EARLY MORNING SONG

It is strange to work on a piece of theater for so long, yet ultimately have it come together so quickly. If you pore back through this blog, you can see the long slow percolation of this project’s genesis and evolution; but the casting, rehearsal, design, and promotion process has felt so amazingly quick in comparison. It is surreal and exciting to see it all rapidly coming together now.

After our intensive kick-off workshop at The Playwrights’ Center and the first few weeks of rehearsal, I stepped out of the process for a few weeks for some travel to Boston and Maine. It felt strange to be away; and yet we had reached the point where the script was ready to go - plus I really had to stop changing it, so that the performers could have time to learn their lines. Having performed my own language (which tends to include a lot of repetition, density, layering, and sometimes rather counter-intuitive logic) in recent years, I was well aware that the memorization process for this project would be much more difficult and take more time than, say, the average living room play. And of course, once you add an intricate movement score under the language - not to mention sound, costumes, and lights - that turns into some serious multitasking.

So I allowed myself to peel away for a little while. 

Of course, “peeling away” doesn’t actually mean disengaging with the work. My time away involved a number of long walks through forests, carrying our play in my pockets. I thought about Emily Mendelsohn’s recent writings on performance, climate change, and practicing an ecological way of seeing through complexity, corporality, contingency, and collective action - so eloquently articulating impulses in my recent writings that I’ve never quite been able to name. I talked with Emily and other artists who met up with us in Maine about listening and patience, about sinking into the long view that trees invite us to take, about the important roles that expansive approaches to theater can play in this practice.

Coming back to Minneapolis on Monday was a bit of a jolt; the city and my growing to-do list felt so loud. And yet, as I watched rehearsal last night, I was surprised to recognize the feeling of the forest, the contemplative space of it, seeping through the DNA of the piece. Somehow, in a dark black box theater in the heart of the city, as six brilliant and hilarious performers sang and danced, stitched scenes together, wrestled hard with unruly lines, searched for their specificity of focus - somehow, unexpectedly, the vast presence of the forest became visceral in that space. I can’t totally explain it, but I found it super exhilarating - a reminder of the worlds and possibilities we can carve out together.

By the way, have I mentioned lately this show also references punk rock, cheerleading, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, among a lot of other things?

I hope you’ll come experience it all for yourself, and tell us where it takes you. As I’ve indicated before, there’s definitely no one singular way to receive or interpret this play. While it speaks its own very particular language, we imagine different people will have very different experiences based on the perspectives, associations, and projections they bring into the space - which is a phenomenon I love, as it always makes for fascinating conversation later!

To further whet your appetite, here a few more bits and pieces to explore in the coming week:

Lately I keep sitting with these recent collages by Linden Eller (a dear old friend and former housemate), which feel rooted to the piece for me. If you check them out, be sure to click on images to view them individually - each one is so very intricate.

I listened to this podcast with Emily and Theo up in Maine on the heels of the first presidential debate. It not only helped temper our frustrations, but also includes some excellent conversation about fear and the dire importance of exercising imagination: Beating Trump for Good: Love, Imagination, Empathy with Jeff Chang, David Kyuman Kim, and Rebecca Solnit

This TED talk, “The Anthropocene” by Will Steffen, was recommended by Sarah and serves as an excellent introduction to the proposed new geological age in which we’re living.

While pulling up that talk, I remembered another really good and relevant one by a scientist (who, incidentally, is quoted in the play): “How trees talk to each other” by Suzanne Simard

Finally, do purchase your tickets in advance, ok?! With only three weekends of performances, it’s gonna fly by fast...

Drumroll, please... this is our cast:

Megan Burns! Kimberly Lesik! Dolo McComb! Miriam Must! Sarah Parker! Jen Scott! Dolo is choreographing as well... and we’ll have original music by Skyler Nowinski... plus costumes by Liz Josheff Busa... lighting design by Søren Olsen... stage management by Beth Ann Powers... and of course, Steve Busa directing! SUCH A FANTASTIC GROUP OF HUMANS.

Do you notice a role missing from that list? This production will not have a scenic designer! Pretty early on, Steve was drawn to working primarily with movement, costumes, and light toward a very minimalist visual environment.

Our time at The Playwrights’ Center (where we were lucky to have the added support of Brid Henry, intern extraordinaire) was all about meeting each other, revising the text to be rehearsal-ready, and establishing the start of our sound and movement vocabularies. After the first full read-through of the script on Tuesday, Steve asked the group to popcorn ideas about what the piece is “about.” Here are some of their responses:

science versus nature

a woman’s life’s work - wondering if her work is relevant? will it be relevant one day? is it worth anything? is it all just smoke and mirrors?

humans and our place within everything

an attempt to understand it all, everything we take in daily, and how ridiculous that attempt is; the limits of language

zooming between macro and micro perspectives

the process of striving to work not for yourself, but participating in something larger than yourself

the interconnectedness of lives

extinction

All absolutely correct!

“I don’t know the answers to all those questions, and I want to discover them as we go. Does that make sense? Push back if it doesn’t.”

This quote from Steve from rehearsal the other night perfectly captures his directing style (and our collaborative process overall, and maybe also the play itself). While he has strong impulses about certain moments or images, he largely comes to rehearsal without any fixed ideas about how things should go. Instead, he invites the ensemble to try a bunch of different possibilities, and we let it all simmer as the bigger picture begins to reveal itself. So right now the cast is generating a palette of options for each scene, without setting anything yet. Also, as we’ve known would be the case all along, music and movement are incredibly important pieces of this puzzle (the text I’ve written only works in conversation with them); so Dolo’s exploration and generation of movement in tandem with Skyler’s developing score is pretty central to all that is happening.

A few links if you want to keep simmering with us:

Sarah recommends this Radiolab episode on emergence

Here is a mini interview with yours truly, posted last week during our workshop at The Playwrights’ Center

Jen thankfully introduced us to The Star Hustler

The proliferation of Latin “audio dictionaries” on the internet may prove useful in the coming weeks

We’ll be in rehearsal, but you should check out Northern Lights.mn’s Anthropocene Awareness Association event on September 30 at Macalester College and tell us all about it

Oh, and by the way: Tickets for the October production are officially on sale!! As usual, Red Eye offers a wide range of price options, including two pay-what-you-can performances. Click here to learn more and purchase.

I’m waiting to share it here until it’s complete, as we’re still sorting out a few loose ends... but let me tell you, this group of artists is a marvelous one. We never decided in advance how much we might bring on folks who had been part of the development process along the way versus work with new artists who would bring a fresh perspective. In the end, the way it’s shaking out, there’s a little bit of golden continuation from the development process, but a good majority of the artists are climbing on board for the very first time. There are even a few people in the mix who I’ve never met before (but who know Steve and Miriam). Exciting!

I am so eager to get in the room and evolve the script in collaboration with this specific mix of beings, bodies, voices, idiosyncrasies, and ideas. As a writer who more often works outside of traditional theater settings and, for the past five years, has been developing a lot of work from scratch in collaboration with performers, it’s felt so novel to re-immerse in the practice of writing without knowing who the performers ultimately will be. So many different people have dipped in and out of this process over the past 20 months, and every single one has had a profound impact on the work’s development. I can only imagine what will happen now, as this whole new configuration of artists starts digging deep into six intensive weeks of rehearsal.

I think normally, I might feel anxious about all these unknowns colliding for such an incredibly short amount of time. How can we get to know and trust each other, and put this brand new thing on its wobbly feet, and keep making discoveries together toward reducing the wobble, and also, you know, even just simply getting everything learned and memorized, toward seeing it through, all in a matter of weeks? And pretty much only during evenings and weekends, by the way, as many people will be working full-time day jobs or turning around other projects simultaneously. The way theater happens in this country is completely bananas.

