How much do you love the things you love?

I think, as a group, we are pretty passionate about…stuff. I, though I don’t know if most of you know me quite well enough to be aware of this, am passionate about everything. I don’t have feelings that are not strong. Or maybe I do, but I don’t call them feelings. I was talking about this a night or two ago, to my poor best friend, who, bless her, is “allergic to feelings.” And I was like, “You know how you feel crazy sometimes, in [romantic] relationships? I feel crazy all the time.” Because I just have a lot of feelings. (And, yes, this can be exhausting.)

For the most part, it works out for me. I lead a pretty charmed life, and no one has ever tried to tell me that I love something – or someone – too much, though sometimes I suppose it could be true. I loved The West Wing so much that I quit the School of Theatre (not to be a politician) (this part is confusing). That may have been a mistake. But it’s okay! Life is short! Do the things you think you want to do! You have no way of knowing if you’re going to change your mind, but waiting and waiting and waiting to find out, that kills you.

I love scripted television, that’s one thing. I love it in a scary, only-dogs-can-hear-you, have-to-pause-to-run-around-and-talk-to-myself way. I love that someone wrote something and people realized it and COLLABORATION HAPPENED that led to me feeling the way I do, and I love the fact that it doesn’t end after two hours. (I love theatre, too, as you know; but the different way I access the theatre I love is another story.) Anyway – I love television in a way that, combined with my relatively good memory, leads to stuff like creepily** accurate quoting, or at least frowning at my paraphrasing friends.

And – or because – I love writing. The other night, I went to see Mindy Kaling speak/read/sign her book at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge; and I can’t even tell you, how INEXPLICABLY EMOTIONAL that was – so I won’t. But I will say that we came home and I promptly wrote the first half of a looooong co-written personal blog entry about it, and Joel came over partway through, and he said, “Why would you write more? Why would you write when you don’t have to?” Because I do have to. Because it’s what I do. Because words words WORDS and all my periods of depression and insecurity and Not Knowing What I’m Doing With My Life have coincided with not having the time to write. Or choosing not to write, for any reason, and then everything implodes.

…I think Bukowski’s kind of a tool, and I don’t AT ALL agree with all the things he says in his poem so you want to be a writer? but for me there is truth to this:

unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

A couple nights ago, someone asked me what TV character I was most like, and if other people disagreed. And I had no clue, of course, because apparently I’d not recently explored that particular corner of navel-gazing. Shocking. Anyway, I asked my roommate and three of my most immediately reachable friends, and here’s the exact response of one of them – someone who adores me but, as Anne thought of Gilbert’s mother, is “not overburdened with tact”:

“Oh. Hm. I don’t think they write shows about people who sit around writing all the time or flipping out over [redacted].”

Yikes. Forgetting for a minute the original question, which he misinterpreted a little, and discounting the fact that, really, I’ve never wanted to be any television character (why would I give up being the strange, thought-full, growing person I already am?), I promptly had A Lot Of Complicated Feelings. For example… WHAT IS MY LIFE WHAT ARE MY CHOICES?????

But then I thought – I do do that, and it makes me happy. And, if that were actually what I did all the time? That’d be pretty sweet. In a perfect world, I’d parlay it into a career. In our existing imperfect world, I’m at least going to try.

I don’t watch this specific television show, but I love this quote that a friend of mine provided, from a review of its latest episode. I think it fits with the spirit of the holiday season. I think it fits with the mission of schools like ours. I think it fits with the conversations we have in this particular class, about how we didn’t sign up to be investment bankers, so we’re going to scramble when we leave here, but we decided to for a reason – and about, per show or piece or career choice, why we do the things we do. Lastly, I think…I think it fits with where I wrote “creepily” up above and almost changed it but then starred it instead, because I think that word choice is worth examining.

