writing.performance

I’ve written semi-regularly about my fascination with found objects as triggers for writing and inventing, and about Tadeusz Kantor as an inspiration. Jeff Jones just posted this on his blog– an interview with Rauschenberg along similar themes. (David Hancock’s work is also inspiring in this respect–his faux flea markets and Airstream trailer museums).

It’s very sad to hear that this wonderful theatre has closed its doors.

On a related note to my last post: fellow alien Saviana Stanescu’s new play, Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, will be produced by the Women’s Project this coming season. The title phrase refers to the category of person covered by the “O” visa, which is a temporary visa that may be extended, theoretically indefinitely, without conferring permanent residency to its holder. There are many “O” aliens in the arts in the U.S. I’ll be interested to see this play!

If you grew up here and have an American passport, you might not know this. But there are many, many people (such as me) living and working legally in the US on all kinds of visas, sometimes for decades, for whom the green card remains an elusive and arduous long term goal–especially since 9/11. The country isn’t just populated by “illegals” (a chilling word that turns an adjective into a noun/ person) and citizens / permanent residents. There’s a big gray zone out there teaching, practicing medicine, serving tacos, running businesses, repairing bicycles, writing plays and films…

In the theater, some of us write plays, have them produced in American theaters, and entertain/ engage American audiences. These plays are, arguably, part of the American theater. They are produced with American actors & directors & audiences. They are certainly part of a conversation between the writer and the country that stages their work. But the writers, without the elusive green card, cannot receive NEA money for “American” plays, or many other opportunities besides (Playwrights Horizons and many, many, new play development venues are for “American writers”). There is no “alien” minority slot.

Arena Stage has just announced a wonderful new commissioning and development program for “outstanding new American plays”. What makes these plays “American” however, is not their production, their collaborators, or their AUDIENCE–but the stamp in the passport of their writer. (more…)

Have been thinking about how to develop work on its feet in some way even at the earliest stages–to get a sense of the “concrete physical space” overlaid with virtual space that is the matrix of theatre.
So tried out this with a ball of string in my playwriting workshop:
Each person read out a short scene, then instead of discussing it as received words in the ear, I asked each writer to make a series of sculpture/ tableaux of their scene using string to chart the connections between characters. So using other people as those characters, those characters would hold the string or be tied together by the string in different ways (charting connection/ tensions between them). Each writer was asked to make a “string map” in this way for the beginning, middle and end of each scene. And then we asked whether those moments and changes were apparent in the writing.

It showed clear vs. fuzzy shapes, clear vs. fuzzy sense of relationship and connection/ tension between characters. And it physically reinforces that (counter-intuitive for new writers, perhaps) that words aren’t everything–they’re one element in the dance.

It was wonderful to reconnect with Dijana Milosevic (friend from Serbia’s Dah Teatar) in San Francisco. Both of us were working on separate projects with playwright Erik Ehn. (I began our week’s workshop as dramaturg and sort of segued into writing some music. I do miss my life as a musician—it was many years for me in the theatre before writing wriggled to top spot–time to dust off the saxophones again).

Anyway, Dijana gave me a brochure for their company’s work The Story of Tea. One sentence from her director’s notes really sang for me: “The space that we create through our work is at the same time an extremely concrete, physical space and a virtual space that reaches over the physical existence”. This idea formed the core of the workshop I gave in playwriting this week at the Playwrights Foundation—more on that later…. (more…)

George Hunka’s posts on his blog Superfluities Redux are always worth reading. He cites Howard Barker regularly, and in the American context (where moral uplift and redemption seem to infect so many discussions of theatre) Barker’s views are a wonderfully corrosive corrective as to the role and responsibility of art.

Here’s the link to one of Hunka’s posts citing Barker’s Arguments for a Theatre

Tadeusz Kantor and circus clowns are the poets of the umbrella. Kantor, who also wrote the wonderful sentence “Today’s theatre is impregnated with conformity,” has much to say about umbrellas. I can’t find my favorite quote right now, which is along the lines that umbrellas shelter an amazing range of human affairs (poverty, loneliness, indifference, poetry). But there’s this:

“The Idea of Journey”
“In my painting THE IDEA OF A JOURNEY has close thematic links to my whole output.
It is an idea of art. As a MENTAL JOURNEY, of the development of ideas, of discovering new areas of exploration.
From 1963 traveling accessories made their appearance in my pictures:
PARCELS (EMBALLAGES)
BAGS
SUITCASES
RUCKSACKS
FIGURES OF ETERNAL WANDERERS.”
Halczak, Anna. Tadeusz Kantor. Cricoteka. Cricot 2 . Kraków: Cricoteka 2002.

The umbrella is a ghost in this list, I think. . . a fragile, impermanent skeleton that wears its flesh in the rain, that’s only there for temporary shelter between wanderings, or along the way.

Anyway, tonight was the first meeting of my playwriting workshop at the Playwrights Foundation and umbrellas featured. I asked everyone to bring in an umbrella they’d found, begged or borrowed. We wrote scenes based on a “police report” initial encounter with the object, then used those descriptions to build characters based on the properties of each particular umbrella. From there, to a scene five minutes before and five minutes after the encounter with the umbrella.

Later: an argument over an umbrella (prompt for a scene) in which it becomes clear that the argument’s about more than the umbrella.

People wrote lovely and surprising things. I love this exercise because it’s a simple and vivid way to teach subtext, conflict, and scene shape.

Tomorrow we will work with string and found dialogue. I’m planning the whole workshop around objects as writing prompts. And I plan a secret event with the umbrellas (to do with making a space in which to write) but won’t post it til after tomorrow in case some of my students read this!