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Urban Research Theater Newsletter - April, 2008 ------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------ ANNOUNCEMENTS 1) Upcoming Body & Song Workshops (April and May) 2) Another City (August 2008) 3) Membership Community PROSE 4) Ben: Excerpts from Correspondence with Daniel Mroz ------------------------------------------------------ ANNOUNCEMENTS ------------------------------------------------------ 1) UPCOMING BODY & SONG WORKSHOPS Urban Research Theater presents BODY & SONG WORKSHOPS in NYC This workshop is a rare opportunity to explore the organic intersection of song, movement and action. Participants are invited into physical and vocal explorations ranging from the dynamic to the subtle, and touching on all aspects of performance. Every participant receives personal guidance as well as safe and open space for wordless exploration. - Explore the subtle relationship between body and song. - Learn a kind of singing you've never heard before. - Meet other people inside highly active silence. Participants may be dancers, actors, singers, clowns, and anyone interested in the practice of performance. Beginners and professionals alike are welcome. Please 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. Upcoming Workshops: - Saturday, April 26, 2008 - Saturday, May 24, 2008 All workshops are from 2:00pm to 5:00pm. Locations TBA. Details and registration: ben@urbanresearchtheater.com ------------------------------------------------------ 2) ANOTHER CITY Urban Research Theater presents - ANOTHER CITY - In the heat of the New York City summer, experience another way, another city, another self. August 22-24, 2008 New York City "Another City" is a unique chance to rediscover your world through the techniques of the Urban Research Theater. You will never experience your city or yourself the same way again. Each full day begins at sunrise in the serene half-wilderness of Central Park's North Woods. Here you will be able to slow down, breathe deeply, and step out of the busy rhythms of urban life. The group will walk, sing, and engage in simple physical exercises among the trees and waterfalls. It is a unique experience in itself, as well as preparation for concentrated artistic work. Afternoon and evening sessions will be held at the Chez Bushwick studio, where participants will learn to work on traditional and original songs as a basis for developing short performance fragments. We also spend time waking our bodies through extended periods of playful and demanding physical work. Participation Fee: $200 early registration $250 after June 1 The group will be limited to 8 people. Additional information and participant testimony is available at: http://www.UrbanResearchTheater.com/ To register or with questions, email: ben@urbanresearchtheater.com ------------------------------------------------------ 3) MEMBERSHIP COMMUNITY Urban Research Theater intends to eventually support itself through community-based interactions rather than through ticket sales. In order to do this, we need to build a supportive membership community. If you support the work of Urban Research Theater; if you have participated in one of our workshops or events; if you believe in our philosophy of art and practice; if you enjoy receiving our monthly newsletter... Please become a member of our community! Supporting members donate at least $5 per month / $60 per year to support our continuing work. Five dollars is not very much - the price of a single cheap lunch or an expensive coffee. But we consider it a serious gesture of support. And with a big enough community, this small amount can add up to a lot: - If our community had 10 members, we would receive enough income to rent a space for one Body & Song workshop each month. - If our community had 100 members, we would have enough money to cover all our work expenses for the year and run several week-long or even month-long events. - If our community had 1000 members, we would be able to dedicate ourselves full-time to Urban Research Theater! Our goal now is to build a community of 100 members. All donations to Urban Research Theater are fully tax deductible. You can also donate to us directly, if you do not require the tax deduction. Please follow the link on our website to become a supporting member of the Urban Research Theater community! ------------------------------------------------------ PROSE ------------------------------------------------------ 4) BEN: EXCERPTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE WITH DANIEL MROZ I have been corresponding with Daniel Mroz, Professor of Theatre at the University of Ottawa and Director of One Reed Theatre Ensemble. Here are a few excerpts (slightly revised) from my recent letters to him. I am very grateful to him for this ongoing dialogue. ... I think that you and I have a fundamental agreement, but that it leads us in two different directions. The agreement is that it is ethically wrong to manipulate the inner experiences of a performer for the sake of making a show. For you, this seems to lead towards the desire for a training method that can produce excellent work without manipulating the inner experiences of the performer. For me, it leads rather to work that is directed primarily towards the inner experience of the performer and which functions only secondarily as a show. We are both reacting against the manipulative relationship that capitalism fosters between producer/director and actor, in which the producer/director tries to get something from the actor in order to sell it. This is a form of prostitution and leaves the performer without dignity. But I am only interested in performance insofar as it does have a relationship