To Make Our Way

The purpose of this blog was to facilitate your return to working after our semester and our lives were totally upended by the corona virus landing in the US. Given where we are in the semester, and where you are in your work, I think it’s time to wind it down. You’re welcome (of course) to revisit what’s here and to make use of it, adapt it, respond to it, etc., to the extent that any of that is helpful to you. In recent entries, I’ve been hoping to help you come to terms with the way in which this is your time , and there is ample time , still, for you to make your work as an artist. It should be noted that almost every time is a shitty time to be an artist. When times are good, everyone else is making a lot of money and has a lot of opportunities and rent is high and the appeal of just going with the flow and getting a Real Job is very seductive and everyone is talking about Real Estate and Stock Investments and very few people care about art. And when times are bad, everyone ...

For some reason, over the weekend I decided that I wanted to know how many days it had been since I’ve been more or less hunkered down in my house and, based on my calculations, today is Day 47.n That’s a few days shy of seven full weeks. Or...half a semester, which is a meaningful way of measuring time in my line of work (which is to say...I have a visceral sense of what that amount of time is). It’s less time than that that I’ve been writing these posts for you, but I am thinking about the ways in which these posts might function for you in ways that are similar to other devices I have been using in my quarantine life . Every day, I make myself a to do list. And every day I write out the hours that I plan to be awake in a timeline that runs down the right side of that page. And I check off the items on the to-do list. And I list the appointments I need to keep on the time line. Mind you, I don’t always get to everything on the list. And some days my list is more an exhaustive inv...

Use the sun in your work today. Warm up in its warmth. Make shadows. Distort shadows. Make shadow puppets. Observe the way it occupies your room and measure time by the trajectory of its shadows. Feel it on your face, on the back of your head. Move in and out of the brightness. Trace its arc in the sky. Until this evening.

There’s an interesting article in Today’s New York Times about artists working in These Times. You might read it if it isn’t going to get in the way of your working. I’m interested in it because it acknowledges what we all know: that there is something that many of us experience as debilitating  in this moment. Living in a time when so many people are getting sick and our leaders are so totally lost and our futures all seem uncertain and the hideous inequalities of our cultures are all hanging out there...it’s easy for us to want to crawl up in a ball. Or go volunteer to do something that could actually help . I’m thinking about this on three ways—but there are (I’m sure) more than three ways to think about this. First, it was largely the failures of our culture to imagine, to listen well, and to respond creatively that got us into this. Those of us who have more finely honed skills in imagining, listening, responding, and making are really needed now. We may not be making ...

You don’t have to be like me and it’s totally OK if you aren’t. But the best working for me comes when I hit a stride. When the shape of every day is kind of the same and I can lean hard into the dependable rhythms of waking, taking care of myself, focusing on my day, going to work, meeting my collaborators, identifying our goals for the day, taking our first shots at those goals, breaking, reviewing, discussing, trying again, perhaps turning to a new problem and working on that, working on it again, tending to some of the material aspects of the work, turning back to the hard work, perhaps trying to see what we’ve made, thinking about what I’ve just seen...and thinking about the day, making a bridge between today’s work and tomorrow’s goals...and then letting my attention go wherever it wants for a while. It’s the regularity of the working process that lets me take chances in my approaches, that lets me trust what my colleague David Brick calls “the black box,” my intuition...and th...

Name the projects you are going to do today (“replace the Bundt-cake monologue,” “Outline the battle scene, “ “Build and test the airplane puppet” ... etc.) Each project wants to be achievable and specific and make a real contribution to your project. So “have ideas” is a bad project assignment. As is “fix second act.” Assign yourself an amount of time to contain your work on each of these projects: — build and test airplane puppet. 45 minutes. — replace the Bundt-cake monologue. 90 minutes. — outline for battle scene. 30 minutes. Allow yourself 5 minutes at the beginning of each task to size up the problem. If there are multiple ways of attacking it, take a few minutes to identify these (or some of them). BUT THEN PICK ONE method and use THAT. Save a few minutes at the end of the time period to “show” or “document” or “observe” what you have achieved. At the end of each period, just sit with what you did for a few minutes, before you move on. In this moment of reflecti...

1. From wherever you are, connect to the outdoors. (5 minutes) spend a minute looking and seeing. Note the movement. Note the presence of natural forces. If you do this every day, you can note the differences. Listen. Hear whatever is there. Just spend a minute. You can close your eyes if you like. And you don’t need to identify the source of sounds, just take them in (let them in). Let the ambient sound be a one minute soundtrack. If you are inside, and you are able, open the window. If you are outside, you’re all set. Sense the forces of nature on your skin. Maybe there are things to small. Maybe there are air currents. Maybe the warmth of the sun. Just take a minute. Spend two minutes attempting to synch your own rhythms and impulses with those of the outdoors. Breathe with the world. Hum to it. Maybe even sing with it. Let yourself move. You don’t need to “dance” but let yourself move with the world. You’re a part of it. It’s a part of you. 2. Follow any impulse that occur...

