what can you do?
ohhh oh kay, lots of stuff i want to write about. probably won’t get to all of it; coulda shoulda woulda written on my day off on monday,
day off
but instead i slept appallingly late and got tea and a donut at the bakery up the street (the one that sells 5¢ cookies by the dollar bag on tuesdays) and then biked to sequoia park
and then to arcata. i took old arcata road, aka the back road, in the interests of not riding on highway 101. very nice, past farmland and little eccentric houses. it’s cool to cycle around here in a different way than it’s cool to cycle in portland. there’s less of us here… but not a single cyclist i passed the whole day (and there were quite a few) didn’t greet me with a nod or a smile or a hello or all three.
in arcata i hung out at arcata plaza for awhile, reading in the sun. an old hippie gave me a flower that matched my hair, asked my name, told me his, wished me a pleasant day and headed on his way… and then turned around, called my name and asked if i wanted to smoke a bowl. hah! i couldn’t help but sorta giggle at that, the quintessential humboldt moment, am i right? i mean if i’m trafficking in stereotypes. plenty of people in eureka don’t really like the pot stereotype thing, but plenty of other people sorta shrug and say, well, it’s true for a lot of people.
when the clouds rolled back in i biked back to eureka along the 101, which wasn’t too bad at all (and was lined with beautiful madrone trees), which is good ’cause i’m really looking forward to biking much longer stretches of it next summer!
braiding the river
spent a few days before that working on set pieces with two other students, leslie and ramy. water is represented in various ways in the play… for one of these ways, we had to braid very long pieces of blue and green fabric into roughly 24-ft-long braids. it’s very hard for one person to braid such long pieces, so we each took a strand and we did the “braid dance.” we got a really good rhythm going and sometimes we sang songs or got into the dancing part of it, with little flourishes and such. sometimes we just talked, about the institute and about our lives. we spent probably five hours or so total, over two evenings, making twenty braids. the playfulness with which we accomplished what otherwise would have been a repetitive and boring task was really valuable to me.
posters
this project feels interminable! in this picture they look beautiful and so close to completion:
these ones are limited edition, actually-printed-on-the-press lovely ones, and they just need to be gold-stamped with the golden fleece stamp that our set designer nephelie and sage (a student) designed. the posters we actually put up around town will be photocopied, with the names of the actors around the edge (though still with that lovely blue color, and–if all goes as planned–all hand-stamped with the golden fleece). we’re supposed to take the poster to the copy store tomorrow, but… the cast is still a little up in the air. one of those things about working with first-time artists and all of that. i feel a little distant from that aspect of the project, because i’ve spent almost no time in the rehearsal room. my community engagement is sort of theoretical. it’s one of my challenges here.
(mieke and leslie in the print shop after leslie and i printed a whole bunch of posters)
atmosphere
in the morning it’s foggy and cold. in the middle of the day, it’s warm and sunny for a few hours. in the evening, it’s foggy and cold again. tonight it felt like portland in march. the air here often has the same heavy, low, moist quality as the air in portland. this morning in class i made a dance about this similarity, and about how people here and people there paint their houses such bright beautiful colors. hah! we are in the middle of a workshop with peter dimuro, formerly of the liz lerman dance exchange, which creates community-engaged/community-based dance. also, liz lerman is the person who came up with the critical response technique of workshopping that is used during jaw (just add water, portland center stage’s annual playwrights’ festival–i interned in ‘06 and ‘07, and stage managed in ‘08). ya know, connections…
dancing in sequoia park
for the second part of class today, he took us to sequoia park. sequoia park is to eureka sorta what forest park is to portland. except smaller. except full of really tall beautiful trees. anyway, we danced there.
i really like this sequence of photos of morgan–
the ducks did some dancin’ too–
yeah
i got into a conversation with peter over dinner about communication and reconciliation. he has apparently actually done a great deal of reconciliation work as part of his career, and he uses critical response–he says he recommends viewing the relationship between two entities as a work of art that the two entities are co-creating. so, asking neutral questions, etc. i like that perspective and hope to incorporate it into my relationships.
people:
i am feeling artistic tonight. full of things. i was looking through my hard drive for things to delete ’cause i’m running out of room for all the photos i’m taking, and i found this little cover i recorded of one of my favorite songs (off of my favorite album in the whole world). it is not exactly what i was trying to make it be when i recorded it, but i listened to it tonight and found it to be sweet and i wanted to share it.
