Gull(ability)

I became very interested in philosophy in my early twenties. It was around a time when I was just figuring out most of my priorities in my work and life in general, and it helped that I (a Unitarian Universalist) was freshly in love with a girl who had some very strong, specific ideas about life, the universe and everything. One wishes to rise to such specificity, after all. So I began reaching out--in the inimitable U.U. fashion--for any and everything around me related to philosophy. I rapidly began leaning eastward, based on a completely non-substance-abused altered state I found myself in one day. Here's a short list of some of the books I explored as a part of this process:

  • The Case for Christ
  • A Grief Observed
  • The Celestine Prophecy
  • Hero with A Thousand Faces
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • Way of the Peaceful Warrior
  • The Tao of Pooh
  • Tao Te Ching
  • The Analects
  • The Art of War
  • Chuang Tzu
  • Siddhartha
  • The Prophet

I came to find a lot of personal truth in Taoism, such as I understood it, and incorporated it into my core philosophy of Unitarian Universalism. (Let's not get into religion here; pretend we're at the Thanksgiving dinner table.) One's spiritual and philosophical journey continues, etc., etc. Being a U.U., I find people with answers a little silly. People with answers often find this frustrating. I suppose this is part of the motivation behind all these books written about the way we should all be living. Sure, there's a selfless hero's quest to such a contribution to the history of literature; every self-help author has had some profound sip from the fountain of Truth and returns to his or her humble hometown to share the wealth, like a mama bird, regurgitating into her young, blind ones' beaks. But let's face it, too: No matter how ecumenical one is, writing a treatise on what one believes is at least a little about saying, "I know something you don't."

Written apparently in a similar spirit is the famed book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach. I'll admit two things: I haven't read the book, and I can't get a terribly clear picture of the author's intention in writing it. It seems, however, to have been embraced by anarchic Christianity as a really good metaphor for how a life should be lived, and by all accounts (no: still haven't read it) there are some good reasons for this identification.

Last night I attended Kinesis Dance Project's presentation of Gull(ability), a work-in-progress sort of thing in its first stages. The dance featured Friend Patrick and Friend Melissa (who is also Kinesis' founder/choreographer/artistic director) along with three other dancers, and was squoze (is SO a word) into the Manhattan Theatre Source stage, which itself was further reduced in spacial capacity by a proscenium demi-arch, presumably built for this weekend's premier there. True to my college habits, I read up on the various notes and critiques of Jonathan Livingston Seagull prior to attending, in order to better appreciate whatever parallels Friend Melissa might draw. This was probably a dumb idea on my part.

I forgot two things. Firstly, Melissa tends to treat her inspiration for shows as just that, making her product unlimited by any artificial allegiance to identifiable details from the source. There were people emulating seagulls, and there was the dissatisfaction in an individual for the given circumstances of her life, but from there it took off into explorations and free-verse in the form of dance. And therein is my second neglected fact: It is a dance. I forgot that my best mental state for watching dance is one of extreme receptivity--a relaxed mind taking in waves, rather than an analytical one struggling to make sense of it all. That difference of mental state makes all the difference between an evening of sublimity or one of frustration. I found the sublimity, but wasted a lot of time sputtering about in the detritus of logic and analysis.

And so maybe too there was a third neglection (is SO a word) (the three thing just never gets old for me, do it?). The Taoists are big on being receptive. It's sort of their whole thing, really (see 7/16/07 for a brief reference to my take on this), and part of the appeal of the philosophy for yours truly is the way in which it reminds me how valid and valuable that approach can be, in any experience. I neglect my self-learned lessons sometimes, to my and my friends' and coworkers' disadvantage.

