The House of Ash

Some photos from the final days of LCDL:

(with Hector)

(On the Alice Tully steps)

(with Anne Cattaneo)

I didn't blog as much as I hoped...

This is worth its own entry. We had a wonderful Q/A session with Russian director Lev Dodin. Here are some of my favorite quotes of his from the session:

"Being a theatre director is not a job... it's a way of life."

"You have to stay a student all your life - the learning process should never stop."

"When making theatre you want to set yourself tasks that are impossible - because when they're impossible you will travel further to reach them."

"Teachers should not only teach skills, but help students form artistic personalities."

"Theatre is about getting to know things - ourselves and the world."

and finally, my favorite...

"What we do is NOT just a job or profession - it's a CALLING. The highest calling. Treat it as such."

I failed... on the blogging of course. I'm sticking with my excuse that it's been so intense and I haven't found time to even get on the computer, let alone blog. Plus, I had rehearsals for my reading of "Decadent Acts" (which went swimmingly, thanks for asking... more on that in another post). I'm also producing two shows in the Estrogenius festival (check out the new web page at www.estrogenius.org) that needed my attention this week in addition to Fringe. Thank God I'm busy.

I left off talking about the workshop I was co-facilitating on Wednesday night. We got a lot of great feedback! Everyone seemed to enjoy it and create magnificent ensemble generated pieces. I have included an outline of it below. The talk with Winter Miller (author of In Darfur http://wintermiller.com/) especially stood out for me. I'm looking forward to seeing her work in the future and hopefully seeing In Darfur back in NYC soon.

Socially Conscious Theater Outline
7:00-7:05 Read out participants responses to “What do you consider socially conscious theatre?”
7:05-7:45 Discussing and Q/A about IN DARFUR with Winter Miller (author)
7:45-7:55 Writing exercise. Participants answer in their notebooks:
1. What makes you American?
2. When was the moment you felt truly America?
3. What is your title?
4. If you had a national anthem – what would it be or write a short one
5. What does it mean to be engaged in America
6. What is the single biggest issue facing your generation?
7:55-8:25 Types/Examples of “Socially Conscious Theater” Discussion
Arts Institutions (Intersection For the Arts, Arts in Ed)
Social Groups
Community Generated / Site Specific
Commercial/Regional Theatre
Independent Project
Also Adaptation or re-visioning a classic
Bring it out to the group in terms of how people have been doing this work in different ways in their careers.
8:25-8:40 Future Project Proposal
A community generated piece on the social and economic issue in Michigan (Issues of the outsider: How one enters the community and creates work that frees itself from the sense of these poor people). We each talk a little about how we would approach it and open it up to the audience for ideas.
8:40-8:50 BREAK
8:50-9:00 The Advantage Line Exercise
9:00-9:30 Instruction and group work
Split people into groups (10 groups of six people)
Explain what they are going to be doing and hand out the component sheets (Create a Community Generated Project – that is socially conscious of and for the community that’s right here, right now). Send them to their spaces
9:30-10:00 Group sharing and reflection

Create a two minutes piece that utilizes the following components:
Five specific references to the group member’s answers to the six question (the only text you can use are the question and the answers)
Something that actively engages spectators / A moment of actively endangering the audience.
A reference to something that happened on “The Advantage Line”.
A moment of simultaneous action
A moment of danger
A national anthem

Another highlight included a phenomenal workshop facilitated by MAAFA at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Read more about it here: http://www.themaafa.com/ .
The workshop incorporated heart wrenching performances and techniques in how to use theatre as a tool for collective healing, something that I want to do in the future with refugees. I can't wait to see their work this fall!

We have been looking at a lot of different variations on physical theatre - Grotowski (an amazing workshop facilitated by Garrett Ayers with James Dacre assisting) Biomechanics, Meyerhold and dance theatre. The workshops are very intense and leave me soar! Looking forward to finding spaces to continue this training after the lab is over.

In other randomness... I'm on a HUGE Moulin Rouge kick. It came out of nowhere. Really. I'm revisiting it... as it was one of my old obsessions. I'm VERY bummed I don't have the DVD with me (it's in Jersey... somewhere... but definitely in Jersey). I may go crazy if I don't see it soon. For now the youtube clips are almost sufficient. I'm sort of in love with Ewan McGregor's character, Christian (I mean, who isn't? Really.) Please enjoy one of my favorite scenes from the film. I remember the first time I saw this particular scene in the theatre "El Tango de Roxanne", I was undone. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I was completely in awe.

