Last Saturday I did a meditation workshop that I am still feeling the effects of very powerfully. Not all the time mind you, but little pauses and moments of clarity or peace crop up at unexpected times. Stillness in the eye of the storm. I feel very much right now that I am existing in that eye. The storm all around me.
This year, 2006 has been quite busy so far. I have lit an Opera, an Off-Broadway Show, an Off-Off Showcase, and a Directing Thesis at Columbia. Two dance showcases, a ballet and a short modern dance work. I assisted on an Opera in Chicago and a theatre/performance piece in New Jersey. It feels like a lot. The month of May is thankfully a month of calm. I have meetings and research, but also a little time to just catch up with myself and see where I am.
This is where the meditation workshop has been really helpful. The thing with freelancing is that you never truly stop working. There are gaps in tech times and drafting, but you never stop working. A little downtime means catching up on all the things you do not have time for when you are running full steam ahead. Cleaning up and organizing my studio is still largely left undone. But there is time yet. Organizing my computer has been a good effort. I am still waiting for software to tag images on my harddrive with the simplicity of flickr. I have a bunch of pictures en route from old shows that should be a nice addition to my portfolio. A lot of dance pictures. This is good since most of my dance photos are still from grad school. They are fine pictures, but I would like more of my professional work on the site.
I have not written any poetry for some time now. I am fine with this. I have still been writing, which is a wonderful change from my other work, but no poetry. I think the reason I am not saddened by this is that I am finally getting my theatre work where I want it in regards to the poetic lyricism of light. I feel that I have something very specific I am trying to do with light, that is so densely abstract I can not put it into words. My recent work has gotten much closer to the ideal that I see myself landing in. At least for the near future, as all creation evolves.
My last play really got into the substance of what I have been working on recently. For lack of a better term I will call this ‘Synthetic Experiential Environments.’ What I mean by this is the synthetic abstraction of the intersection of objective reality and subjective experience. We are beings who act in the world. Our actions impact our Being just as our Being-in-the-world impacts our Being. This inner and outer world must come to some sort of a agreement on reality. That is experience. After all an environment can never be wholly objectively observed, since we observe it through our subjective experience. So there must be a mediation between objective reality and subjective experience. Add to this the interaction with other beings and their synthetic reality and we have a dynamic process of human social interaction. These synthetic experiences all exist within some physical context. A location. An environment.
Cupid and Psyche was a play about archetypes. And a comedy. As a result my work creating Synthetic Experiential Environments was more on the broad brushstroke end of things. Big, bold, clean ideas. One clearly delineated from the other. This is in contrast to Haiku Geisha that dealt more with the interweaving of these environments. That show too was also a bit more of an experiment with this kind of visual thinking and in many ways helped to work out the ideas that I can now put more clearly into practice.
But then there are the insights from my meditation workshop. These include a radical realization of the organic nature of existence. Everything, from organic life to experience to cultural production to individual artistic journeys all follow an organic model of birth, growth and death. Nothing truly dies, it simply decomposes and becomes something else. The universe just keeps moving on. And from the calm, we reenter the storm.
Tags: art, evolution, meditation, plays, style, theatre, theory
