Talent: We Haz It

The following was started August 17th, but completed today . . .

So . . . I did this thing. Just helping some friends, really. Back in June. I didn't write about it. But it invaded my every thought for a while there, so it was weird to not write about it. I sort of wrote around it a bit (see

6/25/09

) and contented myself with the knowledge that someday I would be allowed to write about it. The trouble was, I wouldn't know when exactly, until it happened. In fact, as I begin this post, I don't know when it "happened," or in fact

what

happened to allow me to publish about it, but I hope and hope and hope that what happened was something along the lines of my friends blowing away the competition and their lives changing for the better, forever and ever.

Anyway: such are the promises of TV.

America's Got Talent

is not my favorite show. In fact, that's putting it rather mildly. I put it mildly, however, because the show has provided Friends Zoe and Dave -- of

Paradizo Dance

fame -- with a tremendous platform for their unique work. Dave and Zoe have combined Dave's background in competitive salsa with Zoe's in modern dance and circus skills to create stunning, fairly stunt-oriented choreography, the likes of which no one has ever really seen before. I met Zoe through Kate

Magram

while working together in

Kirkos

, was there for one of her first collaborations with Dave, in

Cirque Boom

's

Madness & Joy!

, and thereafter shared an apartment with Zoe in 2006. They're great people; you may remember my write-up of their incredible wedding last October (see

9/15/08

). For all that, I never saw us working together. Their emphasis is so on dance, and mine on theatre, that the commonalities seemed few and unlikely to bring us together.

So thank you,

America's Got Talent

, for scaring Dave and Zoe enough to ask for feedback from this crazy clown. To be specific, I worked with Paradizo Dance for a total of six hours, over three days. We would have worked more, but I had to be off to Italy, and those two . . . well. Those of you who think

I

keep busy have no idea. Really. They're pretty amazing offstage as well as on. So what on earth would compel them to ask me for help? I mean, Zoe can lift Dave off the ground, and Dave can practically balance Zoe on his fingers! ("Come on!", I often find myself involuntarily shouting in disbelief when I watch one of their acts.) Well, turning in several unique acts over the course of a summer television season requires one to stretch one's versatility a bit, and one such stretch that they wanted to perform was into the area of stage comedy.

I'm going to assume at this point that I'm not posting this until the season has ended, for them, or in its entirety (for me, the latter will coincide with the former, regardless). As I'm writing, I have no way of knowing how their comic act went, or if they even had a chance to perform it -- though all signs I have now indicate that they will. In fact, I don't know a thing about the act itself. It will be as much a surprise to me as to the rest of the viewing audience. When I left their process, we had established a lot, but choreographed very little, and one of my imperatives to them was to throw out anything we "established" when it ceased to work for them. I know they were working with other people on this particular piece, and I hope they consulted someone else as they were actually building it. Most of my time, you see, was spent workshopping with them on how we collaborate to create a narrative, physical comedy.

It's one of my favorite subjects, it's what

Zuppa del Giorno

is all about, and somehow I'd never had the opportunity to explore it the way I did with Zoe and Dave. Here were two people with tons of performance experience, tons of physical ability, and even a little theatre background, but very little experience with physical comedy. I had a really excellent time working to explain ideas that make comedy work for me, as well as working to refine a functional dynamic in which they could collaborate to create something unlike anything else they've ever made. We were thinking on our feet, and discussing big ideas, and man -- I'd love to do it again.

* * *

Well: Hell. America,

what is wrong with you?

I'm kidding, of course. It was an awful disappointment to witness my friends voted off the show last night, but I'm not bitter about it. (Okay, I'm only mildly bitter about it. [Okay, I burned all my Hasselhoff CDs.]) There's a lot I could write about the contributing factors to the elimination, but it's all a little pointless, and I have to remind myself that

Paradizo Dance

got a pretty wonderful second prize in all this -- the kind of exposure that changes their professional position for the better.

America's Got Talent

was never going to change the fact that they're incredibly entertaining and talented performers, win or "lose," and I just hope they are walking away from it with chins held high. They did a magnificent job, and the whole thing was more a fortunate accident than it was their ultimate goal, anyway.

Not that a cool million and headlining in Vegas would have been unwelcome, of course. But anyway.

There's a small but persistent part of me that feels really, really terrible and anxious that I may have steered them wrong. Logically, I know that the work was out of my influence for two months before they performed it and we only worked on ideas and a few beats of choreography. I certainly can't claim any credit for their work! I also know that what they ended up performing was beautifully done, and that the judgment of the audience was as much a matter of taste as of anything objective. Still, I have this little bit within; it is kissing cousins with my general sense of responsibility, and makes me want to take it all on myself. I would like to say to America: "America, blame me for all the parts you didn't like. Let's give these crazy kids another chance!" And so, America, if I have your ear, there you have it.

