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Monthly Update - May, 2006
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, Rather than produce answers to last month's questions about the place without words, I will again offer a few edited excerpts from my journal. As always, responses are welcome.
> April 18
One thing is build the infrastructure. This means establishing a relationship with a studio, learning how to teach classes that really are good classes, and working at my day job while starting to investigate graduate schools...
That's one thing. The other thing is the actual work, the actual discovery. The analogy of the scientist is good. If you want to do pure research, you have to also teach it or else work in R&D for technology. The two parts go together. And I may not be capable of making any grand discoveries--maybe I will just be a little research scientist doing small work--but you don't know what you'll uncover. You only know the questions. And then, you have to spend time working on them.
Questions. "Finding the answers" is the right model, rather than proving what is known. Why get into good physical shape? Why learn to sing with different resonators? Not to show that you are personally capable of it. Only if it comes as a byproduct of a real investigation. Not to imitate anyone but to answer the real questions of my own heart: What am I capable of? What can one person do, alone in a room? What do we already have? What if there were no actor / director division?
Small seeds--I have to start with small seeds and tend them. You can't create seeds. No one can create a seed. We humans can only find the existing seeds and care for them. We are not creators, but gardeners, custodians... Even, custodians of ourselves...
> April 19
Faith. The thing a teacher gives, and what a student needs. It's faith.
> April 22
Over and over I read Barba's paragraph about Cieslak:
"When I left Grotowski's theater, Ryszard Cieslak was already a good actor, but he wanted to be an intellectual. It was as though a great brain were getting tangled up with that body that was so full of life, and flattening it out somehow, reducing that life to two dimensions. I saw him again two years later, when he came to Oslow with THE CONSTANT PRINCE. Right from the start, it was as though everything I remembered, everything I had based my ideas on, was disappearing beneath my feet. I saw another being. I saw a man who had discovered his own completeness, his own destiny, his own vulnerability."
Where will I find my humanity? Alone, or...? No one knows.
Think: What have I been doing all this time? I have been discovering, for myself and in practice and reality, that even in New York City, the work of going "out" to people must be preceded by a long period of isolation and personal research. Here I am with a million opportunities to work with people, a million theater companies, everything I used to think I wanted, and yet... I am not only making no effort to found a theater company... I am also not teaching the songs I learned in Poland.
> May 1
At the end of work today I tried the "song with two voices." But this time it wasn't a dialogue of prophet and disbelievers, as it has been. It was one old man with his right hand on his hip, and what he was saying was so clear... I almost cried... Felt the wave break inside me early on, and my face opened, it was amazing... But as soon as I noticed it and judged it, everything closed up again. The door was open for maybe five seconds, and then I scared it away again. But it was there, in one of my songs, no question. I knew the content immediately and could see who I was talking to almost.
> May 6
In a conversation, if you try to "produce an effect," you go towards manipulation and a lie. But if you ignore the other and babble on, that's just rude. These are the only two options in a mechanistic world. The alternative is to relate to the other as if it is alive.
But the part of us which senses whether a thing is alive is not the mind. When this self recognizes another self, that is the "meeting." That is why it is possible to meet a tree...
> May 9
On Saturday I went to see an old mentor of mine, and it was totally unexpected in significance. It was like entering another world, and many times I felt suspicious. The magic is very intense in him and many times I wondered if he is really out of control. But by the end I could see also that he is still a person, I mean that he is capable of standing up, that he is in the world and in reality even though he is also in touch with the crazy and impossible.
And even though his language is completely alien to me, I could see through it to something very important, which I cannot name but which touches me intimately. It was like looking through a bizarre prism and seeing something very familiar. Just like with another teacher of mine in Poland. The same inner meaning, covered in rocks and crystals or other objects that make no sense to me. But this time I really got it that I don't have to worry about whether I agree with or "believe" the words or objects they use. That's profoundly not my problem--and what a relief! And then I can see what is real in it, which is something of another order...
Yesterday I rested until evening and felt comfortable in the developing mystery. This man is some kind of key for me. With him I feel that, even if his own ways are alien to me, I have the possibility to be myself. He allows and accepts his whole self. He is not hiding. Therefore I become whole.