You don't know how bad I want to adapt this for the stage (I have big plans for this, and "The Newsies" haha). Caroline O'Connor is riviting in this dance and as a performer in general. Fierce. Gorgeous. Gritty. I would LOVE to work with her! I bug everyone I meet from Australia about her. After seeing her performance in Moulin Rouge, I made my mom order me her CDs from Australia. I admit when I was 17, I wrote her a fan letter and delivered it to the stage door of Chicago (when she was in the Broadway company). I got to meet her afterward, she was very gracious and sweet. I also got an autographed photo (total dorky fan moment) that I still have.

It's 11:30 pm and I just got home from Day 2 of the Directors Lab. I figure I must post now or else I will fall way behind and I want to make sure I keep up with blogging. I know that if I don't start doing this I will wait until this weekend... which will end up turning into next weekend... and then happen at the end of 3 weeks. I'll be overwhelmed with everything that all I will post is "I attended the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. It was good." or something like that...

Yesterday was orientation. We arrived at 2:00 pm and met in the lobby of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. We took the infamous group picture and proceeded downstairs into the rehearsal room of Lincoln Center for orientation. I overdressed. Part of it was my mother calling me early in the morning with the gentle reminder of "if you look like an ass in that group picture, I will never let you forget it". There are about 65 directors this year from across the world - Denmark, Zimbabwe, Canada, Australia, Germany, Thai Land, Greece and throughout the United States. Most everyone arrived that morning and headed directly from the air port to orientation. Somewhere in the next three weeks we will be addressing international theatre and the role of the director in the various countries of origin.

We were introduced to Anne Cattanneo, lab director and Winnie Lok, lab coordinator and a slew of ASMs and PSMs we'll be working with over the next three weeks. They provide us with a brief oversight of what the lab is about, the guiding principles "Directors run the lab and make their way through the lab... it's driven by ideas... an idea lab as opposed to a career lab. DO and EXPLORE things you don't know. This is NOT a showcase..." We are now part of a large network of directors who have passed through the lab in previous years.

This year's theme is about questioning what makes better theatre - the things that are close to us (ritual, background, experiences etc.) or the things farthest from us?

From my notes:
- LCDL is an opportunity to connect with others
- This lab should question the fundamental assumptions of both the academic and professional theatre worlds
- Most preexisting rules are nonsense
-No one gives you anything - MAKE IT HAPPEN YOURSELF!

We broke up into groups, two of which attended performances at Lincoln Center and mine, that attended a talk with Kate Whoriskey, who touched on a variety of topics including her personal journey in developing "Ruined", her approach to new work, dealing with gender bias and finding your voice as a director. I'm glad that there are a lot of people thinking about these important topics. I will be talking more about this as the week progresses but overall I'm absolutely thrilled with the discussions we're having and themes that we're thinking about (and it's only day 2). I can't wait to see where it's going. These are topics I've been thinking about in my own work and discussions that I never got to have in academia. It's incredibly stimulating.

This morning I took part in an experimental lab session called "The 7 Holy Sacraments", led by one of the lab members. She has been thinking about religious ritual and its place in developing new work. She focuses especially on the 7 Holy Sacraments in Catholicism and by taking the "religiosity" out of them, creates pivotal "life changing" moments that we applied to our own lives and create work around in small groups. My little paragraph doesn't do this workshop justice. I'm excited to see where she will take this, especially since we're returning to it tomorrow. I can certainly see the beginning of a new directing pedagogy come out of something like this. In any case, this workshop made me realize that apparently water has played an important role at every pivotal moment in my life (one of my colleagues pointed this out to me)... I could ramble on more about my personal relationship to water, but I'll save it for another time.

This evening I worked with Andy Paris, one of the original members of the Tectonic Theatre Project and a collaborator in "The Laramie Project". We did "Moment Work", focusing on creating pieces from a starting point other than text. We spent a great deal of time talking a structure/deconstruction/structural analysis and what this means in developing new pieces. Andy discussed his experience working in previous productions with Tectonic and on his new show, "Gold Star Ohio".

I hope to elaborate more on these panels in addition to what they've been forcing me to think about personally and professionally really soon. I can't stress how excited I am for the next few weeks. These few days have been incredibly awe inspiring.

Pictures soon.

Tomorrow I'm part of a group that's presenting a three hour panel on "Social Conscious Theatre". I'm not going to give it away yet, but we've got (what we hope is) an exciting evening of events, discussion points and experiments planned. Full report soon.