Do you remember serious nerds in high school? I’m not talking about, good at physics, voluntarily took AP chem. I’m talking about, wore a cape to school and taped their ears back to pretend they were an elf. Or, insert your non-Halloween nerd costume of choice. People who cared a lot about things that we were afraid to care that much about (or just didn’t, and whether we were lucky or unlucky is a longer conversation). I was not one of those kids, but I had friends who were, and I made fun of them, too. I still do, sometimes; they make fun of themselves. One of them recently wrote a joke about it into a pilot we’ll never pitch. That’s fine. But think about them for a second, as people and not a punch line, and then, too, the ways we’re portrayed sometimes (“theatre kids”; “actors”; what have you). Then, if you’ve made it this far, consider the following:

“There’s nothing wrong with being happy. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying something so much that it strips away all that irony and cynicism. And there’s nothing wrong with loving anything so much that it feels like it could pull your heart out of your chest and toss it on the floor. We build ourselves up to not do that, and then we build up the armor so thickly that we have trouble finding what’s underneath. We use that as an excuse to lash out at people who do feel stuff, who do like things (and I am, of course, mostly saying this about myself). It’s hard sometimes to remember that the world isn’t a place to glide through, so nothing can touch you. It’s a place to be experienced.”

— Todd VanDerWerff for The A.V. Club

I guess I might be preaching to the choir. Oh, well; it never hurts to be reminded. Love things – or people – or causes – or places! Have feelings! Celebrate them.

I was doing this thing with friends and acquaintances that involved asking and answering more or less random questions. It’s an interesting way to get to know each other, and it devolves into being extremely conversational, which is nice, because, you know, I like to talk to people!

Someone asked me, “What are some of your favorite plays?”

And I went, “Holy shit, I have no idea!”

Some of you can answer this question, I don’t doubt. Certainly I might be able to name some playwrights I admire, and some favorite writers, overall. I’ve thought about my favorite musicals at great length – Parade (pre-Donmar), Ragtime, Les Mis, The Last 5 Years. With the exception of the last one, which I just find beautiful and structurally fascinating, these are all shows that I have strong emotional associations with specific productions or processes of. Shows where, working on them propelled me forward in life. So that’s that; favorite musicals, because musicals were so important pre-college, are where sentiment and memory intersect with actual liking. And my purview is limited.

What is “actual liking” about? Because the only play I could really think of, that had moved me and that I thought was fascinatingly written, and that I have worked on (if somewhat peripherally) was A Few Good Men, and then I was like, God, I don’t even know besides that; diventare? Bleugh. I suppose I have a deep and abiding fondness for Much Ado About Nothing, but I hardly think that should count. And then there are all sorts of plays I really enjoy, like Noises Off! or Rumors or Moon Over Buffalo, but that’s all…shenanigans. I liked them because they were fun to watch and fun to learn and fun to work on. They make good high-school stories. Maybe The Shadow Box? But I’m not sure I even remember all of it; maybe I only remember the lines I helped my friend Matt learn (and memorized myself in the process, of course).

I guess I’m looking for where art and entertainment intersect – not for everyone, I don’t think; probably just for me – where my interests as a writer and an artist meet my interests as a citizen of the world. Except for L5Y, which is just – I love love! all the musicals I picked are meaningful to me on Big Issues thematic levels… Anti-Semitism, the plight of the outsider, race, the immigrant’s journey, the weight of history, revolution, class struggle…

I don’t know, guys! I just don’t know. Except for what we read in class, which I always find fascinating for historical, thematic, or writing-y reasons but would rarely say I overwhelmingly like, the only plays I come in contact with are plays I work on. And those are all tied up in how I feel about you.

Thoughts? What are your favorite plays? What are your criteria – do you love them because they have sentimental value, after working on or performing in them? Do you love them because they speak to your heart artistically – and does that mean, Issues? or does that mean, beautiful words? or both? Do you think it has to do with what you think of yourself as first – actor, writer, theatre artist? What are shows you like but don’t think you’d call your “favorites”? Why do we fixate on picking favorites, in general? (I’ve always hated that.)

