This journal contains both personal and professional writing. You can subscribe to it via email as a monthly newsletter.

Urban Research Theater Newsletter - March, 2007 ------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------ ANNOUNCEMENTS 1) Open workshops at Theaterlab (March 4th and 11th) 2) Urban Research Theater Working Group 3) Collaboration with Stone Soup PROSE 4) letter to a workshop leader 5) on authenticity ------------------------------------------------------ ANNOUNCEMENTS ------------------------------------------------------ 1) OPEN WORKSHOPS AT THEATERLAB (MARCH 4th AND 11th) ONE RIVER: BODY & SONG Two Workshops with Ben Spatz This workshop is a rare opportunity to explore the organic intersection of song and action. I will lead a rigorous, playful session of dynamic physical and vocal work. You should 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. Please join me if you would like to: - Explore the subtle relationship between body and song - - Learn a kind of singing you haven't heard before - - Meet other people inside highly active silence - - Consider joining the Urban Research Theater working group. Two dates to choose from: Sunday, March 4th, 2pm - 5pm Sunday, March 11th, 7pm-10pm Come to either one or both! $20 contribution requested per workshop. Theaterlab 137 West 14th Street New York City Please call or email to reserve a space: Ben Spatz - ben@urbanresearchtheater.com Theaterlab - (212) 929-2545 ------------------------------------------------------ 2) URBAN RESEARCH THEATER WORKING GROUP The Urban Research Theater working group is developing a process for structuring performances based on wordless, highly evocative songs. The current work centers around the "first song cycle," a collection of unnamed songs developed by Ben Spatz since 2005. The working group also trains physically to increase the presence, awareness, and articulation and each individual and to encounter ourselves inside a discipline. We play and experiment with song and movement, song and association, song and action in a way that is new and evolving. The working group currently meets on Thursday nights from 6-9pm. Members contribute $80/month to sustain the project. There is a minimum three-month commitment to join. For more information, please contact me: ben@urbanresearchtheater.com ------------------------------------------------------ 3) COLLABORATION WITH STONE SOUP _stone_ by Edward Bond featuring Seiko Carter, Caroline Reck, Ben Trawick-Smith and Chris Wild _the maguffin_ by Adam Hunault and Stone Soup featuring Lauren Birriel, David Bryant, DR Hanson, Jacques Laurent, Marsha Martinez, Rachel Rhodes and Maria Schirmer Production Team Director - Nadine Friedman Producer - Leigh Goldenberg Stage Manager - Nat Cauldwell Set Designer - Czerton Lim Lighting Designer - Sean Linehan Costume Designer - Jessica Lustig Puppet Designer - Maria Schirmer Song and Movement Director for Stone - Ben Spatz Thursday-Sunday, April 5-28, 2007 Actors Theatre Workshop, 145 W. 28th Street, NYC More info: www.puppetpuppeteer.com ------------------------------------------------------ PROSE ------------------------------------------------------ 5) LETTER TO A WORKSHOP LEADER [Note: This letter was not written in response to any single workshop.] Dear Workshop Leader, Are you terribly afraid of silence? What do you think would happen if we just waited a moment? Are you afraid of our boredom? Are you here to entertain us? You have arranged the exercises so that we dip our little toes in silence, and then you come swooping in immediately to save us: "Great." "Okay." "Again." Why are you speaking so much? Do you think I care about your ideas? I am not here for your ideas. Do you think the group needs to agree intellectually about what we are doing? You are talking through everything. You believe in the ideal of mind and body in harmony, but you end up in the middle. You never go down. You never allow us to sink into the somatic. You only refer to it. Freedom comes with honesty. No lies. Don't you know that every statement is a lie? Don't you want to reach the truth that is below language? For you, theater is a social event, like a parade. It is made up of signs. That may be another use of theater, but if so I would rather see a movie. Don't tell me "there is no right answer, there is no wrong answer." This is already too much of your personal verbal machine. Just actually don't give answers. Just actually don't lie. You don't have the authority to declare non-judgment. You have the authority not to judge. The latter is actually more powerful. Cleverness is the enemy of work. You are teaching mechanics. I think you like the work to make you feel comfortable. I think you like to make a nice show. I think you mostly want the work to be fun. These students here do not understand what you are giving them, and you are not telling them honestly. What you are giving them today is an empty structure, which, if they do it regularly over the next few months or years, could eventually become filled with something real. It is just the container you are giving them, not the contents. The other thing a workshop can give is a taste of the formless unknown. Both could be useful, but you should be honest about what you