with the inner experience of the performer. ... For me, it's very important to keep the ladder of technique separate from the non-technical ladder. The ladder of technique is the one that you can climb up and get somewhere. It's the one where a person who has been working for ten years is going to be further along than a person who just started. But on the other ladder, those rules don't apply. PRESENCE in performance is a complex relationship between these two ladders. Without the technical ladder there is no reliability and no ability to repeat. But without the other ladder there cannot be greatness. ... Just above I distinguished between inner values and external values, or between the technical (external) ladder and the non-technical (inner) ladder. I agree with you that words like "center" and "inner" are often used in an ambiguous way: Do we mean the center of the body or the center of the person? Do we mean "inner" in terms of muscles or in terms of the spirit? Do we mean "grounded" in the sense of physics or in the sense of personal power? All these things are connected, but they are not the same. Or perhaps they are the same, but different registers of language approach them differently. Grotowski said that an impulse originates "inside" the body and then asks: "Does the impulse belong to the physical domain, or to one that is more complex?" Your discussion of physical centers and the inner physics of movement is fascinating, but it remains unclear what the relationship is between that and the center / inner domain of the PERSON. By way of example: Sometimes a very powerful movement onstage happens only because someone moves their little finger in a certain way. A technically-minded person might say that this is because their little finger is connected through the muscles and skeleton to the actual physical core of the body. But what if it isn't? What about greater actors who don't have core strength? What if the center of the PERSON can sometimes be located in the little finger and not in the physical core? And then, people don't really have centers, or we have a lot of centers... ... I used to believe it would be impossible to work on what is not consistently visible. But it's not. One can work on anything one believes in. And the fact is, as you point out at the end of your email, one's deepest goals are never visible. The reason why one "does it" is not finally articulable. It can be shared between people, but that sharing is contingent and temporary. There is no guarantee against illusions. I could be under an illusion; so could you; so could Grotowski; so could Master Chen. But we all believe that it is at least possible to accurately perceive the inner workings of another human being to some degree. Even if we often misunderstand, misperceive, or otherwise mistake another person's experience, we can't throw out the possibility of deep communication, because in fact there is nothing else to work for. ... Most of the time people assume that training sequences are simple and schematically organized (to "address fundamental principles from different points of view" as you said), but in ritual contexts there is every reason to make a score that is extremely complex but still targeted on the doer. This is what I mean when I say that the border between training structures and performance structures is fuzzy. I'm not talking about audience-focused performances. I agree that audiences do not usually want to see elementary training exercises. ... For me, the reconciliation of Grotowski / martial arts / religion / faith with feminism / queer studies / postcolonialism is the great question. To speak grandly, I feel it may be one way of stating the central issue of the 20th century, parallel in some way to the vexed relationship between "Islam" and "the West". I say without reservation that what feminism, queer theory and postcolonialism have to offer is at least as valuable as what religions and traditional training and spiritual practices have to offer. However, I don't yet have any good language for talking about how these things relate... ... I want people to leave my workshops saying something like: "Ben uses very precise techniques to reach things that are subtle. For example, today he told me at a certain moment to relax my shoulders, and when he did, I felt... it's hard to explain." In other words, I want them to know what the technical direction was, and I want them to know that the technical direction was relative to the moment. I don't want anyone to leave thinking that they have learned certain forms or exercises that will automatically be useful in the future. If a given form remains useful to them it will be because it touched them personally. If anyone left my workshop thinking something as algorithmatic as "actors need to keep their shoulders down," I would be very disappointed, just as I would if they left thinking something like "technique is irrelevant, just follow your bliss." ... I am aware that my project might fail. But I have a hunch that this wheel needs to get reinvented regularly. I have a hunch that to become truly great at an existing technique actually takes about the same amount of time as inventing a new one, assuming that people are working on both of them equally hard and with equal intelligence and care. You have said that it takes about 10,000 hours to become competent at a form like taiji. I'm guessing it takes about the same length of time to become competent at a form that doesn't particularly exist yet. In fact I think the inner process is very similar in both cases. I don't think that things are necessarily better because they're older. They might be better, but they might not. Everything must be tested in practice. In