And yet, somehow, it happens. One reason I’m not anxious is the fact that all of the artists involved are brilliant, thoughtful, and highly skilled. Another reason is that, once again, The Playwrights’ Center is making dreams come true. As I mentioned in my last post, they supported our workshops in May and June (as part of their Regulars program, where they partner with theaters to help move new plays from development to production). As I worked through revisions in July, I kept thinking about how valuable those May/June sessions had been and wishing I could do something comparable with the artists who would be part of the actual premiere this October. I also happen to be a Core Writer at the PWC, and as such, have the honor of proposing one funded development opportunity for my work each year. Core Writer workshops don’t normally happen until later in the fall or spring, but I asked The Playwrights’ Center if I could pretty please possibly bump mine up to happen right before rehearsals begin - and they said yes!

I can’t begin to express the hugeness of this gift. It gives me one more set of intensive script workshops, with the actual artists who will be seeing this piece through, before I have to let it go enough to let folks start learning their lines. It gives our new creative team some concentrated time to get to know each other, experiment, and begin developing a shared vocabulary before we dive into our normal rehearsal schedule. And in full transparency, it also gives all of the artists a little bit more pay, which makes a big difference.

In other news:

The new and official title of this piece is Early Morning Song.

It will, as you might have guessed by now, include a lot of movement as well as live music.

It will be a kind of collage or meditation rather than a plot- or action-driven “story” (I’m sure anyone who knows my work or Red Eye’s history is shocked by that one).

As we think about relationships between language and sound and movement and light, we’ve been watching scratchy old clips of the original Einstein on the Beach for inspiration (like this one) and excerpts from chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech (like this one). Also Miriam and I have been comparing our experiences working with SuperGroup - whose latest project, PEOPLE I KNOW, opens at Red Eye in November (right after we close) and also features Miriam in the cast!

If you ask me what Early Morning Song is “about” right now, I will be genuinely honored by and grateful for your interest, but I confess I might evade the question, or give a rambling account of our process, or offer a laundry list of themes (such as creation, destruction, existence, labor, legacy, mortality, control, interdependency, women in science, climate change, the universe, trees - all of which are true, but vague). It’s not that I don’t know what the play is about, and it’s not that I want to keep anything secret; rather, I just struggle to find language to articulate work in a meaningful way when I’m still deep in the thick of the creation process. One would think that because my medium is words, I could put them together better to respond to such (reasonable) questions... but to my own chagrin, this is not the case. To create a play and to sum it up are, for me, two very different skill sets that do not always play well together. Some writers can do both; but I work pretty intuitively, letting conversations and ideas simmer for long periods of time, seeing what emerges that I could never anticipate or map out, exploring how my words then interact with my collaborators’ nonverbal worlds of movement and sound and image, etc. So trying to name all that, while still striving to understand it, can quickly feel reductive and incomplete. That said, it is a skill that I’m forever working to improve.... and Red Eye and I both will be sharing lots more information in the coming months... and I can easily tell you all about our process in the meantime... and I hope the many seeds throughout this blog will spark your curiosity enough to simply come experience the work for yourself in October. Truth be told, this piece might ultimately be about different things for different people; so I’ll be very interested to hear what it ends up being about for you!

1. The title of this play probably won’t be MAKE. Surprise! We’re simmering with a few possibilities right now, and I’m increasingly drawn to one of them... looking forward to sharing with you soon.

2. These videos came from two workshops we did in May 2016, generously made possible by The Playwrights’ Center. We read the latest version of the script, then spent most of two days on our feet, experimenting with sound and movement using a series of prompts from the script. You can see a few more snippets here.

3. The performers in these videos are Miriam Must, Billy Mullaney, Dolo McComb, Kristin Van Loon, Charles Campbell, and Vie Boheme, with sound by Crystal Myslajek and direction from Steve Busa. This extraordinary group is teaching me so much... it is pure honor to work with them. We’ll have one more workshop all together on June 29.

4. People in the play don’t have names anymore. Lately I’ve been thinking about Einstein on the Beach, that kind of meditative portrait of a famous (male) scientist; and how, in our process, what’s emerging is a (different) kind of meditative portrait of an unknown (female) scientist. The contrast is intriguing to consider.

On a somewhat related but largely unrelated side note, Miriam recently gave me a copy of Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, which quickly took precedent over a large stack of library books despite impending due dates. Highly recommended!

5. Sitting with this piece amidst everything happening in the world over the past six months has felt connected to the need to remember that climate change is urgent, despite the fact people are killing other people with guns every single day. How to be with it all, hold it all at once? How to be present for rapid response while also maintaining the long view and keeping up with that work? I’m acutely aware this play will premiere right before the November elections. Most recently, in grieving Orlando (and there is little I can put into words about that particular event just yet), I have moments of wondering if I should start all over with a whole new play, write a different piece that deals directly and explicitly with all the deeply tangled problems that immediate tragedy brings to light... whatever that might look like.

As unpacked here and here, Red Eye and I enjoyed an intensive workshop last summer that served as one of the first big milestones in our process. The first two days consisted of text and movement experiments with some guest artists. On the third day, we switched gears and gathered some “non-artists” together for an evening of conversation, toward expanding our thinking about questions and themes we’ve been pushing around. I put “non-artists” in quotes for reasons I will explain in a minute…

First, a little personal history. Part of the impulse behind this gathering came from my years working on staff at Cornerstone Theater Company, a renowned ensemble-based theater company in Los Angeles with a specific methodology for making community-collaborative work. Among other kinds of research for new plays, Cornerstone often hosts story circles, where community members share their stories around a specific topic. These stories, in turn, inform the play that is being written—sometimes in big ways (a story shared could become the backbone for an entire play) and more often in smaller, nuanced ways (events, characters, and ideas from the conversations may get woven into the play’s fabric). Sometimes story circles are wide open to the general public, and sometimes they are smaller invited gatherings. They are always facilitated, ensuring everyone present can share.

My experiences observing and supporting remarkable writers like Shishir Kurup, Sarah Ruhl, Michael John Garcés, Octavio Solis, Alison Carey, Julie Marie Myatt, Page Leong, and others as they moved through this process with Cornerstone had a huge influence on my own early explorations in playwriting. I loved participating in the story circles, then watching the conversations pass through the imagination of the playwright, resulting in a piece of theater that person never would have written otherwise, which then continued to grow into something even more beautifully unpredictable as other artists—typically including a mix of professionals alongside many of the community members who participated in the original story circles—put the play on its feet and brought it to life.

While still in Los Angeles, I got involved with Padua Playwrights (based in the same building where I lived, in the same neighborhood as Cornerstone), where I really began to dig into writing; and from there, I started exploring many different avenues of performance creation, influenced by artists I met in Poland, Providence, New York, and Minneapolis. Every step of the way, I’ve experimented with integrating elements of Cornerstone’s approach into my independent projects, with varying degrees of success; now more than ever, I deeply appreciate the value of having an institutional grounding, committed ensemble, and robust full-time staff to take on the many complex moving parts of community-collaborative work! But even for projects that are not wholly community-collaborative in their making, Cornerstone’s influence is strong as I think about how, why, and with whom theater lives in the world.

Which brings us to the present!

My current new play development process with Red Eye is not a Cornerstone-style community collaboration. But from the beginning of our work together, Steve, Miriam, and I have shared a commitment to expansive thinking about how the play might come into being; and as we conceived the July workshop, we were drawn to the prospect of doing a story circle, to bring new perspectives into the fold and further crack open our thinking. Having mostly percolated ideas with fellow artists so far, we were curious about deliberately reaching out to some people working in different fields. So on Wednesday, July 15, we brought together Kristin, Howard, Randy, Leah, Bettina, Timaria, and Scott—seven acquaintances who work in a wide range of occupations, from education to law to retail to architecture—for an evening of conversation. Everybody knew one of us personally (myself, Steve, or Miriam); but only one knew all three of us, and most of them did not know each other. We also recruited esteemed fellow theater artist, Peter Heeringa, to facilitate so that we could focus on listening, rather than running the room.