are teaching. Anyway, this kind of actor does not need any more empty containers. They are already cluttered. I sense in them an accumulation of empty containers and no hint about how to fill them. This is the kind of culture we have. What these actors need is patience, permission to slow down and explore deeply. You are not giving them any additional power to do. You are only giving them more forms to choose from, more things that they could do. You are not showing them how to discover which ones to do and why. You are not allowing them to meet with themselves. It's not that one shouldn't do technical exercises. Obviously the best thing is to do fully inhabited basic work. To do technically simple exercise but not in a simply technical way. Question: Is it worthwhile to do hollow technical exercises? What does this accomplish? What is good about technical improvement by itself? Answer: It can be necessary. It's about surviving in the world. It's a practical matter, strategic. Hollow work may be necessary, but it has no ethical value. It is not art. It is not for the world. It is for you, or for your group, for survival. The ethical value arrives through the non-technical work. It makes sense for someone to do hollow technical work in order to create and protect space for ethical work. But it's important to know the difference. The technical work serves the other work. Protects it in the harsh external world. It is not itself the goal, and if it exists by itself, it is without ethical value. Meaningless. To warm up the "instrument" but not the inner life, the soul? What for? Or is our culture so private that we can't even conceive of touching inner life together? A theater of social masks. Why go running at night together? To warm up the body along with something else. All that is missing here. Hollow. "Possession" must only happen during performances, said an American teacher. He believes that if possession happens during rehearsals, it is always suspicious and inappropriate. This is like telling a team of basketball players not to try to win in practice games. Telling them: Save the desire to win for actual competitive games. Telling them: During practice games, just go through the motions. Meaningless. And would they ever win? You might as well not use the word teaching for what you are doing in that case. Better to call it "arranging" or "manipulating," something like that. Do not manipulate your students like objects. Instead, seek to open yourself. I do not feel your edge. Where is your edge? What is your challenge to yourself in this room at this moment? What is your challenge to yourself today? Don't say you want to teach us something. Don't say you hope to "give" us "tools." Show me what part of yourself you are hoping to meet in this work. A good teacher is one who is truly open. It cannot be faked, nor can the technique accomplish anything by itself. All that matters is the presence of the teacher. Not a static aura, but their actual responsivity to the moment. If you do it by rote, better not to have class at all. You are killing the name of art. I have had so many teachers like you. I did not know how much it bothered me until I began to meet another kind of teacher: those who teach in silence and do not try to command the idea of what we are doing. Teachers who actually do, and who care about doing more than ideas. Teachers who leave space for discovery and humanity. Then I realized how your kind had stifled me. It was like jumping into the sky. You are the leader. I want you to change the space. Do you know what that means? When have you yourself been changed? Go into that. ------------------------------------------------------ 6) ON AUTHENTICITY Much is made of authenticity these days. In philosophical and academic circles, it is a "contested" notion and the fashion is to say that it doesn't exist. In popular culture, it is taken for granted as the essence of what can be bought and sold. In activism and justice movements, there is an understanding that some sense of the authentic is necessary as a basis for ethics, but this is balanced by a wise reluctance to romanticize or idealize that which is old or exotic. It increasingly seems to me that authenticity can be understood rather simply as a prediction about the future behavior of people. Defining it this way allows us to avoid the hazy "mumbo-jumbo" of essentialism or idealism while admitting that authenticity can in some sense never be verified. The way it can never be fully verified is like the fact that we can never know the final fate of the human species: as long as we are around to observe it, any fate is not final. Here is a simple example: If you tell me that a song is sacred for you, I may accept this as an authentic or an inauthentic statement. The "essence" of what I'm accepting or rejecting has to do with something deep in your heart, down in your center. But the human organism has no single spiritual or emotional heart or center. So rather than try to dig for this nonexistent spot, which will only result in dismembering the golden goose and not finding an egg, I can understand your authenticity (or lack thereof) as a projection into the unknowable future. If you maintain for the rest of your life that your song