> May 15
Questions for the studio... Maybe there is no need for questions. I know that everything will follow from a sense of relaxation, the understanding that I have unlimited time to work. I have to feel like I am "allowed" to rest, to take breaks, to lie down, even to sleep, and to write in this journal. Otherwise it is just pumping. The energy that comes out of me after I have rested, written, and centered myself is of a much deeper and purer quality than what comes out when I feel rushed to "get it in" before time is up.
That's why it's so important to come every day. So that it doesn't matter what happens on any given day. So that each day is like a plain blank sheet of paper, and all together one can feel the mind rustling through the whole sheaf of days... The sense of time. That it doesn't matter what I do today, because I will be back tomorrow. Every morning, a tiny step along the inner path. It's only difficult to relax. I have to keep saying that and writing it down, because of the voices: "Ben, you aren't working hard enough. You aren't sweating. You aren't a dancer or athlete. You have no rigorous exercises, no technique, no discipline. At this rate you will never create anything." It's like the Dark Side of the Force: "Ben, you can only achieve out of anger... You must suffer constantly or you will not get anywhere... Only impulses of competition and violence can help you defeat your enemies and win back your pride... You will show them! Sweat! Fuck! Kill!"
Hmm... No thank you...
May 17
This week I finally have a situation again where I can do what I need to do. Finally I have the pocket of time in my life that doesn't make sense. Every morning I get up and come here, and I don't know why, and I'm not making a show, but I keep doing it. I can't justify it and it makes no sense, but I am doing it. That's what I always wanted. To meet my other self, the one who does it.
I feel so far from making something visible, a performance. Right now I'm still just doing warmups and training, and I'm not even doing that very well. How to do it better? Just keep doing it, obviously. The training is the training for training. The work is the work. I still believe that order will crystallize spontaneously when I reach the right level of proficiency. When I master one level technically, the next level will manifest through spontaneous self-assembly. There are no secrets.
May 18
A tiny but significant step forward today. I set my alarm incorrectly and arrived 15 minutes late, but then worked for almost two hours in a pretty decent way. I saw how this week I have been moving way too fast, trying to "go through" the whole training structure and ending up paralyzed or doing shallow, frustrating work. Today I again started with running. Still working on being centered and light. At a certain point, after, say, ten minutes, I stopped to rest and work on my feet. But then, instead of going to the "next" thing, I returned to running.
By always going to the next thing too quickly, I never get anywhere. I learned this in Poland, but it's hard to remember. When an exercise is frustrating and the mind begins to wander, that means you have to keep doing that exercise until you conquer the rough spot--not go on to the next one! So I ran three or four separate times, and the last time I discovered something.
I don't "train" to write or to talk by repeating the same exercises over and over. I just enter into some "problem" or "task" and then work on it. I don't worry about getting into "shape" or the right "state" in order to do those things, I just do them! And I certainly don't ask myself while writing whether I will ever be famous for it. I just concentrate on the work. Why is it so difficult for me to do this in the studio??
Someone said: "A writer is a person for whom the act of writing is especially difficult."
May 19
Running to be just in the present - no words - listening - not too much about the feet - trying to be light but not forcing it - looking around, really playing in the room, not worrying too much about the technique, more looking for associations, though I also tried to move towards more sharp changes, and find the center to run from - running for pleasure, calling myself to no words - then the whole room darkened - thunder - running through the forest, running away from pursuers - wet rainy evening forest, thick, hard, wet - what behind me? A band of anger, Mario, the kind, bandits, a chariot, a mob, "the machine" with wheels and blades, Gmork, something heavy crushing through the underbrush, and me running from it - rain - and then singing - at first the whole song was a crazy call, coming out of me at chest level, desperate, part of the chase. But as the room cleared and became light again, I looked around and saw it differently - the woods clearing, maybe at dawn, I was transforming. I was becoming a kind of beast. It was an incantation. Then the song moved in me to a deeper place. The first part is now a big channel for myself, my ego, declaring my life as a man - but under that, something deeper being born, ìwhat rough beast slouches...î I was becoming it, maybe just one of many, but a beast - it was coming out my hands first. I was still standing, but the run became a strange, beefy kind of walk, overflowing with clumsy release. Fumbling out in power. The low one being birthed out of my abdomen, flowing, rippling. It continued, it could have gone on for a longer time, I don't know, but at some point it falls onto all fours. I did the cat exercise but something else was rippling through if I had been strong enough for it. My voice was hoarse then but I continued, the message was there, the transformation was correct - to become a bear... then I lay back... and the walking song began..