The first lesson of the evening surfaced as soon as we went around the circle for introductions. Peter asked the participants to share their names and something about themselves, such as what they do for a living or how they like to spend their time; and to my surprise, almost everybody introduced themselves as artists! The few who didn’t still acknowledged their creative interests and how those interests influence their working lives. Pretty much nobody brought up the occupation that had spurred us to think of them in the first place. It was such an important reminder that artists are everywhere! And it also didn’t matter at all, for no matter what their primary occupations or interests, it was clear we had a remarkable group of people who had come with distinct and valuable perspectives, histories, personalities, and insights to offer.

Also, this group was ready to dig deep right away. Peter offered a warm-up prompt, asking everyone to riff on the Frankenstein story (what it brings to mind, what it means to them, associations), but the responses were not warm-up responses. These folks were ready to talk. The warm-up led into a rich discussion about how the concept of “creations that consume their creators” has played out in different ways in each of our own lives - which then led to more open conversation about control and loss of control, love, parenting, creativity and collaboration, work-life balance, mental health, fitness, death and grief, bodies versus technology, science, religion, capitalism, the individual versus the collective, the role of art in society, and how the world (as we know it) will end. So, you know, a few things.

We filmed the whole conversation; but sadly, the first half of the footage has vanished and the second half is without sound, mouths moving and bodies gesturing in silence. The silent video is actually quite beautiful (I’m already thinking about how it could inform choreography); but unfortunately, it doesn’t help much in terms of referencing back to the actual conversation. All I have, instead, are my scribbly notes.

Kristin talked about a loved one who is bipolar and the complexities of what is lost in treatment; how the creation and rebirth of a “stable” person can seem to include losing certain vibrant aspects of that person’s personality; balancing the serious risks of non-treatment with the trade-offs that come with treatment. She also talked about the edges of grief, the valuable perspective that grief can provide, how comfortable one can become lingering in it, how alarming and disorienting it can be to wake up and not feel grief; and about our culture’s worship of capitalism, how a framework has been created in which Trump is a viable presidential candidate.

Howard observed that Frankenstein and so many other classic works are morality stories, warning about the dangers of humans attempting to “play God,” or replace God with science; but that he is much more concerned by the way faith is too often used for exploitation. He also talked about cancer, Jewish identity, and reinventing himself twice, first as a corporate lawyer “who helped rich people get richer” in New York (where he felt like he was never Jewish enough); then as “a guy who could fit into Stillwater, Minnesota with a baseball cap, burger, and beer” (and in this context, he suddenly felt perceived as extremely Jewish).

Timaria talked about being a young woman climbing the corporate ladder, and how good intentions aren’t always enough—how difficult choices have to be made. She also talked about being in love, how that’s the closest she’s ever felt to losing control; the inexplicable and impractical things one is willing to do for another person, like driving clear across the state just to spend a few hours together—how simultaneously scary and beautiful that can be.

Scott talked about intrinsic versus extrinsic reward, how the thrill of creativity takes precedence for him over the satisfaction of completion; for example, in his job, he often conceives projects, then hands them off to people with different skill sets to carry out and finish. He also mused about “real” collaboration versus the “appearance” of collaboration, observing that, even in very collaborative environments, there’s often still a hierarchy of sorts—whether it’s the CEO of Apple or lead architects at Burning Man.

Leah shared about her capacity to be consumed by the physical and meditative action of quilting; and about the consuming nature of grief when a relationship ends, how it’s not necessarily dramatic from day to day, but how there’s a process of rolling around in it that is emotionally consuming, and cathartic over time. She also confessed that she’s always been jealous of people who have a strong, ecstatic faith in something larger than themselves; how she secretly used to want to be a Catholic nun, to experience the all-consuming devotion of sacrifice, pain, and pleasure combined.

Randy shared about the many years he spent consumed by creating businesses—how it all started when he was as young as three years old, as he discovered the joy of positive affirmation when he created things; how his journey ultimately has been both fulfilling and agonizing; how connection to people in other countries has been one of the most important revelations; how such relationships teach you about yourself as well as how important it is to adjust your efforts to meet other people’s needs.

Bettina talked about not growing up in the U.S. and therefore not having the same cultural references as others in the group. She remembered wanting, from a young age, to create something so badly, but wrestling with what it takes to create, from space to resources to the right people, and what happens when what you create isn’t valued. She now has three children and is in awe of their beauty, completely consumed—but also acknowledges she can’t control what happens with them; that their wishes, ideas, and goals aren’t always what she would imagine; that surrender is required.

As I recall these snippets, my brain is flooded by so many other things that were shared and discussed. This recap really only barely scratches the surface.

Maybe most of all, it’s the feeling that followed me from this gathering – a sense of awe and gratitude for these individuals who were willing to be vulnerable, sharing their experiences, memories, fears, hopes, and questions so openly – that has been sticking just as much as the content discussed. The phenomenon of strangers coming together in a space, pouring out pieces of their lives, then going their separate ways. None of us knew (or yet knows) what the next day will bring, let alone how this all might color a new play; but there we were, together for an evening, sharing and receiving and witnessing and honoring. There is something so beautiful and crucial about that.

Images: 1 – Steve Busa talking with story circle participants at Red Eye, July 2015. Still image from video by Miriam Must.

2 – The cast of atTraction, written by Page Leong and directed by Michael John Garcés, in rehearsal outside Cornerstone, 2008. Photo by Gary Leonard (via Cornerstone Theater Company). 

“The thing is becoming a thing!” is what I find myself saying (and texting) to people who ask how the reading in December went. That and, “We had an amazing cast!” This all star cast of MPLS + STPL’s theater van guard, as Secrets of the City put it in a generous shoutout, would be Miriam Must, Billy Mullaney, Bianca Pettis, Dolo McComb, Charles Campbell, and Moheb Soliman – and they were, indeed, brilliant. I could watch this group read a rental contract and be dazzled. I also have been saying, “We had an incredibly lovely, warm audience!” And that’s true as well. Huge thanks to everyone who spent the evening with us!

We had one rehearsal the day before the reading, an unseasonably warm rainy Sunday morning, at which the cast read through the script once. As you might expect from a first draft, the script is all over the map right now; but a few threads that I imagine might become core components have started making themselves known. Steve simply listened and didn’t give any special direction, apart from some logistics like assigning who would read what stage directions. That evening, I went home and made some tweaks to the text that were small but, to my ear, made a big difference in certain spots. And then we gathered on Monday evening and heard the script again, this time with an audience.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering, that scenic design was not connected to our reading - it was for Walking Shadow’s guest production of A Midwinter Night’s Revel. We enjoyed the surreal atmosphere that it created, though!)

So in this play, in some form, it seems that we are looking at a person – a scientist, probably a botanist or dendrologist – who is reconciling the end of life and creating an archive of her existence to leave behind. The archive starts to become a sort of larger sentient being, while in the larger schema, the planet moves swiftly toward overwriting all traces of human endeavor. Humans, nature, mortality, legacy, resilience, climate change, and mutual impact are themes of sorts. Currently, there are two very, very, very long songs.

On a side note, I also have been experimenting with some different ways of approaching “character,” including seeing what happens when figures in the play have names and what happens when they don’t – how the simple fact of having a name changes the way performers and audience members interact with the script. As you might guess, turns out it’s pretty significant. At this juncture, everyone in the play has a name. The scientist-archivist, played by Miriam, is named Louise.

We asked the audience to write down impressions and questions on sticky notes. Here are but a few brief examples (I’ll share more sometime when I have access to a camera that is not my subpar phone):

After the reading, Joshua Tanz (a Red Eye Board member) sent along a song I’d never heard before, “Third Reel” by Joe Henry. The lyrics, especially the chorus, have some intriguing thematic resonance, including the shared use of the name Louise:

And you can ask me for nothing at all And I'll always be what you please, You can never leave nothing behind you And I always will love Louise

Sort of uncanny, no?

Also, Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire is now next on my reading list for the spring. Thank you, Sarah Myers!

The day after the reading, Miriam and Steve and I gathered to debrief the process – parts of the play that “worked” for each of us, and questions that we have moving forward – and we sketched out our ideal development plan for the coming year. Then we dispersed for the holidays.

