Posts Tagged ‘brecht’

If Brecht were alive today he would be twittering about Kanye

Monday, November 16th, 2009

One of the things that interests me about Brecht’s theoretical project is his focus on creating work that resonates strongly with contemporary audiences. The world as he knew it was one firmly rooted in “the scientific age” of modernist utopian possibilities. He saw theater as a tool to open up fracture points in contemporary society in order to make possible a transformation in class consciousness.

He writes in A Short Organum for the Theatre:

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

Brecht’s work, to my reading, has always concerned itself with the extremes of society, the revolutionary consciousness and potential on the one hand and the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces on the other. But as he says in the above quote we must concern ourselves with the contemporary reality. We must use the system as it is, and through an exploitation of its fracture points, transform it into a more perfect world. He makes this second point more explicitly, a little earlier, when he states that “[t]he theatre has to become geared into reality if it is to be in a position to turn out effective representations of reality, and to be allowed to do so.”

Theatre, for Brecht, was to be an Event, in the Zizekian sense, an authentic experience which fundamentally alters the experience of events not only after its occurrence but alters the experience of the past as well. The theatrical Event was to be of such a magnitude that one’s whole orientation to the social experience would be fundamentally and irrevocably altered.

So what does this have to do with tweeting about Kanye West?

What I was thinking about specifically was the extreme of contemporary hip hop embodied in the radical political critique espoused by groups like Dead Prez or BDP (KRS-One) on the one hand and such acts as Kanye and Fergie on the other. Bling bling capitalism juxtaposed against social revolutionaries mediated through contemporary performative/artistic experience. How does Kanye’s Golddigger intersect with KRS-One’s Love is gonna get cha(Material Love)? But of more interest is the question: how does the technology through which these songs are experienced interact with the audience?

What twitter does, in a similar way to other social media like blogs, facebook, myspace and so forth, is to blur the distinction between life, audience, and performance. When surveillance is total, and everyone is on camera, then everyone is an actor. So then we have the consumption of culture as a performative act. We tweet about the song we are currently listening to and fold the performance of the song into the performance of subjectivity on-line in a way that presents it immediately as commodity and reifies the subjective performance.

This is the world we are in. The “scientific age” has been passed by for the “information age” and we are no longer gears in the machine but statuses in the social group blog. So the audience/actor takes the stage and incorporates cultural commodities into the performative feedback loop. The subjective experience of identity shifts along the audience/actor continuum and becomes complicated as that experience gets mediated through various technologies. Is a retweet performative? Has the subjective experience then become another cultural object to be consumed or does it still contain the potential inherent in performance? Has the subject/object dichotomy been pulled out of the either/or world and brought into the light of both/and?

Brecht makes it clear that “[n]ot everything depends on the actor, even though nothing may be done without taking him into account. The ‘story’ is set out, brought forward and shown by the theatre as a whole.” I would argue that this extends to contemporary performative technologies.

While Brecht set out in his day to reconceive Theatre and Opera into a medium appropriate for his contemporary world I could easily imagine him shifting the very stage from the physical world to the digital world. Perhaps his performances would only appear in Second Life or as episodic narrative released via twitter.

Despite all this conjecture, the question still remains: how might these technologies be utilized to exploit fracture points in contemporary culture in order to unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses? Or to look at it a different way: is the very search for those points of fracture, and the desire for social revolution, an idea tied up with the modernist notions of a bygone era? Have the differences been so radically folded into one another that we no longer have such dichotomous existence but rather the uneasy experience of both/and?

I certainly don’t know the answers to those questions but I would love you to retweet this piece if you enjoyed it.

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Transformative Performance

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Last week I pulled on some low hanging fruit to make an argument about live performance and social change. While there has been some interesting dialog about that, the focus has largely been on the example used, Burning Man, rather than the larger question I was interested in: how can art, and performance in particular, serve as a vehicle for social change? That line of questioning largely got lost. It is worth our effort now to tease that idea out of the shadows and bring it center stage into the spotlight for closer exploration.

Let us review last week’s post:

We, the makers of the work, create this space and this experience for our audience and ourselves. But what happens next? What guarantee, if any, do we have that the ideas and transformations from within the work will in any way transition out to the real world and effect true social change?

