Sunday, January 17, 2010
DIY creativity
(If you're looking at this on Facebook and seeing a bunch of html below, click here to go to my blog and see the original post. )
Ji Lee: The Transformative Power of Personal Projects from 99% on Vimeo.
what the cat twitter dragged in
- Awesome green structures.
- Leaf-cutting art.
- Mad subway architecture.
- Trippy mirrors.
- Obituary for Eric Rohmer
- A dream about Susan Sontag in a pink miniskirt
- Rad living statues of kids.
- The first graphic novel, in woodcuts.
- Bitchin fireworks.
- A book with jellyfishtastic pictures of outer space.
Not bad for
Susan Sontag
It was truly dizzying the way that she wielded difficult literary and philosophical concepts with the ease of combing her hair. She constantly invoked unheard-of artists as if they were common currency in late twentieth century America. A bit older and wiser now, I get that that was part of her act, and some of her ideas, thrilling as they are, don't hold up to prolonged scrutiny. But even if it was part affectation, the fluency in the art and thought of our time that she seemed to take as a given in all her readers gestured at a way that the world could be: we could live in a world in which people had immersed themselves in, and become truly intimate with, challenging, contemporary artists who MATTERED.
Another book that was assigned in Jody McAuliffe's class was Richard Gilman's The Making of Modern Drama. Sontag had endorsed it "Richard Gilman's study of this beautiful subject is written with love, measure and authority. It has no equals." Gilman's book was impressive enough, but Sontag's endorsement of it made me love it all the more. It was a book I was to read and reread many times over the years. Later, when I came across a copy of Gilman's Common and Uncommon Masks in a used bookstore, I was astonished to learn that he had written a whole essay about Sontag, mostly defending her from older critics who Just Didn't Get It. I swooned; it was like two of my best friends had met and were falling in love.
I worked in a campus bookstore one summer, and had plenty of time to read the one biography on Sontag while I was at work, but that wasn't enough. I needed to buy it. It was mostly intellectual biography, but certain facts emerged about her personal life: her incredible precociousness, going to Berkeley at 16, appearing on the cover of Vogue, her divorce, her travels to Hanoi.
She has turned up at many junctures in my life. I remember falling hard for a guy in New York who was probably never meant to be more than a one-night stand for me but he had a Sontag book on his bookshelf. He would one day become the actor David Pittu, Later, in Berlin, I met a guy who introduced me to Robert Wilson, who was directing Sontag's play about Alice James, Alice in Bed, for the Schaubuehne. I went to the premiere with my snarky, cynical friend Egbert, who insisted he saw Sontag snoring through the premier of her show at the Hebbel Theater. I don't know if it was true; it was the kind of thing Egbert would have made up. It was a funny image nonetheless.
Still later, still in Berlin, I met the photographer David Armstrong, and was enthralled to learn that he and his associate Nan Goldin were socializing routinely with Sontag and Daryl Pinkney, as they were all guests of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). I remember David remarking that Sontag seemed to look through men; she was apparently only interested in listening to women.
David and I moved back to New York. David had a good friend, Peyton Smith, who was a member of the Wooster Group at the time. I had been a fan of the Wooster Group for years at this point, and couldn't believe my good luck that I had gotten to meet one of them in person. Even better than that, I was invited to watch rehearsals, and when I was there watching, who else was there watching too? You guessed it, Susan Sontag. Peyton let me know that Sontag had recently discovered the Wooster Group and was there pretty much every night. I was glad to know that one of my favorite critics loved my favorite theater company, and I was even more glad to know that I had found them before she had.
While I was at the Drama School at Yale, Sontag came to read from her new novel, In America. Of course I was there with my first edition copy of Under the Sign of Saturn to be signed. I hadn't read her recent novel, The Volcano Lover. I had picked it up in the bookstore and given it the first paragraph test. It had come up wanting. All I remember was that the first paragraph ended in the word "Rubbish" and that had struck me as terribly stuffy. Plus it was a historical fiction, which made me deeply skeptical as well. Had the great Sontag gone soft in her old age? Historical fiction was decidedly midbrow, or so I believed at the time.
I found the reading that she did from In America tedious. David and I went up to her afterwards, and David was able to sort of make her remember who he was. I gushed about what an honor it was to meet her, and handed her the book to sign. She complied, almost grudgingly, and then let me know with more than a little impatience that I needed to read her more recent books. I remember thinking what a waste it was that such a brilliant critic and thinker wanted to write these novels that just didn't seem very interesting.
