Lose Your Self

It's been a time of some frustration for me, lately. Frustration is not a particularly novel emotion on my part, I must confess. I'm something of a tense individual. (Please withhold any cries of "Understatement!" That's impolite.) My tendency is to hold energy in and rigorously control or funnel it when I let it out, which is part of why I find certain acting environments so appealing. Some because they are well served by this familiar approach, and others because they encourage me to abandon it completely, which is liberating. My natural impulse, however, is to control. Always has been, really. Any departures from that are still, no matter how incorporated they've become into my lifestyle, somewhat experimental. Some part of my mind is always thinking,

Okay boss; this is great and all, and I'm learning a lot, but when do we return to terra firma here?

Now, it's not that my approach hasn't rewarded me. It has. Greatly, at times. However, in the long run, it's an obsessive approach, and therefore at best limiting -- at worst,

damaging

.

Saturday I had my second exploit into the misty realm of acupuncture. My first was several years ago, when I volunteered as a patient of cranial acupuncture for a demonstration to be given to a class of acupuncturistas. That was pretty intense. It was supposed to treat my ETs --

mysterious medical condition

, not league of other-worldly gardeners -- and it probably did, but it's always difficult to say. Qi/Chi? Meridians? Or simply reflexive muscle stimulation and a little calm attention? Whatever the function,

Fiancee Megan

has been reaping great rewards from acupuncture lately, and with

a personal recommendation

to her acupuncturalama, I went under the pin in the hopes of treating

my recent struggles with ma' balls

. Fine: my "pelvic floor dysfunction." But I still prefer to view it as an epic battle betwixt me, and ma' balls. Which, you know . . . might be indicative of said control issues. I am a land divided!

Recently I have had cause to observe a very interesting sequence of development in a short play I've been working on as an actor. I feel as though I've learned a lot about myself through it, which is not something I was expecting when it began. My frustration in this process can best be summed up as a difference of opinion. At first, I thought my difference of opinion was simply between me and the director, which happens all the time and is one thing. But due to various circumstances, I discovered my opinion differed from most of the other actors, and the playwright as well. I perceived the script, as it originally started, as a more naturalistic, character-driven story. Through various stages of working and some unusual factors, the concept was taken more toward farce, then amped up to screw-ball, and finally the script was pretty majorly revised to accommodate those changes in style and plant the story firmly in that genre. To put it plain, I began with one script that I liked, and it's ending with one almost entirely other. This is not the first time this has happened to me, but for one reason or another, it bothered me more this time. Whether or not it began with my own misconception of the piece, it has taken a lot of effort on my part to fulfill others' expectations.

I had been anticipating acupuncture to be a bit like a massage, in the weeks leading up to my appointment. You know, something that might at times be painful, yet ultimately relaxing. I may be a bit of a controlling obsessive (a

tiny

bit), but I've come to appreciate instances in which I'm expected to relax and allow things to happen to me. If I can avoid any hostile emotions, I do pretty well with that. It's a relief. Well, it turns out that acupuncture can be a bit of work. (I might've known.) Since I am treating what is essentially a self-inflicted injury, it makes poetic sense, at least, that I might have to put a little effort into treating it. The first acupuncture appointment is two hours long, so they can get the run-down on your condition, Chinese-medicine style. They could see the problem I was dealing with in my body, as I stood before them in my underwear. According to my acupuncturians, I'm all bent out of shape (no, really) in numerous subtle places. Also: I'm a liver person. This apparently means I tend to be frustrated, to rise up against challenges with a somewhat fervent and stubborn passion. They may eat ox tail, but those Chinese know something about something.