And this past week, we came back together to process what we’ve been thinking about as the work has been simmering. Among other things, we are mulling exactly what kind of scientist Louise might be, and what form of archive (perhaps not a library, as the current draft suggests) she is creating. We’re also drawn to exploring the relationships between her elaborate endeavor and the greater impending realities of climate change.

Much more to say along these lines - but first, up next - I’m going to leap back to July and finally tell you about the rather incredible community conversation that we assembled, with an unlikely but remarkable cohort of people from (seemingly) disparate professions...

Someone recently asked me, “What does a first draft mean to you?” Good question, right? Especially in a process that lives smack on the hinge between a typical playwriting process and a more collaborative creation of work. I am a playwright, responsible for producing a script that we will read aloud for anyone interested on Monday, December 14 (p.s. you’re invited! 8pm at Red Eye, no RSVP necessary). But a director and performer also are contributing ideas, desires, perspectives, and processes along the way (see this earlier post about our approach to working together). But we’re not devising everything together. But we are pushing around a number of ideas on our feet. A first draft of a script written in this collective context may or may not look, or function, like the first draft of a script in a solo writing context.

I think I responded to the question with something along the lines of, “I’d like to have some sense of the work’s shape, what form it’s starting to take - in what direction we’re heading.”

For the past month or two, I thought I was getting closer and closer to that. More recently, I’m not feeling so sure. And that’s okay, because we still have a little time before the deadline. But this really is always the hardest part of the process: trusting that the piece will reveal itself in time.

Okay, perhaps I should share a little about what has happened between July and November after all, to give context to this moment...

At some point in August or September, Steve brought The Tibetan Book of the Dead to the table, and Miriam was reminded of the Jorge Luis Borges short story, The Library of Babel. Increasingly, our conversations turned toward mortality and the archive - the relationship between death and certain acts of creation - from attempts to make sense of the great mystery of what comes after life, to the desire to create legacy, a form of immortality. We began honing in on some thematic focus.

I also checked in with Steve about how consciously he hopes audiences will take away the seed theme of “creations that consume their creators” (his original impulse for the project). Is it something they should walk away thinking about? Or is it an artistic jumping-off point that may or may not be obvious in the end? He said that he’s quite interested in having it be something people experience on a conscious level (whether or not they articulate it as such).

That led me to think about performances in which something is literally built over the course of the event, such as Machine Project’s 24-Hour Roman Reconstruction Project and Pearl D’Amour’s How to Build a Forest. Might something be built during our performance - but instead of being destroyed or taken down, it somehow actually consumes those who made it?

Stirring the stew, we began pushing around the image of a library that, rather than encompassing every possible combination of letters ever (as in Borges), attempts to catalog a single life. A person building a library, creating an archive of existence - an effort to reconcile mortality, or transcend it.

As I’ve started writing in this direction, I’ve realized that such a library indeed would quickly consume its creator; for archiving a life, in fact, points to archiving infinity. We are so inextricably connected to everything around us, all we’ve learned, everyone we’ve known, everything we’ve touched, all our thoughts, dreams, regrets, influences, potential. To try and catalog all of it really would be a never-ending task.

In last weekend’s workshop, Billy Mullaney brought up the excellent quote by Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” So very appropriate. In theater (and “storytelling” in general), a common rule of thumb is to get really specific, because the deeply personal illuminates to the deeply universal. Yet I continually find myself distracted deconstructing what “specific” means. When I try to break down what comprises any given person, it’s impossible not to go down this rabbit hole that ultimately leads me to believe there’s no such thing as an individual person at all - we’re all too inextricably connected. You can’t break down what makes an apple pie without eventually facing the vastness of the universe.

As I write, I’m recalling a blog post I wrote for the Walker in 2013 following a conversation with Sibyl Kempson and John Collins about “focusing on the wrong things,” building work intuitively, and trusting the uncomfortable complexities of truth. Looking back, everything in that post feels immensely relevant to this current process. Click here to read it.

Last weekend’s intensive workshop at Red Eye, which started on Friday, November 20, first brought together Steve, Miriam, and myself with intrepid performers Pramila Vasudevan, Ryan Colbert, and Billy Mullaney, plus the glorious sound duo Beatrix Jar, for some experiments in language, sound, and movement improvisation. (We think there might be a section in the script that is improvised, so were exploring possibilities for how it will work. Very fun! More on all that to come.) On Saturday, I wrote for most of the afternoon. On Sunday, this time with only Steve, Miriam, and myself plus Pramila and Billy, we read through what I was calling a “pre-first-draft draft” – decidedly not an official first draft, but a compilation of pages ordered with growing intention. Some of the material was reworked from July and some was new. I was thinking a lot about this action of building a library, juxtaposed with text, interactions, and other images that might overlay or interrupt it.

The performers did a beautiful job reading and we had a rich conversation after, but I left the workshop feeling unhappy with the text. A lot of the writing didn’t feel as evolved as I had thought it was, and I was having trouble articulating my own thoughts, questions, and responses to other people’s questions. The clarity and excitement I’d had while in the writing zone was gone, and suddenly it all just felt like a big mess.

I also haven’t even mentioned yet what I know is on most people’s minds lately, which is that the world around us seems to be falling apart at a faster rate than usual. Terrorism of unfathomable proportions is unfolding daily around the globe, including here in Minneapolis with the tragic shooting of Jamar Clark by police on November 16 (just a few days before our latest workshop). It is difficult to focus on anything besides the latest Twitter updates when so many people are hurting so badly. All weekend, I wrestled with being in our workshop and writing instead of protesting at the 4th Precinct.

In one haze of scanning social media for updates, I found a blog post by Sun Mee Chomet for the Minnesota Humanities Center, reflecting on being a grad student in acting at NYU when 9/11 happened.

She writes:

Zelda Fichandler (world-renowned theater maker and founder of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.), head of the Acting Program, sat quietly waiting, listening to the silent chaos of her students’ minds. My classmate, Darren, finally spoke, “I just don’t know what it’s all for…I mean what are we doing? We should be down there helping the firefighters. What is the point of acting now? It’s meaningless....” There was silent nodding in a room filled with fifty plus aspiring young actors at the cusp of their careers. 

I will never forget Zelda’s response. She said quietly, “The firefighters are doing their jobs. We are not trained to do what they do. We would be in their way. We must do what we have trained to do. The world will need to try to understand life again. They will need to heal. We, as artists, will help them to do that. The world needs us, just as they need the firefighters.”

Later in the post, she continues:

Zelda was right. People did come to the play [The Three Sisters by Anton Chekov] to laugh and cry and to examine life with us. Towards the end of the play, as the youngest sister, Irina, each night I said the lines Chekov wrote in 1900: “The time will come, and everyone will know the meaning of all this, why there is all this suffering, and there won't be any mysteries, but meanwhile, we must go on living… we must work, we must work! …It's already autumn, soon it will be winter, the snow will fall, but I will be working, I will go on working…”

And so, amidst a month of feeling the weight of the world’s chaos, frustration with my own progress, and uncertainty in the face of this looming deadline, I am striving to go on working - and to be patient, an active observer (paraphrasing John Collins). I spent a good portion of Thanksgiving weekend poring through the text for this play, cutting big sections, writing new material, and rewriting old material. I also slept on it, kept tabs on Twitter, read ostensibly unrelated books (Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking has been profoundly important this week, for reasons that require a whole different post), and shared food with a lot of people. This coming week, I’ll be looking at everything with fresh eyes and staying open to where it all might lead.

The play is cohering more slowly than I’d like - but it’s happening, steadily, bit by bit.

This is the hardest part.

But we must work, we must work!

But looking back at the summer... I had started writing about our July retreat, but I only unpacked 1 of 3 days. I’m sure you’ve been waiting with baited breath to find out what we else we did! So here we go.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

We took Monday off, to let everything from Sunday simmer. I had grand plans of using the day to write, but wound up doing a lot more staring out windows and taking naps than actual writing. As Erik Ehn has been known to say, though - it’s all writing! Different parts of the process.

