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Urban Research Theater Newsletter - December, 2006
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
1) new photos and opportunities
PROSE
5) workshop (Schechner)
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1) NEW PHOTOS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Dear friends,
New images are up on the website, showing me at work on fragments of an individual song-based composition in development. You can find them on the portfolio page, in a new section at the top of the list. These images represent my current work better than anything else on the site. A larger number of them can also be found in random rotation on the very top page: www.urbanresearchtheater.com
Please note that there are three opportunities to work with me in January. Three different opportunities! Choose the one that suits you best. If you are interested in working with me, there is no excuse now.
If you want to come and join me for a one-day workshop, without having to organize anything yourself or make any commitment, please sign up for the three-hour workshop at Lotus Music & Dance on January 20th.
Or you can organize your own workshop with your own group of participants. It can be any time you like, anywhere, and with any number of people. You just have to organize it and respond to my open invitation.
Or you can join my ongoing Thursday night class, with a three-month commitment. It's very cheap (just enough to rent the space) and the experience has been growing deeper each month so far.
As always, please forward this information to anyone who might be interested. Thank you!
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2) WORKSHOP AT LOTUS MUSIC & DANCE
One River: Body and Song with Ben Spatz
Date/Time: Saturday, January 20th, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Fee: $50
This performance workshop is a rare opportunity to explore the organic intersection of song and movement. Mr. Spatz will lead a rigorous and playful 3-hour session introducting a range of dynamic and meditative structures designed to free the creative and expressive possibilities of the performer's body and voice. Participants should come prepared to walk, run, sing, roll, leap, hum and listen, to lead as well as to follow, to work in a group, in pairs or individually.
For more information, visit www.lotusmusicanddance.org - click on "Lotus Presents" and scroll down.
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3) OPEN INVITATION
I am a teacher and practitioner of experimental performance as research. I would like to meet you and your community through song and movement.
Your community could be a group of friends; it could be a theater ensemble or a poker club; it could be a small choir, a therapeutic population, or a prayer circle. You could be the leader of this community, or you could just be a member.
I will visit you anywhere in the five boroughs and lead three to six hours of playful, intensive exploration as a way of meeting your community. If you want to learn technique, I will teach you technique. If you want to learn songs, I will teach you songs. We can also work without speaking. All you have to do is find a clean, open room and five to ten willing participants.
If you are interested, please email urt@junkriver.org with some background information about yourself and your community.
For more information, please visit www.urbanresearchtheater.com
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4) THURSDAY NIGHT CLASS
One River: Body & Song
weekly training session led by Ben Spatz
Thursdays 6pm-9pm at Theaterlab, 137 West 14th Street, NYC
This intensive weekly workshop is a special opportunity to explore the organic intersection of song and movement. It is designed for participants who want to continue developing their performance skills without committing to a production schedule. The instructor will verbally and physically lead rigorous three-hour classes, using a range of dynamic and meditative structures to help free the creative and expressive possibilities of the body and voice. Participants should come prepared to walk, run, sing, roll, leap, hum, and listen; to lead as well as to follow; and to work with a group, in pairs, and individually.
To enroll please call Theaterlab at 212-929-2545 or email urt@junkriver.org.
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5) WORKSHOP
"The workshop is not restricted to theater, it is ubiquitous. In science, it is the 'experimental method,' the laboratory team, the research center, the fieldwork outpost. In psychotherapy, it is the 'group,' the rehabilitation center, th 'therapeutic community.' In living styles, it is the neighborhood, the commune, the collective. (When the workshop is repressive rather than facilitating as in many 'total institutions' such as asylums, prisons, hospitals, and schools, it is a most violently abusive way of treating human beings.) The aim of the workshop is to construct an environment where rational, arational, and irrational behavior exist in balance. Or, to put it biologically, where cortical, brain-stem, motor, and instinctive operations exist in balance, leading to expressive, symbolic, playful, ritualized, 'scripted' behavior. It is my opinion that workshops are more important than most people dream of.
"And if I may end on a somewhat fanciful note: I associate the workshop environment with those ancient, decorated caves that give evidence of singing and dancing, people celebrating fertility in risky, sexy, violent, collective, playful ways."
- Richard Schechner, _Performance Theory_ (2003).
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6) MASK/SONG
I did a workshop with Per Brahe (www.perbrahe.com) a few weeks ago. We used his masks, and they released powerful characters / aspects of ourselves / archetypes into the room. It was intense and chaotic. I did not believe all of it, though. It was too much. If the masks are real, then one or two at a time should be enough, with the rest of us keeping a protective frame. All fourteen of us, together, in new masks, with no rules? That can only lead to repression or falseness. There just isn't space for the real to unfold. It's too much.
Aside from that, the functioning of the masks is fascinating and significant. The masks take the place of the self-image. The masks become the actors in the space.
What if songs are like masks? But instead of hiding the face, they change the space, change reality. Change the person without hiding the person. A mask of repeated doing, a melody. Not external objects but performative structures.