I didn't know what to expect of our premiere of an essentially new play, midway through our run. My character's opening monologue was changed pretty drastically, with some very out-of-left-field stuff, and I couldn't get effectively off-book for it in time. I could get

off-book

, but not

effectively

. So, with the playwright's permission, I took it in hand as a sort of

Zuppa-del-Giorno

adjunct to my performance, and largely winged it (wung it?). After all, the play had been changed significantly, and in the direction of absurdity, so maybe it would be best to go with that current and risk more, rather than less. I can improvise a monologue all day, but no one in my cast knew that, seeing as they had from me the careful development process over the previous month that I apply to a more naturalistic role. They seemed to largely take my angst over the changes to be anxiety over performing them, and I didn't try to dissuade this opinion, because my opinions of the play itself had very little to do with the job I had to do. I didn't want to get into a debate over the relative value of the play or the changes; I just wanted to get on with it. And what was the worst that would happen if I broke out my improvisatory style in performance? It tanks, and the playwright has something to consider the next time he has the impulse to revise midway through a run. So I set foot on stage that night, and wanged. Wung. What you will.

I could at first barely feel the needles the day after the performance, they were applied with such a gentle touch, and in gradual stages of difficulty. I had two practitioners working with me, and they talked to me throughout, because I admitted my curiosity and, eventually, they needed to give me instructions. The needles were being applied to my front, and the final stages were in my calves and lower abdomen. That's when they started to sear a bit through, er, my meridians, as they slid in to their work. And one of the practitioners started to see a habit of mine, of my breathing, that she thought was contributing to my pelvic difficulties. Namely, that I breathe into my stomach, expanding it, and drive the air out when I'm exerting effort, constricting my abdomen to push. It's called diaphragmatic breathing; it's something every stage actor is trained in. And, as she was raising her voice to get me to

reverse

this physical tendency and

relax

(most self-nullifying command in the English language), I realized that she was right. I constantly contract my abdomen, even unrelated to my breathing. I've been doing it since high school. Through an extreme effort, I managed to reverse, to stretch my abdomen flat and long on the inhale and "relax" it out on the exhale, and they finished my poking, covered me with a thermal blanket and left me in the room to rest and let the needles do their work.

There's a certain relaxation to giving in to a force, or forces. I quickly reached my monologue Friday night, and let 'er rip. There was no shortage of energy, certainly, because it is a thrill, however familiar, to face an audience with something less than a plan. Yet I was relaxed, because it didn't matter what happened. Win, lose or draw, I couldn't even be sure what one or the other would look like. So I did my thing . . . and it was a hit. Even I was surprised; not because I didn't expect to succeed or because I thought the new play wasn't viable, but because in all my resistance to the changes I had felt that I wouldn't be able to leave that frustration behind, that I would inevitably carry it on stage with me. Somehow I had let it go, and the audience was delighted with my performance. The whole performance went great. Was I wrong about the changes? Should I have let go from the word go, and not complicated things with my opinions, my liver-induced feelings?

Lying there in a dark room the next day, riddled with pins, I managed to let go of a little bit of what all was pent up inside. Just a couple of spurts of acknowledged helplessness. That's what prayer essentially is, you know: letting go.

Acting is a confusing business, not to mention art form. I often forget what I'm doing here. Like an Alzheimer's patient, I'll suddenly awake to the room around me and be baffled at what my purpose was in entering it. The key to it is, I want to be an actor. Not a stand-up comedian, not a circus performer, not a mime or clown, and certainly not a clerk or secretary. All those roles are very nice, and I've been lucky enough to experience them all, and have opportunities to return to them. Yet an actor is a specific person, with specific goals that surpass entertainment. Perhaps we lose sight of that as a result of the actor seeming to be anything, seeming like a compilation of roles, all adding up to a bizarre nullification of identity. The experience of this show, however fraught, has served to remind me of what it is that separates an actor from a performer. An actor dares to let all of his or her practice, and technique, and safety go, and offer the self in every aspect up to the moment, to the risk of failing to entertain, in the pursuit of truth. An actor is not a cypher for any one person or idea, but for everyone. And I want, more than any of those other things, to be an actor.

The final diagnosis of my acupuncturologisti was that I needed to give up all front-ways strength training until my issue gets resolved, that I need -- if I am to continue exercising at all -- to find a way to do it that lengthens and relaxes my abdomen. And, ultimately, I need to find a different approach to working, altogether. Because my health and work isn't about just one direction of strength, or the appearance of success. It's about the risk of being open, of allowing what will be, and of constantly discovering new ways of being and, thereby, new risks.

