Major thanks go to the talented and generous artists–LOVE the poet, Bashi Rose, Vincent Thomas, Liz Lerman et al., and Double Edge Theatre!

For more info on Baltimore Performance Kitchen go to the site at www.performancekitchen.org.

Don’t expect to see much up here in the meantime, as all of my extra focus is being channeled there.

Thanks!

Buck

Here’s what I can tell you for sure about the piece: nothing. Not because I’m not allowed to say. It’s because we haven’t decided anything about the show. The only thing we’d actually decided prior to rehearsal is that we wouldn’t decide anything prior to rehearsals starting.  The rehearsal and performance calendars have been determined. We’re rehearsing for one week now in August, and then we’ll rehearse essentially every Sunday until April of 2012, at which point we’ll do five weeks or so of rehearsal, and then it performs for five weekends.

I do know the entire Single Carrot will be involved in some capacity. I’m guessing the piece will be original. I’m guessing that as is standard for Single Carrot, we’ll configure the space in some new way. I’m sure it’s going to be a great show. I’m not sure how or when it will turn into a great show, but I have confidence that it will.

Since we needed to start somewhere, the group allowed me to run the first rehearsal. We began by folding a piece of paper into nine sections. We took the first column, and wrote in each of the boxes the answers to the first three questions: 1) Why are we here? 2) What are our concerns? 3) What are our ideas?

The next thing we did was launch into a discussion on setting the right conditions for ourselves, and we watched the Ted talk I referred to in an earlier post. At the outset of any original work, the creative team has the ability to lay out the conditions for the process and the performances. At this crucial part of the process, we need to consciously make the right decisions to ensure what we’d like to have. After watching the Itay Talgam Ted talk, we went back to our sheets, and added new “Whys”, “Concerns”, and “Ideas”.

Following a short break, we watched several video clips to open up the concept of different artists being at the “center” of the work. What I mean by center is that in most original pieces of art work, you often have a single artist who is driving the production. I believe that in American theatre, it is most often the playwright in the center of the work. In Eastern Europe, it is the director. In Hollywood, often it is the actor. Sometimes you can tell who is at the center of the work because it is they who gets top billing. Edward Albee. Krzysztof Warlikowski. Tom Hanks. In starting a new process where we’re determining the conditions, it’s important to think about who can be at the center. Here are examples of a few clips:

Choreographer/Director

Designer/Director

Director

Actor/Director/Shakespeare

We then read two short pieces of writing. One by Tim Etchells from his book “Certain Fragments” which is about his company Forced Entertainment:

“The process we’ve worked through (of which I’ll say much more below) has always mixed improvisation with writing, argument, discussion and , latterly at least, a great deal of watching back through video-tapes of the previous day’s work. It’s a process in which no single aspect of the theatrical vocabulary is allowed to lead–so that set design, found costume, soundtrack, text fragment or idea for action might just as well take the lead as a source or starting-point in a project. It’s also a process which refuses to know, at the outset, what it is looking for. Remaining, rather, a journey undertaken, in which the territory unfolds, as much of a surprise to us as it may be to anyone else. We say without hesitation that it takes us time to find out what a certain piece of work might mean or even be concerned with, and that this discovery, if it comes at all, is made by doing–making, talking, touring–a discovery based on risk and uncertainty, no t by our adherence to a plan.”

The second was from Liz Lerman’s book “Hiking the Horizontal”– a short chapter called “Wondering about Books”, where Liz discovers that putting “I wonder why” in front of a sentence, can unlock so much.She writes “the reason I recall the incident at all is because the round of questions that followed this simple insertion let the full group see how anger and frustration can become inquiry and that inquiry opens the door to discovery and to art.”

I then read excerpts from another chapter of “Hiking the Horizontal”, where she talks about the process for creating her very first piece, and her most recent piece. This was useful to hear about the different approaches one artist used at various points in her career.

We closed out rehearsal by reading aloud our “Whys / Concerns / Ideas “. It was so useful to hear this out loud at the start of the process. Of course everyone had many ideas and concerns. By setting up an environment where both ideas and concerns are shared up front, we’ll be able to solve a lot of issues before we even start. Concerns ranged from the self-deprecating “What happens if the show sucks?” to the intricate and strategic “How are decisions made, and is there a hierarchy within roles as it relates to decision-making, and can this change throughout the process, and are we establishing precedent as we go?”

The very last piece of business was the all important questions: “What are we doing at the next rehearsal?” I asked if it would be okay to make a proposal. The group said it would be, and I proposed that we write down all of our questions for the piece and process. After five minutes, we had each written out a total of nearly 140 questions, which we promised to address as the starting point for the project.

I believe that to be a great artist, one must have Ability, Passion, and Funds. This is not to say that a person with only passion but no ability isn’t able to be an artist. I’ll go into that more later. First, I’ll briefly explain what the three words mean to me.

Ability is whatever it takes to excel at your art work. This is the natural stuff (talent, sensitivity, curiosity) combined with the learned stuff (training, reading, study).

