For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
(Elie Wiesel)

Poet and activist Maya Angelou wrote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” In small quotidian affairs as well as in the context of large world events, bearing witness to the suffering of others matters tremendously. The fact of being seen with empathy, especially in light of persecution or distress, provides the event an objective meaning. Bearing witness makes it real.

SITI Company has launched SITI Work/Space!

What does that mean?

23 years into our life as a theater ensemble SITI Company has begun working in a new way. I have been trying to think of how to describe this new way of working, and perhaps the best way to describe it is to say that we are being who we have always been. We are coming together and activating our interests. We are making the work that we want to.

Composer, music theorist, writer and influential artist John Cage, known for his delight in the unplanned and the unexpected, nevertheless recognized the necessity for an artist’s rigorous preparation and training. “Energy at its highest level,” he said, “energy that can be expressed by the movement of the human body, will not burst forth unless the dancers have had the courage to train themselves with extreme meticulousness.” 

You need something to open up a new door
To show you something you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more.
(Bob Dylan, from Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie)

“If two roads open up before you, always take the most difficult one.  Because you know you can travel the easy one.” (Raymond Belle – Parkour Traceur)

As a teenager I was deeply enamored with French impressionist paintings. The canvases, even in reproduction, lit up my heart and fired my imagination and I wanted to live my life as if in an impressionist painting.  The first time I visited Paris, at the age of fifteen, my high school summer program organized a visit to the Louvre, and for me even better, the adjacent Musée du Jeu de Paume.  

As the SCOT company clears away the debris of what was probably their most ambitious festival ever, they nurse injuries, sweep through guest rooms to clear out flip flops, broken umbrellas, half empty bags of coffee, “gifted” packages of nuts and cookies, and little surprises left by those of us who had to return to our own country. Simultaneously the SCOT company launches plans for new rehearsals and tours as they settle in for a long winter.

Most of us are regularly plagued by doubt, overwhelmed by the impossible odds against us, discouraged by lack of support and dragged down by physical and emotional hardships.  And yet, despite this, why is it that some people can regularly rise above such difficulties and make more headway in their creative work than others?  Is there a way to calibrate and encourage a balance of energies and forces in one’s daily life to optimize the ability to renew and flourish?  What is the ratio or balance required to maintain creative flow in sufficient doses in daily life?

Toga 2015 #2

This is by now out of date, but I thought I’d just post it for those interested.  It doesn’t accomplish what I’d hoped, and doesn’t  have a central idea, but maybe works as a kind of reflection from the heat of the moment.  I’ll try to write something as the festival finishes and the master class continues ….

Toga August 2015

Chicago theater director Damon Kiely is about to publish a book entitled “How to Read a Play” with Routledge Press and he asked me to write the forward.   Inspired by the title of his book and the thoughtfulness of Damon’s manuscript, I wrote the following:

I love reading and yet I am usually anxious at the prospect of reading a play. I tend to put off opening a script for as long as I can because it requires such different tools from me than reading a novel, a poem, an essay or a biography. Plays are not intended to be read in solitude and plays ask for an inordinate investment of my patience and imagination.  Essentially a novel, a poem, an essay or a biography embodies the words contained within its covers and is brought to life by the reader’s imagination, but a play, also within its covers, ultimately exists to point at something else and it requires a team of diverse talents to animate it successfully.