While it is certainly true that the cause and effect relationship between art and action is rarely if ever clear and direct, it is significant to explore our motives for creating the art in the first place. If one is merely interested in creating diversions from daily life, and that is certainly the intent of many people, then we can stop the questioning now. If we are interested in works that spark the imagination, engage thinking and potentially transform, we must not only question our work and our motives, but seek to find ways of further enhancing the experience beyond the confines of the performance venue.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone of the performance creates a resonant chamber wherein new and potentially revolutionary ideas germinate. The performance itself must be transplanted into the fertile soil of society to truly take root. Such performances are rare, but possible.

Let us look at a recent example of a performance moving its ideas into the larger social world, How Theatre Failed America, by monologist Mike Daisey. His performed piece was accompanied by an essay along similar themes titled The Empty Spaces. The thrust of the work is how the focus in mainstream American theater has shifted from the work and the artists who create that work to the institutions themselves and the buildings that house those institutions. While I was unable to see the actual work performed, due to logistical circumstances beyond my control, I did read about the fallout around the internet including Mike’s blog wherein he engaged with several artistic directors and theater makers across the country in email, essay and blog comments. The resultant conversation, while it may not have effected immediate change, certainly shifted the dialogue around artist salaries and related topics.

An older example worth exploring is Rites of Spring by Stravinsky and Nijinsky. That work was so extreme, relative to what the status quo music and dance worlds could understand, that it quite literally sparked a riot in the audience. The revolutionary force of the performance was such that the audience could do nothing but react through physical violence.

I am not arguing that art must shock and devolve into riots in order to be effective. I am saying that true art must effect some kind of change if not outright transformation in the viewer. Simply reinforcing the values and opinions of the audience is not the role of art, particularly performance.

I hold performance up to such a high standard because of the liveness of it. There is a direct energetic channel created between viewer and performer that, unlike the plastic arts, is not mediated by materials but rather exists directly in the experience of the work. Because performance happens over time, unlike a painting or sculpture which happens instantaneously, the performer and audience are undertaking a journey together. Thus an idea or emotion is presented, expanded upon, negated, and otherwise radically transformed over the course of the journey.

This thinking has moved us deeper into the subject of our inquiry, but has not solved the fundamental problem at its core. The question remains how artists interested in effecting social change through their work might do so. We will continue to explore this idea as we move deeper into the possibilities inherent in performance.

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Bear with me, I just woke up and now I have to go to rehearsal

Friday, October 27th, 2006

So I figured I would try that whole conversational blogger thing out, as it seems to be popular with the kids these days. Also I just woke up from a nap, so please bear with me.

I have been thinking about conceptual art recently and for the most part I don’t like it. “But Lucas, you are such a conceptual, intellectual type, why on earth would you not like conceptual art?” Well, because I love art. And I love conceptual thinking. But I find a lot of conceptual art misses the art and lies about the concept.

What the hell does that mean?

Actually I am not so sure but it feels right. And again, I just woke up from a nap.

Let us take one of my favorite conceptual works of art. Erasing De Kooning. I have never seen this work of art. I don’t need to. It actually is conceptual art. The idea, and execution thereof, is the art. The object, ultimately, bears no relation to the work of art. It is after all, a blank piece of paper. My next favorite is 4’33”. But again, the ‘work’ exists only in the past, in that first moment it was performed. After that the art died and only the concept remained.

Concepts are dead. There is nothing wrong with death. It can be quite beautiful. But unlike art, it is not alive. Most conceptual art hits high marks for concept but falls dead on the art. At that point I am bored.

In an essay in Theatre of Essence titled ‘After Grotowski: The end of the impossible Theatre’ Jan Kott describes a happening in which a truly transformative social-sexual event takes place and then a later run of that same piece, where the audience, knowing all the cues, is prepared for a huge orgy and is in no way challenged. There is a fundamental difference between those two events, even though they might follow the exact same script.

I love reading philosophy. Yet it is interesting that that works like Being and Time are lumped together with general criticism as both being Philosophy. One would never, I hope, confuse art with art criticism. Yet when one delves into conceptual art the lines begin to blur. Done well this can be interesting, but more often than not I simply end up bored. And I do not think anything interesting has been added to the conversation.

In California I was involved with a group that threw very high concept dance events in San Francisco. While the event itself was highly conceptual in nature, the music fucking rocked out. There was no esoteric cerebral concept. It was just some bangin’ Breaks.

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Afterwards there would often be discussion and criticism of both the concept and the music, but they were two separate conversations. Why? Because they are two separate things. To try and conflate the two misses the entire point.

