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Urban Research Theater Newsletter - September, 2007
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
1) Another City (August 2007): Participant Comments
MISCELLANY
4) Song Cycle: Report on Recent Work
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1) ANOTHER CITY (AUGUST 2007): PARTICIPANT COMMENTS
The first Another City event was a great success. Six courageous participants from diverse backgrounds (street theater, experimental theater, animation, drama therapy, and others) joined Michele and I for three days of group singing, performance creation, active meditation and urban pilgrimage.
The event took place from 2pm on Friday, August 17, until 9pm on Sunday, August 19, and included four studio sessions, two sunrise sessions in Central Park (starting at 5:30am), and three urban expeditions. Here are some comments from the participants:
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"Thank you so much for the truly beautiful 'otherness' you sculpted with such grace. It was a tremendous gift. I felt like I was in another city, or even another country. I felt like a foreigner in this city where I have lived for six years. [...] I am used to doing street theater that is very political and in-your-face. It's different when you're behind the mask of a message or image, or if you even have any kind of costumes. But here were were just ourselves, doing this. I felt vulnerable in the city. Vulnerable in a radical way."
* * *
"It was very liberating for me, truly inspiring and I still feel a surge of energy. Thank you for creating that welcoming and encouraging space that allowed us to explore our voices and bodies and explore some of our boundaries. I amazed myself how quickly I felt comfortable expressing myself in public - both in the studio and in the streets. The use of song really succeeded in creating imaginary spaces and perceptions within the city."
* * *
"From what I experienced, it seemed that what was at the heart of this method was that the actor gets to a place where they are feeling something, experiencing something within themselves that is also not shut off. There is an awareness generated that is apparent from the outside, and this visible internal awareness is what an audience or viewer would be drawn to and be able to connect with, as if they were experiencing the movement, the scene and the mental state of the performer through the performers eyes."
* * *
The third quote is from Christina Spangler's blog entry. Read the full text at http://spanglerstudios.com/WordPress/?p=44
A few images and a video clip are available on the URT website. Meanwhile, we are very pleased to announce that the next "Another City" event has been scheduled for January, 2008.
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2) ANOTHER CITY: HEART OF WINTER (JANUARY 2008): CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
Group singing - theater craft -
/// ANOTHER CITY: HEART OF WINTER ///
Four big days of work and wonder
January 3-6, 2008
This January, when the days are short and cold and the year is new, we will kindle fires in ourselves through group song and individual performance research. "Another City: Heart of Winter" is a unique chance to rediscover your city and your self through the techniques of the Urban Research Theater.
/// Overview:
Another City: Heart of Winter will begin Thursday afternoon with an extended session in a beautiful, centrally located dance/theater studio. Each of the following days will start at sunrise in the North Woods area of Central Park, and then move into the studio later. In the serene half-wilderness of the North Woods, we will breathe deeply, slow down, and prepare ourselves for concentrated artistic work. We will wake ourselves up and come together as a group through song and physical exercise among the winter trees and cold waterfalls.
The greater part of each day will be spent in the studio, where we will focus on the use of songs as tools for embodied performance. Participants will be asked to bring a song to work on, and will be taught several traditional and original songs during the four days. We will explore these songs both individually and as a group, searching for their hidden strengths and subtleties.
Previous experience with singing or performance is not required.
Participants should be comfortable running, jumping, and lying on the floor.
The group is limited to 10 people.
/// Participation Fee:
$300 if paid after December 1
/// To Register, email ben@urbanresearchtheater.com
/// For a complete event schedule, visit http://www.urbanresearchtheater.com/
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3) ACTION LAB: WEEKLY DROP-IN SESSIONS
We are also very pleased to announce that it is finally possible to offer weekly drop-in sessions for those who are interested in learning about our work.
_ Action Lab _
Action Lab is a site for the investigation of ACTION in performance. What does it mean to really live onstage? How can technical precision support spontaneity and presence? How do you construct a line of actions that can be repeated without becoming mechanical?
We will approach these questions with rigor and patience, skipping no steps but driving straight to our individual limits and looking over the edge. Participants are asked to arrive each day with a text, song, or acting proposition to work on. This material can be chosen specifically for the Action Lab, or it can be part of a role you have played in the past or are currently working on.
Each session will begin with intense, playful physical work and group singing, and then focus on the individual work described above. Participants will develop their propositions through increasing layers of precision, and learn to encounter themselves through exploration of the chosen material. Our goal is to rediscover the essential act of performance here and now.