I stopped because I feared to lose the new song. So fragile. I do want to catch those clear formal elements. It's the only way I can move towards structure. But I had the feeling, when I woke as the young / old man... I glanced at the clock and thought about writing, but I preferred to keep going. I wanted to continue to play. I felt that I preferred to do that!!
Why did this work? Because I came in and thought for a while about a problem, one of my frustrations, and traced it back to a deeply affecting memory of something that took me beyond words. Out of words. That is it. People who were beyond words and I saw them and I cried.
The place without words is the place in the sun. "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there..." And then I looked back at his criticism of me, while we were sitting at a table in a cafeteria... no...
When we are talking, it's never the thing itself. It's always this blind attempt to convey the impossible to the other person. Those were the words he used then to try to wake me up. That was his attempt, and that's the best anyone can do. But the place I'm trying to get to is safe from judgment. When one is as an animal, without words, while singing or transforming, words are meaningless. "Good," "bad," "artificial," "genuine"--these can point to anything. They are not the thing.
The only way for me to get free of all judgment--most of all my own--is to go into the place without words. That is the task. I am not working on sweat or technique towards any discursive end. I am doing it to escape discourse, and I use sweat and technique as necessary to help myself get there. I don't need to carry any words when I go to that place. It's always right here, now, waiting.
> May 23
Last night I read an old interview with Grotowski in TDR and felt the understanding that he is still so right and bold and necessary. He speaks of using the exercises to demand an "insupportable effort" from the actors... Insupportable effort! And to demand that explicitly! To do more than one can justify...
For me now, that practice is just to arrive here at the studio each morning. I cannot justify that. Everything I do here is insupportable, beyond reason, somehow "against the world," or against an old conception of myself, which is like a skin that I am shedding... Which is why the impossible can happen here...
For right now what I need to do is run. Running unlocks me, puts me up against my limits. For another person running is easy and fun, but for me it is hard. I feel heavy, lazy, and that I run like a lumbering giant. I need to run until I own running, until I possess it--until I am free of any doubts about whether I can run. I need to run until I can fly.
Everything else will follow out of that... Because once I am running for real, i.e. without thought of stopping and without fear, then I am afraid also of nothing else. I stop being myself with all my limitations and personalities, and become a field of shifting potential. I am no longer Ben, because Ben is that one who does not run. I do not recognize myself, nor can I keep up with myself, and so I become another self: my real self.
> May 31
That was good. Twenty minutes of real work, meaning it was real, I wouldn't even call it work, it was... the thing. The thing for myself. "The thing we call. The called-thing" (Orson Scott Card).
What happened is that first I tried running with the hunting song, and it was empty. Then I went back and read what really happened two Fridays ago, and there were so many more beats, changes, details, moments, and those were exciting. I mean they were real for me, real memories, like a dream. So I went into it again keeping in mind... the role of associations. That's not even a good word for it. All the words seem trivial: "fantasy" - "imagination" - "associations" - "acting" - maybe I could call it the dreamlife... It has to be understood as a parallel world, not artificial.
So then it worked. I felt things. I also felt how my technical limitations limit me. So there's a reason to work harder, and also clarity about what to work on: Precisely those technical elements that limit me. Running lightly, with stamina, singing while running, control of breath, consciousness of the room... And I didn't look at the clock for a twenty-minute cycle. I chose to stay inside the dream instead. I preferred it.
> May 30
so in the mornings i go and work on "my special problem." it's nice to call it a problem because that has two meanings: a problem in the sense of a puzzle, and a problem in the sense of the reason i can't fit in. that way it doesn't have to make sense with the art world or anything like that. it's just a peculiar problem of mine, something i have to deal with, like taking insulin if i were diabetic, or caring for a relative in need. it's just what i have to do in the mornings. that's all.
the problem is: how to structure performance in movement, song, and action
without dividing the roles of director and actor. how to bring play into
relation with structure. how to work, and how to learn to work.
how to meet with myself...
Ben Spatz
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other,"
Don't make any sense.
- Rumi
New York City