fact, anyone who thinks that my reinvention of the wheel is unnecessary or redundant is laboring under the illusion that algorithms can produce beauty. You have to reinvent the wheel just as much to master taiji or any existing form. It takes all of a person--not just the body--to master a form. If someone thinks they can master a form by following certain steps or working for a certain length of time, they are wrong. Mastery is much more elusive than that, and the technical steps that lead to it are relative to the individual. The wheel has to be reinvented for anything significant to occur. Following an existing form is a good way to produce wheels, but a bad way to produce art. ... Let's say I want to reach a very high level of joy-in-technique. There are a number of existing forms in the world that I could approach in order to do this. Some of them, like basketball, are definitely not right for me personally. Others, like martial arts or modern dance, might be right for me. I can choose to work on them. But I might realize after a number of years that I still haven't found the right form for me to excel in. Maybe when I'm 50 I finally find the form, and I start to train in it, and when I'm 60 I experience the full joy-in-technique. Or, on the other hand, maybe I try to create my own form instead. You might think this is less efficient because I'll have to invent all the details. It's true that it will take a long time, but on the other hand, the details will be invented and designed specifically for me. So when they do exist, they will fit me perfectly. Maybe the form doesn't even come into being until I'm 60 years old, but in that case I will still experience the joy-in-technique, just the same as the person who went the other path. There is no short cut, either way. ... I do know why I do performance. I just can't express it fully in words. Maybe it depends which "I" we are talking about. There are many selves in me, and very often they don't agree which path to follow. Every now and then, all my selves agree on what to do. When that happens, I experience the joy-in-work. This is another answer to your question of how I know that what I'm doing is right. ... What is clearly "good" from a martial standpoint--gestures that carry with them the full weight of the body--is not necessarily always the best in performance. Because, once again, the goals of performance are more complex and not only martial. There probably are no martial arts that train the fingers in a way that is completely detached from the center of gravity... Is that true? I can't see how such a training would be useful in a martial context, because those gesture would have no force in the physical sense-but that hardly means they could not have power in a performative context. Similarly, as you mentioned before in relation to contact improv, going farther than the point of balance can be useful in performance, but never in martial arts. ... "Relax" is a very tricky word, Michele and I were just talking about this the other day. It often means trying to totally relax muscle tension, which as you said can hardly be done in a full way on command. Also, the real goal is rarely to "relax" a part of the body in this sense, because that is like cutting off that bodypart. Most of them time when I say "relax the arms" I don't mean to try to leave them dangling and noodle-like even while the rest of the body is highly active (although this can be a very good exercise, as you mentioned above). I mean to "make the arms available" for the movement, i.e. try to figure out what is the most efficient use of them in relation to what the whole body or center is doing. ... I think it's essential that rational, technical, falsifiable language be combined with intuitive, poetic, spiritual language in the studio. To have one without the other is, for me, an impoverishment. ... There is a process by which people take particular technical elements that have worked for them and reify those elements into universal truth, as if there were a universal technique for life. I call this "making a church" and I think that both the church aspect and the mystic or open aspect can be found in almost all religious traditions. For example, within Buddhism there appears Zen, but then Zen can immediately be made into a new church: Rinzai, Soto... In every generation you need people to fight against the making of a church. ... When I was a kid and interested in musical theater, someone told me about "head voice" and "chest voice" as if they were two completely isolated domains. I guess this is one way that people approach the voice here. In Towards a Poor Theater, Grotowski talks about "resonators," but in my experience it's pretty misleading to use any plural word, as if the possibilities for resonance are discrete. There is no "head voice" because there are many different places in the head that sounds can resonate. The image of a straight line going from low to high is a bit better, but the line isn't exactly straight, and maybe there are two resonance qualities that seem to be at the same level of the body but are nonetheless different from each other in some other way. I think this is what people call "color" or "tone" or "timbre". Grotowski talks at one point about how many actors can't seem to hear these differences very well--as if they couldn't hear the difference between a violin and a piano playing the same melody, he says. In any case, I used to think of resonance qualities in terms of whole songs. So, for example, a certain song should be sung in a certain way because of its origin or purpose. Only recently I have begun to realize that it's possible to have a map of resonance qualities within a song that is equally or even more