To Make Our Way

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...

Today's optional assignment/work seeding exercise: working from image. Agnes Martin, the painter who I've mentioned and recommended previously, waited for the images of her works to "come to her" in "inspirations." These inspirations often came to her in her dreams. She did not paint until she had a mental image and then she worked feverishly to do the math to translate the image she had in her brain (almost always a pattern of stripes or a grid) to the six foot (or, later five foot) square canvases she used. For her the image was all. It was the object of her work. Her brushstrokes and her pencil work were not pre-dreamed...the process of her work remained an improvisation. But she had a shape that she was making: there was a form that she sought to realize. Martin experienced this work as sublimely peaceful. Antonin Artaud's cruelty can be described as the human desire to realize form. To consecrate oneself  to making the messy system of the bod...

Feel free to ignore this post/assignment, particularly if you are excited to make things and especially if you are excited to make things in a context that takes you AWAY from the digital world and into the world of the senses. But if the grayness of the day has you in a reflective mood, think about starting a commonplace book...or building into your JOURNAL a section for commonplace book-style entries. What's a commonplace book? RILKE:  “A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories:’ and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make yo...

In a work of time-based art, something happens . The work takes place in time  because time is one of its parts. (Even those works which, for conceptual or other reasons, just keep going on without change  are using time because our experience of the event changes over time. And so the something happening  is happening in us. Think about time today. Make a time based unit of art in which something happens . SOME QUESTIONS: What does it take to make something happen? What's the tiniest thing that can happen and still have it be perceivable that something happens? What's the most that can happen in the smallest amount of time? What happens to the way we experience something happening if you distort the way time works? Think about your own project as you work, if you can. RESOURCES: 1. The 4 (or 5) frames exercise we used in Deathbed Edition. Divide an event up into 4 or 5 frames. Draw it like a comic strip. There are 4-5 "moments" and, if we experience them ...

Select 8 of something. Paperclips, coins, cards, whatever. Let each item represent 15 minutes of time. Put all 8 items in a START STACK and also identify a place for a DONE stack. (You can give these spaces better names.) I'd like you to spend 2 hours (120 minutes) of focused time on your project today. Not on your journal (maybe that at the end or tomorrow but not in the 2 hours. You may spend that time on any activity, experiment, exercise, diagramming, writing you like...but--if you can--let the emphasis fall on doing, on iterating, on making versions of things . Maybe you'll work in a two hour stretch. In which case, when you're done...move ALL the Items from the START stack to the DONE stack. And you're finished. If you want to take a break at any point, for a meal or because you're distracted or stuck, GO AHEAD! Move as many items to the DONE stack as you've spent focused time. And when you come back to work, note the time that you begin to work...

This song was taken off from the internet in China because of too people sharing and reposting this on their social media during the beginning of the pandemic. However, when we are tweeting, do we still see? When we are singing out of fear and angry, do we see?

Keep singing. Jonas Mekas, who died last year, is a crucial figure in the American avant-garde and the world of downtown New York. You should read about him here and  here . You could look at his films, too, but even if you don't like them (you might not), you should read on. At the end of his life, he would tell people "Keep Singing!" And when he died, some of his friends made this tribute to him. It's a five minute film , but it gives you a little sense of the perspective that age brings (he was over 95 when he died) and what it feels like for a young artist to have lived through hard times. In particular, I'm struck by his hunger  for culture and by his willingness to look at how work was being made in his field, film, and issue a call to  blow it all up, because he and his friends felt as if they could make film that was more lively, more vital. So, today the assignment is: Keep singing. What does that mean to you? (It might mean actually singing. I...

me chris and andrew cuomo conversation with self/chris and andrew

We went to Bryn Mawr yesterday to watch flowers in their best bloom at the worst time thinking of the wind and rain today we pitied these beautiful little things and picked some branches to make Ikebana But today I thought they were not to be watched  so nor to be pitied for the fall In their best bloom at the best time, they were not to be saved by us nonetheless decorate our home as they do