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Urban Research Theater Newsletter - July, 2006
1) Body & Song workshop in NYC
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1) Body & Song workshop in NYC
Friends: Please forward this short description to any people or groups that might be interested. I would appreciate it. Thank you.
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BODY & SONG workshop in NYC
This series of five classes will combine technical instruction with improvisational play. Participants will be challenged to discover new levels of energetic and organic engagement through the use of dynamic song and movement structures. In addition, they will be invited to discover self-initiated practices and to develop these towards simplicity and quality. By calling on the body through sweat and song, and on the mind through individual exploration, we will develop our practical understanding of performance craft and work to open ourselves.
Sundays from 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Panetta Movement Center
If interested, please contact urt@junkriver.org.
www.urbanresearchtheater.com
PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY
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2) Prison work
Prisons are full of angry people who are getting fucked over and locked in and locked out by society. I have always been obsessed with imprisonment.
I am acutely aware that, as a result of technology, one person can imprison another. Without technology--without metal, concrete, and plastic--people can only hurt, kill, or banish one another. There is no such thing as imprisonment. Restraint without technology must be manual, person-to-person, and therefore demands as much effort from the imprisoner as from the imprisoned, and cannot be permanent.
With technology comes the possibility to put someone in a room and close the door and walk away, leaving them there, constrained by the actual physical walls, while you are free... I cannot bear this. It seems to violate the universe in some way, so that despite everything I almost cannot believe it is true. Can a human being really be locked in a cage for many years? It doesn't seem possible. And who would do such a thing...?
I want to work in a prison. To do my work in a prison, that is.
In addition to being among the most interesting and important people in society, and a crucial political constituency, prisoners have more free time on their hands than anybody else. As I understand it, they are provided with basic room and board in exchange for menial labor or no labor at all. Nor do they have complicated schedules and travel plans. Although not by choice, the lives of prisoners are as ascetic as monks.
I know very little about this topic, but it seems to me that, if you could overcome the obviously immense administrative hurdles, then the possibility to do long-term performance research might exist with prisoners in a way that it can hardly exist with artists, professionals, or students.
Friends: If you have any contacts or experience related to arts programs in prisons or "correctional" facilities, please let me know about them. Thanks.
3) Journal excerpts
As always, your comments and responses are appreciated.
- July 6 -
Today I approached the room itself more as a partner. It's the room that I am dancing with. I am trying to do something with and for the room. I bow when I enter and leave. I thank the room at the end. It just feels right. It's the space which is consecrated, which represents a part of me. Just changing into work clothes this morning set me free.
And what is it that I am trying to do to and with the room? I am preparing the space for the one who will come. I don't know who it will be. Today I thought it might be someone I worked with in Poland, who wrote to me recently. Maybe it will be someone else. All I know is I am waiting for this person, every day, and until then I am preparing the space, that is to say, preparing myself, to meet them...
Still thinking about Gandhi. The introduction to the book I'm reading is very close to my heart. Eknath Easwaran writes: "A decidedly unpromising nobody, [Gandhi] left India in 1893 and dropped out of sight completely. By the time he returned in 1915, this 'nobody' was hailed as Mahatma, or 'great soul.' Those twenty years in South Africa hold the secret of the 'essential Gandhi'. We will return to look there more closely, for it is that transformation--not just an extraordinary success story, but the utter remaking of a personality--that holds Gandhi's ultimate significance for us today. [... In these years], hidden under the affairs of a terribly busy life, we can see him working tirelessly on the business of mystics everywhere: training his mind, transforming personal passions, 'reducing himself to zero'."
He doesn't care primarily about what Gandhi did after he was Mahatma. He cares about the transformation. He cares about what happened in South Africa, after he was thrown off the train. How did the transformation come about? This is what I care about too.
How did Grotowski get from SHAKUNTALA to APOKALYPSIS? And from APOKALYPSIS to ACTION? Not only what did he do, which is in the books, but what was the inner action, which is between the lines. How did he become so fully himself?
- July 7 -
What is the thing I need? I need a space. A space to work in. All the time. Enough hours. Where I can bring other people. I need a space. Get it. Get a work space. A work "center". Doesn't matter how. Graduate school. Residency. Entrepreneurship. Luck. Sugar daddy. MTV. Fame. Contracts. Sweeping the floor. Teaching kids. Studying under someone else. Meditation or yoga culture. Find the way.
- July 15 -
It's an impossible task to try to figure out where one is, what "level" one is at. Any real teacher knows that whether you tell a student to go and teach and work on their own, or whether you tell them to keep studying under a master, depends not on any objective level of their achievement but on what you think they need as an individual. With one breath, Grotowski gave harsh commands to his actors and treated them as if they knew nothing. With another, he told his followers to go follow their own paths and not imitate him.