complex as the melody itself. (I am singing alone right now so there is no harmony.) I am finding this to be a very powerful area of work that I've never heard articulated. People do talk about resonance quality in a basic way, as in the examples I just gave, but I don't know of anyone outside the Workcenter who 1) approaches resonance is if it can be as complex or maybe even more complex than melody and harmony, and 2) links it to internal experience or acting techniques. This is an area where I am very much a beginner. But so far it seems to me that--just as the physical center can be a way to approach another kind of "center"--the fact that resonance qualities take place in different parts of the body can be a way to approach acting, that is, work with memories and associations and emotions. Of course it's not a simple one-to-one thing where a certain part of the body automatically stimulates a certain memory or emotion, but those connections do exist, even if they are different for different people. ... It's very rare for people to really just explore their own movement possibilities. You can take a bunch of dancers and ask them to just play around, but their minds will probably be filled right away with all of these intense pressures to succeed in various ways. It's those pressures that will cause them to "improvise" in ways that might lead to injury. If you can actually get people to stop pressuring themselves and stop thinking about impressing an imaginary audience, then the way of moving will become much more natural, in precisely the objective sense of the word "natural" that you are saying is embedded in these ancient traditions. So, to put in other words something that I said in my last note: I suspect that it takes about as long to get someone to relax away from their unhealthy pressures through the via negativa as it does to get them to do so through a via positiva constituted by a healthy body-technique. ... I am working right now within a universe of less than twenty songs, which I've developed over the past three years. And in the actual Song Cycle structure we're creating for me, there are only five songs. But each of these songs can be sung in several different ways because of the different "resonance maps" or "resonance choreographies" inside them. (The phrase "resonance choreographies" is inspired by your comment that singing is a kind of movement.) So when we develop songs in this way, we are really looking to slowly develop structures that we can practice continually over a number of years. This is a very different process from writing songs for a performance. ... The science and politics of the Enlightenment are very good for studying insects and also for organizing large political bodies such as the nation-state. But they are no good for running a theater company, at least in my understanding of what a theater company should be. Certainly they are no good for running a monastery or a spiritual community. So then the question is: Should a theater company be run like a spiritual community or like a nation-state? The ethics of performance are different from the ethics of citizenship. They require completely different techniques, for starters. Also, the dignity of an actor does not consist in having a vote. In fact, to allow the dignity of a performer to appear, it is often necessary for both the director and the actor's conscious mind to intentionally work against what the actor's conscious mind thinks it wants. This happens frequently in my work. We call it "Ben and Michele against Ben." Obviously, this only becomes possible through the cultivation of trust. ... I want to ask you about the concept of "fitness" because I think you might have a very useful view on it. One of my goals in approaching physical work is to disentangle the various objective gauges of fitness from the hyper-visual image of fitness that is so violently dominant in our culture at this moment. It's pretty obvious that a distorted image of fitness--having mostly but not only to do with being thin--is violently hegemonic in our society at the moment. It seems to me that anyone who is doing body-work has to face this issue. At the very least, we should make sure that we are not ourselves discriminating against or incorrectly perceiving the work of people whose body-type doesn't fit the mainstream ideal image. To be more radical, we might actively state the point that any respectable notion of "fitness" has to do with how a person uses their body and not what the shape of that body is to begin with. This is complex, of course, because when you as a martial arts teacher look at how someone moves, you are necessarily evaluating them in a largely visual way. How do you separate the visual of martial capacity from the fetish for certain body types that stares back at us from billboards and magazines? Do you feel that your martial arts training has enabled you to escape from these kinds of prejudices? How do you work with fat performers? I'm also interested about your experiences with master teachers, especially if they are from very distant cultures that are perhaps not yet defined by mainstream US culture. Everyone knows that being a good teacher has to do with knowing how to go from a technique you learned on your own body to that which is universal and can be applied to any body. But, for example, it's much harder to do this in relation to weight than it is in relation to height, because of the stigma attached to weight in our culture. On the other hand, I would expect and hope that a martial context would be much freer of this stigma that theatrical contexts usually are, simply because the martial arts have this other goal--martial ability--which is not so easily confused with