$20 per session
Wednesdays 10am-1pm
Thompson Studio
Action Lab is led by Ben Spatz, Artistic Director, Urban Research Theater.
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4) SONG CYCLE: REPORT ON RECENT WORK
Work on the First Song Cycle project is ongoing. It may be less visible, but without it none of the activities described above would be possible. We are now entering our fifth month of regular work, four to six days per week. Results, as always, become perceptible through small, delicate changes and openings. New possibilities appear and then disappear, until, through patient coaxing, we can bring them to full arrival.
We are not working directly on the Song Cycle structure right now. Instead, we have temporarily set that aside in order to develop an individual structure for my partner, Michele. This is based on a short text from Antigone. Through working on it, I am doing my best to teach her everything I have learned about acting and performance in the past 28 years. At the same time, I am learning many new things from her and from our work together.
Here are a few exerpts from my journal:
"First we went through the text analytically, thinking about what Antigone's intentions and inner actions might be. Then I had her create two different propositions, based on two very different childhood memories. Then, just by accident, I had her work on the text phonetically, to explore the sounds as separate from the meaning of the words. I had her cut the words into phonemes, and it exploded. I feel like I am in the room with some kind of bizarre monkey. And she can clearly go forever. I have never seen her do stuff like this before. It's extremely funny!"
"I think maybe the reason it's funny and comical and ironic rather than emotionally powerful is because this huge fountain is being pushed through the face and hands. Her mouth is extremely active, as in a comic mask (half-mask). In a tragic mask (full-mask), the mouth is not seen. The difference between comic-mask work and tragic-mask work seems crucial. Unblocking the body is the same as unblocking the feelings, unblocking the memories, making it real."
"There is something in 'acting' - in the montage - in 'putting on a show' - in mimesis - that I find to be like a deception. That's why I always feel out of place with performers - because I don't want to do shows. But I'm always hanging around them, because I want the process, the training and the exploration and even the increasingly precise work of structuring. For me it's not that the process is more important than the product - it's that process is product. There is no product other than the process. But I never knew how to work this way because it really is not a conceivable practice in my society. It always seemed like it just couldn't make sense for me to do the kind of work I love, unless it could be 'justified' or 'proven' by the kind of show that I never want to be part of."
"What I have described as the 'circuit' of energy or authority, that which passes through me when I have 'someone above and someone below,' a teacher and a student at the same time... I have just realized that it is identical to the 'ritual process' in anthropology. My experience with the 'teacher' or 'leader' - that is, my own 'bottoming' or 'followship' - is the experience of separation and liminality, as my world is opened into theirs. My experience with a 'student' or 'follower' - my own 'topping' or 'leadership' - is the experience of reintegration. When I only have students, I become too much in the world, my self hardens, I am not vulnerable, not innocent. But when I have only teachers, I am afloat in liminality, and it is not sustainable. But in June, for example, when I was working with 'someone above and someone below,' the complete process was taking place continuously. I was transfigured. It is this complete circuit that I am searching for, to make it a sustained reality, to make it my life."
"What is really necessary - to find the complete ritual process: separation, liminality, reintegration; or deconstruction / reconstruction - in one's daily life, today? To do this, you should have a teacher, and a student. To have a teacher and a student - this is the way to remain between heaven and earth. To be a brother or sister rather than a parent or child. To be in touch with one's leadership and one's followship, if not in the same moment, then continuously, in waves."
"After paratheater, you experience the normal, social world as unreal. This is what happened to me after my most significant encounter with Grotowski's late work. But my chief concern is not just to get myself alone into that other reality. My concern is to be a bridge, which means that I must touch both shores. Or maybe it's that I've always known reality is unreal, and so don't need to be taught it, only reminded. In any case, I won't abandon society just because it is unreal. The people who live in it are real."
"Another City was successful in several ways. With regard to the work itself, I learned some things about the relation between what I sometimes call 'the mode of Gardzienice' and 'the mode of the Workcenter'. These are hard to articulate, but I have the sense in a new way that they are not inherently incompatible approaches. That's what I've always wanted: To stretch between the two with integrity. A bridge must touch both shores and keep its own integrity. If it fails to reach one shore or the other, it is useless, but it is also useless if it collapses under the strain."