So then on Tuesday, we gathered back together with the same crew from Sunday and, this time, spent most of the workshop on our feet. The main objective for the day was exploring an exercise that Steve brought in, “Circle of my Life.” For this exercise, the performers walked in a circle on stage for a very long time while Steve gave them prompts to think about and, for periods of time, to process aloud. Specifically, he talked them through different stages of their lives, asking what they remembered and, in some cases, what had consumed them at each juncture. If he asked them to “remember” an age that they hadn’t experienced yet, they were supposed to project what they imagined it would be like. Even more than the content it brought up, he was curious about the duration and consuming nature of the exercise itself.

They spoke aloud, continuously and simultaneously, as they walked, sinking into a rhythm, almost a trance. Occasionally Steve would orchestrate, asking everyone except one person to stop talking so then that one person would monologue, or sometimes having two people drop out and the two others continue talking.

I watched them from different places in the room and wrote down wisps of what I heard:

Ages 0-8

television programming

fat kid

appropriate/inappropriate

Jasmine/Aladdin

tapioca pudding

crying in Target

walking to school

no better or worse, it felt different

very tiny

don’t remember any particular desire to do these things

fantasy world

a figure skater disappears

photo

made out of the rays of the sun, stalks of corn

what did I eat?

thinking a lot about school

all I wanted was a cockatiel

slow progression being less of a person

first grade incident

woman with wild hair

her sense of identity

later on, going to school

flights of stairs

during the day

kids were allowed to rank themselves

when I left home

competitions

she told me she saw

turned the corner

little secrets about someone who hurt my feelings

throwing them behind her

waiting for the bus

I remember bending down

an enormous deal, who got to sit in that seat

go find another place to be

Ages 9-14

Florida, Key West

paid a buck fifty

how could there be so many people out

glasses case

Central and South America

at a very early age, started to learn about

they were just always talking

trickled into middle school

cut deep enough to

his backyard

wanting to learn every single lyric to every single Broadway show

vests

beautiful white cars

picking that up as a language as well

how do you express yourself

a world to escape in and a world to live in

when we were young

a big presentation

damn

if I could articulate the way that they were structured

started to put words to feelings or impulses

but that’s when, that’s when I lived

doing whatever your brain is telling you to do

as if we were a gang

changing but I think that

Catholic school

very active when it came to

the things that make things scary

excused from school that day

Ages 15-21

safest place to be

dream about this last night

fitting into these social structures

more consumed with how we relax

homeroom was stupid

rules for how to be doing this

choreographer from, um – or who works at

little things like where everything had to go

understanding

relationship that changed over time

part of your job is to hide

external reaction

learning how to speak

lisp I had a lisp I had a lisp

they corrected my speech

correcting my speech takes a lot of breath

diagnosed all of these voice problems

it changes you

also external for me

insecure, almost

focusing on a position within it

when it’s worth saying "hi" to someone in the hall

"hi, how are you" conversations that you take for granted

what is the cost of all this?

escape my body

maybe that’s all that I am

really starting to see the walls of the system

yeah okay so you show me that and – yeah, so?

a historical text

consumed by a lack of being consumed by a nostalgia for childhood

Ages 22-28

green sugar cake

I moved to California

I was trying to simultaneously

yellow red green red blue

I guess the idea of it was how do I become

navigating

four days a week for five hours a day

very vivid

I willfully for whatever reason put myself in that situation

afraid of being consumed by somebody else

spray painting

spending most of your time thinking about

the ability to suddenly have

you need stakes but also no stakes

consumed by movies

winter boots

five bags of

zooming out, seeing the entire world

piles of snow

conditioned to identify pattern

geologic formation of the Earth

pattern beneath the pattern

have this understanding of myself

fancy jewelry

headdresses with beads

interesting characters, always ran into them

breaking through the wall of the space

obsessive about making art

thinking about what’s in everything

vocabularies and strategies

dumbbell, adjusting back in

maybe my body won’t work forever

building blocks are important

consumed by the attempt to out-think our behavior

I worked there something stupid, like seven days a week

working all the time so I can’t think about the other things I’m doing

slowly lost track of what I was doing

spiraled out of control

all these New Agey people doing herbal remedies and massage

lacuna of institutional boundaries

trying to articulate what the rules are

if I wanted something, deep paranoia of why I wanted that

what should I want?

wanting to out-think constructs of what it means to be a good person

units of time

knowing what’s inside

to monitor in a very paranoid way

programmed into me

it’s scary

right now I’m reading a book about the multiverse

state-based way

no that’s real, that’s real, because I can see it

vibrational things

the idea of finite/infinite

the gift of a person

I did that and it was extremely hard

Ages 29-38

it’s nighttime

all these coworkers

the other place is Griffith Observatory

the 300th anniversary of the United States

consumed by just letting time pass by

traveling

my father will start showing signs of Alzheimer’s

every day working on mental games

now it makes me feel at peace

updates about the minutia of their lives

sisters

how do I need to position myself

desire to geographically move

so many families – they’ve all grown up

ride rollerskates with them

they probably have kids

some of them getting married

all there finishing up a meal, so much food

along the river

he, she

never celebrated my birthday once

going to museums

find somebody

doctors are convinced

knowledge of knowing there’s something there physically

not helpful and what does that say

a month and a year

Ages 39-50

best years of my life

I’m writing – I was writing

planning to

the things that felt

wanting to be around family

wanting to travel

tension between

keep it simple

space between people

that is the place of

pinning down touchstone

(humming)

journals

what I remember before

what I see now

in space still exists

but it’s the same management, different wait staff

be a mother

personality is performance

something in the air

seeing younger people

the maternal, and this nurturing and compassion and sensuous sensitivity that I’m attracted to

embody and practice

also perhaps philosophical concept

seed of that inside of you

offspring child

spreading that to all other creatures

duality of male/female

having a visible lasting effect on a thing, a garden

seeing a change

air will still exist

a freedom that I haven’t experienced in this way

conceptual change is not satisfying

numbers representing dollars not real

my feet on the floor

connecting with people

when I started all the time

even to the point of destroying an object

connecting physically, that is very powerful

residue of behavior

therapists saying that

intimacy

Given time constraints, we stopped there and Steve led a conversation about what had happened. Did the performers find themselves addressing anyone in particular? (Yes, but the “who” was a little different for everyone.) Where did they focus? (Up during group listening, down when remembering, paying attention to posture, gravity, talking with hands, keeping up the pace and spacing of the circle.) What were the individual versus group dynamics? (This became a much longer discussion.)

Before breaking for lunch, we audio recorded Billy and Dolo singing a scene from Sunday’s compilation, a long list of native Minnesota flowers, for use in the afternoon. As they sang, I thought and jotted notes about the idea of being consumed by the natural world, that which we did not create (connecting back to David Graeber’s chapter on Primordial Debt Theory, a sense of being in debt to that which created us). But also, how the human creative process enters as we attempt to name each element in the natural world - our various and inevitably incomplete attempts at cataloging the world and our place in it over a lifetime, over many lifetimes.

After lunch, Dolo led a physical warmup that I’ve found myself revisiting in different contexts multiple times since (imagining a drop of warm oil in your hand, moving it around to seep into all your joints, starting with your hand and wrist then moving it gradually through your whole body). We then spent the rest of the afternoon on some movement improvisation to the Minnesota flower song, taking impulses from the text and sound (without being illustrative), with Steve setting various additional parameters and prompts (e.g. when a certain recurring part of the text is heard, change what you are doing; play with letting vocalization happen). We alternated between improvising and conversation, improvising and conversation.

A few (of the many sprawling) notes that came out of this session:

individual spheres moving into collective awareness

duration consuming, lost in movement state

Dolo: What are my physical powers of creation? Composition, formal structures, energetic places (passing on, picking up), story, tasks, abstract games, making sense

Celeste: Different ways to consume space. Open place vs. against something. Small thing consuming a large thing and vice versa. Space surprised me (the wall seemed infinite, but then ended).

Ki Seung: How I relate to creation - creation being the stage. Reacting to rhythm (awe, ignored). Knocking each other off balance.

Billy: Mostly responding to sound. Same intervals of tiring in vocal and in movement, tracking when change happened.

