Landing your week

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 the work of assessment and analysis and planning that I proposed above, you are free to DO. To work INTUITIVELY. To TRUST YOUR IMPULSES FULLY. And to LET GO OF YOUR IMPULSES TO JUDGE, STOP, CRITICIZE, or in any way SCUTTLE the work of DOING. IN this moment (or these moments) of DOING, you are working from INSIDE the project. You are making what you FEEL THE IMPULSE to make. You are tuning yourself into the VOICES you hear, to the RHYTHMS that pulse through you, to the IMAGES that seem resonant.

Let the voices flow, change, reverse, do what they will. Embrace what comes. Accept. Be jubilant that what is coming is coming.

Let the rhythms take over. Follow. Make in the flow of the rhythms of your body. If you are stuck, go back and begin again. Let the rhythm vary itself...you are not really repeating; you are creating variations, you are deepening your connection, you are learning more.

Let yourself respond to images. Let yourself create images. What can you make? What can you see? This is not the moment to think about the meaning of things or even the structure.

Play.
Put things next to each other, just to see how their new neighborhood changes them.
Explore scale. Try it bigger. Really big. Smaller. Really small.
Give yourself assignments. What if I remade this as a song? As a scene between two parts of myself? What if I remake what’s tragic as comedy? What was comic as tragedy?

When you are making, let yourself be more tuned into physical senses than sensibility. There will be time to evaluate whether you have made anything worthwhile AFTER your week is done.


If you feel stuck:
Every obstacle you think you can see is NOT telling you that you can’t do it. It’s telling you that there is ANOTHER WAY—MANY OTHER WAYS besides the way that you thought of first. Rather than fixate on the OBSTACLE, imagine the ways around, the ways WAY around. THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS! (One of my toy theater friends gives this assignment: write down on a card the one thing that you could never put onstage. Now: do it using toy theater. Three different ways.)

 *** I will see you at 1pm today. Lucia wanted some time to share work. Who else?

*** I want an email from you summarizing your activities, progress, and trouble spots (if any) for the week. You can send it today OR you can write to me today telling me when your week is ending and when I can expect it.


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