There was one thing that she said on this occasion which surprised me. Before she read, or maybe afterwards during the Q&A, she remarked that she thought that one of the main purposes of art (or literature, or fiction, I can't remember) was to instruct, particularly to instruct the heart, or something to that effect. I remember this striking me so strongly because it is such a far remove from her positions Against Interpretation, when it was all about how sensual appreciation of art conditioned the moral sense. "Instead of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." She had ridiculed any sort of didacticism. And now here she was extolling "instruction". She was coming out as a nineteenth century novelist. No wonder the preoccupation with historical settings. Time passes, people evolve, I guess. But it sure was surprising.
I had an encounter with another guy, Rick Whitaker, that catalyzed the dissolution of my relationship with David. The night I met him, he was talking about Thomas Bernhard's novel Woodcutters, about which I was to go on to write a dissertation. Sontag would write about Bernhard years later in discussing the phenomenon that is W.G. Sebald. Rick Whitaker, too, had Sontag on his bookshelf. I ended up writing him a postcard with a reproduction of the image that was on the cover of the Penguin edition of Portrait of a Lady, my favorite nineteenth century novel. That postcard was probably the closest I have ever come to writing romantic poetry.
I saw Susan Sontag one more time in person. It was near the end of my time in New York. I was getting ready to say goodbye to all that. I had somehow ended up in a hip new gay club in Williamsburg. I don't know what it was called anymore. I was barely over 30, but I felt old and frumpy compared to the kids at this club. I was still trying to figure out what electroclash was, even though everyone assured me it was already over. Whoever I was with, I can't remember now, pointed to a couple at the bar, who were much older, and said "Isn't that Susan Sontag?" And sure enough, there was the black hair interrupted by the streak of distinguished gray, nodding sagely to the shaved head gay culture vulture she was sitting with. It took me a moment to accept that Susan Sontag was hanging out at this divey night club with these teen-agers, but there she was. The person I was with, whoever it was, assured me that Sontag liked to keep her ear to the ground with respect to what the kids were up to.
Last night, scrolling throught my Google reader, I came across this video that collects excerpts from Sontag's appearances on Charlie Rose. In watching the clips, she somehow struck me as earthier than she ever had before. I don't know whether I had changed or she had, probably both. But what I love about this video is how she owns up to having made a big mistake: when she was younger, she had doubted the power of fiction to communicate. Quite late in life, she had discovered her true passion, her true self. It was inspiring to hear this woman, an authority on everything, admit that she had missed the boat. It somehow made it ok to admire her without reservation: she was not so full of her own expertise and insightfulness that she couldn't see her own mistakes. A critic who knows everything, but then, finally, doesn't, is a critic I can embrace, once and for all.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
in praise of keeping it light
Since at least 1990, the authors of this article--director and playwright Barbara Carlisle, with scenographer and lighting designer Randy Ward--have been participating in a common theatre problem at Virginia Tech. As a department we pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of execution to provide valid design and technical learning for our students. At the same time we confront increasing materials costs with fixed budgets, intense pressure to meet overlapping production deadlines, and perhaps more importantly, deep discomfort with the unrecycled waste that has gone out the door after each production. In every respect we have balked at the model we were perpetuating for our students--debilitating burnout, financial anxiety, and production panic. In writing the book Hi Concept - Lo Tech*, Barbara and her co-author Don Drapeau (also of Virginia Tech) coined the expression "sustainable theatre" to refer to the need for a mode of theatre making that does not deplete the resources of the theatre makers (174). Yet our theatre at Virginia Tech was not sustainable. We were working off the backs of exhausted students and staff, caught up in a theatre mythology that presumes "if you're not willing to kill yourself for the art, you better get out."
As a young theater artist, I considered myself willing to kill myself for the art. Directing in college and graduate school, this was possible: those were both relatively forgiving environments in which to neglect everything else in your life to get the product you wanted. In between those two periods of study, I was living in Berlin, Germany. I had gone there with some money from my undergrad school to do an internship with a theater company, but had stayed on well after that money was gone. I worked as an English teacher, worked on my German, and got to see a lot of exciting theater. However, I eventually decided I wanted to produce and direct my own production of Maria Irene Fornes' play Mud there. I raised a little money and went to work.