Miriam: Rhythm of what was being said. No response to words at all, making choices against the beat.

Dolo: Channel changing, disorientation, in and out of states, vocalizations became a crazy zoo, nonhuman social places

Celeste: Emotion ebbing and flowing with structure

Miriam: Interpretation, translating other people’s movement into something for me

Billy: Opposite of contemporaneous, feeling of surveillance, paranoia. Pushing against the vocabulary.

Miriam: Image of camera zooming into a mouth, down the esophagus

Images: 1 - Billy, Miriam, Celeste, Dolo, and Ki Seung doing “Circle of My Life” 2 - Minnesota prairie flowers (via Uniquely Minnesota)

ADDENDUM: I just shared this post with my supporters on Patreon and now feel compelled to share some of what I wrote to them, given the timing of this post going up the morning after the Paris attacks: I have been thinking a lot this morning about how strange it feels to carry on “business as usual” while Paris and Beirut and Syria and indeed people here in the USA are experiencing such profound chaos and pain. Yet it is also in these moments that I believe, more than ever, art is essential - as a space for reflecting and processing, for expanding awareness of our own bodies and beings, for exercising imaginations and making connections between divergent ideas, for coming together as communities in real time, for dreaming what is possible, for deepening our empathy and compassion. When I remember that, “business as usual” doesn't feel so strange after all.

Over the next few posts, I’ll recap what we did and give you a peek at my sprawling notes.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

The performers that we assembled for the first two workshop days were Celeste Busa, Dolo McComb, Billy Mullaney, Ki Seung Rhee, plus of course Miriam (also performing), Steve (directing), and myself (writing). The group deliberately represented an eclectic mix of artistic backgrounds, various lineages of theater, dance, and contemporary performance; we were excited to see how they would compliment each other in this exploratory context.

To kick off the retreat, I brought in 60 pages of text that I’d written in the preceding months. I was careful not to let myself or anyone else think of this text as a “script,” because really it was an unstructured collection of fragments that may or may not be related. As I shared with the group, it is possible some of these fragments could go together and will be expanded upon for the script; and it’s equally possible that none of those pages will be used in the script, but rather some tiny kernel of an idea from the collection will open up the whole world of the performance that is yet to be written.

That said, we spent Sunday morning in a circle of chairs, reading through the pages in the same way we might read through the first draft of a script. Given some sections were pretty dense, it took a full 90 minutes!

Coming out of this reading, we had a conversation; but before diving in, I asked all the performers to draw or write in response to a few prompts. They had 30 seconds for each prompt and were free to be as abstract or representational as they wanted.

Here are the prompts and responses:

1. Make a drawing based on your thoughts and feelings coming out of reading the text.

2. Look at what you made. Now on a new piece of paper, recreate what you made, but now feel free to evolve it without the play text in mind - embellish, exaggerate, deviate, add, connect dots that make sense to you - toward making a picture that you like.

3. Look at what you made. Now distill one thing that you think is most important, or represents an overarching feeling or theme from your creation. Isolate it in a third drawing.

While I confess I often dislike participating in “rapid response” activities like this one (they can feel so superficial and incomplete, unrepresentative of what I’m really thinking or feeling), I love these drawings. They communicate something raw and nonverbal to me about how the fragments that we read were moving through the group, sitting with each person, in that moment. I know the responses are hasty and only the tip of the iceberg, but still, I find them valuable - cues of impulse.

In the time that followed, and for another good hour after lunch, we talked about reading and listening to the text. Per Steve and Miriam’s suggestion, we used a very loose feedback structure – starting with images that came up, then feelings, then associations, then impulses toward form (be it the “world” of the piece, the shape, or possible artistic approaches to different kinds of content), then finally questions and points of curiosity.

Here is a brief rundown of what came up. I share it out of context (almost certainly, you are reading this post without having read the 60 pages of text that I wrote), in part because I’m curious to know, dear blog reader - what does this collection, standing alone, conjure for you? What kind of world, if any, do you begin to see in your own imagination? And what kinds of questions do you have for that world? I’d love to read any thoughts you’re willing to share in the comments below.

IMAGES

A “whole” that becomes aware of itself, falls apart, keeps reacting

Flour, baking, a white and silver kitchen

Motivational/inspirational environments - business, TED talks, cheerleading

Little micro tape recorders

Maze, labyrinth (of language)

Birthing a debt and raising it

“Female” imagery – moon, eggs, birth

Light/dark – controlling it (“Turn on the light”), but also things being illuminated

Showing vs hiding

Scientific vs pedestrian

Army of scientists with their shoes

Gold light beings, thrown away

Folding – inside out, outside in

Celestial images – God, universe

Books – leather-bound, not paperback – tomes

Desk as a singularly concrete object. Made of stone or concrete, immobile (like an altar?), with a stone chair. Huge and formidable. A plant on it? – plants mark your place. Moss?

FEELINGS

Unsettling certainty: We know exactly what’s happening, but chaos = anxiety

Clinical transferring of information

The exactitude of certain transfers, but then other scenes that “human” it up

Baking instructions: straight information, but also teaching, which is human

Deliberate – people knew their own rules/logic, even if others didn’t understand them

Common vs scientific names of native plants, flowers; relief when voices aligned in unison

A sadness, to hear that list – things taken for granted, disappearing (climate change, mass extinction, along with certain professions) – huge amount of information lost, work/labor lost

Poetic language juxtaposed with science, interviews

In/out, micro/macro, zooming - Latin roots of words (felt like we were moving with it, not violent)

Power as she speaks everything into creation

ASSOCIATIONS

Watching TV, flipping through channels, futzing with the reception

Headlines

Name change scene – bureaucracy, institutional, naturalization, MNsure, also FAQs – the funny order of questions being asked, tech writers

Thinking about when information touches people, channels through people – how it has to change (from itself; straight up = considered cold) in order to be “human,” to connect

In bed, imagining running away – quite touching, most emotionally engaging – we’ve all had that fantasy. If we could take money out of the equation, what would my life be like? Distilled, relatable, familiar, recognizable as a response to the complex world

The story of the businessman who met a fisherman sitting on a beach and encouraged him to buy a fishing boat, so his business could grow, etc. and eventually he could go on vacations, toward sitting on the beach and doing nothing but relaxing, fishing, meeting people like himself…

Cycle – fantasy – the desire to be elsewhere

Snake eating its own tail

Lists – at the Academy Awards, list of everyone who has passed away; war vets, memorials; commemoration. Jobs, traditions, disappearing.

Tadpole to frog

Birth of anything

Seeds – what happens underground?

Liminal space of the shopping cart: haven’t bought it yet, but feel ownership

IMPULSES TOWARD FORM

Making croissants – Groove Tube – 4th of July Freedom Rolls, ‘60s/’70s instructional video that gets weirder and weirder. Underlying perversity, seduction.

Ina Garten, Barefoot Contessa – character of Connecticut homemaker on five different bodies, similar physical manner, moving slowly

Cynosure’s cheer – Guy on a multiple city speaking tour, only remembers specific things, reduced to repetitive phrases.

Creating a debt – woman looking through scrapbook, childhood

Cynosure as a seed (in interview scene) – doesn’t want to crack open

Flowers and scientific names – curious about “Let’s keep going for a very long time…” – is it to the audience? to each other? to selves? Must pay attention, must name things.

Mascot Speech – Tom Cruise in Magnolia, spectacle

Invention – we don’t invent by following instructions, we invent by pursuing things not pursued before. Where does failure fit in? Living our lives, making croissants – what are the interruptions?

