Everyone is Leading Someone(s)

I've been pondering me the nature of good leadership of late. I think my interest is in part due to my recent desires to direct, to take the reins on a show of my own and lead it through the scabrous paths of the New York theatre scene. I often have a great idea, and then take a really, really long time to think about it. I'm not sure if this is just my way, or a way of sifting out ideas without staying power, or what (what = sheer laziness), but I can be very meditative about a new task. I like to do things right, and do them right the first time, which is of course

an interesting strength/weakness

sort of trait. For this particular meditation, I have been borrowing data from all sorts of sources in my day-to-day life, quite subconsciously. Sources like observations from my day job, observations from commercial transactions, news reports about various international governments and -- yes -- lessons from actual directors with whom I've worked. I've also been reminded of certain lessons from my Directing for the Stage class, taught by the late Dr. Kenneth Campbell. What it's all left me with so far is something like this:

• Lead by example. This simply covers a lot of ground. It's cliche, and simple, and so often over-looked or excused in its failure. Some people even argue that you should set an example you can't fulfill, so everyone's striving for it together. I say be real, and be the best you can.

• Leaders should infect with enthusiasm, not terrify with consequences. Maybe it is called for at some point: the terror technique. But if so, I'm not sure that I've ever seen it. Called for, that is. I've seen the terror technique. It's my noisy next door neighbor, figuratively speaking. I know way too much about him, quite accidentally, and never know how to respond when confronted by him. The terror technique, he makes no sense. You get much better results with enthusiasm. My boss switched it up to enthusiasm just this morning, and, man, have I gotten things done and cleared since then. Of course, this may also have something to do with her acknowledging a personal need to . . .

• Be organized. It's true there have been plenty of inspired leaders who couldn't find matching socks in the morning, and plenty of perpetual followers who can pull their second-grade report card in under sixty seconds. I'm not saying this is the key to good leadership, but it helps. A LOT. People are a lot more willing to listen to someone who shows up early, doesn't allow interruptions and knows where they left their glasses. Of course, keeping oneself organized is a whole other ballgame from keeping other people so, which is why a good leader must know how to . . .

• Delegate intelligently. Another cliche here. Although: really? I always hear, "Must be able to delegate responsibility," but rarely is it qualified with something suggestive of delegation being a skill of varying effectiveness. The trouble with delegation is that it takes a very finely honed sense of perspective, and an intimate understanding of the people around you, and very few people seem to appreciate this. You can't do it all, and even if somehow you can, it makes working for you miserable, because necessary information gets centralized so thoroughly that if you disappear, so does a great deal of effectiveness. How to delegate intelligently, exactly? It would take its own entry (or book) in all likelihood, but I suspect it has something to do with being able to perceive the big picture right alongside the details.

• You're only as capable as you are flexible. The leader has to have the ability to stick his or her nose into every aspect of the endeavor. Also, the insight to know when to go with a specialist's opinion over his or her own. Orchestration is a good word. You may not be able to play every instrument in the band, but you damn well better know what each and every one can sound like, and be able to pick it up without knocking it out of tune.

• Communicate. Seriously. About everything. On some rare occasions a secret or particular dissemination of information may be useful, but the rule should otherwise be to talk about everything, all of the time. And I do mean talk. Getting things done comes of talking; talking is the real-time interaction that provides the most information and the best understanding, even between people who are having trouble understanding the actual words involved. Collaboration is communication.

• Whenever possible, begin every response with an observation and affirmation. And for that matter, start every conversation with a question. Beginning that way invites the person into communication, rather than laying something (yet ANOTHER THING) on him or her. Once you're in the exchange, you'll get much more helpful responses if the person you're dealing with hears you saying "yes" with your voice, even when you have to disagree. "Yes" maintains energy, affirms worth, and allows people to feel like you're listening. (It helps you out too with your long-term positivity.) In acting it's called "accepting and building," taking something you're given and making something more with it. This may sometimes be a matter of turning lemons into lemonade -- you're still going to get fewer squirts in the eye this way.

• Know what you're about. I'm not saying by this that a leader has to have it all figured out. (On the contrary: How pointless.) No, I mean to say that people need something to latch on to if they're going to follow someone. Maybe it's just because they also need something to criticize or catch you failing to fulfill, but some singular quality that's demonstrable helps people focus in on you. Something personal must separate you from the crowd, and it's just helpful that you understand your own je ne sais quoi. Mystery can be your trademark. Just know it, if it is. It may become a target at some point, but so what? You aren't the important thing:

• Make calls, and take responsibility for everything, credit for nothing. We tend to resist images and examples from kings and emperors (we're more comfortable with ship captains, for some reason), but there is something about that dynamic that everyone craves, or at times needs. We're more inclined to follow decisive people, and more inclined to work hard for them when we know they have our backs. This is difficult advice, because it can be so easy to misconstrue. A leader isn't always right, and a leader must have a chorus of input from his or her followers at all times, but he or she must also mediate, resolve, and take things forward. When things go wrong, the good leader protects his or her team. When things go right, the good leader makes sure the team members involved get the credit. It's a lot to take on, but in my opinion you're wasting your time if you do it any other way.

That's what I think so far, anyway. I must admit that it's not based on a whole lot of personal experience. Most of my leadership roles to date are the result of coincidence and/or default. Soon I hope to take that in hand. For now, I remain content to meditate a while longer.