looking sexy as acting often is. After all, in our culture acting is just one step away from modeling. ... I generally use the word technique to mean anything that can be written down or articulated systematically, and the word "craft" to refer to the living practice of using techniques in life--or what you eloquently called a "living transmission from a person to a person." A hollow technique for me is when someone has mastered an objective system as is therefore able to produce certain results, but nevertheless I find those results to be somehow boring, counterproductive, or violent. The reason I use the word "technique" in this way (detached from any value judgment, positive or negative) is because of its etymological and poetic link to the word "technology." When I think of technique being used violently I can imagine the bad karate boys in The Karate Kid or I can think about the technology of smart bombs dropping in the Middle East. There's no doubt that a good deal of objective knowledge is at work, but it's being employed violently, in order to impress and bully, or "shock and awe." Craft, for me, is the sensitive application of objective, systematic technical knowledge to the every-shifting complexity of the world. The transmission of a technique always involves craft, because teaching itself is a craft. ... If people spend their whole lives in the human body, and if there are certain ways of moving that are objectively the most powerful and graceful for that body, then why should it take several generations and an "unnatural" sequence of movements to get the body back to those objectively best ways of moving? I can understand that the constraints of society and technology might work to take the body away from its natural state. But shouldn't playing around in an empty room gradually work to undo this? Why would the objectively best ways of moving not also be the body's natural way of moving? Do you also believe that cats and dogs and other animals naturally move in the objectively best ways, or do you believe that in theory a cat could improve its way of movement through something like taiji? (Ha ha, that is a funny image.) I generally assume that animals naturally move in the ways that are most functional for their bodies, unless they have a specific injury or a scar of some kind. That's why I'm confused about the value you attach to the specific forms of movement in martial arts. Secretly, I have always believed that it is more a question of how much time one spends exploring movement, rather than what forms one practices during that time. I believe that what one learns from a great teacher has more to do with patience, focus, and stamina than with technique. ... There is perhaps a paradox between the desire to move in the most fluid and objectively perfect way and the desire to produce a compelling performance. If one moves so as to produce tremendous force through total grace, as in a martial context, it can be--as you said before--almost completely visible to the outside eye. In performance it is not just a question of what the body does internally, but also of making the internal external, of making the invisible visible (as Peter Brook said). This paradox exists also on the institutional level. Hence Grotowski's reference to places that are "almost (but not entirely) invisible." If it is completely invisible then it can't be considered performance, it can't have any living bridge to the world of theater. But if it's highly visible then it is "just" theater, just a show. There is an essential tension, a kind of productive contradiction or exchange, between the cultivation of objective quality and the intent to perform. Objective quality is not necessarily visible--like a monk in a cave. This is also related to the question of the "humble," below. There is something "humble" about the soft martial arts in comparison to the hard, in that they do not declare themselves so loudly. But they are not less powerful--maybe they are even more powerful?--in an objective or martial sense. They also perform, but what they perform is softer. And again, this is true both on the practical level of the form itself and on the institutional level, with the difference between a school that emphasizes self-defense and a school that emphasizes internal transformation. The paradoxical goal is to loudly proclaim the very quiet. To make make visible what is extremely subtle. This is different from the pure cultivation of the invisible. It's not a binary opposition, of course, but one often encounters moments of choice between the two emphases... ... For me humility would have to do with the understanding that mastery of a technique does not equal mastery of life. This is again based on my understanding of the word "technique" as something basically algorithmic. There is a world of difference between someone who has a strong sense of self and someone who is arrogant. Having mastered a technique is similar in this way to the power of being king or president. It is very easy to be "corrupted" when one possesses such things. One starts to think that one has a special key to life, which is not true. It's not that a person with great skill should be or pretend to be unaware of their skill. It's just that they must remain humble in facing the unknown. You might say that this version of humility is part of any technique, if correctly taught, and I would agree. But there is no way to write it down or be absolutely sure of how one's students are understanding it. ... ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ As always, comments and feedback are welcome. Ben Spatz & Michele Farbman Urban Research Theater New York City ben@urbanresearchtheater.com michele@urbanresearchtheater.com