Instruction manual of self-help, lists of how to improve life on the internet, Buzzfeed – past 25 years of “you” focused self-help – Oprah as icon of this movement. “Manifest” with the power of your mind, vision boards, materialistic consumption, relationship to capitalism (via Billy, see here and here)

“Meta talk” – “I hate to tell you this, but…” (I don’t actually hate it) behavior

Books – recipe book, Book of the Dead – correlative

Things starting to web – crescent moon, croissant, Icarus story, two halves of eggs…

Folding

Beach, ocean, waves – many different kinds of waves – sound, energy, vibration, shock…

Debt – absence, lack, God withdrawing (Simone Weil) New Testament – list of the begats (names of plants), revelation (things destroyed)

Lists as framing device? A feeling that it’s happening around us, whether we pay attention or not, another layer of reality knocking…

Civilization (humans) reflecting on the rest of creation, over which we don’t have control

QUESTIONS / CURIOSITIES

Egyptian Book of the Dead – curious to know more. Different from other kinds of text, seems fascinating but didn’t understand. Is that scene about the Book? Or attempting to separate something out from the Book? Scrambling for it, but it’s elusive?

What is the portal into this world? What is the doorway that we walk through?

Drive Theory – homeostasis versus increasing over time?

Croissant instructions – all for real? Enjoyed when I thought it started to get far out, more made up.

Other applications of that idea. Are there ways to take these procedures for our lives, insert things we don’t expect?

Line between being creator and being overtaken. What is the moment, when do you know you’ve crossed that line?

When is it good to be consumed? When is it positive?

2 languages happening – poetic (“I am life,” lots of M’s text, slow consumption) and clinical (can be violent) – latter conjures manufacturing. Mascot cheer – oppressive positivity. Changing names – bureaucracy of dead ends, instead of serving as guides.

Wall Street text (“headlines”) – glitches interrupting/interfering with message. How do they function and why?

Who creates in this play? Nobody? Creation referenced, we deal with it, but don’t necessarily see it

What is the risk?

Loved lists of trees, flowers – something operatic about subject matter, felt appropriate, EMOTION. Reminds of Wagner at opening of Syberberg – we don’t question the music, as we would a linear narrative, why? What weighs us down, keeps us from being successful, creating?

Desk – strong image, one of the only things described, manmade, person defined by it but also leaves it.  What is its significance? Does it grow bigger (unnerving)? Higher and higher stacks of paper? Desk made to control body, define amount of space you need in order to do work. How does size vary in different contexts? You shrink to it. Draftsman, big desk. Finding optimal situation – standing, best functionality. How people relate over/across desk = civilization. Making things linear (violent) vs. messiness of real world (See Erik Ehn: genocide needs linear narrative)

After this very rich conversation, we only had a little bit of time left in our day; so we did one final “rapid response” exercise, this time on our feet. The performers (sans Miriam, who sat out on this one to watch) paired up and created short physical responses to the text. Again, fast and inchoate, yet revealing as broad strokes. Here are the two responses layered together:

+ “From Alexander Pope to ‘Splice’: A Short History of the Female Mad Scientist” 

+ “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing’”

+ “Old Print Article: Using Electricity to Reinstill Life”

+ “The Invention of the Internet”

+ ”The Long Story of U.S. Debt, from 1790 to 2011, in 1 Little Chart”

+ “In Los Angeles, Vintage Houses Are Giving Way to Bulldozers”

+ “Planning Ahead Can Make a Difference in the End”

+ “Failing and Flying”

Today I’m adding all things Simone Weil to that list. 

In May, Steve and Miriam and I roped prolific performers Billy Mullaney and Katie Kaufmann into help us with the aforementioned improvisation experiments. The session was a delightfully fun and thought-provoking; more on that in another post soon.

In the meantime, I might note that I’ve finally started on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, mentioned in a previous post. Billy and I both are reading it this summer, meeting up weekly to discuss. We’re only on chapter two, but already I can’t recommend this book enough. Packed with dense research, yet so very readable (and not just readable, but mind-blowing)... it’s one of those important tomes that you probably shouldn’t take on the bus, because inevitably you’ll get absorbed and miss your stop.

Debt is a subject that keeps bubbling up for me in this project, a human-made creation that consumes not only individuals but whole societies with such enormous and absurd ramifications. Yet translation starts getting complicated when you explore “collective” creations, amidst systems of power and many generations of history. Are the “creators” the same as those who are being consumed by the “creations”? I am thinking the answer is both yes and no, at the same time. I wonder if I’ll get to the end of Graeber and realize debt needs to be a whole different project. 

But for now, it keeps surfacing; even hunting down the etymology of “creation” somehow took a sharp turn into the root of “capital.” I’m so grateful our process includes time for going down these rabbit holes and seeing where they lead.

A mathematical part of me wishes that I would be more diligent about writing a post following each interaction with Red Eye. Immediate reflection can be so valuable (capturing the detail of specific thoughts and conversations before they slip away, like writing down dreams right upon waking) not to mention satisfying (the sense of geometric symmetry that comes with thorough, linear documentation). When we started this blog, I imagined a post for each meeting, each epiphany, each event, all beautifully mirroring each step on the project timeline.

But I have to confess another part of me (the part that turns out to be winning at the moment) loves the wild process of letting experiences simmer and then remembering them later, letting the details drift and seep and swim, seeing what sticks and re-surfaces and morphs. Writing reflections about meetings as other meetings happen, collaging together what we’re doing and have done, dipping in and out of chronological order. This approach to blogging, incidentally, feels much more true to my playwriting process - gardening over architecture.

So today, as Minnesota finally enjoys a warm sun and sweet sneeze-invoking blossoms on its trees, I am casting my memory back over the past few months with Steve and Miriam.

I brought some early writing explorations to most of our monthly check-in meetings. Miriam and I would read the pages aloud while Steve listened. And then we would move on without a lot of discussion, per the good rules of Sister Corita Kent: “Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.”

For each check-in, we brought in various articles, visual seeds, excerpts of films, exercises to try at future sessions, and thoughts related to community engagement. Most of all, we talked about things we had been mulling since the last time we saw each other. 

Here are some excerpts from my written notes:

   Grey Gardens (Miriam)    wild characters    interview format

   howling for partner in the next room    [referring to a Paris Review interview with Arthur Koestler]    how people cut off create strange methods of communicating

   disparate ideas – ridiculous, later obvious    showing the creative process    uncreativity

   oppositional:    what if they don’t want to be talking to each other?

   family physicists    social rules versus discussing ideas

   “One thing creating collaboratively does is, it stirs up trouble.     So we’re looking to stir up trouble.” (Steve)

   causing deliberate structural trouble toward transformation

   individual vs collective invention    the decline of rugged individualism vs rise (return) to collectivity    relationship to income inequality, economic justice    collective consciousness    the cultural binding together of a world 

   Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler    Surrealist narrative: the daughter sleeping, waking, guide    vast swimming collage world-landscape    lists, historical anecdotes, judgments, questions    puppet-object world, dioramas, projection    “Syberberg’s ‘Hitler’” by Susan Sontag (The New York Review of Books) 

   revisiting Hilary Faye’s collage gifs: history + fiction

   Frank (the 2014 film) – band leader’s papier-mâché mask    Housetu Sato’s giant wool cat head mask

   The Bakken Museum

   improvisation exercises and dream list of collaborators    improvencyclopedia

More from the winter to come, including a reading list and questions for our community (that means YOU).

It’s so meta to read this breakdown of the creative process as we embark on our own creative process, exploring what disparate influences might lead us to new ideas, to a new play. This bit resonates extra strongly with me at this early moment in our process, a wonderful reminder to relax into unreason:

To be fair, we weren’t starting completely from zero. We had talked previously about our shared interest in the tension between creation and destruction, how creations can overtake their creators, for good or ill, becoming something larger and more powerful than originally imagined (citing some of the examples I noted in my first post).

We also had talked about how we’re interested in the content of this play to be informed, in part, by personal stories we gather from the public related to this theme. Rather than retelling any specific story shared with us in a dramatic or literal way in the play, however, we likely will look to those responses to help us unearth patterns and poetic nuances that inform the metaphorical framework we’re constructing. (More on all that and a call for participation to come - but if you have something to share right away, please feel free to do so in the comments below!)