It's not my place of course to go into any detail here about what I did and didn't see from our time working together in the piece. That's a private discussion that Zoe and Dave and I will have sometime soon (I hope!). Regardless of the outcome, I loved working with them, especially on this kind of thing. I hope we get to do it again someday, whatever the context. Even if we don't, I have no doubt that Dave and Zoe will continue to succeed more and more in what they do best: Creating breath-taking choreography and performing it with love, together.

Oh yeah, and Piers Morgan: What. Ever. Dude. Zoe lifting Dave is flash -- the two of them holding up one another is the heart of their act.

Metamorphoses

On Friday, I did something pretty neat. Once again I visited the Steinberg Lab at NYU to help the undergraduate playwrights there hear their work aloud. Instead of reading one or two excerpts, however, I participated in at least five. They're gearing up for a presentation of a ten-minute segment of every student's work, and needed a day of hearing a bit of it all. The workshops at NYU are often an exercise in improvisation and flexible characterization (

oh-ho, it seems I'm a mine worker - all right, I'll be gruff and... - who wears pumps and is accused of singing soprano... - okay, I'll spin it Harvey Fierstein...

) but this took that adaptability to a different level for me. It's wicked fun, even when you face plant on something. Reminds me of role-playing games.

Speaking of which,

Camp Nerdly

is coming around again, and

Expatriate Younce

is actually venturing back from across the Atlantic for it. It doesn't commence until the end of May, so I've plenty of time to fulfill my promise to myself to run some event this year.

And on Saturday I attended a suggested-donation dance concert at

DNA

. Friends

Matthew

and

Alessandra

were performing a duet of Matthew's, and I was pleased to find that it was accessible for me. Modern dance often isn't. (Or, perhaps more accurately, I'm often not accessible by means of modern dance.) There were a number of dances in the mixed program that I thought were quite good, and at least a couple that didn't shy away from having a sense of humor about themselves, which I always appreciate. One dancer in particular seemed perfect for my much-imagined "cartoon show." If anyone could convince you of running off a cliff and hanging suspended for a few seconds, I imagine it would be this fellow. Matthew's dance, on the other hand, was quite serious in its delivery and content. The hour-long program, called

Visa Voices

(it was choreographed by invitees of DNA's pool of students from other nations), was a very mixed bag indeed.

Occasionally I get frustrated with my limitations regarding my capacity for change. This may seem odd, coming not only from an actor, but from one who rather specializes in physical characterization and playing multiple roles in a single performance. It's my urge to transform that motivated these directions in my career, though, and I suppose that urge goes deeper than the boards. I wrote a few days ago about the merits of being able to switch rapidly between activities (see

4/23/09

), and now it seems to me that this virtue -- as I see it -- is closely related to my priority for change. As frightening as change can be when unbidden, sometimes I crave it so much that it's a little consuming. Spring is a good time for this, actually. It's what gets me out the door and jogging again, as it finally did this warm morning.

There are limits to what we can change about ourselves, of course, and I suppose recognizing those limitations is a valuable ability in some regards. Still, I enjoy imagining the possibilities more. When my life seems to be especially set, or even staid, I try to remind myself that life has been the most unpredictable story I've ever known. Even at its still moments. In fact, sometimes especially so. That doesn't mean I'll stop aiming to upset the routine. It does mean that the "routine" is changing even when it seems not to be, adding new steps, twisting the story and sometimes even altering my character.

Attention Spanning

There's a commonly held opinion that our attention spans are shrinking, and many people attribute that to our rapidly evolving communication and entertainment media. I don't disagree as to the causes for the phenomenon, but I do question that lack of specificity in this summary view of our ability to, and interest, in maintaining attention. I mean, if you take a little time to really examine—

Ooo - lookit - puppies!

What was I saying? Ah, yes: abbreviated attention spans. Was there ever a time in our history when culture didn't seem to be accelerating? You could point to the so-called "dark ages," but what you'd be pointing at would actually be a gap of written record, not some great backward lurch of civilization. No, I believe this sense of cultural acceleration lies more in our psyches and personal perspectives than it does in some larger, more-objective sense of time itself. We are an impatient bunch of creatures. It's part of what motivated us to develop tools and agriculture, and it applies to the human psyche whether you're talking about Twitter or gunpowder. We always want something "better." Ambition and impatience are kissing cousins, at least in my mental genealogy.

I think what we're really talking about when we worry over attention spans is worry over being a part of it all, of being included and/or contributing. I'm talking about more than trending here; perhaps Zeitgeist is a better word, but that still implies a cutting edge, which is more limited than my idea. My idea has less to do with something concrete and static, or even directional, and more to do with movement. Instead of staying ahead in a race, adapting to rhythms and adding something to a dance, maybe. Sometimes we're on the fringe, and sometimes we're setting the beat, but always we want to be in there and a part of it.