is truly sacred, then your statement now about its sacrality is authentic. Unless, of course, you are deceiving us even to the point of death, and, had you lived longer, you would eventually have revealed that the song was just a silly game for you and had no deeper meaning. On the other hand, if while you are alive you state publicly that the song is meaningless, then we can say that your original statement about its sacrality was inauthentic. Unless, of course, you were forced to recant in this way, and, had you lived longer, you would eventually have revealed that the song was in fact really sacred for you. Clearly, the future referred to by authenticity is not limited by death. If it were, then authenticity would be finally knowable in terms of a person's stated beliefs on their deathbed. What I am recognizing here is an equivalency between the limit of communication and the limit of mortality. Normally we say that authenticity is deeper than what can be communicated, which is why a person telling you something does not mean it is necessarily true. Alternately, however, we could say that authenticity is defined by what a person articulates, as long as this includes not only what they actually articulate in their lifetime but also what they would have articulated given the longest possible timeframe. The asymptote of time replaces the asymptote of interiority. I find this realization useful in examining authenticity in my work. Part of what becomes clear is that authenticity is at least partly a choice, a kind of allegiance. Let's say I make a song and I call it sacred. If in ten years I would call it meaningless, then I am being inauthentic right now. If in a hundred or a thousand years I would call it meaningless, then too I am being inauthentic right now. But if in infinite time I would never denounce this song, then my work now is authentic. This is the sense in which all work is a work of knowing oneself. The question upon which the present moment turns becomes: In what distant future would I renounce this work? Bearing in mind that I could be persuaded to renounce it and then afterwards reverse my position yet again - my goal is to do that of which I would ultimately, in an impossibly final sense, approve. Thus the possibility of authenticity in the present moment is irrevocably tied to the idea of eternal life, to the judgment of the infinite future, even if we admit that there is really no such thing. To the degree that the meaning of our life is bound by its mortality, so too the possibility of total authenticity is an illusion. Yet on a small scale, these distinctions function powerfully. If I tell my lover a secret, I expect her not to reveal it publicly. If she does reveal it, this betrayel undoes the authenticity of the moment in which I first whispered the secret to her. That is why it is so painful. However, if she later on apologizes, then no matter how shamed I still am by the public revelation, at least the sense of betrayel can be put to rest, because she has restored authenticity to that first whispered moment. Of course, I need to believe and accept her apology as authentic, which means I need to be convinced that she will not betray me a second time. In a certain sense, the authenticity of the first moment can flip back and forth in that way an unlimited amount of times. As long as I believe that each betrayel and each apology is authentic, ie. it speaks for the future, I will continue to revise my assessment of the original moment every time. In theory, there can never be a betrayel so great that an authentic apology is impossible, since the authentic apology speaks for the future and not the past. But in life there are limits, such as that of mortality, and perhaps it may be that the time required to communicate an authentic apology is greater than the time one has left to live. I submit that this is never the case, because the future significance of an apology is exactly equivalent to its sincerity. It may appear that only a thirty-year span with no betrayels could prove the sincerity of one's intent - and at the same time, one may not have access to thirty more years. But I submit that there is always a way to reveal one's sincerity to this degree. Of course, this way is different not only for each person but for every particular moment. But it exists, and there is no distant future which cannot be authentically indicated through actual, current, personal depth. This is what it means to see a person perform an action of authenticity: it means we are convinced, by their way of doing it, that not if they lived a thousand or a million years, indeed never, would they spit on what they had done. It is like a promise, articulated and believed despite the fact that it refers to an impossible future. The point is not to hope that one will live forever, but to make an impossible, absurd, crucial commitment to one another: I will not live forever, but if I did, I would remain faithful to what we are doing now. And perhaps it is most astonishing, not that the imaginary future defines authenticity, but that, through the authentic act of another, we can glimpse eternity. ------------------------------------------------------ Ben Spatz ben@urbanresearchtheater.com New York City