Consider creating from the point of view of VOICE. Of course, we all speak and we all have voices—many voices—in which we speak. Indoor voices. Outdoor voices. Classroom voices, with their attendant vocabularies. Parent voices. Barroom voices. Political voices. Shy voices. Bedroom voices. We may have different shadings of voices for all of the kinds of community and situation that we are in. But these are not circumscribed. The truth is that we are perpetually shifting between images of ourselves that we have (or are spontaneously creating) without ever being aware. In acting, we often talk about the shifts of voice as being related to action (X), object (Y), and situation (Given Circumstance). OK, fine. And if you are literally writing voices, creating conversations and stories, you can simply use this exercise as a way of checking in on the diverse range of voices that your character(s) might use. EXERCISE: A. Take a piece of writing you are working on. Use colored pencils ...

Take a look at what you have been making or doing. See it for what it is. Now consider complementary actions or aspects. If there is music, look to make silence. If there is silence, make music. If there is stillness, make movement. If there is lots of moving, make stillness. If there is language, make wordlessness. If there is no language, make language. If there is finely crafted, make messily. If there is mess, make refined. If you have been rushing, take your time. If you have been slow, go quickly. If you have only pieces, make a whole. If there is a righteous whole, shatter it. If you have been preoccupied with balance, make unwieldy. If you have been making everything smooth, make jagged. If you have been striving for consistency, make with contradiction. If you have been making from the brain, make from the heart. If you have been in your mind, move into your body. Don’t try to take on all of these or allow yourself to be shut down by the variety here. Wha...

Imagine that today is a vast expanse of time. From the time you read this until the time you close your eyes to sleep, there is SO MUCH that is possible! Picture the time of today as one, unbroken pure moment that you can occupy in whatever ways you want or need to. Remember what a day felt like when you were little and had ALL DAY to play. Perhaps a day felt like a LOT! How could you occupy a whole day ?! Perhaps you felt bored. Perhaps you wanted to play with your friends. Perhaps you played with some of your toys. And hardly any time has passed! The time of today is no different. It really is abundant. And tomorrow will be another long expanse of time and then another... and another. You cannot even imagine a month of these days! There is just too much time... In our current moment, of course, we feel the pressure of time. Because we can’t go out. We can’t touch one another. We can’t visit one another. We can’t sit together or gather together. This makes the time feel heavy. B...

If you’ve never seen THE WOOSTER GROUP. You should take an hour to watch one of these videos . They’re videos of experiences that are really important to see LIVE, but they are important to consider, because TWG is almost certainly the most important American contribution to Global Performance in my lifetime, maybe even since WW2. Although they are, I’m afraid, only a shadow of their former self these days (important members of the company have died or moved on), TWG pretty much invented the integration of media into live performance. They developed a style of performing that is much imitated but not matched (the deadpan downtown style which, in most downtown work, is just the absence of anything, was for them a total spiritual/psychological/personal commitment to a specific task and the form that the task occupied. And they cultivated the sophisticated use of collage to attack and to befriend dramatic texts from different eras and styles. With Mabou Mines (Lee Breuer, Joanne Akala...

Take a moment today to enjoy a long view. Your project, of course, is your  project, and you might think of it as an ongoing vehicle for your growth and experimentation that takes you through all the way until...you can share it with a roomful of people, live and in person. But there is a specific incarnation of your work that wants to be tuned to the semester calendar. So ask yourself: What do I want to achieve before the end of the semester? Think about this in idealistic terms, in creative terms, and in practical terms. What milemarkers do I want to make for myself—and observe—as I move from where I am (wherever I am) to the place I imagine getting to? Am I going to be able—if I have not already—share a full version of my project and get feedback on it, so that my project’s “final” Bryn Mawr incarnation is the result of a process of Making, Reflecting, Revising and Reimagining, and Remaking?  Note that there’s pretty much a month before everything needs to be turned i...

Look back at your goals for the week and assess where you are. Think about how you want to treat your day (and, potentially, the weekend) to respond to that. The point is NOT to punish yourself if you haven’t met your goals. It will be natural to want to do that, but be very formal about letting go of that impulse. RATHER, the point is to look at where you are, consider what you have achieved, or uncovered, or opened up, or begun to question...and to register for yourself very clearly and in writing  what the OPPORTUNITIES for you are. What avenues of exploration are available? What questions need to be followed up? What activities can you now imagine for yourself that you could not see before? Make lists of these things, the questions the activities, the half-done experiments that want revisiting...and decide how best to use your day (and, potentially, the weekend) to follow up, to consolidate what you are working on...and to explore new terrain. Then: DO. Once you have done t...