Freedom!
Why do I feel the need to work in NYC? Why not go to a smaller city that really needs art and where it would be easier to get space? Somehow my technique has always been something like: "Go to the center and be different." This is my mode--to position myself as close to the center as possible, and then try to distinguish or myself through actions from what is going on there. To be marginal at the center. This creates the highest voltage, like two opposite magnets pushed together. Like a squat or an organic co-op in Manhattan. To bring the wilderness into the center of civilization; to lead the "goat" back into the walled city; to confront the king.
I know I need to give myself room to get more physical with the songs. That's the only way to call the voice. I'm working on distinguishing, in practice, Grotowski's "elan" ("something with which you should enter your physical line of actions" says Thomas Richards) from what is "forced" or "pumped".
Forcing is a big block of energy that starts and then stops. It's when you do something so hard that you become blind and deaf. Elan starts initially as the same kind of energy, but is immediately modulated by a continuing openness to perception. So the important thing is not what "kind" of energy starts the work (i.e. the original impulse) but how to stay open and responsive as the energy passes through you.
- July 22 -
This afternoon I arrived at a retreat center where I will spend one week in the woods, with vast amounts of solitude and studio time. It's a wonderful place, open and communal, run as a collective wherever possible. You can feel that in the air.
After that it was pouring the whole day. I feel somehow exposed in the rain--so far from my natural self who doesn't mind getting wet. I hope that will change, while I'm here.
"Whoever seeks me finds me and whoever finds me comes to know me and whoever comes to know me loves me and whoever loves me then I kill that person and whomsoever I kill then I must pay the blood money and to whomsoever I must pay the blood money then I AM THE RECOMPENSE FOR THE BLOOD MONEY." (From the secret teachings of Mohammad.)
- July 23 -
The way I worked last night is not something I could have done in the past. It required my critical mind to be operating at a pace appropriate to my actual doing.
I feel like I was carrying all of this city stuff, artificiality of some kind, and today it dropped away and I can feel myself again.
I am working on a fragment from Samuel Beckett's TEXTS FOR NOTHING. It's for a workshop in two weeks with Mario Biagini of the Pontedera Workcenter, and the Beckett source was assigned to us. I don't like the book. It is so relentlessly dark and arcane. I chose the following fragment:
"Another thing, I call that another thing, the old thing I keep on not saying till I'm sick and tired, revelling in the flying moments, I call that revelling, now's my chance and I talk of revelling, it won't come back in a hurry if I remember right, but come back it must with its riot of instants. It's not me in any case, I'm not talking about me, I've said it a million times, no point in apologizing again, for talking of me, when there's X, that paradigm of human kind, moving at will, complete with joys and sorrows, perhaps even a wife and brats, forbears most certainly, a carcass in God's image, and a contemporary skull, but above all endowed with movement, that's what strikes you above all, with his likeness so easy to take and his so instructive soul, that really, no, to talk of oneself, when there's X, no, what a blessing I'm not talking of myself, enough vile parrot I'll kill you."
- July 24 -
It's good to keep coming back to the studio, all day long... wake up; studio; break; studio; go to sleep. That's how it should be. The studio isn't a strange, special place. It's the rest of the world that is strange. The studio is home.
The people here do not know how to be quiet. It was the same in Poland. Am I the only one who was born knowing the value of silence? Or is it a function of my not feeling safe, not feeling at home... Something needs to be protected, first, before speech can happen without violence...
Again: What do I do in the studio? Do I work on a solo show? Not at all. I just move and sing and wait for structure. I refuse to generate. I am waiting for God, I mean, to become God...
Lesson 1: If you're going to sit around for a half hour doing nothing but complaining internally, leave the studio so that when you come back it will feel peaceful again. Don't pollute the space with whining. Stay in the space if you're actually resting. Leave if you should be working but aren't.
Lesson 2: I'm at the point where right when I start to sing or move, keeping it simple, I always feel a burst of faith. The difficulty is keeping this faith before I start, and then when I get to the hard part.
Lesson 3 (important): There is ONE river of good work. That's why people say they can go right into the studio and make no separation from life. Not because they are always physically ready (although this could eventually be a product) but because the river of good work is the same river everywhere. So it doesn't matter if you're writing or singing or moving or resting. There is one river. This also means that it doesn't "go away" when you stop.
I remember leaping: first running in a circle around the room, spurred on by birds, and then leaping, as far as I could, every so often... I remember a period that was terribly real, energy pulsing through all of my limbs... A time when I was kneeling, hands on heels, diaphragm pushed forward, letting my stomach fall open to catch the lowest possible sound... it was like a bestiary, and also like a catalogue of my souls... an exercise, a cleansing... I remember...