Did you know he also has a piece that will run for 639 years? Apparently it started in 2001, and you have to wait months for a chord change. Whaaaaat.

Fans of Cage, such as board chairman of the town’s John Cage Organ Foundation, Rainer Neugebauer, say that the performance is a rebuke of hectic modern life.

“Everything does not need to happen so fast. If something needs a bit longer then it can give us an inner calm that is rare in normal life.”

Okay…

Update, Nov. 28: There is competition for the world’s longest concert. On Twitter, Mark Polishook alerts Arts Post to Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long musical score that is being played by computers.

You have to admit, it’s a little funny. I also find it fascinating in terms of – church organ vs. computer, and generally how we’re in a place where besides thinking of this stuff we can automate it…mechanically and electronically! When I read the title of the initial article about a 639-year concert, I was imagining that Cage thought he was going to live that long and had committed to playing something constantly, or there were multiple artists playing in shifts, and I was like, “Uh, buddy…” but no. It’s more like installation art, I guess, or a very long-lived exhibit, like the Gutenberg Bible. Can we still use the word “concert”?

Unrelatedly, but VERY interestingly…

Click here for an image I didn’t want to post as “theatre news” exactly but found super-helpful in light of all the talking we’re doing about relative amounts of money. Information presented accessibly – for me, at least – so I thought other people might enjoy it as well. Definitely click through to the “huge” version and look closely!

I really enjoyed both performances! And not just because they were relatively short and I have no attention span! Sonia was also at The PGK Project, so maybe she’ll write more about it specifically, but it was beautiful. So was House, though in a quite different way. And they were both – what was the word I used? Oh, right. I described them as both being “on the more palatable end of the spectrum.” The spectrum being the range of bizarre Art that I’ve attended, participated in, studied, or encountered in some way since coming here.

Guys, I’m different than I was. I don’t know how the kid who applied four years ago would have felt about these shows this weekend; for sure, she had a different spectrum than me. Bestie, who wishes she were less literal-minded, but alas, (I still love her!) spent the better part of House and before and after looking askance at me and going, “What???” and I was all, “What?” because it was so… normal. To me. And she couldn’t “get” it – the experience-don’t-analyze thing – until she’d read the program (which we received after), at which point she went, “Well, if I had known that beforehand!!” And I was like, “But that’s the…point.” Is it? Well, I don’t know, but for sure I go into spaces more open-minded than I did, for all I still whine that we don’t do anything “normal” or “happy” or “fun.”

This permeates my non-theatre life, too – a friend pointed it out last spring, when I wrote about some of the things we talk a lot about here (the value of half-formed thoughts! being open to having your mind changed! generosity of spirit in the sharing of ourselves!). I guess it comes through even when I’m talking about, say, TV – I get into these long, involved conversations that wouldn’t happen if not for this sense of listening and responding, of not being convinced of your own right-ness, not just waiting for your turn to speak.

Not that the journey is done, but, especially if you’re graduating in May 2012, think of what you were like in DR100. Think of what some of your peers were like. I was terrified of you. Are you stiller/more measured/more open today, or am I braver? Maybe both? I hope both. Because of how we talk! Here! Around! THANKS, SCHOOL. I like you. Have another poem about the heart:

Another Poem About The Heart

When the floor drops out, as it has now,
you cannot hear the squirrel on the wire
outside your window, the wheels spinning
on the road below. You want only pity
and are presented with the unbelievable
effrontery of a world that moves on.
But wait: this is not the person you are.
You’re the kind of person who
sits in dark theaters crying at the collarbones
that curve across the dancers’ chests,
at the proof of a perfection they represent;
a person who goes out walking in a four-day drizzle,
sees a pot of geraniums and is seized, overcome
by how they can bring so much (what else
can you call it?) joy. You love the world,
are sure, at least, that you have. But be truthful:
you only love freely things that have nothing
to do with you. You’re like a matchstick house:
intricately constructed but flimsy and hollow inside.
You’re a house in love with the trees beside you -
able to look at them all day, aware of how faithful they are -
but unable to forgive that they’d lie down
leaving you exposed and alone in a large enough storm.

