate Viewpoints workshops you led at the University of Iowa between 1996-1999.  I've heard you speak.  I've read your books.  And most recently I've worked with one of your students and mentees AV, at the university where I teach full-time now.


Given how little time we've actually spent in a room together, it's staggering to me how much you've influenced my life.  Concepts like the violence of articulation and vertical energy & horizontal energy have become foundational principles in my own directing and teaching.  My memory of the quality of attention you gave to a small group of MFA directors one day in a cafe in Iowa City is often on my mind when I prepare myself to encounter a new group of people.  The satisfaction of reading your words which capture and amplify truths I recognize fuels me in my teaching practice.


This is my first year in higher education - an intentional transition from the non-profit theater world that I undertook in order to support my family.  I went to Princeton as an undergrad, and the aforementioned U of Iowa for my MFA.  And despite how much I love school, I have always been distrustful of academia.  There seems to be much hypocrisy in the academic environment, as well as a strong tendency to value intellectual knowledge and book learning over experiential knowledge and other more intuitive ways of engaging with truth.  


And this is why I value you so much.  Because you are both a deeply intellectual person and a bold practioner.  In you, theory and form appear to be (miraculously) evenly matched.  Your example offers me hope that I can construct a similarly balanced pedagogical approach in my new environment.


You are also a model of courage for me.  I am trying to do something I have never done before - educate and train artists within a liberal arts context while at the same time empowering them to toss out everything they know and remake theater in their own way.  I am trying to imagine/create/discover a more cogent and inspiring approach to artistic education than the ones I was exposed to in school.  There are a lot of days when this seems an impossible task given how little I know.  You are a model for me both in terms of how you translate your experience into ideas and conceptual frameworks, and also because of your ability to ask unanswerable questions and live with the unknown.


About a month ago, as the semester was grinding to a close, I found myself exhausted, demoralized and seriously considering quitting my job.  But today - largely because of my re-exposure to you - I feel encouraged, energized, and inspired to get back to work.  It's a beautiful word encourage - to put heart into.  I feel my heart beating in my body again today - as I stagger across the ring, holding up myself, my family, and my students - all of us working together to maintain a fragile balance.  All of us buzzing with the thrill of being alive in this moment.


Be well.


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