But I'm still doing my push-ups. Damn it.

Jumping In

It's a wonderful feeling to be caught. Not in the red-handed manner, mind, but literally and physically caught -- as in, in interruption of your speedy progress toward something a bit on the hard side. Like the ground. It's also a great feeling to catch, especially if you're catching somebody who's in danger of said impact, but I covet a bit more the feeling of being caught, possibly just because it's a rarer experience for me. In teaching acrobalance to the youth of America, I'm more frequently the catcher. And, I admit, I have relished and relived some good catches I've made (one time I had to spin a falling girl around so that she, in effect, did a back flip before I set her on her feet . . . yeah, I revisit that, now and again . . .). But nothing quite beats the combined sense of vulnerability, gratitude and connectedness of having been caught. If you're open to the experience, that is.

I've been working on a short comedy for the past few weeks that performs as part of a one-act play

festival/competition

this weekend. It's called

Jump

(no; the other one) and it was penned by

Josh Sohn

, the gentleman I unexpectedly performed for in a

reading

back in the spring. It's an interesting situation, this production. As a part of a competitive series that contains 37 plays -- some of them longer than others -- we only perform twice if we fail to advance, three-to-four times if we go farther. So the whole thing has a curious similarity to a high school production experience, wherein you work for a rather long time, perform one weekend and that's it. Fortunately, it being a short play (under 20 minutes, I believe), the ratio of rehearsal-to-performance doesn't feel totally absurd. It is also strange to work on a pretty straight-forward, narrative comedy with strangers again.

I've gotten very comfortable with performing with my

Zuppa del Giorno

cohorts, and when we plunged in to

Jump

, I had a period of adjustment to contend with. We did not speak the same comic language right away. It was not collaborative in the same way as I have grown accustomed to with Zuppa, which not only made me reticent to put my ideas out there in rehearsal, but more than a little affronted when I received suggestions from fellow actors. (That's messed up; I'm still working out why I felt that defensive, initially.) And finally, and I believe for the first time, I'm the oldest person in the room. Everyone else in this show is early-to-mid-twenties. Which, well, is something I'd do best to grow accustomed to.

It's funny about comedy (ha ha): It requires a lot of trust. Stage comedy is like the do-or-die theatre -- there's little room for interpretation of audience response. Oh, we try to justify our experiences. "They were a quiet, attentive audience." "I saw everyone smiling, though." "It's this house; it's too hot/cold/separated/claustrophobic/post-modern..." When it comes right on down to it, though, live comedy is like a deathsport in which there's no overtime, and no one's allowed to a tie game. The only people who have it rougher than a stage actor in this regard (and I believe

Friend Adam

will back me up on this) are stand-up comedians. They practically stand up there and say, "Okay, world. Here's your chance to crucify me. No one else to blame but myself." Then again, too,

good

actors have to take a similar stance; even if they have a supporting cast of a dozen or more.

I've written here before about my rules of acrobalance, and how widely applicable I find them to be. Perhaps the most applicable is the idea of shared responsibility, summed up by the dictate, "Always be spotting." I wasn't familiar with the term "spotting" prior to learning circus skills, except as a part of a verbal sequence I was taught in my very first summer job, with

Beltway Movers

. (When lifting something heavy with someone else, you were told to say, "spot," meaning "brace yourself," then, "pick," meaning "we're lifting now." When lifting things such as pianos and trundle beds, I often added my own, more-flowery, four-letter words to this sequence.) Spotting, in a circus context, is to be ready to catch your fellow daredevil. When I teach, I teach everyone to always be ready to catch everyone else. It keeps people alert to think this way, which is generally helpful. It also reinforces that idea that all responsibility is shared. In this context, when something goes wrong or disappoints, no one is at liberty to blame anyone else, because each individual must always consider what he or she could have done to make it safer, better, or both.