For this retreat, we also had decided that each of us would compile at least five “seeds” – articles, essays, pieces of music, poetry, visual art, historical characters, current events, single words or phrases or concepts – anything that felt related to this project, directly or indirectly, that we might want to share. I arrived with a list and a collection of website links, but Steve and Miriam came prepared with thick printed packets! Between the three of us, there was a whole bounty of goodness to explore. So we decided to structure the rest of the weekend according to this show-and-tell.

We spent an hour perusing and talking about each set of seeds, then gave ourselves extra time to pore more slowly through the materials, coming back together periodically for sprawling conversations. While I can’t possibly recap everything we discussed, I will share what we each brought to the table:

MIRIAM

+ An excerpt from Paul Auster’s novel Sunset Park (focusing on a particularly vivid character description)

+ An amazing compilation of online information about sports mascots, including Kelly Copper’s “The Mascot Acting Technique”

+ A collection of quotes about invention by Nikola Tesla

+ The Fall of Icarus – the myth, paintings, and poems (“a splash quite unnoticed”)

+ A timeline of inventions spanning a French cartoonist’s life

+ A list of 13 inventions that killed their creators

+ Ray Johnson’s art and recent obituary

RACHEL

+ Debt as a collective creation, including a Naked Capitalism interview with anthropologist David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years) 

+ Brittany M. Powell’s “The Faces of American Debt” project

+ Hilary Faye’s collage gifs

+ Bach’s cello suites - inspired, in part, by this On Being interview

+ A rumor about a myth that someone dropped in my ear, but which I haven’t been able to locate, involving a creator who, upon seeing creation gone awry, folds it all back in, rather than destroying it.

+ Loring Park, where both Red Eye and I are based – Who and what is here? Why this piece here and now? 

STEVE

+ Dictionary definitions of “being out of control,” “creation,” and “role reversal,” from both physical and psychological standpoints

+ More Nikola Tesla quotes about invention, some overlapping and some different from the ones Miriam brought

+ Marcus Pearce’s “Notes on Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation”

+ A scene between Hal and Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey

+ An excerpt from Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality

+ Animator vs Animation

+ Kidd Pivot’s Dark Matters

We agreed to take some time to process all this material - and that I would begin doing some writing explorations - in the month to follow before our next check-in.

This intensive gathering was the first of several that we’ve mapped out in 2015. Carving time out of our hectic lives for the purpose of making this play—for collective exploration, conversation, and experimentation—had been one of our first steps in articulating what kind of process we want to cultivate for ourselves, back in our earliest conversations about working together. We wanted to give ourselves deadlines, but we also didn’t want to feel rushed. We wanted simmering time.

We spent the first half of Saturday defining, in more detail, what kinds of “collaborations” interest us and how we want to approach “collaboration” for this project. I keep putting“collaboration” in quotes, because it can mean so many different things to different people. At the start of any new process, I find a conversation defining collaboration to be essential for everyone at the table, and I know Steve and Miriam feel the same way. While the three of us all have theater backgrounds and have worked together before—and thus, to some extent, have the start of a shared vocabulary—we’re also setting out to work in a way that we haven’t done together before, so we don’t want to make any assumptions about how that process will play out. Entering into this retreat, we knew it was important to talk first thing about our roles and expectations.

For example, even though it had been pretty clear in our early conversations and stated in funding proposals, we affirmed officially that I will be writing the play, Steve will direct, and Miriam will perform. That might seem totally obvious, given our respective practices; but it was important for us to be clear that we’re talking about “collaboration” in terms of development and exchange of ideas versus, say, devising all the elements of the play by consensus. Steve and Miriam will contribute ideas for the script; but ultimately, I’ll be the one writing and making decisions about what is in it. Miriam and I will contribute ideas for the staging; but ultimately, Steve will be the one directing and making decisions about how the play lives in space. Steve and I will contribute ideas for Miriam’s performance; but ultimately, she will be the one acting, making decisions about who she is in relationship to everything else and how that plays out in her own body.

So on the surface, it appears we are approaching this project more or less like any other new play development process in the American theater.

However, we also discussed the fact that it’s not quite that, or only that, either. This project is not simply Red Eye commissioning me to write any new play; the driving concept really comes from Steve, plus both he and Miriam will be more involved, conceptually and artistically, throughout the development process than the average director and actor. I also will be working closely with them as they produce it, as much as if not more so than the average playwright in the context of a world premiere.

In fact, as we talked, we realized we’re broaching quite rich, strange gray area, in terms of how we are defining our work together. After all, most playwrights do incorporate the research and ideas of others into their work, in many cases including artistic contributions from collaborators (a most immediate example being Caryl Churchill and Joint Stock). But will the play we create result in a script that can be produced by other theaters after its premiere at Red Eye? Or will the piece be so intrinsic to the space and artists of Red Eye that it should only live in this version (I wonder about the future of Sibyl Kempson’s Fondly, Colette Richland, in development with Elevator Repair Service)? Might Red Eye want to explore the prospect of touring this production down the line? Might it only live once, then be gone? These are open questions.

As we mulled, we realized that we were veering into territory that won’t actually matter much until later. While we are unsure about the work’s future self and what kind of crediting will be appropriate, we are clear about our roles and way forward at this early stage; so we agreed that we will postpone making a decision about some of those nitty gritty details until we’re a little further into the process. I know this conversation might drive the good folks at the Dramatist’s Guild batty; and, trusted friends though we are, the three of us do recognize the need to articulate the terms of our work together in writing before long, toward setting clear expectations all around and avoiding sticky situations later. But for now, the questions are fueling great conversation and helping us get more and more specific about how we want to work. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting artistic processes don’t fit neatly in boxes. At the very least, they challenge us to drill down and get specific about our path… and at best, they can spark genuine discovery.

That was only the first half of Saturday. After a break, we started delving into the play itself!

MAKE is a collaboration between myself (playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski) and Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis. More specifically, in this first phase, I’m working closely with Red Eye’s marvelous co-founders Steve Busa and Miriam Must. As the process unfolds, we’ll lure in more artists to work with us.

This work has origins in a few different places. For one thing, Red Eye has been itching for awhile now to develop a new play over a longer stretch of time than they normally do. Red Eye regularly produces new plays by emerging writers and supports other artists and companies developing work; but only on a few occasions have they been able to carve out time to create new plays together from scratch as a company.

Simultaneously, Steve has had a persistent seed knocking around in his brain – the phenomenon of “creations that consume their creators.” The concept is, of course, so present in art and life alike – from the classic images of Frankenstein or the puppet/puppeteer, to historical turning points like the atom bomb that resulted from scientists’ desire to harness atomic energy, to contemporary phenomena like carbon footprints, corporations, and debt - huge aspects of our culture that seem to control us, for better or for worse, even as they ultimately were and ever are being made by us. Steve’s impulse to develop a new play out of this theme traces back to his encounters with writings by Arthur Koestler and Ivan Illich in the ‘60s, among other influences.

In 2012, Red Eye produced my experimental play, MERONYMY, as part of their fall season. I originally had written MERONYMY in a unique process with installation artists and a composer, so I worked closely with Steve (directing) and Miriam (performing) to evolve it for Red Eye’s space and context. Along the way, we discovered an invigorating, symbiotic working relationship; and toward the end of the play’s run, we began talking about ways to work together again toward digging deeper into our shared questions and interests. Steve and Miriam brought up the “creations/creators” concept, and it resonated strongly with things I’d been mulling. We began brainstorming ways to approach it and how a collaborative process between the three of us could be shaped.

Fast forward many conversations and several grant proposals later. We’re immensely grateful to have received support from the National Endowment for the Arts for the first phase of this work’s development – and now we’re off to the races! Springing from our seed concept, we are embarking upon a year of research, outreach, dialogue, and cross-disciplinary experimentation that look at the inherent tension between creation and destruction. We will focus on development throughout this first phase in 2015, leading to a public reading and conversation around the script’s first draft in December 2015. A second phase will focus on workshopping and production, with a Minneapolis premiere in October 2016.

I’ll be blogging about our process over the next two years, as well as inviting others to share their own thoughts, ideas, stories, and feedback that will contribute to the play’s development; so please bookmark this site and stay tuned! We’d love to have you along for the ride.