~ Jenn Habel

And thirdly, for fun, an xkcd comic I’ve had in mind since a recent class of ours:

I guess the BCA has this thing called Movement at the Mills? It’s basically, from what I can glean, a dance exhibition where three different companies perform in the same gallery and, instead of sitting down, people walk around and watch. I think it sounds really great, as my attention span for sitting down and watching performances “properly” seems to be getting rapidly worse instead of better, the more Art I encounter and the older I get? It’s terrible.

Anyway! This Friday, November 18, 2011, at 7:30 PM, The PGK Project will be one of these groups! From their website:

The PGK Project is an eighteen year critically acclaimed, award winning contemporary repertory dance company originally founded in Munich, Germany now based in San Diego, California. Our mission is to create and produce affordable, artistically accessibile performances that promote diversity and community in entertaining, innovative, qualitative ways that educate audiences through dance.

Our performances are known for creating appreciation and awareness for the arts where dance is a cultural expression available and intended for everyone. Whether at home or on tour our objective is to engage community support of the arts where the arts can in turn support and promote community.

And they’ve invited six dancers from the local dance community to join them to create and perform! Not that I know who any of these people are, except the one that teaches here, but local + national = awesome! And I was actually most intrigued by the fact that the email that told me about this included the word site-specific. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh you guys – I’m dragging my roommate to it Friday night! If anyone doesn’t have rehearsal, I totally encourage you to go as well! It is only one night, and it’s free and open to the public! (And it sounds like you can leave whenever you want!) Again:

MOVEMENT AT THE MILLS
Friday, November 18, 2011 – 7:30 PM
Mills Gallery, 551 Tremont St.
Boston, MA 02116

But anyway. Joe posted about helping Stuart with his work on DTG’s annual Origins! but he did not tell you how to go see it! So:

Boston University’s Dance Theatre Group is pleased to present ORIGINS 2011, a fall dance concert. This production showcases a wide variety of original works by student, alumni, and faculty choreographers.

Performances are:
Friday, November 18, 2011, at 8:00 PM
Saturday, November 19, 2011, at 4:00 PM & 8:00 PM

Tickets:
$8 BU community and students (with ID)
$12 General public

You can get tickets at the GSU Link from 10:30 AM to 4:00 PM tomorrow or Friday. You can also purchase tickets through the Dance Theater Box Office by calling 617-358-2500, or get them at the door!

I really enjoyed the BU Dance Showcase, when I went! And Stuart’s in it. Why not? It’s like ten steps from our door!

Writing Time

I stop writing
to make a cup of coffee
to read the mail
to put a load of wash in
to play a game of solitaire
to water the African violet
to straighten out the piles on my desk
to pluck my eyebrows
to call my mother
to shorten a pair of slacks
to pay a bill
to look for a lost phone number
to check my email
to get another CD to play
to file my nails
to scan a picture of my cousin
to make lunch
to watch the news
to read a magazine
to put the wash in the dryer
to make a cup of tea
to take a nap
to put the laundry away
to shut off the computer
and wonder where
I will find time
to write great things.

~ Jane Schneeloch

LIFE. It gets in the way of creating. But then, with no life, I might run out of things to create. QUANDARY. Since we can’t all be Emily Dickinson…

How do you make time to make art? (Tell me!)

But I didn’t plan to blog, because – well, first, I think we thought we weren’t ALL supposed to blog about it? haha, but also – I STILL don’t feel like I have a “whole,” “thoughtful” post! I just have a lot of feelings, and they’re quiet and they’re not quiet but either way they don’t have words yet? I could probably be all, production value! choices! zomg curtain and I counted the light fixtures! but – it wasn’t about that? Even coming home, considering a post on my personal blog (which is even less coherent than here, if that’s possible, so it’d've been okay if it was just all – BLURRY BRIMMY ~FEELINGS), the only thing I really wanted to say was, “If you like Art-with-a-capital-A, go see this now.”

