Yesterday I saw Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor’s play House over at Studio 210 and had a slightly-universe-rocking experience. I felt moved, affected deeply – at times in ways I could put my finger on and at times in ways that still escape my conscious understanding.

Since I’ve been here at BU I’ve been constantly redefining my idea of what theatre is, and especially what GOOD theatre is. I’ve come to a place where I can read Mac Wellman’s Antigone and find it moving. I can draw meaning from it’s intentional chaos. I’ve come to enjoy post-modern dance and am generally a good little liberal theatre student.

So why did House rock me so? It struck me at once as avant-garde and utterly traditional.

Traditional – total unity of time, place and action. Victor is a clearly delineated character who operates via realistic psychological processes. Even when he takes flights of fancy, they seem to come from a certain internal logic. His world, if not EXACTLY ours, is very close. He is a bit of a Willy Loman – the dysfunctional modern everyman, chewed by the world. He is the protagonist, the projection screen for the audience’s own neuroses.

And in other ways the production is near avant-garde – especially in its meta-theatricality. The fourth wall is obliterated, and the theatre is utterly undecorated except for the audience’s seating and a few theatrical lights. Like the post-modern dancers, it strips away much of the theatricality of theatre to look at what is underneath. As I watched the performance I became more and more aware of my own assumptions walking into a theatre (even with all the stripping away that has happened at BU!)

The production was brutally simple and performed, directed and designed with such razor-like attention that every aspect felt necessary. Never did anything happen that felt unjustified. The power of the piece was in that it was a story told simply.

And why not? Simplicity! Human truth! Humor! These things don’t need huge budgets or spectacle or anything, really, apart from people committed to telling a story truthfully. Once Victor admitted that he knew it was a theatre, a permission was given. Permission to listen. To feel, or not to feel.

It is easy in the exploration of the theatrical illusion for me to forget that it’s okay to just be a storyteller. To just tell stories and trust that the meeting of human soul with human soul will simply, with no fanfare, inspire terror and pity.

So this is today’s manifesto. Tomorrow a different one, maybe, but this for now. Simplicity, truth, admission of pain and pleasure, generosity, and humor. Occam’s Razor stripping away all the artifice, all but exactly what is necessary. Let us speak truth, and trust that truth.

I’ve spent my time with him primarily noting how things are hitting me. “I don’t get what’s going on there”, I’ll say, or “Yeah, I found that really surprising!” During this last run of the piece we both realized that one piece of choreography was breaking out of the choreographic world that had been set up, and were able to change it. I’ve helped out with music selection, choreography, and served as the eye of the audience.

I was thinking about what exactly my “role” might be in this process. I’m not a choreographer, certainly – that’s Stuart. He takes any comments I make and then decides his own movement. So what am I? I’m kind of a dramaturg. Excluding the reams of research necessary on a written text, I found myself filling many of the parts we’ve studied as falling under the hat of production dramaturg. Serving as the naive audience member, watching for continuity, expressing my own good ideas with discretion and aplomb.

The articles we read at the beginning of the year that mentioned the possibility of dramaturgs for things as wide-ranging as architecture make more sense to me now. The weaving together, the eye for continuity, the subtle observation of all the parts and how they will relate to the public – this is such a vital function!

In this piece I was truly a facilitator, both for Stuart himself and for Stuart’s connection with his audience – it’s not my voice or choreography out there on stage, not by any means (and has no right to be) but I can look at sections and see how my contributions eased a transition or clarified a moment.

Dramaturgs are USEFUL, man.

Visceral: Loved it. I was consistently surprised in a way that I rarely have been in the theatre. The set, the use of the run crew, the acting choices, the bits of physical business – everything felt brave, creative, and effectively discomforting. I remember especially the first moment of the production – the choice to start with a bare set and then to lower in the beautiful red curtains with such ominous lethargy. Before my eyes I saw the illusion of the dollhouse created. Had I walked in to see the set already constructed, a massive amount of the nuance and message of the play would have been lost. This attention to every aspect of the production, from casting through to the wonderful interaction with the pianist was lavished with remarkable attention and discretion. The production disturbed me, moved me, shocked me. I laughed for a lot of it, not quite out of humor, but out of gleeful surprise.