good night
sweetest dreams
figure it out
this morning’s class was about design for community-based theatre and the “five Fs” of community-based design, which include Forum, Found objects, Folk, Fabrication, and Facsimile. (i am sleepy or i would talk about these more. on the first day of class, one of my classmates asked, “what’s the policy on sharing the curriculum with others outside of the institute?” and the artists who are teaching us sort of went, “what? we want everyone to use the things we’ve learned and to make art like this.”) the designers who taught the class (the designers for jason in eureka) showed us lots of pictures and told a lot of stories, and then each talked in more detail about one show they’ve designed for cornerstone and how they incorporated the five Fs. these designers make AMAZING things happen. beautiful spectacular things, artful and resourceful things. they also talked about a sixth, unofficial F–”figure it out.” if you’ve got an idea, if you know what would make the show wonderful, etc, make it happen. figure out how to make it happen, even if it means attaching huge lights to a battery pack and a backpack to create moving lights in a venue where you can’t run cable or whatever. (and make it accessible, even if it means building a wheelchair ramp to the second floor of a huge building, up stairs and through windows…)
anyway, cornerstone is really into getting groups of people into circles. and one thing we do in these circles is check in. when we start class, or a meeting, or whatever, we go around the circle and we say how we’re feeling, what attitude or emotion we’re bringing to the meeting and to the day. when we check in at our end of day meeting, most people talk a little bit about how their day was. this is pretty amazing for a lot of reasons. my day today was sort of slow, and i’m pretty tired, so i’m glossing over a lot of stuff as a sort of reminder to write about it later, maybe. i wanted to say, today my check-in at our end of day meeting went something like: “i’ve been thinking about class today, too, and ‘figure it out,’ and i think that i tend to make a lot of excuses for why things aren’t gonna work out, when really i can just… figure it out.”
really glad i ended up here. ’round lots of people who are figuring it out, all the time. and not in the “well i’m still figuring it out” kinda way. they’re making it happen.
.
poster progress:
.
i’m leading warm-up on sunday. another student, leslie, loaned me augusto boal’s games for actors and non-actors and i want to play ALL of them. seriously, i want to maybe put together a group that would meet a couple hours a week to work our way through the whole freakin’ book. find out what’s good. find out about each other.
practice
* most mornings before class (i mean, every morning that we have class, which is most mornings), we have a half hour “warm-up” led by an institute student. today sage led us in some movement exercises, and then a partner movement exercise, and then a partner exercise that i found to be incredibly powerful. we sat across from each other, placed our palms together (one person’s facing up, the other’s down), and looked into each other’s eyes. after a long moment, sage told us to notice the light and shadow on our partner’s face, to take it all in… another long moment, and she told us to find something to love about our partner’s face, and to practice loving that thing. then, to find something we hate about that person’s face. and then, a different thing to love. while we continued to look into each other’s eyes she told us to remember the way it feels to love that face and to hate it, and to remember that we always have a choice, and to feel that love and bring it into our interactions throughout the day. my beautiful partner and i hugged and thanked one another. it was a good day.
* i’m leading a warm-up this coming sunday and i’m not sure what i want to do yet! what are your favorite fun theatre games or movement activities or whatever? so far i think i’d like to do nala walla’s “steamroller” exercise from the ecosomatics workshop i took with her during the village building convergence (man, when i put it like that i sound almost as cool as everyone else here at the institute. almost)–in which one lays oneself perpendicular to a prone partner and rolls one’s midsection over the partner’s body–but i’m not sure it would work very well on the hard gym floor (maybe if it’s a nice day we could do it outside!). the people here are definitely cool with touching each other, singing funny rhymes, dancin’, whatever. maybe boppity bop bop bop? silly might be the way to go.
* i am so busy. what else is new? i am so happy. that is sort of new.
* i spent two hours this afternoon pretty much alone in the incredibly dusty print shop at blue ox, learning how to set type (with a little guidance from eric) and digging through boxes and pulling open cases looking for what i wanted. it was much-needed and reinvigorating and fun to be alone with the dust and the type. i’m not sure how i ended up in charge of this project, but rock on! starting tomorrow i will have some people rotating through there with me one at a time, and i’ll have to figure out how to make it productive and fun for both of us. i’m sure it will be good.
* i also rode my bike there and back, in the sun. that helped a lot too.
* and i talked to a.