As it is with acrobalance, so let it be with comedy. (And all other things.) Over the few weeks of rehearsal, I and my new friends have found a great deal more trust. I trust them to catch me if I fall and, more importantly, I've found the trust to forget myself enough to be ready to catch them at any moment. We'll have a very short time of fulfillment for our work to date, and it's entirely possible that we'll never see one another again thereafter. And, come to think of it, it's pretty amazing how we actors have to cultivate this sense of trust over and over again. Not just because it's a great thing in itself, but also because actors are continually being used. We will work for little-to-no pay, we accept a million tiny violations of our rights that others are alarmingly ignorant of, and frankly, get viewed as objects or sources of pleasure as often as we are as people. Put all that together, and it's pretty amazing that actors find any trust at all amongst themselves, much less intimately and repeatedly.

There's a popular axiom amongst circus performers: Leap and the net will catch you. I think perhaps for actors it should be, "Just jump. I'm sure it'll at least be interesting."

Up in Smoke

Last night I acted in a staged reading of one of

Tom Rowan

's plays,

Burning Leaves

. Foist of all: I have a lot of audience members from the night to be grateful for. It must have seemed like I was packing the house, which would be easy to do--it was easily the smallest "theatre" space I have ever worked in. It was akin to a return to the womb, and the play is not, as yet, a short one, so I owe big thanks to Friends

Geoff

,

Natalia

,

Kate C.

,

Sister Virginia

and

Fiancee Megan

. Way to go, guys. Way. To. Go.

Not that the experience was in any way bad. The script is, in fact, excellent. My friends were very engaged by the story and the performances, and only had critique for the run time -- a quite forgivable fault in my opinion when it comes to an initial reading. This was evidently a reading aimed at giving Tom some perspective on his work in action; the crowd seemed intimate and friendly, and he has already got a literary agent representing him (she was in the front row, and what I wouldn't give to know her response). I felt fairly good about my work, though I had a bit of that familiar sensation wherein I think to myself, "Damn--that went so much better in rehearsal..." It's hard to get away from that, particularly in a performance that has such a brief and concentrated rehearsal period. I just try to remind myself that some things go worse, but others go better, and I just have to stay open to the possibility each time of having the most true and effective performance yet.

I had several reasons to meditate on the various distractions that can enter an actor's concentration during his or her work, even while the reading went along. Not that I wasn't kept busy: I think there were maybe ten pages out of over a hundred on which my character didn't have substantial dialogue. The distractions, though seemed to begin to gang up on me even prior to entering that (very small) room. I had dressed casually nice for the event, and was careful to keep myself that way through my work day, but at my hasty dinner I spilled grease on my pants. The chairs we sat in for the reading had arms (rehearsal did not), which felt limiting and inappropriate, somehow. And my friends, God bless them, all sat in one corner and were not shy about being themselves. Add to that the audience just being very visible and very close in general, and you have yourself many interesting choices for being taken out of character. Fortunately for me, the script is very effective, to the point at which I almost didn't need to manifest the emotions involved. They were just there, ready.

In some ways, being an actor can boil down to an exercise in determination and concentration. The funny thing is, we have to remain supple and open at the same time, to allow impulses in and unpredictable forces to affect us. My character in this reading, a former NYC actor who moves to a more suburban environment to teach, recalls a director he worked for telling him acting should be a "stripping away of layers" to his soul. Apart from this immediately reminding me of the onion scene from

Peer Gynt

, it also reminds me of how the actual craft of acting, at its best, seems to work. Never mind souls and Truth, and all. A really successful acting experience is all about shedding, rather than accumulating, layers of analysis and lines and decision and fear and, hell, everything. Even the concentration so necessary for doing an effective job has to eventually become unnecessary. We're aiming for an emptiness, a nothingness, of sorts, to become cyphers for . . . what? Maybe it is Truth (by which I mean something more than simple verisimilitude), or maybe it's some kind of human energy, continuous and interdependent. I can't say. All I can say is that my best memories of jobs well done are suspiciously blank. They're mostly just a

knowing

of having hit the sweet spot, and the collective details are as impossible to touch as a leaf turned to ashes on the wind.

This reading was no such sweet spot on my part, though it went well enough. It was, however, one of those experiences that reminds me that this work is worth the struggle, the concentration, all of it. Sometimes, it seems like a very good trade-off indeed.