Passion is whatever motivates you. What compels you do make your work? Social justice? Catharsis? Helping others? This is what keeps you coming back for more, and keeps a smile on your face while you’re doing it. Often there’s a specific style of the art form you practice that is where the passion lives.

Funds is how you survive financially in society. In this example, I’m thinking specifically of the funds to be able to earn a living wage to make your work

Below is a venn diagram I’ve been using to help me think about this:

Ability, Passion, and Funds

I firmly believe that anyone and everyone can make art. Art is not a precious thing–it’s a fundamental right for anyone who would like to create something, express something, or discover something to be able to use art.

That said, there are some people in this world, who for one reason or another, have or are trying to devote their lives to making art. Art is their career, and it is their professional life. The venn diagram above is geared towards them.

I have known people who were purely passion driven with their art. They had little to no talent, but they wanted it. These people at one point replace natural talent completely with learned skills. On the other side, I’ve known people with enormous ability, but absolutely no motivation to create art whatsoever. It is a no-brainer, but early on the most successful individual artists are those with both passion and ability.

But very few of those artists have that section in red: funds. If every artist received a government pension and health insurance,we’d have a renaissance on our hands. I won’t hold my breath for that to happen. The arts regularly lose their best and brightest because artists often can’t afford to live and make their work. Many artists live right near the breaking point for years, hoping to “break in”. Looking at the green area, this is the cliche “starving artist”.

I would say that when I look at myself purely as an artist, I sit in that green area of the diagram. I have passion and ability (although most days I’d like to have more of both), but not necessarily the funds. However, I wouldn’t call myself a starving artist, because having a stable income and health insurance is something I value. The funds I have come from my work as a director at an arts services organization. I’m very close to the arts, and work in, with, and for them, but when I’m at work I’m not an artist.

However, to get to the green area in the first place, it took a bit of red. I come from privilege. I don’t have a trust fund or an ever lasting well spring of money, but growing up I was “given everything I could have asked for, but nothing more”. Going to college was not a choice or a dream, it was taken for granted. These funds gave me the ability to go into the arts, to study theatre in the first place. I had four years to train in the bubble that is college, and that is where I had the luxury to hone my yellow part. And then I graduated. And then the red left my life, and I fortunately found enough red to live, and I was fortunate to find it in the arts, although it is outside of being an artist. This is a rather common story in the world of arts administration.

Getting on stage the first time is like your first cigarette. It gives you a glimpse of something greater than you. It’s the gateway drug. And as life becomes more demanding, and as your faith in your ability (the yellow) wanes, you have to take your fix (the blue) where you can get it, and thankfully arts administration is a lovely place to to pay your bills (the red), and support the arts (the blue).

I have seen many artists with amazing abilities use their art to make money, but not in a way that they are passionate about. This gives us the orange section. I’ve heard many artists who live in orange talk about losing that feeling that made them fall in love with their art form in the first place. It’s at this place that the arts feel like a plain old (poorly paying) job. Orange is that passionless, but extremely professional work you sometimes see. It’s that album you listen to, and while it sounds like the band you know and love, you know they only recorded a new album so they could go on tour and play their old hits to the old fans and make lots of money.

The only outer section I haven’t touched on is the purple section–funding + passion. I don’t know many people who live in purple, but the best example I can think of is non-traditional artists who come to the arts at the middle or end of a successful, well-paying career. My father was an interesting example. At 48 he decided to make a documentary. He’d never picked up a camera for anything other than home videos at Christmas, where he would inevitably pan away from the present opening pandemonium and film the geese flying in formation against the backdrop of the Rockies outside instead. Because he had the money, and because he was passionate about it, he was able to make a decent first documentary.

The center of our diagram, the white section, is the combination of all the colors. These are the artists who are the inspiration for all artists everywhere. The artists who live in white are those with passion, ability, and funding, and they keep everything in balance. They do amazing, high quality work, they love doing it, and they make enough money to live the life they’d like.

So how do you do it? How do you live in white? How do you take your ability and passion and tap into funding? How do you take your passion and funding and hone your ability? How do you reclaim your passion if you have the funding and the ability?

Yesterday, our coach showed our group the below Ted Talk with Itay Talgam.

It’s impossible for me not to compare these conductors to directors. I think it’s important to remember about a director the same thing executives have to remember–that “every expression, every word, every posture of the leader is magnified by 1000 in the eyes of their employees”.

The key message that comes across to me is that the leader sets the conditions of the working environment and the culture. The leader defines the boundaries, the goals, the process, and the terms of the collaboration, indicating how much each individual artist may bring to the table. This last piece is essential to communicate to your artists.

After directing The Other Shore last year, I’m really interested in how much freedom of interpretation you can give to your artists on any given night, while still having them follow the conditions set up. I think by building a very strong ensemble, I was able to trust the group to alter the blocking every evening, to follow their impulses, and to deliver honest, present performances every time.

As part of the conference, Liz Lerman gave a keynote. I could always listen to Liz for hours, and she prompts so many thoughts. I really admire her ability to connect to her audience personally–she’ll pick up the threads of the conversation the night before and weave them seamlessly into her speech, and into the progression of her thoughts. She’s always building, adapting, and refining. Liz is always operating a grand conversation in which she’s always engaging others.