Gull(ability) doesn't seem to be interested in telling a story per se; at this stage, it is much more an alternately humorous and existential expose into the neuroses of four seagulls, and the aspirations to nonconformity of one. This does not sound entertaining, I confess, but in the hands (and feet [and legs]) of Melissa Riker and her crew of uninhibited dancers it achieves out-loud laughter. They do not seek to impersonate seagulls, or even to embody them (a term I hate seeing the generic use of in artistic circles). Rather they interpret seagulls in movement and shape into human forms, each one a little characteristic of the individual dancer, which is nice, seeing as how that's most likely a distinction animals make amongst members of their own species. A particularly memorable sequence involved a series of tableau in which the dances all came together to form the shape of a single seagull from different perspectives, weight-sharing and flat-out climbing atop one another to create wings. The entire performance was infused with this sort of child-like joy, which we can safely state is a trademark of Melissa's choreography to date.

In contrast to that joy, Gull(ability) also contained some movement that began humorously, but through repetition became almost disheartening. The dancers would haul their left legs up and down, or perform a brief, formal series of pelvic twitches with glassy stares, and hysterical laughter was elicited repeatedly by the latter. As the piece went on, however, it became clear these twitches were unthinking, unfeeling impulses--compulsive--and something about them seemed empty and sad. This, interspersed as it was with "solos" in which each gull came on stage with a bundle of seemingly precious items and made a nest out of them somewhere on stage or in the audience, suggested to me only after the performance the hollowness of the pursuit of a material life.

Then again, maybe it was just a comment on conservationism?

In terms of what I'd like to see this piece progress with (and Melissa asked for feedback, so stop judging me to be judgmental), of course I'd hate to see any of Melissa's patented sense of humor leave, and the sound design by Benjamin Oyzon was beautifully layered. I would like to see a more succinct narrative of our seagulls' personal quirks. Or perhaps an expanded view of who they are, as seagulls (a sentence I never would have guessed I'd one day write). I felt it needed to go one way or the other, or else let their nesting build toward something, otherwise it becomes (at least in form) too predictable to me. But this is an actor talking. I'm always trying to make it about story.

When very often, it's better just to not act, and let the moment be what it wants to be.

Self-Aware . . . ed

Self-awareness is a fascinating aspect of the human condition. It will blow your mind to think of it for very long. I mean, dude: You're only able to think

of

it because you

possess

it. It's an almost inconceivable cycle of reciprocation, like the chicken and the egg, or

Siegfried and Roy

. An endless spiral in and down, forcing us to wonder if infinity owes more to inner space, than outer.

I swear I'm not snorting the pot.

It is fascinating to me, though. Self-awareness seems to be a uniquely human condition, though this may simply be a result of we being the only ones we understand, verbal communication-wise. I mean, maybe a dolphin (maybe even one in S&R's

Secret Garden

, which just scares the crap out of me) can conceive of thinking "I am," and is maybe even capable of expressing it, and we just can't relate. I'm inclined to think, however, that we are the only ones on this planet who can think about what (or worse: who) we are. It's also my opinion that such a gift creates as many problems as it solves.

Take, for example, suicide. Other creatures can starve themselves to death, it's true, but we seem to be the only ones who can plan our own deaths, not to mention come to perceive nonexistence as a preferable condition to life itself. This is the big (possibly biggest) down side to self-awareness--the way it can wreak havoc with a simple life of stimulus and response. The urge to examine is inherent in us as a species, and I suppose it was inevitable that such an urge would eventually come to be focused upon our selves. On about a par with self-destructive behavior as an unwelcome result of self-awareness, is bad acting.

What? Well, it's on a par for me, anyway.

There are few things quite as miserable as suffering through a performance in which the actors are self-conscious. The young, I suppose, pull it off with a certain earnest quality; but the older the actor, the less forgivable this heinous crime of art. Nothing will destroy the verity, and suck the wind out of the sails of a show faster than even a single actor who seems to be aware he or she is anything but the character he or she is playing. I'm not speaking to style, here. If your play includes the actors as characters, well, fine (see

6/29/07

for my general responses to such defiance of classical structure), but even in such cases the moment of action has to be believed in. Self-consciousness destroys that more effectively than any other distraction, and lots and lots of we actors (we thousands, we stand of others) spend lots and lots of our time working on reliably attaining a state in which we can do the deed without thinking.