"Those Who Can't Do, Teach"

The implication being, naturally, that if one could really succeed at something, one would have neither the time nor interest to teach it. And, by inference, we can allow that to mean that to teach is a default activity. Teachers end up teachers because they could do nothing else, and teaching is an unsupervised, disinteresting field.

Now, I admit up front that I am about as biased as can be about this pithy little saying, so full of pith as it may be. My mom was an elementary school teacher for years before becoming a

minister

(which is in many ways just a different sort of teacher). My dad teaches college-level courses now. I have been teaching workshops in a variety of subjects to a variety of students over the past few years, and even spent a year teaching in an NYC school. I believe in teaching. In fact, if I have dogma of any kind, it probably lies in the practice of teaching more than it does the practice of religion. So be it. Can't disabuse me of it. Teaching, and teachers, are important. And further more, it's something that can be quite difficult to do well. I know the above quote is half-joking, but I still eschew it. It is totally and entirely eschewed by my person.

Some time ago,

Friend Heather

began a process to get

Zuppa del Giorno

signed up through the

NEIU

(no; the other NEIU) as an official "rostered teaching artist," and we passed our initial interview back in February. Last weekend, I took the road more-traveled, and landed in Scranton, PA, to complete the application. We received some brief orientation and demonstrated our ability to not-immediately-destroy malleable minds. We're in like Flynn, in other words, which bodes well for Heather's continuing struggle to avoid the confines of a day job. (Less so for me, as I stubbornly remain in NYC, where the cost of living is inversely proportional to the average pay for actors.) In fact, the good people at the NEIU seem quite enthusiastic about our participation in their program, which helps to organize residencies for teaching artists in public schools. We could be spending up to a month at a go teaching our unique brand of creation, development and performance to students we really get to know. It's an exciting move forward in our educational work.

In addition, we'll periodically receive free training in educational and personal interaction theories and techniques. They briefly described what to expect in terms of that, and it sounds both useful and interesting, focusing on reaching out to all different kinds of dominances in an individual's learning process, and without losing sight of the fact that at all times one is dealing with a person, a unique individual who exists outside of a classroom as well. When I worked for

Wingspan Arts

during the 2006-2007 school year, many were the times I wished I had more training in my interaction with challenging students. It seems as though I'll get some of that, finally, and at no cost to me. Additionally, I'm fascinated with the processes of learning and intelligence, especially so since tackling Italian. When it comes to a foreign language class, despite my best intentions,

I'm

the challenging student.

I used to regard "resorting to" teaching as giving up on my acting career, way back when I was a college student. College affords us a lot of space to draw conclusions unrelated to real-life experience. The fact is, I've probably learned more in recent years from being a trainer or teacher than I would have had I been enrolled in school the whole time. Plus, a teaching-learning environment is one of those unique opportunities in life to practice the craft of an actor without artifice, and I don't mean simply because one is often in a "stage" relationship to an "audience." In fact, in my opinion a good teacher uses that particular paradigm sparingly. A good teacher, much like a good actor, is more concerned with connecting to and communicating with his or her students than with enforcing any separation or dominating aura of authority. Sure, discipline enters into it, but discipline won't invite absorption of knowledge. Eye contact. Listening. Humor. These are the keys to transforming people into little dry sponges, thirsty for learnin'. And doesn't that sound appealing?

As I tentatively turn my interests toward directing plays, I'm reminded of something

David Zarko

once said to me about division in rehearsal (and, if memory serves, he was paraphrasing Brecht): It's important to keep rehearsal and training in separate spaces--not just in time, but if possible literally in separate rooms. The thinking behind this is that actors need to associate the space in which they work with how they're expected to behave. In a classroom, in training, mistakes can (

should

, in my world) be made, but the emphasis is on a narrow goal that can generally be defined in terms of right and wrong. Whereas, in an ideal rehearsal room, actors must allow for willfully getting things "wrong" all the time, in order to explore, to make discoveries, and above all make their work true. It may seem a subtle difference but, believe me, it's not.