I remember...
One river... One hour...
Joyfully...
I always think that "to reveal yourself" means to collapse and feel bad. But actually I am already collapsed and feeling bad when I'm hiding myself. To reveal oneself means to let oneself stand and feel good. To let oneself be seen in joy as much as in sorrow. And then when criticism comes, to adjust the technical element but continue to stand and feel good and be seen. To reveal oneself is the opposite of shame. Dignity!
"If you will reach this particular place, you will acquire in a single moment the knowledge of hundreds of mysteries, but woe to you, if you lag behind on this road! You will lose yourself totally in the path of grief. Do not sleep in the night and do not eat anything during the day. Then, perhaps, the desire for this quest will be kindled in you. Seek until you lose yourself in the search and you lose even the idea of the search!" (From THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS.)
- July 25 -
I went and worked at the house under construction, knocking out nails and tearing down old sheetrock in preparation for new. Then I lay and stretched in the sauna until my heart was beating fast. Then I swam in the quarry.
I had no idea what a challenge and learning experience it would be to share the space with other people on this retreat. I can feel my desire to have intimacy with the group, to be part of it, to socialize, and to lose myself in social games... It's very tempting, to abandon myself to this childhood, this freedom, this flirtation... But something prevents me. I see that it's just a game. Not serious enough.
In my dream there is a community that spends a lot of time working. More work, less play. Less "fun," more ruthless self-discovery.
[...]
There are two kinds of happiness, as far as I can tell. I mean real, true, deep happiness. I wonder how they are the same?
The first is the intimacy of friendship and love. Laughing or talking or playing together, in pairs or groups, with good friends or lovers, sexual or not.
The second is the intimacy of the studio. I felt it last night even though I was alone. A few times I have also felt it with others. Love of work.
play vs. work
To me, the difference is awareness of the outside world... This awareness of external affairs is what makes the community stand--makes it adult. Otherwise it is childlike.
[...]
Lesson 4: All sadness and darkness is preparation for the next wave of deeper work. This can only be taken on faith.
People passed by the window while I was working. I chose to stay with my river rather than to hide myself before them. My allegiance was with the river, and this was because of the previous two hours of doing "nothing". The "nothing" is what keeps you going when you get to the "something".
From ZEN AND THE WAYS:
"In a contest, first control your own mind;
- July 26 -
The job of the leader is to hold the span between the warmth of the community and the vast cold / hot distance of the stars. To see how each of us is beautiful, and still press us each day without remorse towards greater annihilation. Both together lead to sublime joy. This is clear.
And so I need to come back to that motive: To prepare the space. Not to construct anything or achieve anything for myself or an audience. To prepare the space (and therefore myself) for the people who will come to work there in the future. This can apply not only to the studio but to myself at all angles. So you don't have to be a great dancer, now or ever. You just have to work hard on your craft every day, and have a true assessment of yourself, without illusions. The space must be clean, empty, ready. One day someone will show up at the door and ask to come in. You have to be ready...
[...]
Question: Was Grotowski innocent? How did he show it? What is the complementary value to innocence? Wisdom? Responsibility? Seriousness? I cannot be innocent when I am not taking care of my responsibilities.
It seems that Gandhi was innocent...
- July 27 -
What I am trying to do: "To attenuate or intensify both aspects: Will and organicity."
Inside the space or structure, total organicity. But will is required to create space in reality, and to create structure despite entropy. Organicity without will is a summer camp for hippies, or what Grotowski called "soup". Will without organicity is, what, fascism?
Will and organicity are director and actor, mind and body, thought and intuition.
- July 28 -
Watching the emotions go by, like animals...
My intense resistance to working on simple acting lines is very old. It's what took me out of "normal theater" and led me towards hammy, entertaining roles, and then to being a conceptual director, and then to Gardzienice. But here I am again, caught up with myself. I can't go any further with pure movement or song technique without becoming a dancer or a singer, which is not my purpose.
So what is this resistance? Am I simply afraid to be boring? Or to be emotionally present in a simple way? It seems to annoy me: The simple vulnerability of everyday life. It gets in the way of my heroic fantasy life. I have to reconcile it, and it seems like the only way is through actual acting. Maybe I should even take an "acting class". That must be right, because it sounds impossibly, unimaginably difficult and painful.
Ben Spatz
2) Prison work
3) Journal excerpts
August 20 through September 17
Fee: $100 for five classes (8/20, 8/27, 9/3, 9/10, 9/17)
214 West 29th Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY
talking vs. singing
laughing or crying vs. dancing
flirting vs. acting
kissing vs. structure
sex vs. performance
only after that think about technique.
If you have control of your mind,
be careful not to lose it;
Hold the mind firm, and then make the thrust."
New York City