Naturally, my idea is going to be an inclusive one. (You can take yourself out of the Unitarian Universalist Sunday sessions, but you can't take the UUSs out of you . . . rself?) But in this case, I tend to be in total agreement with myself, and not just because it's to the advantage of my argument. (I promise. [Myself.]) It may sound like a philosophical argument, and it is, but it's also a practical one. Everything changes, and everything has the potential to change very rapidly, so it's good both to have the willingness to adapt and the centeredness to choose. For me, its akin to the error of multitasking -- namely, that it can't be done effectively. What can be done effectively is to do one thing at a time, and be able to switch tasks rapidly while keeping priorities straight. That can be effective, but true multitasking is a fault to any objective. Unless of course your objective is to make a mess of something.

If our attention spans have, on the whole, gotten shorter, its a result of successful adaptation to our environment, and anyway I don't see it as an irreversible condition. Music can be an amazing salve to a wind-burned attention span. Theatre, too, if one is willing to give it a chance. There's a general idea that entertainment, as such, is also a primary culprit in the criminalizing brevity of our attentions, but there I disagree as well. In fact, entertainment is pretty self-nullifying if it doesn't take us in well enough to influence our sense of time in some way, be it for the better or worse. The word itself, to "entertain," comes from an idea of holding something together. Maybe that refers to people's attentions, and maybe it means keeping the dance alive.

Move Me

So begins that much-esteemed classic of hip-hop, the Beastie Boys' "Flute Loop," off of, of course, their momentous album

Ill Communication

. It's permanently lodged in my memory, as are many other things that happened to me between high school and college, simply by merit of having been introduced to me at such a sponge-like moment of my life. There's another spoken bit off that album that has rent control in my brain, which begins "...if I'd known it was going to be this kind of party...", but that one doesn't segue nicely into what I'm writing about today. (Lucky you.)

I have

a few workshops

coming up teaching commedia dell'arte to movement students. Not dancers (thank goodness) but actors and other generally untrained movers. It's an interesting opportunity, both for the ways in which I'll need to adapt curriculum to suit it, and in the ways that the dynamic will be different when I'm teaching solo. I haven't done this in awhile. My usual teaching partner, Friend Heather, is tied up in performing

Brilliant Traces

in Scranton, and frankly I didn't feel a need to call on anyone else to fill the gap, like Friends

Patrick

or

Todd

. I'm excited for the opportunity to teach by myself, and by what I'll learn from it. Fortunately for me, I'll be teaching college-level students, so they should be relatively attentive. More energy will go into the teaching than the wrangling.

I really resented my movement classes in college. They were mandatory and, in spite of my agreement with the idea that actors need formal movement training, I mentally fought this (I was way too obedient then to actually do anything about it). Part of what made them so infuriating was that they were taught solely by dance instructors. I would take advantage of that now, but at the time it seemed negligent of the skills we truly needed. Out of about four, I only remember one teacher who seemed to actually understand what might be useful to the young actor. When I occasionally reunite with my fellow performance majors, we still make inside jokes about carving our way through an enormous, imaginary watermelon. Watch out for the seeds!

What's suddenly quite strange for me to consider is just how pivotal (har har) movement became in my work, and how significant a factor it is in my work history. I mean, highly physical theatre is what I do. It's like my calling card. Strange then that I began with such a resistance to the work. Perhaps it was the teachers, or just my obstinate teenage mentality, but it all started to turn for me toward the end of my sophomore year at

VCU

. That was when I was reaching the end of my mandatory movement classes, my emotions reminiscent then of reaching the end of mandatory Phys. Ed. in high school. It was also when I was trying to figure out just why theatre was important to me, and when I auditioned for my school's production of

The Three Musketeers

. In that audition they tested our ability to learn fencing and used various scenes from the play to evaluate players for the callbacks. In one such scene, I played d'Artagnon stepping up to his first challenge of a duel by immediately tripping and pratfalling directly onto his face. It was a move I wouldn't even contemplate now, but old hat at the time, hearkening back to my elementary-school antics, and I'm fairly sure it's what got me the part.

Three Musketeers

had a lot of influence over my self-perception in that it got me a lot more comfortable with the idea of myself as a mover, and since then, well -- it's all been downhill pratfalls. I made broad physical characteristics for differentiating a couple of summerstock characters, latched onto the Suzuki training at my next summer gig, got involved with the circus crowd in New York and finally became a founding member of a contemporary commedia dell'arte troupe. Now there's no question in my mind either about my ability to use physical choices to fill out a character, nor about the importance of that work to theatre. Theatre is the only place where an actor has that much influence and exposure to use his or her entire person to tell a story. It's exciting, really. Movement is ever-changing ideas made concrete, tangible and visceral. What's not to love?