It was conceptual art, with a sense of fun. A sense of play. Ideas and concepts, rarely, have that play. I like plays. I like having fun. Working on shows I have little interest in working with people who have no sense of fun. People who take themselves so fucking seriously they can not laugh at their own absurdity from time to time. One can do serious work and still have the process be fun.

I’m about as absurd as they get. I’m also tend to be high on the conceptual list as well. In the theatre I don’t care about the concept. I care about staying true to the moment and having fun. The conceptual work is great as a foundation. It is a fun intellectual exercise and as a way of using all those fiddy cent SAT words. But when I am working it is not with the rational linguistic part of my brain that I work. It is the visual and temporal processing centers.

This was true of Brecht, one of the biggest theory geeks ever to grace the theatre. Theory has its place outside the rehearsal. Inside the rehearsal, theory is deadly. The only way to truly engage a work of art on the conceptual and theoretical level is through another work of art. To engage it on the level of theory and criticism is either a book report, or it engages the concept behind the work, and not the work itself.

As Peter Brook says in the Empty Space

To make matters worse there is always a deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity and even a lack of entertainment, such as the scholar who emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself, whilst reciting his favorite lines under his breath. In his heart he sincerely wants a theatre that is nobler-than-life and he confuses a sort of intellectual satisfaction with the true experience for which he craves. Unfortunately, he lends the weight of his authority to dullness and so the Deadly Theatre goes on its way.

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intellectualism and aesthetics

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

I saw Mother Courage last night and must say it was quite a wonderful show. The production style lay firmly in a contemporary American style of design and it served the text quite well. By locating the visual language within a modern musical theater world, the emotion and ideas behind the text come through quite strongly. It took me a while to get used to the performance style, but once I did I had a wonderful time.

A friend complained that the staging seemed to be built around a traditional proscenium stage rather than the near three quarter round of the Delacourt. I took the staging to be a “Brechtian” choice and just rolled along with it. Either way I am not sure how much, if at all, it detracts from the experience.

There is a current of theatrical production that tends to over-intellectualize the work. So much effort goes into researching the text, that the play often gets largely ignored. Moss Hart, in Act One, makes the point that sometimes it is better for a writer to approach a subject with no more knowledge than what the average theater goer comes into the play with. In so going, the text can meet the audience at their level, thereby creating a single adventure for the two to go off on. This is a highly effective means of avoiding the deadly trap of didacticism.

By making Mother Courage conform to the visual language of the contemporary Broadway musical, it allowed an otherwise difficult text to be engaged with directly. It sidestepped that deadly didacticism that a lot of “Brechtian” productions of his plays fall into.

Research is a wonderful thing. And I certainly love the various opportunities that different plays provide for researching new and different avenues of thought and inquiry. However, it must be remembered that we are not writing essays. Rather we are constructing a work to entertain an audience. Brecht understands this, which is why there is such a wonderful play between the idea and the emotion and the humor in all of his works.

Once in the theatre, the research must be abandoned. This does not mean to ignore it, but rather to trust that you have done your work and now the focus must shift to a more formal aesthetics. The questions should not be does this or that conform to the research. But rather does this or that look and sound right in the context of this performative moment. The “thinking” such as it is becomes a visual and aural thinking. It is not an intellectual thing at all. In fact, intellectualism can and often does destroy an otherwise beautiful piece of theatre.

The mind is always removed from the immediate world. The mind can only react after it has taken in information and fully processed it. The heart can act directly. It is here, or perhaps the [heartmind], that one must operate in. It is that place of direct action where one does not “think” but rather one acts. That action creates beauty. Allowing the play to be the play and not some intellectualized idea of a text is a difficult thing to do because we love our minds. But our minds often get in the way of our direct action. Preparation certainly can and should exist in an intellectual space, but the direct work itself is a whole different animal.

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interruption science and aesthetic exploration

Monday, August 14th, 2006

It would make sense that the majority of the results for Interruption Science would lead to things like books and blogs on how to organize your life. Meet the Life Hackers addresses the idea of interruption in the workplace. Sure there are “good” and “bad” interruptions, and when the goal is getting work done, one must try and maximize the efficiency of the interruptions one faces in daily life. But this is not all there is.

When brought into the realm of aesthetics, the role of the interruption becomes something different entirely. Watching a play we do not want distraction. The cellphone going off is one of the worst things that can happen, especially in a rather quiet dramatic moment. We want to get lost in the performance, not reminded of the office. Of course, the role of the interruption has existed in theatrical theory for quite some time. Stage illusion can be as deadly and calcifying as anything else. But so too can an overly “Brechtian” performance.