Yesterday as Liz was covering the concept of hiking the horizontal (which I will loosely describe as the notion of taking your vertical hierarchical assumptions and putting them into a horizontal continuum, thereby not making value judgement but acknowledging the relationships and the spectrum–for more reading, or if you want to see it in Liz’s terms, click here) I had an important insight into my own upbringing.

I’ve been spending a bit of time over the past few weeks thinking about my family and the way I was brought up (all part of my long process of self-initiated and self-administered therapy). Part of this was kicked off by Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (which I loved, and Giti not so much). I have dwelt on the theme which was embodied by the line which in essence was “Mom, Dad, always you are at war within me”. This is not to say my parents fight each other within me, but their two view points, their approaches to life, do. Since my father died nearly seven years ago, our relationship has still continued, although I do most of the talking as I try to think about his responses to my questions and conundrums. I am very grateful that I still have my mother to discuss things with in real time.

I would say that my father had a much more vertical approach to life, and my mother had a more horizontal approach (although they both valued the horizontal and vertical). It’s important for me to “hike the horizontal” with these two approaches to life, and to put them on a spectrum instead of a vertical. One is not better than the other. I view myself as a much more horizontal person. I prefer the sharing of decisions and knowledge. I love collaboration, consensus, and tolerance, etc. I tire of exclusive elitism, am made uncomfortable by extremism, and the assumption many people have of their being right about everything. Although I must confess I love having the right answer, I enjoy even more having thought I had the right answer, but seeing a better answer presented.  How do we grow if we cannot question what we think we know?

At the same time, I am my father’s son. My father was ambitious and achievement driven. He strove for excellence in every single thing he did, and was pretty darn good at everything he put his hand and mind to. Better grades meant you were smarter and more industrious. Better test scores meant you were smarter, and in a way more worthy of his admiration. This is not to say my father didn’t value everyone. He just especially admired intelligence on his vertical hierarchy. I agree it is important to achieve, to be ambitious, to reach the level where you can do the work you’re meant to do. If I hadn’t climbed at all in my life, I’d still be the dishwasher I was at 14, working four and a half hours a day at $5.50 an hour. It is important to strive–to work for quality. It reminds me of an article by Octavio Roca that my sister, Lisa, shared with me called, “In Defense of Elitism“. We must have excellence, especially in the arts.

I think I’ve been living with this tension of my mother and father, this horizontal and vertical, since high school. As I begin to be able to name it, I begin to be grateful to have both within me. By putting them into a horizontal, I am free to use and embrace them each–to integrate both approaches in my life as needed. To both strive for excellence in all that I do, but also to view our complicated world in a manner that is appreciative, critical, and open.

Alternate Roots for me is best described as a service organization that serves those who work at the intersection of arts, community, and activism.

So today was the lead off day for the three day national learning exchange. The final part of the day discussions kicked off. There are three discussions slated for the exchange–healing, inter-generational leadership, and sustainability.

After a lead out from three speakers, we broke into small groups. Our group of eight entered into a nice discussion, which left me with a few take-aways, but prompted a lengthy internal gear grinding which is manifesting itself here:

In order for Art to have a “healing” ability, there must obviously be a wound in need of healing. In order to heal a wound you have to do several things. First, you must acknowledge the wound. If it’s a wound between two people, we must have both sides acknowledge the wound. Second, we must be lay bare the wound–which means we have an honest approach to it, where both sides scrub the sucker hard and long and then pour copious amounts of hydrogen peroxide on it. It isn’t going to feel good, but this is the only way to really start the healing. We’ve got to get at the root of the issue, and we’ve got to understand the full context, and we’ve got to get everyone (both sides, all the generations, all the backgrounds) on the same page. Then, we have to take the time and have the patience to let it heal. We have to dress the wound. And then we have to change the dressing. And eventually we’ll have a scab. But we can’t pick at it! We’ve got to let it do its thing. And in the end, we’re left with a scar. And we’d better not ignore that scar. We should do as all warriors with battle scars do: celebrate it. Talk freely about how it came about, and the great pains we took to heal it, and how we’ve overcome it, and it has become a part of our story.

Baltimore has some serious wounds to heal. The arts could do it. But will an audience come to see it? Will we be able to get both sides of the wound to acknowledge we have healing to do? Will the artists capable of generating the work come to play? And will they work with the people involved? Will they give them ownership and voice, and the power to curate their own experiences? And will they watch, and listen, and allow their minds to be changed?

I’m excited that Roots Fest is converging on the Highway to Nowhere this weekend. It’s there that we’ll see the first step in what is going to be a long healing process.

Mental, Physical, Spiritual, Emotional

Creativity touches on several of these. Sex can. Conversation.

Core Values I Hope to Strive for in my Work and my Collaborators:

Process
Patience
Collaboration
Curiosity
Diverse participants
Tolerance
Willingness to fail
Fearlessness
Inclusion
Excellence
Rigor