Or maybe not even. Maybe just, “GO SEE THIS NOW!!”

It was an experience. Something to be experienced and not described. Even if it DIDN’T speak to your heart – and I’m still not sure in a way if it spoke to mine – it was so, SO interesting. I’m incredibly sorry we saw the second-to-last production ever; I would have liked to encourage others to go.

I wanted to create a sculpture almost anyone, regardless of their background, could look at and instantly recognize that it is about the idea of struggling to break free. This sculpture is about the struggle for achievement of freedom through the creative process.

~ Zenos Frudakis

So I’m taking dance classes this year, for the first time since high school, ’cause:

1. I decided to stop kidding myself that I would exercise on my own time.
2. I love it, and I’ve missed it. A lot.
3. It’s free!
4. Apparently I wanted to find out how much flexibility I’ve lost. DDDDD:

One of the classes I’m taking is Jazz-Funk with DeAnna Pellecchia, who is excellent, and for the last several classes we haven’t moved as much as usual, because, as she puts it, “Everyone comes in looking like zombies.” (It’s first-round-of-midterms season out there in the rest of BU.)

Today, we watched the end of Singin’ in the Rain, which we started on Tuesday (and I had never seen before), and then selections from Fosse (which I’ve actually seen live, but I was too young to appreciate it then). Then we were going to dance for the last half-hour, but we ended up just talking – first about Fosse and classical jazz; then about other forms, and how styles of dance, and all art, evolve over time and then are commercialized or bastardized or mixed up…and eventually rebelled against to make the next form. It was really fascinating. For all that we kid here about how pretentious/isolated/insulated/frankly strange our environment is, this place where we Make Art and Talk About Art and Cry Together and Share Our Feelings…and for all I gripe that everything we do is wicked depressing in the name of Art… I rarely appreciate us more than when I go out into my “normal” world and encounter the uninitiated. And it’s not just, oh, wow, you’ve…never heard of Bob Fosse and kind of offensively think this is traditional Indian dance. It’s – remember the Manifestival? I forget sometimes that, in more of the world around us than I’d think, people go their whole lives without asking or being asked: “What is art?”

When I say I’m in theatre, I usually get the assumption that I’m an actress. When you say you’re an actor, do you get the assumption that you want to star in blockbusters? DeAnna likes to joke (but not really, because it’s true) that when she says she’s a dancer, she used to get asked, most often, if she worked at [strip club] or [other strip club]. Or if she was with the ballet or on Broadway. Now, most recently, she gets asked if it’s “…like So You Think You Can Dance.” And kids sign up for her class expecting to learn what she calls “video dance” (read: dances from music videos). And she’s an artist, and that bugs her. But what’s really struck me about how it bugs her is what she said this afternoon:

“There’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s not art. It’s entertainment.”

Big question. I felt like I was home with you guys all of a sudden.

Singin’ in the Rain is iconic and seems like it might be DeAnna’s favorite movie of all time. And there’s enormous artistry to it. But it’s also entertaining. Can it be both? “Savion Glover,” DeAnna said, when I asked her if there could be overlap – apparently he’s both art and entertainment. And us? I saw a really funny, lovely production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee recently. It was entertainment. Probably not art. But I had two friends in it, actors who would consider themselves artists, I’m sure. And Sayjay Mullins was in it – a 2006 graduate of this world. Where is the line? What are the rules?

How do you relate to art vs. entertainment? Do you know you prefer one over the other? To what extent do you believe something or someone can be both? I’m interested in a lot of people who seem to be artists who mostly work in entertainment. What if I never work in art or entertainment again? …Okay, increasingly unlikely, but go with me for a sec – I don’t think I’d ever stop considering myself an artist. But you might stop considering me an artist. Certainly no one would consider me an entertainer… Thoughts, anyone?