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Monthly Update - February, 2006 1) Going Down Grotowski in his late work compared the performer to a person lowering themself by their own hands into a well: Slowly releasing the rope and sinking into the depths. Recently--I mean in the last few months--I often return to a sensation that is like this. It's not a question of going below myself, into the earth below my feet, but rather I often find that I've gotten above myself during the course of the day. I have become like a raft floating on the surface, skimming along reality at the level of my eyes and brain. What I want to do in the work is to come down from there, towards the center. It is only a few feet from the top of the head to the center of the body, but the distance asymptotic. The approach becomes slower and slower, and the depths are never plumbed. Eventually "down" becomes "in." I used to understand Grotowski's metaphor as referring to the work done in a particular performance structure, over a period of thirty or forty minutes, through the ritual enactment. But it also describes a much longer work done over time. To come down into ourselves. To begin again. "'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be" (Shaker song). To calm down, to get down, to be down-to-earth. And the Hasidic practice of ecstasy, called the "drawing-down." Last year in Poland I was working in the last few months with just four people, after many others had come and gone. We were developing a single ten-minute performance structure, and towards the end I felt that we were finally beginning to enter into it. I mean: We had stopped adding new ideas and elements and reconsidering the overall scope of the project. We had taken on a task--or a task had become apparent--and we had begun to apply ourselves to it from the artisan point of view. We were beginning to lower ourselves down into the structure. I had intended to begin this kind of process again in January, so that by now a small group of us would be two months down into some kind of work. But I misjudged the level of commitment that I could expect from my partners. I was like someone who signs up for an internet dating service and expects to marry the first person they meet. It could have happened, but I was not so lucky. You never know when the right person will come along, but there is no way to speed up the process, so at a certain point you have to give up waiting. Now, as I turn 27 years old and enter the next month of work, I find myself alone again in the studio each day. I see that for every constellation of working partners, the going-down is a different journey. As a group, part of what we are going down into is each other. Therefore each time someone left the group it was like starting from scratch. Now that I am alone, I am going down into myself, and it feels like I am picking up that journey almost exactly where I left off at the end of December. I say "almost" because I learned a great deal from the Winter Work Session. Nevertheless, there is a strong sense of liberation in working alone again. It takes time to develop trust between people, and one can't really start to work until the level of commitment is agreed. Tonight I feel merry and unworried about going to the studio, and part of that ease is that I don't have to worry about whether the others will be there. I can also see how my inhibitions in front of other people and my impulses to entertain and take care of them were preventing me from going down. As soon as another person enters the space, the energy becomes more chaotic. They carry in chaos with them off the streets, and I react with my own chaos. The more people there are, the longer it takes to calm down. I would welcome the chance to calm down with someone, to go down and in together, two or three of us lowering in buckets side by side. But it took many days of working alone to reach the point where I feel comfortable just being with myself. Why should I expect to take any less time to reach that level of comfort with someone else? 2) Teaching For now, if I want to work with others, it will have to be through teaching. I read a wonderful description of a writing workshop the other day, by Eric Maisel: "First I invite you to decide what important writing you want to accomplish during our time together. ... Having chosen your focus and made your commitment, you then write. My job as you write is to be still, model intention and presence, and hold the integrity of the writing space. To someone peeking in, it would look as if I were doing nothing-but it is a very special kind of nothing." This is how I was trying to lead the "Winter Work Session": Not by demonstrating and critiquing technique but by embodying "a very special kind of nothing." When I did temporarily try leading the work like a class--the way classes are taught in this culture, with continuous verbal feedback--it always "worked" in the sense of easing frustration, but it also felt somehow cheap to me. Like a trick: The trick of pretending that the teacher knows what they are doing. This can be a useful trick, as it allows us to relax and encounter the passive and receptive parts of ourselves, but it mustn't be mistaken for the end goal. I need to sort this out for myself before I can take a strong leadership position with others. A crucial moment in any teaching relationship takes place when the teacher reveals their own mortality and humility. If this moment comes too early then the student will decide that this particular teacher is not a real master and will set off on a journey to find someone more dominant or convincing--in another country, if necessary. If the moment comes too late then the student will never give up the idol of the teacher's perfection and will spend the rest of their life trying to live up to a static ideal. It is a question of the appropriate revelation of vulnerability. 3) Real Work It is still difficult for me to describe what I do in the studio. When the "real work" happens it is like a flower blossoming, and explanation really is unnecessary and insufficient. Words cannot touch it. I feel this when I try to explain what I do most nights after work. I don't know what I do. I go to an empty room. I sing and move and sweat sometimes, but why does that matter? I am reluctant to use the language of theater because I spent so long "escaping" from theater, but the language of spirituality seems pretentious. This is like trying to name the central practice of Zen: Is it "zazen," or is it just sitting? Someone challenged me to define my search in terms of a single objective. Why do I go there? Because I want to know who I am. I want to meet with myself. This is not a tautalogy, because here the same phrase repeated refers to two different things. The first "I" refers to my conscious self, the one who decides to go to the studio and for whom going is a discipline. The second "I" refers to the manifestations of freedom and selfhood that appear inside the work. What I am doing in the studio is looking for myself, waiting to hear and understand my own intuition in song, dance, and emotion. I know that there is something down there, down in the well of myself. I can feel it. Beneath all the ideas there are deeper roots, those that date from childhood or even further back. These are the fragments of actions that touch me personally. They arrive like strangers who I recognized from dreams: The parts of myself that I do not know. There is a whole world down there and I live on top of it, skimming the surface. Or, more accurately, parts of me skim the surface while other parts live below, and they want to meet and become unified. It is like the story of the man who had great difficulty controlling the horse he was riding, until one day he finally realized that he was a centaur. My disciplined self wants to be harder than I am now, like Grotowski or Navy Seal or a Zen master: Training every day, sweating the technique, and fighting for every detail. Another self of mine wants to be softer than I am now, like a child or a pilgrim or a gentle guru: Always close to both laughter and tears, always acting freely out of the moment. These are the distances inside that one can look for. I want to give myself the chance in this life to be both truly hard and truly soft. Ben Spatz February, 2006 New York City