* i am writing more about the institute and less about the community part of all of this ’cause it’s hard to know where to begin. i have talked to a ton of people, and not talked to a ton of people i probably could have talked to. it’s challenging! the whole process of getting to know a community this way–with the explicit intention of getting to know this community–is really fascinating and i’m not really sure how to begin to write about it. julia (another student) and i are doing this notecard project: during auditions we asked auditioners to answer two questions on two notecards, with words and/or images: “what brought you to eureka?” “and why do you stay?”–questions that are important in the play. we have gotten some beautiful answers, some funny answers, some poignant answers. two of my favorite answers to the second question: “as a wild seed, i finally found a safe place to plant myself.” and “my family was made here.” today during callbacks, we asked people to “tell us a piece of eureka’s history, yours or someone else’s.” i have all these funny feelings about eureka all wrapped up in all these reasons people have given us for being here (both positive and negative). in class a few days ago, we talked about the blurry line between insider and outsider…
keep making mistakes
blue ox millworks and historic park
(our venue for jason in eureka)
human-powered jigsaw! operated by eric hollenbeck, blue ox owner, creator, craftsman–
more human-powered machines–
plus, several printing presses! and many cases of type!–
(guess what??? i am learning how to set type!! we are going to try to make a letterpress poster for the play, and i am sorta taking the lead on that project. am pretty thrilled about it. more later.)
slice of 1400-year-old redwood logged 100 years ago–
the place is beautiful and rugged and dusty as heck. eric has led an incredibly full life, is full of stories, tells us about all the “mistakes” he’s made in his life, and says to us (something along the lines of) “i figure if i keep making mistakes, i’ll be all right.” lots of the machines he has he found in ditches or the woods, abandoned. he built his business out of what came to him, literally–these machines. the old-growth redwood he uses is all salvage, and he’s been involved in tons of home restoration projects (gorgeous intricate victorian detailing and the like). he also runs a school (for high schoolers) of traditional arts at blue ox–woodworking, blacksmithing, printing. it is a pretty exciting place to be. the air is full of sawdust and good vibes.
other than that–i am tired out. been listening to so many stories, some of which are not mine to tell here.
process
been trying to sit down and write this entry for days! and, of course, the mental version keeps getting longer and longer. last night i got this far: “ok, i am going to do this chronologically because i only have 20 minutes before dinner in which to write, and if i put this off”–and then someone came by and told me our dinner guests were beginning to arrive and let’s go over and greet them! right now i have a bit of downtime before my audition for the play. i’m not expecting or expected to be cast, but all the institute students are supposed to go through the (very quick and low-key) audition process ’cause we’re expected to basically go through EVERY PROCESS here, which is awesome, and that is what i want to write about: process. [have since auditioned; not done with this entry, of course.]
anyway, i am living in eureka, humboldt county, california, for the next month or so, to attend the cornerstone institute summer residency. cornerstone theatre is a company that’s been based in los angeles for the past seventeen years or so (before that, they traveled the country making theatre with rural communities). they make a lot of theatre with various communities within los angeles and they’re pretty much totally awesome. check out their website. anyway, every summer they travel to a small california town (or sometimes a community within a large city) and they put on a play. the institute director and the playwright started making trips up here like nine months ago to get to know the community, talk to people, collect stories, meet organizations, etc, and the playwright wrote a play based on those stories–and on the myth of jason and the golden fleece. the play we’re putting on this month is called jason in eureka: an epic adventure in search of golden fleece and other local treasures. we students get to come and learn about community-based theatre by taking classes together in the morning and working on this immense intense project in the afternoons and evenings. such divisions blur of course. so. yes.
before that i was in portland, of course, and i was feeling rough. gotta acknowledge that. felt rough here in eureka too. sort of overwhelmed and unengaged and i dunno. the other night i meditated for the first time in much too long and i saw flowers made of light growing and blossoming and dying and growing again. so there’s that. i mean, the growing again.
the institute has been great so far. amazing and scary and thought-provoking. on thursday night we sat in a circle (the first of many many many, everything is done in circles here) and shared our reasons for being here, and i said for the first time really that i don’t want to be a stage manager, i am not a stage manager, i think i’m done with that. felt weird to admit to it out loud.