I thought I’d share info on the 100 Days Project, which actually started on Monday and it lasts for 100 days, which is longer than you have to do your thesis (officially), BUT you might benefit from the resources and from having a sense of being a part of a larger community of people striving to complete creative projects. As you may remember form being an underclassperson, the last part of the Spring semester is a crazy time for Seniors at Bryn Mawr, or for most of them, anyway. Customarily, people move into their carrels and spend all their waking hours there. Writing. Reading. Revising. Writing. Or they move into the common room: rehearsing, inventing, revising, rehearsing. It’s an intense time and friends worry about each other and bring each other food and, it’s true, some lean into the “drama” a little heavy and, it’s also true, some are not actually getting as much thesis done as they are signaling that they are stressed, but all in all, it’s a cracklingly focused community th...

I want to deliver two seemingly contradictory messages. 1. Keep working. 2. Don’t keep working. Check out this important post from Medium . Nicholas Berger argues that we should stop making theater as if we were all in the same room... that we should not perform “business as usual” by pretending that Zoom and Facebook Live are neutral mediums through which we can keep on making theater (or share old work in a meaningful way). He’s speaking not just to the theater community but, a little, too, to enterprises like, well, Bryn Mawr, who have asserted that we are gathered together just the same, whether we are actually with one another OR “gathered online.” (I got some email yesterday about plans for a virtual May Day...for example.) Enough of that, Berger says. Stop pretending. (And he makes some really compelling arguments in a well-written piece—please read the whole thing.) BUT there is work to do. So says him. And say I. Although this is not the moment to pretend that we ...

We’ll talk together at 1pm today. In advance of that, think about the week ahead and invent some plans for yourself. Spread out over a piece of (real) paper—a big one if possible, or pages in your journal. Think about (and write about/diagram/sketch/doodle): What sorts of activities do you want to participate in this week? Inventing, outlining, sharing, reflecting, refining.  In what forms might those activities live? Solo rehearsal? Meeting with a peer? Talk with Mark? Sharing in our full group on Wednesday? Think from the POINT OF VIEW of your sense of yourself as an artist: Think about what will feel good to you. Think about what will be beneficial to your having a full sense of an active, engaged creative practice. Think about how you might be able to feel part of a team, if that’s desirable. Think now from the POINT OF VIEW of the PROJECT: what does it need? Where is it? What kinds of nurturing does it require? Where does it need to be fed? Where does it nee...

I went to a work session one time at BANFF . It's in one of the most beautiful areas of Canada . On the first day of our residency, we were taken to a little office and our photos were taken and we were issued ID cards and under our names on the ID cards it said "ARTIST." I found this both charming and ironic which is, frankly, how I experience a lot of Canadian things. Such a useless administrative function, processing  the artists, documenting  them,    providing them a means of identification. After we got our cards, we went for a little walk around the campus, which has gorgeous views in every direction and is fashioned a little bit like its own town. We saw a little store and went in. I was hoping to grab a newspaper and my friend needed cigarettes. We noticed they had coffee and each decided to grab a cup. (It being Canada, the little coffee stirrers were not made of wood; they were linguini, a more readily compostable item.) When we went up to the counter...

At the end of her career, the pianist Lili Kraus came to Swarthmore, when I was a student there, to play a concert. For reasons not worth mentioning here, I was around the music building at about 9am the day of her concert. I heard what sounded like a child playing the concert piano on the stage, so I peeked in. It was Ms. Kraus, beginning to warm up. Her hands were so gnarled with arthritis that they were almost like claws. But she was forcing herself to play scales with them, despite the fact that she sounded (almost) as bad as I would have. I learned later that she had to begin to warm up almost 12 hours before every concert so that she could work her fingers and hands into a suitable dexterity to play the bright, fluid, fast Mozart that she was famous for. I went to the concert that evening and was amazed that the stooped old lady I had heard that morning clawing at the Bosendorfer was flying through piece after piece, as wild and merry as you'd imagine Mozart himself. She w...

Two options for work today, both involve looking back/getting back. 1. Look back over the blogposts to date. Include any assignments that you have given to yourself. Take up any assignment that you did and want a second go at. And do that. 2. It's a good moment, now that we know that our moment of hunkering down is extended through this entire month (at least), to find your way back to your own rhythm and schedule for working. How to claw your way back to a rhythm of working that relies on your own curiosity and your own hunger? How do you create for yourself the structures of inspiration and accountability that are required? What is going to provide for you the structure to get your project to the place that you want it to be? Thank about that. Take up any of these questions in your journal. Or other questions that seem pertinent to your case. Consider making a commitment to a regular time of work. And a regular space (or arrangement of space) in which to work. There are...