I Wasn't Kidding

I've

written here already

about my recent exploits in (read: surrender to) teh Facebookz, and how I think it relates to my general life and specific creative journey, blah blah blah. Embracing my past yadda yadda savoring the moment etc. etc. and so on. And so on. As usual when I'm writing about anything in the moment of experiencing it, I have found that I was completely wrong or, at least, utterly naive. That's a bit harsh: I was assumptive in my appraisal of the over-all effect of going all-in on a "social networking" site. Teh Facebook(c) has reached deeper into my history than I had imagined it would and, owing largely to the way in which it is structured, has allowed me to contact and be contacted by people I

really am curious about

from my sordid suburban past. Last night, I reconnected with my first-ever drama (you called it "drama" in my neck of the woods) teacher. This is the guy who got me seeing what I do today as something more than showing/goofing off, something that was done. And now I can check in with him anew. Madness.

One interesting personal side-effect I've noticed from this world-wide-interwebz experience of mine is that people I know, know one another, too. This is not surprising in the big picture; actors tend to spend much of their social time together throwing out names to establish connections by association with one another (an occupation I loathe...but could probably benefit from learning to enjoy, somehow). People know people. That's how people are. This isn't Russia. (Is this Russia?) This isn't Russia. [ <-Ahoy, movie quote! ] It's not absurd to find connections between dots when you bother to search. I just don't search very often, and now the Internet does it for me. Thanks, Internet!

The other interesting thing that I've noted brings us back around to the actual mission statement* of Odin's Aviary (*Now 12%** more missionier! [**Actual missioniness subject to personal experience and position of Saturn at time of missionesque experience.]). Specifically, I'm invited to re-explore the origins of my bizarre and unnatural quest to infuse my life with acting gigs. Some people you get back in touch with are naturally from your later life, or even as far back as the transition from youth to adulthood. Still others show up from times of sleep-overs and recess. Most recently, owing in large part to being found by my old theatre teacher, I've begun to get back in touch with people I knew in that most developmental of educational stages:

intermediate school

. Or: middle school. Some even call it "junior high." But in my aforementioned neck of the woods, it was "drama class" and "intermediate school." This was the time in my life when a real stage entered it -- as in the wooden kind, with curtains and lights and EVERYTHING. The smell of sawdust in an largely abandoned school building on tech day. The temper tantrums of students and teachers alike. The declamatory style of eleven- and twelve-year-olds playing middle-aged characters (my particular forte at the time). Intermediate theatre.

In so doing, the people I used to know now know that I'm still doing what we did. Before. Which is to say, not everyone who participates in theatre in high school and junior high continues to do it. I know: It's SHOCKING. I kid (ALL CAPS = sarcasm), but I keep getting notes from people saying that it's nice to see I'm still at it, and all I can keep thinking is,

You mean you're not?!

Yet another thing I haven't thought through. I believe everyone is inclined to imagine the people they used to know in the same or similar context as that in which they used to know them, but for me to assume everyone found as formative an experience in their 7th grade as I is a bit beyond the pale. Still, I can't help but mirror their surprise at my continued involvement, and marvel at their lack of involvement. I want to ask them when the last time they set foot in a theatre building was. I want to know where that all went for them, if anywhere.

And then: Is it surprising that I'm still doing this? I mean, discounting for a moment the possibility that the people I grew up with might view a career in theatre as a childish or irresponsible thing (and I really hope to give them more credit than that), was there anything about me in my youth that suggested I wouldn't keep at it this long?

Come to think of it, there may have been a thing. Or two. Let's face it: Every effort up until one is old enough to reap a few consequences can be filed away as experimentation, or a learning experience. There are even some times of life when this is so expected as to be nearly ubiquitous, such as the teenage sexual experimentation, or the toddler this-whole-walking-thing learning experience. I know people who've written off everything that happened to them prior to year 20. Plus, when I started theatre, I had far fewer advantages than now. Theatre taught me a lot about how to effectively interact with people, gave me tools for overcoming my social awkwardness, and a good dose of metabolic puberty didn't hurt, either. Come to think of it, if I had known me back then, I would have penned me for an English teacher myself. So there were a few reasons why my far-flung friends of yesteryear might be surprised to find me treading the boards to date. Oh, and one more reason, at that.

I didn't learn to act for about a decade.

In some sense, one is never done "learning to act," of course, but that's not what I'm referring to. No, I mean to say that for the seven-odd years prior to my college theatrical experiences, I thought I was acting, and I simply wasn't. I was working hard, and I loved what I was doing, and I was doing a great many things as well or better than some, but acting was not one of them. It wasn't until I got to my third official acting teacher, in college, who had a penchant for axioms and anagrams, that it sank in. He says, "Acting is reacting." I don't know how many times he said it before this happened, but one day: PING! Acting is reacting. There's a lot of ways to express this idea (or, really, host of ideas) -- listening is key, don't "act", stay in the moment, make the other person look good, etc. I try to comfort myself for what would seem like wasted time with an idea from Sanford Meisner -- that it takes at least twenty years to learn how to act -- but of course all the years spent

not

acting were in fact necessary for me to learn this lesson. Some people understand it intuitively, even at eleven years of age. I was not such a one.

What I did understand from a young age, even before I understood that I understood it (take a moment; that was almost as self-referential as an actor's 'blog), was that I wanted to do this, whatever it really was. I remember watching older actors doing their thing, kids in higher grades than I and movie stars alike, and thinking,

God, what do they do that makes this so good?

That's a question that has driven me a long way, down a windy road, and it still takes over the wheel now and then at that. Good thing, too, because I still have a lot to learn. When I would see videos of myself on stage in intermediate school, I would wonder why it looked and sounded so different from my inner-perception of it. At age eleven, when most of my friends were doing their damnedest to get off school property just as soon as they could each day, I was disappointed if I didn't have rehearsal to stay for. I didn't realize I had made a choice about the rest of my life, but every time I got to take the stage, my world aligned somehow and I meant everything I did, even without really knowing what I was doing.

It's good to remember that. Thanks, friends, both old and new.

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."

"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.