Now that I'm the one teaching various ways of using one's body to perform, I just hope to bring that sense of permission and ability to any student with whom I cross paths. For years and years in my youth I loved slapstick and admired action movies, but assumed that because I wasn't good in P.E. that such enthusiasms were at best fantasy, at worst envy. Now I know that everyone has a physical performer in them. It's as natural as being alive, and as emotionally affecting as any word or song. Move me!

Burlesque

Last Saturday was the day of celebration for

Wife Megan

's 30th anniversary of the day of her birth and she, being the woman I married, wanted to go see some good, wholesome burlesque. You know burlesque, right? It's that quaint throw-back to a more innocent time, when men were men, women were women, and occasionally they all agreed to meet somewhere with dim lighting to reveal their knees to one another. One of the things I love about living in New York is being somewhere that such nostalgia for the frilly sins of the past exists. Any town that's a friend of anything remotely related to vaudeville and old-timey fun, is a friend of mine, as I always say (or will, henceforth). Furthermore, I specifically love burlesque. It's theatrical, it's joyous, and it usually incorporates lots of humor and props with its boobies. What's not to love?

So we went to

The Slipper Room

.

We stayed for many acts and several hours.

We left late, and they were still going strong.

Most of us will never be the same.

So from a theatrical perspective, it was a roaring success. I mean, if I can perform in something that really evidently changes people, I consider that a pretty big success. The specificity of that change is something that's even trickier than the change itself, given that all live performance is by its nature collaborative and interpretive. So personally, if you got something out of it, I got something out of it too. This reflects my attitudes on a lot of things. Like . . . dance. Or . . . board games. Or . . . other occupations of one's quest for joyous experiences. Let's not be judgmental about anyone's pursuit of happiness, even if they spell said pursuit "happyness." Hey: Rock on. It brings you joy and, on some level, that makes me happy.

Now there were some things I witnessed Saturday last that did not, per se, make me happy. The responses I had were more along the lines of being made to feel surprised, or confused, or scared. Very, very scared. But others really enjoyed some of these things, and no one got hurt or maligned beyond repair (though of course some audience mockery is part of the idiom), and so we can all look back on it and laugh. Sure, some of us may have gone home and gone directly into the shower, do not pass "GO!", do not bother removing one's clothing. But here we all are, scarless, and with a generally broader view of our fellow man, woman, and all others.

A broader view in a smaller world, I should say. I knew one of the performers -- had performed with her before, in fact. Her stage name is

Miss Saturn

, and she is a dynamite hula-hoop artist. She is also, it turns out, somewhat uninhibited in her display of God's gifts. When I performed alongside her, it was at

a benefit

for

Friend Melissa

's company,

Kinesis Project

. She hooped it up, I clowned around, and afterward she suggested we work together again some time, but I never followed up. Now I'm left to wonder if following up would have led me to The Slipper Room. It would not have been an entirely unwelcome opportunity, assuming I would have been able to stick to my personal preferences for the content of my act. During Saturday's experience I also had the unexpected mystery of feeling I recognized another performer: one "

Harvest Moon

." As it turns out, I don't. She's not who I mistook her for, but she has nevertheless reminded me that secret identities are as common in this city as free newspapers.

Some may view my appetite for nostalgia with disdain, but what can I say? I like sentimental sweetness in my indulgences, and could have used a bit more at The Slipper Room. After each break, the acts grew progressively more risque and shocking, and I grew less and less interested. Of course, if I were to run a contemporary burlesque show in New York City, I've no doubt I'd have to make similar allowances. After all, what we saw was probably closer in overall effect to us as the burlesques of old were during their time. These shows were shocking, titillating not just in sensual ways, but in visceral ones. The atmosphere should be one of reckless abandon and in this sense there was nothing inapt about my experience Saturday night. It was just that I had walked into a circa-1930s Berlin burlesque, when I had been hoping for a circa-1889s French one, I suppose. C'est la vie! I regret nothing!

Looking back, it occurs to me that there's an awfully fine line between anticipation and dread, and that line is going to be set at different places for different folks. A friend of mine recently sent me some writing research that discusses the role of feedback loops in sexual experiences. The gist of it was that "healthy" sexuality involves a feedback loop of increasing focus on arousal, and "unhealthy" (or perhaps, unhelpful) sexuality involves a neurotic, self-evaluative loop. Both increase the focus, but one allows you to engage, and the other rather prevents it. If we accept that sexual feelings are erotic in the broader sense, this is a very interesting way of looking at what we as performers inspire in our audiences. Will we fill them with eager anticipation, loathsome dread, or something of a different ratio altogether? In my opinion, neither is bad, just a different effect. And whatever effect, it begs the question: What, if anything, will we make the payoff?