Having Processed: Now, a while later, I have some slightly different thoughts. Thinking back on the production I realize that a lot of what I remember is the production. What is the story of “A Doll’s House”? I honestly couldn’t tell you. I had never read it before, and lots of details in the story and characters were lost to me. I was still able to basically follow the action, but my focus was rarely on the story itself. Having said that, doing a version of a well-known text rather than an original work did give the production the ability to focus on other things since the content is widely enough known.

Also, while the physical life of the play was very vibrant, many times I had no clue why characters were doing what they did. Often the physical interludes would serve to confound me more, because I couldn’t tell what was motivating them. But again, is this the point?

I find that everything potentially negative I could find to say about this production traps me into the question “but what if that’s the point?” Sure I couldn’t find the justification of the physicality in the performances. But what if that’s the point? I didn’t understand a lot of the story, just the visceral effect of the imagery. But what if that’s the point?

I now find, having gone through that odd paragraph, that the production in fact was great. Great in terms of my response, that is, BECAUSE it has forced me to ask “but what it that’s the point?” And in asking that I am thinking deeply about the point of theatre – a worthy discussion which this piece of art managed to effectively stimulate.

Maybe, for me, that’s the point. Whether or not I “liked” the show, I wish that more theatre would challenge me as thoroughly.

I recently stumbled on another ballet piece, set to the same music by Claude Debussy, also by a famous choreographer. Jerome Robbins, famed for West Side Story, Dances at a Gathering, and Fancy Free (among others) did a piece called Afternoon of the Faun. This piece is a slow, sensuous pas de deux that takes place not in a mythic forest, but a ballet rehearsal studio. It begins with a young ballet dancer sleeping on the floor. He wakes, stretches, and is joined by a female student. They flirt, and he offers her a kiss. She does not accept it, and exits the studio. The piece is easy to digest, pleasant.

I also was reminded of a piece I encountered in my first year at BU called Diagnosis of a Faun . This piece, by Tamar Rogoff, features Gregg Mozgala, a BU graduate. He has suffered from cerebral palsy his whole life, which has caused him to walk with massively turned in legs. Through the work on this piece, he gained the ability to walk to the point that he would not be stopped on the street as having cerebral palsy. The dance piece created centers around a 5,000 year-old faun transported through time to a modern hospital.

These three examples, drawn from on beginning idea, demostrate to me the power and necessity of adaptation and, therefore, dramaturgy. Realizing that all stories are connected makes it possible to at once identify with a known quantity, while also diverging from it in a meaningful way. Rogoff’s and Robbins pieces gain a deeper resonance through their reference to the original, ground-breaking work of Nijinsky.

Daniel Pink, a social scientist, makes a case that the traditional idea of human motivation as being based on extrinsic rewards is not only ineffective, but actually harmful to creativity. The “carrot and stick” method, as he puts it, serves to narrow a persons focus to the specific task at hand. This can be good – if the task has a clearly specified set of rules and a clear outcome. But people are much more creative when motivated “intrinsically”, from an internal desire to complete a task because of interest or desire.

While the speaker specifically talks about this idea of intrinsic motivation in terms of business, citing such companies as Google for making strides forward, I was struck by how strongly his ideas relate to the arts.

In the arts, even MORE so than in business, it is important for people to be able to think creatively and autonomously. There are almost never clear rules, and certainly never a clear outcome. This is the nature of the theatrical process. When I think about directing and acting, I realize (in hindsight) how true Daniel’s ideas are. The time I have felt most stifled, most narrow and uncreative, were when I had some idea of where I wanted to be in the end. As Alexander technique teaches, I was “endgaining”.

Daniel’s ideas, I feel, are also important to keep in mind when it comes to school. The nature of school is that one shows up for classes, fulfills a set of requirements, and then receives either a reward or a punishment for the quality of one’s performance. I took this structure for granted until college, mainly because I never studied art in school before college. Here at BU, however, I realize how much this academic “carrot and stick” structure has the potential of murdering my creativity. Just being here is not enough – I need to be constantly aware of how I am learning, how I am applying myself, or I will be turning my wheels in the mud. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Keep them in mind.

I stumbled across this article and was instantly intrigued. An artist, Liu Bolin, strategically places himself against backgrounds in the real world, then stands for hours on end as his assistants paint him into the background. The result is the stunningly invisible shape of a man just distinguishable in the picture above.

The article states that Bolin’s body-painting began a few years out of college as a visualization of a sense he had of loneliness, without love or family. This early idea has led to a career of these paintings, recently earning him an exhibition of photos in New York.