If songs are like masks, this also teaches me a lot about how to treat them. The songs I learned from the Workcenter, for example, are like precious masks, brought home in a box from a foreign country. I can use them, but it is to my own benefit that I be cautious and respectful of them. And then of course I can also make my own masks, based on what I've learned. These will be good or bad. Their quality will reveal itself. I might produce a great one on the first try -- beginner's luck. But to consistently produce good ones, that will take time.
It's a helpful analogy, emphasizing the concreteness of the song as ritual object.
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7) THE DESERT
For five years I have been working on a cluster of ideas called "the desert." First it was an idea for a novel of magical realism. Then it was a confusing, unscripted mess of a show I directed in New York City. Then it was a very different, explicitly sexual novella. Then it was the outline for a solo performance piece based on invented songs.
In my mind the image of the desert was related to part of a Clive Barker novel, some cartoons by the French artist Moebius, the testing grounds of the atomic bomb, and a quote from Delueze and Guattari:
"...There is a desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert. It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it..."
A teeming desert. I can relate this to the empty room, which in the last newsletter I called a cave and a mountain. The empty room is also a desert, desert which at first appears empty, because there is no one else in it, but which in fact is teeming already, because I am in it, and I am always teeming with myself... The desert is the emptiness which reveals the fragmentation of itself, and of the self... It is the quantum void in which nothingness itself is teeming, popping and sparkling with infinitely small particles that blink in and out of existence with infinite frequency...
And then, recently, I found this:
"The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for thirty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had traveled directly to it. God's plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.
"The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. So too the mountain and the sea. The desert is therefore the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself -- that is to say, a creature solitary and poor and dependent upon no one but God, with no great project standing between himself and his Creator.
"This is, at least, the theory. But there is another factor that enters in. First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the 'wilderness of upper Egypt' to 'wander in dry places.' Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence -- lost because he had immured himself in it and closed out everything else.
"So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servent of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.
"Yet look at the deserts today. What are they? The birthplace of a new and terrible creation, the testing-ground of the power by which man seeks to un-created what God has blessed. Today, in the century of man's greatest technological achievement, the wilderness at least comes into its own. Man no longer needs God, and he can live in the desert on his own resources. He can build there his fantastic protected cities of withdrawal and experience mentation and vice. The glittering towns that spring up overnight in the desert are no longer images of the City of God, coming down from heaven to enlighten the world with the vision of peace. They are not even replicas of the tower of Babel that once rose up in the desert of Senaar, that man 'might make his name famous and reach even unto heaven' (Genesis, 11:4). They are brilliant and sordid smiles of the devil upon the face of the wilderness, cities of secrecy where each man spies on his brother, cities through whose veins money runs like artificial blood, and from whose womb will come the last and greatest instrument of destruction.
"Can we watch the growth of these cities and not do something to purify our own hearts? When man and his money and machines move out into the desert, and dwell there, not fighting the devil as Christ did, but believing in his promises of power and wealth, and adoring his angelic wisdom, then the desert itself moves everywhere. Everywhere is desert. Everywhere is solitude in which man must do penance and fight the adversary and purify his own heart in the grace of God.
"The desert is the home of despair. And despair, now, is everywhere. Let us not think that our interior solitude consists in the acceptance of defeat. We cannot escape anything by consenting tacitly to be defeated. Despair is an abyss without bottom. Do not think to close it by consenting to it and trying to forget you have consented.
"This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent."
- Thomas Merton, _Thoughts in Solitude_, 1993.
Many people have warned me against working alone. The passage above makes their motivation clear, though a metaphor I never would have expected: God and the devil. Yes, this is the teeming of solitude: A solitude of holy purity, a solitude of madness, and a solitude of the devil, the adversary. Those who warn me do so in good faith: They are not advising me to stay out of the desert, but warning me of what lurks there.
The solitude is one, and it is many. Since I am alone in the empty room, no one can say whether the craft I practice there is a sterile paradise of emptiness and indulgence or a real facing, waking up, a fruitful emptiness. Because the room is empty, only the teeming itself exists. The teeming of silence and solitude.
I am frankly relieved to remember that no one can judge what is done in solitude, or name what it is that lives in the desert.
"This accusation [of megalomania] cannot be disproved by anything [he] said or wrote, because humility and demonic pride speak the same language. 'By their fruits,' however, 'you shall know them.'"
- W.H. Auden, from the introduction to _Markings_ by Dag Hammerskjold (1981).
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8) POEM
Tomorrow we shall meet,
But in the meantime how grievous the memory
- Dag Hammerskjold, _Markings_ (1981).
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Ben Spatz
CONTENTS
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2) workshop at lotus music & dance
3) open invitation (ongoing)
4) thursday night class (ongoing)
6) mask/song (Brahe)
7) the desert (Merton, Auden)
8) poem (Hammerskjold)
ANNOUNCEMENTS
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$80/month for a minimum of three months
PROSE
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Death and I -
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.
Of hours frittered away.
New York City