"What Grotowski calls 'the way of the performer' is the life for which it is not enough to experience the depths. They must be made visible, brought back, reintegrated. After Another City, I returned to Central Park with Michele, looking for a different kind of work. Pretty soon she disappeared from view and came back transformed, with stories of her adventures in a waterfall and in the great green meadows. I told her to continue the work just in this one patch of grass and trees, without leaving my sight. This was harder. Harder still to do it in an empty studio, and harder still on a crowded street. Yet this is why we call it 'work'. Go and taste life, disappear, have your experiences - they are necessary. But then try to reduce the outer stimuli, stop traveling, stop self-medicating with novelty, and look for those same waterfalls and fields inside yourself. For us it is not enough to go to the mountain. We want to bring the mountain home."
"The answer is always to go into the grain of the technical work. The GRAIN. Today we started by re-examining the basic physical exercises. In the beginning it was painful, she was mad at the exercises, she was treating them like big known units that just had to be done. Not really using them, not going into the grain. Now they are more clean, and more related to each other - like a suite rather than an eclectic collection."
"Many hours spent working on a couple minutes of silent structure prior to the first word of the Antigone text. Looking for how the feet come up from a muddy field. Looking for it until I can see and feel the mud because of the way her foot hangs in the air."
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5) THE CREATIVE ACTOR AND THE IMITATIVE ACTOR
"The difference between the creative and the imitative actor is that the latter enters into the feelings of his part only during the preparatory stages of the work, while during the actual performance he does so only indirectly, that is to say, by imitating his former experience. Such acting, Stanislavsky points out, may be beautiful, but it is not deep; it is effective rather than powerful. In it the form is more interesting than the content. It creates a greater impression on the spectator's sight and hearing than on his spirit, and for that reason it thrills rather than moves him." - David Magarshack, from _Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage_ (p31)
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6) THE PRACTICE OF THE DEVOTIONAL PRESENT IN MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY
"By the late Middle Ages, there was a remarkable amount of interest in the details of the torture, suffering, and violence of the Crucifixion, as well as in all of the events leading up to Christ's death on the Cross. Passion imagery was virtually everywhere in England--in prayers, sermons, lyrics, devotional treatises, mystery plays, stained glass, sculpture, and manuscript illumination. [...] One of the most significant by-products of this emphasis was the proliferation of Latin and vernacular meditations that encouraged readers to visualize scenes from Christ's life and death as if they were eyewitnesses. [...]
"An important aspect of this method of vividly imagining the Passion was its visual acuity. Readers were encouraged to visualize themselves as part of the original cloud of witnesses at the Crucifixion. This meditative technique has been called 'the practice of the devotional present' [also 'active remembering'], and it involved a kind of highly focused 'biblical day-dreaming.' For example, some texts instruct readers to imagine that they were physically present at the Last Supper, seated alongside Christ and his disciples. Other texts ask readers to take their place alongside Jesus on the road to Calvary or with him as nails fasten him to the Cross. Many suggest standing with Mary and John while he is crucified. Some urge the reader to kneel beside Christ and Mount Oliver, to lie prostrate beside him on the ground, to kiss his hands and feet, to take Christ's blows, to exchange places with him, or even 'to remain with him all night as he stands bound to the pillar.'
"These Passion meditations appealed to people's need to be led into scriptural events in a personalized, individual way. Texts such as this sought an amazingly direct contact with their audience. They were designed to arouse compassion in their readers and also to make the biblical past fresh, immediate, and alive. They gave readers a graphic, vigorous sense of the literal, historical reality of Christ's Passion-and the potential to experience these events as if in their full effulgence. By encouraging this kind of pilgrimage of the mind and spirit, these Passion meditations allowed readers to add a high degree of imaginative fervor to their devotions, compelling a startling amount of mimesis, enactment, and visualization."
- from "Passion Devotion, Penitential Reading, and the Manuscript Page: 'The Hours of the Cross' in London, British Library Additional 37049" by Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, in _Mediaeval Studies_ Volume 66. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004.
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As always, comments and feedback are welcome.
Ben Spatz
CONTENTS
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2) Another City: Heart of Winter (January 2008): Call for Participants
3) Action Lab: Weekly Drop-In Sessions!
5) The Creative Actor and the Imitative Actor (Magarshack)
6) The Practice of the Devotional Present in Medieval Christianity (Hennessy)
ANNOUNCEMENTS
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individual discovery - urban pilgrimage.
in the beating heart of winter.
New York City
$250 if paid before December 1
$50 deposit secures your place
Drop-in okay
Starting September 12, 2007
124 Thompson St. #13
Between Prince and Houston
MISCELLANY
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ben@urbanresearchtheater.com
New York City