One of the main currents in Brecht’s Short Organum is the necessity of creating a theatre that speaks to a contemporary audience. All the trappings that we have come to see as “Brechtian” are due to the particular historical context in which he found himself, rather than inherent to the theory. What is inherent is a work that speaks directly to a contemporary audience, through the visual language we know as members of society.

Theatre as multitasking.

There are times when sensory overload can create a kind of deep focus that is otherwise unattainable. I went to a poetry event at St. Mark’s about five years ago that had an activity which did just this. A participant would sit down at a desk in front of a typewriter while three radios blasted and several people would pick up various books and read passages from them. Plus there was the more distant noise of the crowd at the event as well as flashing lights, etc. etc. What I found when I sat down was at first total distraction and could not type a letter. But soon everything congealed as a kind of stream of consciousness automatism and I just wrote until I reached the end of the page. I hit an amazing level of concentration during that writing. The only time I have ever repeated that kind of concentration is sitting at a tech table during a run through for a show.

Layers of information create layers of meaning as well as degrees of distraction. Crafting these experiences is a delicate balance. What is a good interruption?

House of Lucky has a moment at the end of the first half where an incredibly drunk man collapses to the floor. When I lit this in 2001 there was a very slow light cue that faded to a blackout. Before the lights ever actually reached a total blackout they blasted back to a full brightness as our hero awakes with a severe headache. Interruption as focus.

Being a freelance lighting designer is a job that must manage interruptions. Discussions about the holocaust must shift on a dime to talking about a zombie musical. These are interruptions of the kind that everyone must deal with to greater or lesser degrees. This is a necessary element of modern life. Incorporating them into the realm of the aesthetic and deriving from them some kind of significance is a line of inquiry that has much room for exploration.

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inter/ruption

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

I had been thinking through a post for a while and was on my way to write it when, as George put it, ‘The Great Provocation Debate of 2006 ‘ erupted. In many ways this was perfect as it totally derailed my train of thought that I had been building upon for weeks. But it also proves my point more exactly than anything I could write.

I have been interested for some time now in the notion of narrative interruptions. What I mean by this is those moments where a narrative is going along and some thing or some event completely alters the course of those events. Half the time these are mere blips, like the “cigarette burn” that Tyler Durden points out. And everything just keeps on going. My interest in interruptions grew out of my readings of John Cage and his explorations into indeterminacy. What intrigued me about the notion of chance, was how it could create a situation where unexpected things would come into confrontation with one another. A story would begin and then something would, unexpectedly break into that story and change it. Like a sudden thunderstorm, they only really impact during their existence, and are soon forgotten.

But there are other, more significant kinds of interruptions.

I moved to New York City from Berkeley in late August 2001. Less than two weeks after moving here, the entire landscape of American politics had shifted. A political system that had been limping without purpose after the cold war found a new enemy, and began to engage that threat with the fullest of rhetorical devices. I remember sitting in a teachers living room, displaced from my own downtown apartment, watching Bush’s speech that night and commenting, “This is the beginning of Fascism in America.”

This was no mere thunder storm.

The interruption exists in all great works of art. To one degree or another. Hamlet, like The Orestia is interrupted almost before the narrative begins with the death of a king. Ajax with Madness. Romeo and Juliet with the death of Mercutio.

Interruptions can exist in a larger sense as well, such as the aesthetic interruption caused by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Or Duchamp’s Fountain. In theatre one such example would be Brecht, Weill and Neher at the Baden Baden Festival presenting Mahagonny.

Interruptions are significant because they point out our complacency. They show us where we have been calmly accepting of something that is perhaps much more significant or dangerous than we had previously imagined. Like the passive acceptance of a bully or a fascist. Interruptions are powerful because they exist, in a way, outside of linear time. By pointing out our complacency or blind assumptions, they recontextualize the past and thus change it as much as the future.

My friend Jeff is a painter. He has tried various experiments involving the destruction of his paintings. So he can focus on the work of art rather than the fabrication of cultural objects. This is the interruption.

It was a blue sky day.

That is what made it so shocking. A beautiful, soft fall day. With a slight wind and crystal clear skies. So beautiful.

I remember one night, it was winter a month or so later. A thick mist hung in the air, it was late night and dark. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a spark and as I turned to look a huge downpour of blue sparks few out of a steel I-Beam that still sat in a dusty hole in the ground just off Broadway in lower Manhattan. The construction crew, working late at night to dismantle what was left of these twisted steel arms. Clearing away the weeds, so something new could grow in its place. Beautiful.