I had no idea what the cost would be. As I pushed and grunted and sweated to make the things happen I believed needed to happen for the production to be what I believed it needed to be, my relationships began to fray: with the actors, with the design/production team I had recruited, with my roommates, with my employers. We presented the play both at the Amerika Haus and at a private theater in Berlin, and the set involved a sever rake and a curving cyclorama. It was, in a word, a bitch. And in getting the show up, I took my eye off the ball of promoting the show. The Amerika Haus presentations were well attended, but at the private theater we played to many a sparsely-populated house (the show impressed one of the members of the Berlin Culture Senate enough that she offered to try to help me get money to start a company in Berlin; this was the silver lining). But all things considered, it was a wrenching series of crises and heartbreaks. By the end of the process, my bowels were upset and didn't recover for about a month.
I then was fortunate enough to enter graduate school, which was a more forgiving environment, although it came with its own set of aggravations. I had my triumphs there as well as my disappointments. My last show in school was my thesis production. I had chosen a difficult Austrian play with nothing in the way of a discernible story in the text, that depended on virtuosic performances to give the audience anything to hold onto at all. If it had worked, it might have been something really unique: an experience of being both oriented and disoriented at once. But we didn't get there, and I left graduate school with the monkey on my back of having felt that my thesis production was not a success.
I had spent ten years, between undergraduate school, where I studied with incomparable directing teacher and Yale MFA Jody McAuliffe, to Berlin, where I saw some of the best that European state theater has to offer, to three years at the Drama School at Yale, developing these incredibly high standards for what I wanted my work to be like. When I finally left graduate school and started hustling for work in New York, it wasn't an easy adjustment to make. First of all, I had to make money, which meant long, boring, demoralizing days temping at Goldman Sachs or working as a cater-waiter. When I did get opportunities, it was always a project that someone else had picked. They had also set up the timetable and severely limited the budget. The talent I was able to access was also pretty circumscribed. Little or no rehearsal support, etc. Crises would erupt during the day that I would have to try to handle on the phone at my temp job. I would have to try to make things happen by pulling strings in a bureaucratic setting I did not understand. And I brought my share of neurosis to the mix, which certainly didn't help matters.
After a while, it wore me down. I was able to make happen little or nothing of what I dreamed of, and at such a cost! I eventually turned my back on the theater and jumped on the web development bandwagon. Having given my first thirty years of life to the theater, it was time to take care of myself.
Skipping forward a few chapters, I moved to the west coast and entered a Ph.D. program at Stanford. After a year there, I had a brainstorm and launched an acting studio in San Francisco, now the Mother of Invention Acting School. I was determined to start small: the first time I taught the class, I taught it for free (I had my Stanford fellowship to live off of). The class had some pretty strict requirements in terms of attendance and preparation, so the students were contributing, even if they weren't paying cash money. It worked, and I found that it afforded me the pleasure of working with actors and text, which is what it was always all about for me, without the aggravations of trying to make art in a foreign institutional matrix, whether regional theater, university, or downtown theater. I had the autonomy of being my own boss, and I didn't have the pressure of opening a show. I did institute a Friends and Family night at the end of each cycle, and I found that that was an invaluable practice, since it helped keep me honest with myself about what I was accomplishing with the students. It's hard to kid yourself about your work when there are strangers in the room watching it.
I have been teaching my acting classes for five years now, and expanded to Los Angeles a little over a year ago. It has proved a solid foundation for me. It afforded me the opportunity to continue to grow as an artist, it has provided me with a (modest) income, and it has given me the pleasure and satisfaction of doing what I love to do and do well.
I turn 40 in March, and recently completed my doctoral program in Stanford in German literature. I don't plan to look for an academic job in literature (was never going to be my scene). As I look ahead, I envision relocating to Los Angeles (although still teaching in SF), and starting my own theater company there. One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward with this was the memory of the backbreaking toil and labor involved in producing Mud in Berlin, and the heartbreak of its less than sparse attendance. However, reading this piece and this piece at Theatre Ideas has given me some encouragement. By keeping my vision right-sized, light and sustainable, there is no reason that the process needs to be wrenching or heartbreaking, or at least not consistently so. It is the same vision that worked so well for me with the class: set meetable goals, and then meet them. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Invest in people. Remember what's really important: the passion of the actor, the human capital, and the relationships that keep that capital healthy and motivated.
We usually think of "sustainability" as something that pertains to big industries, but sustainability is a key concern for artists trying to carve out a niche for themselves and create an artistic home. As Will Durant wrote, paraphrasing Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." When we think about what we can repeat, rather than what we might be able to do once, we are creating a future.
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