Enter an Eastern perspective. This summer, my father and a fellow member of my mom's church are writing a sermon together (UU Breakdown: Most American UU churches apply to their ministers the agrarian tradition of summers off, in which time the parishioners get their chance to shine from the podium. Most parishioners, though not farmers, tend to apply this schedule to their church-going, as well.), the which is largely based on drawing connections between spiritual beliefs and quantum physics. The sermon, I believe, was inspired in large part by this:

The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics

. I know nothing of physics (for that, try

Friend Chris

[he

doesn't

write for Spider-Man; the other one]), but I've read my share of more eastern thought, and find the connections very, er . . . connected. Taoism--my particular favorite--speaks of all things beginning in unity before being split into "the ten thousand things." It also incorporates a concept called

wu wei

(无为), often in the axiom:

wei wu wei

. The first means roughly "without action," the second, "action without action," which is often interpreted as "effortless action." To put it another way, the idea is that there is a way of achieving things without using a lot of effort. Now, paraphrasing philosophy is tricky enough business, but trickier still when the book you're interpreting is a combination of personal and ruling philosophies, possibly written with a particular ruler in mind.

This combination of personal bias and undefined terms makes the

Tao Te Ching

rather like any acting textbook. But I digress. At great length. Shamelessly.

It is appropriate, to me, that terms such as physics, action and philosophy should find unity in a discussion of the craft of acting. In Taoism,

wei wu wei

speaks to the idea of there being a way of all things (

tao

) that it is our tendency to interrupt or otherwise interfere with through our actions and deliberations; therefore, the best way of achieving goals is to be sure one is going with this way, or at least functioning with an awareness of it. The more one achieves this, the more his or her actions will arise from stillness. Similarly, the actor (her role named by the very stuff of her craft--action) must be an expert listener and, after long hours of exploration and decision making about her actions, live in the moment without choreography, true in the moment, one with the way. A true moment on stage must be like a force, such as that term is defined in physics--just as inevitable, just as simple.

It's a tricky business. We have to be self-aware to manipulate ourselves into belief in the first place, and then we have to abandon all self-awareness to allow that belief to breathe, if only for the span of a moment. It's a state I have thus far found comparable to states of prayer, meditation, inspiration, intoxication and what many Western religions refer to as the Holy Spirit. Even the Old Testament God

chimes in

on the subject: אהיה אשר אהיה (if, by "the subject," you mean this bizarre set of connections I've been attempting to make).

So best of luck with finding your

tao

in all things. And don't stick your head in a tiger's mouth, ever, much less make a

career

out of it.

Live Free or Die Hard or Make Something People Will Love

Yeah, okay. I caved yesterday and saw it. Sometimes the lowest common denominator appeals to me, I confess. At present I'm reading about the creation of

A Streetcar Named Desire

, from the debut production through the

Kazan

film, and I'm blown away by how viscerally

Brando

lived during his twenties. I feel as though I've positively wasted the last decade of my life (though perhaps retained a bit more cleanliness in general), and last night I wasted two more hours of it. If Brando had had action movies, would they have helped slake some of his youthful lust and mischief? Probably not. And, while on the subject, would I have felt more fulfilled by two hours of casual sex, a la Marlon? Probably not.

Then again, an acting class might not have been a complete waste of my time.

It's a strange stew I prepare for you today, seasoned with

Desire

,

Die Hard

and day-job interruptions. (Best part about being back: Time for 'bloggage. [Ability to pay for groceries also ranks high on the list.]) I was greeted when I sat to email today by an unaccustomed missive (stop it, jerk) by an unusual email from

Friend Anna

. She writes:

"I'm writing my paper on creativity, and was fielding thoughts with some people on the matter. ... What is creativity? What does it mean to be creative? (Are there certain characteristics you think of?) [And, is it a matter of inborn characteristics or influenced by upbringing and social environment? Is it innate talent or something that can be learned? Some scholars propose it is simply a matter of skills learned through hard work, a matter of motivation and discipline, not that anyone is innately more creative (genius) than anyone else. That is, it's conscious effort, they don't believe in it coming from unconscious.]"

