Minkgirl Muses

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.

Labels: Creative Process, Creative Women, Directing, Teaching

# posted by Christine Young @ 12:22 PM