When I teach, I have a concrete goal to be achieved, and that satisfies me. When I act, the goal is in the process, never-ending, which offers a rather unique series of satisfying moments. These bleed into one another in various ways. The success to be found in both, I think, is in doing them equally well.

I'm Trying to not Live in the Past, Now

I'm a silly, sentimental S.O.B. It probably doesn't seem like it much anymore, because I so frequently fail to email people back, or forget they gave me such-and-thus, or throw away show cards the moment I get them. (Sorry 'bout that.) All this behavior, however, has been built up over the years to combat the horrible side-effects of being a sentimental sort of person. Getting sucked into the past is second-nature to me, and the real trick is extracting myself completely once I am, and so I avoid going through old photos, reading old letters, attending reunions . . .

. . . signing up for services like Facebook(TM).

Way back 'round about when I started this here 'blog, I signed up for teh MySpace(r). I've pretty much loathed it ever since. Why I can't exactly say, but I attributed it to my general reluctance to be reunited with people from my past. This theory has since been disproved by how much I'm enjoying the constant and nigh senseless connectivity of teh Facebook(U). Maybe I've changed in the past couple of years. I'd like to think so. Maybe too, however, it wasn't so much that I feared reunion with my past, as that I feared falling into old patterns as much as I feared getting stuck in nostalgia-land. That's a lot of fear, I realize. What can I say? I'm good at it.

An actor is expected to live in the moment, at his or her own peril, and to his or her own possibility of great reward. As with some of the techniques and methods employed by actors, we can occasionally take such rhetoric a bit far, in my opinion, shamelessly extending a psychotically permissive or artificial attitude into our daily lives. It's very easy to do. Imagine spending several hours each day, with great regularity, practicing a certain approach to living. When you leave the rehearsal room or stage, some of that practice is bound to stick to you and your actions. This, in many cases, is a helpful thing. It can make the sensitive and responsible actor more honest, self-aware and receptive in his or her personal life. It can also mean that for two hours following an intensive

Meisner

workshop, an actor is inclined to repeat every sentence another person says before responding to them. Which, though initially novel, gets old. Fast.

As I've mentioned here before (see

12/31/07

), I've found a new priority for embracing my past. This is a personal choice, but it is also somewhat motivated by observations of my progress and personality as an actor. As we've had ground into our ethos...es (ethi? ethae?) by innumerable history and civics classes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. This, I think, includes the details of our personal histories as much as any war or natural disaster. I can never make up my mind about the nature of humanity and our propensity for change, so philosophically I take a very balanced (ambiguous) view. I believe people can make choices for change, and that there's a core to each person that is uniquely theirs, unaffected by circumstance. To put it another way, I think we should always strive for positive change in ourselves, with a constant forgiveness prepared for those aspects of the "me" that may simply be given. I do this better some times than others, and I believe that getting my feet snared in nostalgia happens when the balance between ambition and acceptance falls a little heavy on the ambition side. One never feels so much a failure, I think, than when one regrets the person--or people, if we do change--they have been.

"The moment" is good to live in, certainly. The best formula for happiness probably comes from a life so lived. However, if we fail to embrace our past, particularly the best and worst bits, with love and acceptance (not just tolerance), we may never change. We might not grow. I know I can't love myself without loving the fallible adult right along with the naive kid.

Nietzsche was fond of the phrase

amor fati

, which is Latin for "I meant that our

need

for God is dead, you morons." Wikipedia contradicts my translation, however, insisting

amor fati

refers to a love of one's fate, and since everything I ever needed to know I learned from Wikipedia, I'll run with that. It's been a favorite phrase of mine since my (somewhat) more pretentious days of youth, because it's helped me to understand a lot of touch choices and a few (too many) disappointments. Somehow I always applied it, in my thinking, to my future. Perhaps this is because we tend to think of what's ahead of us when we consider "fate." I would look ahead to the daunting choices to be made, and the ones I had already made yet not acted upon, and be comforted. The mantra applies just as much to our pasts as well, though. Maybe we have regrets, and definitely we have mistakes back there, but those can be loved in their way, too.

But I'm not posting my high school yearbook picture. Uh-uh. No way. There are limits even to loving, after all.