on friday morning we did a “cultural mapping” exercise. we sort of assigned categories to corners of the room–like “love to win,” “hate to lose,” “just wanna play,” “don’t wanna play at all”–and then we each had to choose a corner to stand in. then each corner group had to come up with three things that everyone in that group had in common. some interesting stuff came out of that–then we were given a dichotomy, two extremes, and told to arrange ourselves in a spectrum line from one end to the other. a relative spectrum based on the people who were present, of course… the first (not necessarily real) dichotomy we were given was “mind” and “body.” we walked to where we expected to find ourselves on the spectrum and ended up with a clump of people in the middle and a similarly-sized clump at the “mind” end. i ended up at the extreme “body” end (of this particular group of people). goodness knows it’s a false dichotomy. i found it really interesting that “mind” was a more acceptable or common extreme than “body.” those of us at the body end found our position there sort of socially uncomfortable, i think. i have in my life elevated my “mind” at the expense of my “body” (and thus of my mind), but i haven’t ever elevated my body at the expense of my mind, really, because it’s much harder to do that in my cultural background, or something. but my rejection of the dichotomy made me feel closer to the body end than the mind end–as a sort of resistance to that elevation of the mind, i guess.
the next spectrum we created had “art” at one end and “social justice” at the other. my favorite part about creating these spectra was the conversations that broke out instantly as we tried to figure out our place in the line. here is part of the reason i am at the cornerstone theatre: oh you know all those venn diagrams, with your passion, your strengths/skills, and what is needed, and the “sweet spot” in the middle, what you should be doing? maybe i lived too long in my passions and then too long in my skills (?), and for months now i have been so focused on what is needed, and felt sort of useless in providing it. i felt burnt out on art! so instead of coming to this place from my theatre-making and art, i am trying to go back to theatre-making through what i see as needed. i guess. anyway, i was sorta in the middle of that spectrum.
then we added another dimension to that and made it into a sort of graph, with art and social justice on one axis and PRODUCT and PROCESS on the other axis. i walked all the way to the process end and i stopped. i talked with the people around me, and said, “product is only meaningful insofar as it comes out of process,” and “product is maybe a way of communicating process.” when people see my mandalas, they say, wow, i would never have the patience for that, and i say, i just start in the middle and work outward.
another thing that came up the first or second night, when we were talking about cornerstone’s history and mission etc etc, was some other group of theatre-makers and social-changers: a group of women who are way involved in support for women, shelters, education, etc etc. but their mission statement, or statement of purpose, or something along those lines, is very very simple: “our purpose is to make theatre.” and all the rest of their work comes out of that purpose–that PRACTICE. so i got to thinking about theatre as practice, and meditation as practice (so i went to my room and meditated), and this blog as a practice. i am all about the process and not the polished product–the product communicating the process… maybe this is something that will bounce back a little with time, but right now i am okay with the messy process of this writing.
there has also been lots of discussion about what “community-based theatre” is. i guess my conclusion for the time being is that it’s a process for which community is a product. i am thinking a lot about the role of artists in community, and what it means that we came here to this community of which we are not really a part to make this art–and, by my logic, to make this community!
i am cutting this entry a little short because it’s almost time for a meeting about our community auditions tonight. [hah! didn't actually finish it. am once again pressed for time, before the auditions themselves.] myself and another woman are trying to put together an additional little project for auditioners to participate in while they wait for their audition: answering (in words or images, on notecards) the questions “what brought you here?” and “why do you stay?” which are sort of fundamental questions asked and partially answered in the playscript. i will end with this–someone suggested the other day that one purpose of community-based theatre is community renewal–it’s a reminder and a reteller of old and new stories and issues. i just finished reading a book about mayan village culture, secrets of the talking jaguar by martin prechtel, which suggests that community is never permanent–it is in the creating itself. the process.
The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of its people, but the secret to that generosity was village inefficiency and decay. The House of the World, like our village huts and our human bodies, no matter how magnificent, is not built to last very long. Because of this, all life must be regularly renewed. To do this, the villagers come together once a year at least, to work on putting back together somebody’s hut, talking, laughing, feasting, and helping wherever they can in a gradual, graceful way. This way each family’s place in the village is reestablished and remembered.
If a house is built too well, so efficiently that it is permanent and refuses to fall apart, then people have no reason to come together. Though the house stays together, the people fall apart, and nothing gets renewed…
Generosity of soul and tangible effort in the face of the constant pressure of decay are what give people purpose, fertile imaginations, vitality, a feeling of usefulness, and self-worth. When decay is “cured” instead of communally addressed, a culture becomes decadent. Then generosity becomes an advertising ploy or a dirty word. Violence is close behind when people won’t come together to remake each other’s houses.
lots of love.
thanks for reading.
thanks for helping to build me up.
p.s. victor, one of the institute students and our documentarian, has been staying up late to blog, here.