Something about this man’s work compels me incredibly. I thought first of the idea of the “invisible” actor, a phrase used by Yoshi Oida in his work (and occasionally mentioned in Elaine Vaan Hogue’s acting class). The idea of the invisible actor is that instead of showing the audience his performance, he shows them the image of the object they should see. For example, the first kind of actor would talk about the moon and you would see him talking about the moon. The second actor would talk about the moon and you would see the moon. As I looked through Bolin’s work online, I become struck that due to his invisibility he assumes Bolin actually casts light on the space behind him. Literally, he allows the image to be shown through him. And in his pictures I find myself looking more closely at what the world itself is. I hope that as I make my art I can keep this idea in mind — to let go of ego and focus instead and allowing the world to show through me.

It also reminds me of Viewpoints, a method of thinking about movement that breaks it down into nine categories. One of those categories is architecture. Bolin’s pictures, so much about blending in and the vague shape of the human body, capture the idea of Viewpoints perfectly for me. By placing his own body alongside the images, the backgrounds he paints, he allows for a deeper awareness of both the architecture of the world and the architecture of the human body itself.

Though I am not a painter, and probably never will be, Bolin’s work reminds me that we can always rethink our art, create new forms. There is something strikingly modern and almost disturbing about some of Bolin’s pictures, especially the ones done in grocery stores. My eye is immediately struck by the rows of space-age soda bottles, and only second does it discover the outline of the man against it. A wall of soda, and a man invisible in the middle of it. What better metaphor for crushing rise of consumerism, the dominance of corporations, the diminishing of individual importance? And best of all, Bolin captures all these themes without ever saying a word, without any headlines or banners. His work is cutting, yet subtle. I hope that in my theatrical work I will be able to achieve such levels of artistry, subtlety, and creativity as this man.

Even if it means becoming a bit invisible.

There are lots of staunch old regional theatres spinning their wheels in the mud — this much is true.  When I find myself contemplating that fact for too long, I start to get really upset about the plight of theatre in America.  Where are the young companies, the bright vibrant ideas?

Are they nowhere to be found?

Not so!

As much as the corporate structure and dependency on subscriber bases may have strangled the creativity of some larger theatres, America is still a vibran place for young companies. The Pig Iron Theatre Company is one of these.  Located in Philadelphia, Pig Iron formed in 1995 and describes itself as “an interdisciplinary ensemble…dedicated to the creation of new and exuberant performance works that defy easy categorization.”  Woof, I’ll hop on that bandwagon.  Over the past years the company has been fulfilling this mission with impressive gusto.  They primarily devise pieces, though recently they opened a production of Twelfth Night in Philadelphia, their first foray into working from an established text.  I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing any of their pieces, but based on my online research I have learned several things: every show sounds bizarre (example titles: Chekhov Lizardbrain, Cankerblossom, and Come to My Awesome Fiesta, it’s Going to be Awesome, Okay?)  and every show is roundly praised by critics and audience members alike.

The company is primarily made up of three artistic directors and four company members, who create work themselves as well as bringing in guest artists and establishing connections with other collaborators.  They create work primarily through improvisation, and company discussion.  Their schedules for creating shows are notoriously long – often up to a year.  The production of Twelfth Night, which just closed, began work just before the beginning of the summer.  The three artistic directors are all graduates of Swarthmore, and created Pig Iron initially as just a summer gig.  Eventually it became their primary project and has brought them all sorts of acclaim.

I find the story of Pig Iron incredibly inspiring.  A group of young artists, friends, who banded together to create unique theatre.  And they have done it well enough that they have audience, money, and a voice that is being heard.  It’s possible!  The regional theatre monoliths don’t have a stranglehold on all creativity.  Pig Iron proves to me that there is an audience out there that is LOOKING for that next thing, that theatre company unafraid to push the boundary courageously and skillfully.

On top of it all, Pig Iron recently received a $150,000 grant which they have put into use developing a two-year Advanced Performance Training program, which substitutes for a traditional MFA.  Opening this year, the new program is a testament to the fact that not only can young artists create great work – it is just a few steps from there to becoming the next generation of mentors.

And finally, this is from Pig Iron’s introduction to its new school in the student handbook: “The Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training will re-draw the lines of artistic ownership in theatre and overturn the traditional norms and power structures embodied by the current regional theatre model.”

Like softest music to attending ears.