I know so many people in school right now. It really does make them smarter. Is that an effect of age? Because, God knows, school didn't seem to make anyone smarter the last time I was in it. The most reasonable thing to do before responding to such questions would be to define my terms, terms such as "creativity," "genius" and "it." But as

John McClane

teaches us, it isn't reason that makes America so great; it's a willingness to do viciously risky and self-aggrandizing stunts involving the maximum amount of property damage. In that spirit, I dive right in.

First of all, let's release the concept of "artistry" from this discussion. Great artistry is its own creature, a thing born from arduous study, disciplined work and having a craft or technique. It's great, I love it, and maybe no great work can be great without it. Fine. But in our interests today we're exploring the nature of creativity, not artistry.

I would separate "creativity" from "genius." To my mind, creativity is a quality all possess. In a spiritual context, I believe it is our awareness of having been created (and not necessarily by an omnipotent deity--an awareness that we begin and end suffices) that compels us to emulate the process with our own actions, be this via child birth, entreprenurism or performance art. In a pragmatic context, I see a sense of creativity as one of the later stages of the evolution of intelligence. After one learns to perceive tools out of the objects around them, one may eventually come to refine such tools and create their own. In short, creativity to me is simply abstract thought, which some people take to greater extremes than others.

One interesting feature of abstract thought is the ability to conceive of concepts. (Is that redundant? John McClane wouldn't care. I don't care.) The real brain-twister is contemplating whether concepts are of themselves spontaneous creations on our part, similar to ancient peoples creating gods to explain the bits of the world they couldn't better understand, or master. In other words, have we created the concept of, say, love, in order to explain (or at least name) what seemingly illogical and irrational forces make us act like absolute idiots. Me, I tend to discount the notion of spontaneous creation. I am a fan of the law of

conservation of energy

, and believe that kind of balance applies to a great deal of reality. Similarly, for example, I agree that there are a finite number of stories in the world, and we just seem to create new ones by recombining, deconstructing and re-conceiving these few. To put it still another way, we are all inspired in our "creations" by everything that already

is

, around and within us. To this end, I don't really believe in genius, per se. There is no great, mysterious inborn gift that is only bestowed upon a few.

Then again, when I was faced with Michaelangelo's

David

(and listen: photographs will never express this work), not a force in the world could have convinced me it wasn't the result of genius.

Not even John McClane killing a helicopter with a car.

So my overall opinion is this: The magic of the original

Die Hard

had a lot to do with where the star was at that point in his career (spunky with something to prove, because he was an acknowledged television star but not by any means celebrated) and where the director was coming from (

John McTeirnan

tells us on the commentary that he wanted to find the joy in this otherwise harrowing tale). There's a synergy to it that came from taking risks and improvising, something that could never hope to be duplicated in a sequel. When

A Streetcar Named Desire

was brought to film, it brought together the Stanley from the Broadway cast and the Blanche from the London cast, and it should have exploded. Brash, method Brando set off against Lady Olivier (

Vivien Leigh

) seems a formula for an insane working environment. Yet it worked beautifully, and it never would have happened if the rules had been followed or sense had prevailed.

Whether it really exists or not, the creative person needs to believe in genius. Maybe, in looking back on a creation, we can readily name its sources and the whole thing seems like a masterminded manipulation of common elements. Yet the feeling of creating something good, of being in a creative spirit, isn't like that. It's a chartless territory, a blank page or a silent room. People often ask authors where they get their ideas from, and it's easy to say, "Oh, I was a closeted homosexual who grew up in the south, so . . . you know . . . ." I believe that it's belief that ideas come from. Creativity springs from a confrontation of nothingness with faith in that intangible genius that we can never prove, but that always intervenes.

