Many years ago my T’ai Chi Chuan teacher Jean Kwok made a trip to Hong Kong. On her first morning in the city she walked into a nearby park to practice her form. The large park was filled with many separate groupings of people and individuals moving fluidly through a wide variety of styles of T’ai Chi Chuan. Developed by different families in China over the course of the centuries, there are literally hundreds of distinctly different forms of T’ai Chi. Jean walked around the park observing the variations in form with great interest.

On Facebook and here on the SITI Company blog, SITI has been spotlighting alumni of our many training programs. Today, we have the great pleasure of introducing you to Jessica Burr. Jessica is the Artistic Director of Blessed Unrest, a company committed to producing dynamic, disciplined, and exuberant new works for the stage in New York City and abroad, building original pieces and reconstructing established texts with its diverse ensemble of artists.

Are you successful? 

Do you feel successful? 

What does success even mean to you? 

Do these questions feel familiar to you?

Does it seem like I’m about to try and sell you something?

The question “Am I successful?” is on our minds a lot more than we let on. This is not only because it is a trickier thing to evaluate than we are led to believe, but we tend to think that to ask the question at all is to implicitly answer it in the negative. 

It occurs to me that there is nothing inherently valuable about authenticity. 

I recently attended a screening of City Of Gold; the excellent documentary about Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold. After the movie there was a Q&A with Mr. Gold and Peter Meehan of Lucky Peach. Someone in the audience asked Mr. Gold if he ever traveled to the various countries where the cuisines that he explores in LA originate, in order to calibrate his palate with what would be presumed to be authentic examples of the dishes.

SITI Alum Selena Vela is starting a web-thing and she did an interview with me on it. Here are a couple of excepts:

Theatre is inherently dynamic. That’s why its ephemerality is not a bug. It’s a feature. It’s the essential feature of theater. Because theater is being created in the present moment, it’s able to deal with the moving target that is the mystery of existence. Truth is not static…
see, even that statement is self-contradicting, when you say it in words. It’s one of those ideas that cannot be expressed in language. You have to create something that embodies it.

People sometimes wonder why we are called the SITI Company. What is SITI? 

When we originally came together in 1993, we called ourselves the Saratoga International Theater Institute. And the intention was that we would hold symposiums and panel discussions and talks along with performances. In our first two summers in Saratoga we did conduct these activities, but as time went on we became more and more focused on our performances.

You are free to choose what you want to make of your life.  It’s called free agency or free will, and it’s your birthright.
(Sean Covey)

The moment that Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanatta first encountered David Bowie on the cover of his record album Aladdin Sane at the age of 19, her perspectives and attitude were forever transformed. She said, “It was an image that changed my life. It was the beginning of my artistic birth.” She put the vinyl record onto a record player that sat on the stove of her tiny apartment and began to evolve into the Lady Gaga that we know today.

Dear  friends;

Please allow me to re-post my personal Skidmore summer memory here again. (I posted this in March 2015 on facebook.) I edited a bit this time.

smile

*****
Before Joining SITI company, I participated the summer workshop @Skidmore College in 1995 & 1996. In those days, my English was a mess. I was in a kind of lost status after quitting from Suzuki Company of Toga.

Starting today on the SITI Company blog, every other Friday we’ll be spotlighting an alum of SITI’s many training programs. Today, we have the great pleasure to introduce you to Kim Ima.

Kim has a long history with SITI Company. She first encountered SITI in Toga, Japan, before training with us in New York and in Saratoga Springs. She has performed with us, and now sits on the SITI Company Board of Directors. 

These days, Kim can be found most often on her much lauded Treats Truck. SITI Co-Artistic Director Leon Ingulsrud caught up with her the other day:

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.