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Monthly Update - March, 2006 "A definite time during your day should be devoted to work. You don't do anything else. You sacrifice everything else to it. In the beginning, as long as you are not capable of working, you don't try anything special, you don't work. But you think about work. Or you read something about the Work. You read, speak and think about it. For example, you take the time between eleven o'clock and noon. You allow all the associations about work to flow. This is not yet work, but you are preparing the ground. You accept this idea that a certain period of time should be devoted to work. And if a work is given to you, or if you give yourself a work, you will do it during the time that you have already prepared for this. The place will be made. It is in doing that a man understands, and you will measure the result this brings you. You say you work. You think this. But here no one works yet; it is still child's play. It is only a little better than 'titillation.' I! t is a new kind of titillation. In real work, the forehead is drenched with sweat which also flows from the heels.' - G. I. Gurdjieff The following are edited excerpts from my journal of the past month. I offer them in order to leave a trace of what I am doing, since most of it is private. Questions, comments, critique and other reactions are welcome. Thank you. > March 3 Didn't go to sleep last night. Tried to sleep until 3am, but my mind was alert. Something in me was speaking fire. I hadn't gone to the studio yesterday-or rather, had been unable to stay because of a new class scheduled on Thursdays. So at 3am, I went to the studio. I worked physically for an hour and a half. I also sat for a while, and sang for a while, and took several naps on the floor. The sun came up at 6:30am and I did Motions. Now it's 7:30am and I'm having breakfast at the deli across the street. It was fairly intense physically-the struggle to stay awake, the short bursts of energy and exhaustion... and of course it makes a good story. But it was a mundane effort in some way. It did not enter the realm of the unknown or the sacred. The most significant work experiences I've had recently have been these past few Sundays, at the beginning of my regularly scheduled week, and also a few times back in the fall when I was working less often. In other words, I work better when I'm well-rested. This might sound obvious but there is a real question for me about the place of exhaustion in this work. In some kinds of intensive training programs they keep you constantly exhausted, and I am trying to determine what role of that kind of exhaustion can play when one is working alone. It's not a fully resolved question yet, but it's clear after tonight that doing crazy shit and having a wacky schedule and being exhausted does not necessarily make for deep work. It's like when someone told me last year that I ought to be "wading into the river at dawn" with my Polish group rather than doing simple exercises every day. No. That isn't work. Work is what you do every day. There's nothing wrong with generating intensity by climbing a mountain in the middle of the night, but the import of such a thing is limited because the force of the experience can be traced directly to the extraordinary circumstances. It may jolt one out of the truly mundane, but it will never compare in significance to what is done regularly over time. A one-time event can never be as meaningful as a regular daily practice. In the most profoundly spiritual moments, nothing wild or unusual is happening. Everything that is being done is clear and well-ordered and has been done many times before. This is what good work in the studio is like: Not too impulsive, not a crazy adventure. Just a very simple practice, and inside of that-a miracle! > March 5 This week I succeeded on several days in doing good physical improvisation and looselyuctured work. I have a physical work structure that starts with the simplest element (wrist rotations) and goes through a basic sequence of "warm-ups," followed by the new spine work at different levels. This is obviously not enough. It is a physical training, merely, and I can already see positive results from it both in myself and in the mirror. But therefore when I was unsatisfied this week, I knew that it wasn't because I'm not sweating enough, etc. No, it's much scarier than that. I think I need to work on composition. But composition of what? I am doing this physical work, but I do not want to structure it more precisely. That would become a dance. Neither do I want to structure the songs as songs, though I should continue to work on them technically in this way. I am faced with the need to work with "physical actions" or acting beats. Otherwise I will be doing song and dance, and not theater, and never an Action. This is scary. I am stepping into the unknown. It's as if I realize that I've been faced with this issue many times before, and I've always responded horizontally by working on vocal / physical craft instead. But acting craft? I don't think it matters that I am alone. This would be painful in any case, with or without an external teacher. There is something painful in acting for me, and maybe it's as simple as revealing my emotions. But without that the work will never transcend, it will not make me light and it will not bring me or anyone to tears. So I have to begin: Slowly, gently. The only good side is that maybe it will make the physical and vocal work feel easy by comparison. I am working on the edge of myself now. I don't know who I'll be in a week's time. Yet in another way my life is very stable... And that contrasting relation is exactly as it should be. > March 12 As I go on working, I see that in this work there can be no excuses. Being alone in the room drives home this point, because I can never claim that my limits are the result of my partner. The only way I will get to a place of power is if all of me gets there together. When you're an actor, you can end up being powerful in your body without being self-directed as a whole person. On the other hand, the way of the intellect can lead to disembodiment. I am hoping to reach the point one day where I can work physically with as much concentration as I would if an external director were pushing me, and where I can be as demanding as a director who sits on the sidelines even though I am also the one who executes the directions. I know that this is "less efficient" if you want to achieve one or the other-but I want both. I only care about the way in which the director and the actor can be one. This is a demand for unity in body and mind, so that what I want to do, I am also capable of-not only in terms of skill but also in terms of energy. Now, when my body is tired or unwilling to do what my mind demands, I should not be angry at the body and blame it. For it is also the mind that must come down and encounter the reality of the body. They have to find a way of working together as partners, as in any relationship. Now: What is my ladder to this place? Of what are the rungs constructed? It seems to me that I have already arrived at the basic outline of a working structure for this phase, as follows: Simple sitting; sequence of warm-ups; full-body spine-centered "training"; going up into jumping; opening the voice; structuring the voice through repeated song fragments; and eventually structuring the song fragments into a line or lines of actions. The last step is beyond me for now, but I don't want to hurry and construct detailed links using material I don't believe in. I should instead think of this whole articulated sequence as the ladder and seek to move along it, upward, using each level as a support for the next and letting it fall away when it becomes unnecessary. The ladder leads upward into increasing precision. On a weaker day I start from sitting and progress only to the level of open body and voice. On a stronger day I start right in on the training and by the end can touch a kind of structure. If one day I were able to enter directly into the level of precise structure, then that would constitute an Action. At each stage, the next higher technical level cannot arrive until the previous one is ready to give birth to it. If I am not able to enter organically into more precise, repeatable structures of body and voice, it must be because the playful stream is not open wide enough. There needs to be a great surplus of energy in the playful stream, in order for structures to spontaneously crystallize as at the onset of turbulence. There's no sense in trying to make structures while the stream is still flowing weakly-this is the director-mind clutching at straws. For now I have to forget about setting structures and simply see how wide I can open the door and for how long I can keep it open... > March 22 Students and teachers offer masks to one other, at least at first. It may be something as simple as a kind of pride that causes or allows us to do what is expected of us. A classroom is a situation in which something is expected, and that something has a name-there is a technique. We "rise" to the occasion by doing what is expected of us. This is not only between students and teachers. I think it is even simpler: The fact of being in the room with someone new. The new face always has expectations, and we fulfill them. So we "do something." But the real work only begins when the masks come off and there are no strangers in the room. The word for this is intimacy. It happens between student and teacher, and between friends, just as it happens with lovers. It also happens with one person alone. Even alone we start out masked and have to search to find intimacy with ourselves. Intimacy-that is to say, fearlessness: The absence of shame and the presence of humility. How long does it take for intimacy to arise in a given constellation of people? It depends. What is the way to achieve intimacy? This is clear: The way to achieve intimacy is by discarding distractions-not only the obvious distractions like entertainment, advertising, cheap music and television, but also the distractions of the body and heart. Food can be a distraction. Sex can be a distraction. All of these things can be part of intimacy too, if they are done with the whole self. One of the things people do not like to admit is that doing each thing fully also means doing fewer things-at least in the worldly sense of tasks, activities, and achievements. We do not like to admit that the path to mastery is not mysterious or complex but very clear: The master is one who knows what they do and who does not do what cannot be done fully. From beginning to end, mastery is about saying no. It is about saying no to things incompletely done and actions not really believed in. It is about discovering which few things (one or two is enough, really-three at most) one wishes to do, and saying no to all other things, and then, with the full heart, to those few things saying yes. > March 27 Let's say that I decide to work for three hours, and set an alarm. If I work for the allotted time and then the alarm goes off, I am left with the sense that I could have gone on forever. But if I stop working even one minute before the alarm goes off, and check the clock in impatience, then I feel that I have signified an end-point in my work, a giving-up point, and my resolve in all fields comes into question. > March 27 - later For whatever reason-call it postmodernism, liberalism, feminism, Judaism-I have a built-in dismantler of doctrine. It's called "critical thinking" and is linked to "criticism" (in the sense of both a specific critique and "critical" theory). It is often proclaimed to be the most valuable aspect of education in our culture. When we talk about the good side of "Western culture," as it relates to democracy and education, we talk about "the ability to think critically." Right now I am facing my own desire to be closer to intuition and faith, values not emphasized in the liberal curriculum. These values may seem at first to be in opposition to critical thinking and all that our culture claims to hold dear. They are indeed linked to hierarchy rather than equality; tradition rather than innovation; community rather than individual; and in their most extreme forms they can enable fascism and mob mentality. But they cannot be simply banished or forcibly repressed-or we will end up like Pentheus. > March 29 Aha-I understand something. Two things. First, about the actions. I think they can be used as the basic elements of structure. A singer or dancer builds structure in technical terms. I've always resisted this and that's why I've been unable to create complex structures. When singing one of my fragments in repetition, I don't want to indicate structure technically-e.g. by counting how many times to sing it. Instead I need to link the song to a line of actions. If the actions are clear and make sense to me and run from one to the next without gaps or jumps, then I will remember the sequence, and the song will always be sung a certain number of times, but without counting. I started playing with this and I'm just at the very beginning. I can touch one or two actions but I feel very blocked physically, not relaxed, so the impulse can't circulate. I contain everything and even want to close my eyes. As soon as I try to make the impulse physical, a misguided technical perspective enters and dominates my physicality, blocking the impulse's dynamic manifestations. At first the door is locked; then it is clumsily forced open. I do not yet have the key to open it smoothly. There's nothing for it but to start from small impulses and slowly try to relax myself so that they can flow. This implies something about the physical work in general: It really does have to come out of a kind of relaxation. That's the only way the action river can come into the body. And the technical exercises must always be simple enough to allow work on this inner-outer connection. For example, in Motions today I felt in a wholly new way how the transition from "stand" to "ready" can be executed more purely, so that really only the lower-spine-center causes everything. I am usually tensing my hands, stomach, and legs unnecessarily, which will block the development of a line of actions. I am beginning to see where aesthetics cleaves from craft in this work. In other words, I am beginning to perceive the difference between my practice and my art. There's just no telling what kind of structure may evolve from my working in this way. Ben Spatz March, 2006 New York City