. . . Eventually. Yippie-kiy-yay . . .

Extra-Special Birthday Edition!!!

No, no, no. It's not my birthday. Not yet, anyway. It is, rather, that time of year around which all of my friends have selfishly decided to arrange their birth dates. Let's get organized here, people! Couldn't we spread them out just a little more, and maybe make them a little less immediately-after-Christmas? I swear, it's like the holidays begin for me a marathon of gift-giving every year. And I forget more birthdays than I remember! Totally; totally. I'm awful. You have to be known by me for, like, at least ten years before I start saying to you: "Wait. Wait. Isn't your birthday some time this month?"

Case in point: My adopted brother (adopted by me, that is), "Anonymous," just had his thirtieth last Friday, and I failed to plan for it. Granted, I didn't hear about the party until about a week beforehand, but I should have been better prepared all the same. I should have realized the significance of this year and--when

A Lie of the Mind

schedule conflicts were being arranged--included March 23rd as a no-go date for rehearsal. Alas, I did not, and so missed the digging of the shin.

I can be short-sighted like that, but it's also possible that I'm in denial. Anonymous' birthday kicks off the birthday schedule for my troika of oldest friends, affectionately dubbed by my mother as "

The Three Musketeers

." Anonymous is in March, I in June and Mark chimes in in August (It

is

August, right, buddy? [Man. Do I suck.]). This year, we are thirty. Ye Gods, the wonder of a round number.

It may not be wonderful, or even wondrous, yet the turning over of another decade of this life makes for some serious reflection. Even eschewing the coincidental little deadlines I set for myself at a very sage 21 years of age (see

2/5/07

), Year Thirty holds some significance for me. It holds significance in the universal subconscious as well. Jesus is widely believed to have begun his ministry in earnest 'round about that year of his life. Hamlet is often interpreted to be just thirty when he begins contemplating his readiness. And, of course, there was that

hit television extravaganza

that took the airwaves by storm for about a season and a half. My hope had been to celebrate my thirtieth year since kicking and screaming into this world in Italia, busking in

Piazza Navona

, Roma. As time inexorably jogs forward, however, the prospect of that trip grows slimmer and slimmer. Nigh anorexic. Leaving me with the question: What, then, can I do to celebrate whatever it is I am and do on that very special day?

I put it out to the universe. But it is not for this reason I 'blog at you today. Nor is it to point up the bizarre nature of an actor's schedule as it relates to his ever-patient friends (i.e., "Sure, I'll be in your wedding. That is, if I don't get a gig. Even if I get a gig, I'll try to get off, of course. Of course, if it's tech week or a performance there's nothing I can do. But count me in! Maybe..."). No, I am compelled to write today because of other people's birthdays, and the potential artistry in honoring them.

Consider all the people you've known in the course of your life. Consider not even everyone, but just those people you've held a conversation with more than once. There are probably a whole lot more than 365 at this point (not to presume too much upon the age of my [5] readers or anything). So there is the potential that every day of the year, someone you've known is celebrating his or her self; indeed, on some days, more than one is. How many people do you not speak to anymore, who are turning a year over at this moment? How many have you forgotten entirely who might be remembering you attending their sixth birthday, right now? And just what the hell is my point?

Well, I find it humbling to contemplate this. It reminds me that every day we make a choice to honor the people we've loved and who've loved us with our actions, or to not. UU's believe in the interconnectedness of all living things, and when it comes to other people, we're supposed to respect that particular interconnectedness even more. Similar to a bunch of actors on stage at a given moment, we all have to depend on each other for things to turn out right. It's frightening. It's awesome. We have to take it for granted somewhat just to get by, not panic or become mad with power. But every once in a while, it's good to be reminded how things really are.

You say it's your birthday? Well it's my birthday too; yeah. Happy birthday to you . . .