In pop culture news, the new song on my MySpace is fantastic. Go listen.

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Brecht would be proud

Monday, July 17th, 2006

I saw the Rapid Response Team perform last night. It was quite excellent. Unashamed political art. A rollicking good time. Having a waitress come through taking drink orders sure helped keep the crowd lively. The laughter was almost continuous. Much of Eastern Blogistan was in the house; George, Dan, James, and of course Isaac.

RRT was a great way to end the day. Yesterday felt quite long. I had two meetings for two separate shows. One, ‘a play with music’ for the NY Fringe Festival, called The Unlucky Man with the Yellow Cap and the other a workshop for a production of Ajax that will eventually be presented in Rumania in 2007. Every play that I have coming up deals with war, torture or both. While it may be sad for the state of the world, it is encouraging for the state of the Arts. All we need now are politicians who can be more than mere mouthpieces for Trans-Global Corporations.

In other news, the premier of the making-of documentary about the Medea I lit last August is being screened next month. I will be unable to attend as the company is not providing plane fare to San Juan for the event. If any of you will be in Puerto Rico in mid-August, it should be fun.

Also, my sister is funny:

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Risk and Failure

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

There is an element of risk in any work of art. There is the simple risk of not knowing if it will get finished, and then there is the more complex risk, of meaning. Are you saying what you want to say? But deeper than that, are you forcing yourself to look beyond your previously determined limitations? Working in a medium like writing this kind of concern becomes clear, in lighting it is much more oblique. Still, we are concerned in the first degree with language and its derivative, meaning. Verbal and oral language on the one hand and visual language on the other.

In a very real sense I do not feel there is any point in doing art if one is unconcerned with risk taking. One can make pretty things by following a formula. Hell, Martha Stewart made an entire career out of the attractiveness of formulaic aesthetics. But this is not art. Art is about risk, it is about danger. Art is about sacrificing that which comes easiest to you and looking for a new path upon which to forge ahead. Art is about failure.

The best art, and yes I am making sweeping generalizations here, always fails. It fails because it does not conform to the accepted aesthetic criteria of its time. It fails because the standards by which it is judged can not encompass it. It can be neither measured nor quantified. It stands apart from the judges, alone and solitary.

But it does something else too. Something positive. Its very reason for failure, its iconoclastic nature, causes it to transform the environment around it. It molds and shapes the world around it until that world learns the new tools by which to measure the work. This is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This is Brecht, Weill and Neher presenting Mahagonny at the Baden Baden Festival and getting booed off the stage. This is creating a work so powerful that it alters the way we look at the world.

Very few works will have the kind of effect that these two have had, and not all need to. What is important is the failure. The risk that what is being made may not turn out well. It may not appeal to the mass audience. Yet it still must be done. Without that risk we accept the status quo. Without standing on that ledge and staring into the void we are accepting this world and all that it stands for at face value without asking “what more?”

Guernica did not end war and The Seven Deadly Sins did not end Capitalistic exploitation. I am not sure any work of art can. That is not the role of art in society. Art in general and theatre in particular operates in a very powerful way as a kind of magnifying glass on society and self. It examines closely one or two specific areas of concern and forces us to look at those places within ourselves. This is one area where the live-ness of theatre is unparalleled. We can not escape the fact that this is a person before us. It is not an image or a likeness or a rendering. It is a person. A living breathing thing. It looks like us and speaks like us. Could it be . . .

It is not enough to look at where we are. It is not enough to explore the status quo. And in a way this is why a lot of overtly political art fails(in a bad way) for me. It leaves no room for further exploration. There is no question. Didacticism is rarely interesting. Brecht is not interesting because he proved that Capitalism is bad. He is interesting because in each of his works there is a question. It is not a question that begs an answer so much as a question that simply begs to be asked. Every time we approach a text for production we are not looking to answer anything definitively, rather we are looking to reopen the discussion.

Asking questions is a risk. There is an inherent danger in the act of asking a question because society does not like them. Trotsky argued for perpetual revolution because he knew that any socio-political system that remains static for too long will feel the calcifying tendencies of authoritarianism. It happened in Russia and Cuba almost immediately. It is occurring in the United States right now. Fewer and fewer questions are being asked. Statements are being disguised as questions to maintain the illusion, but that freedom of asking has already gone away. Though not quite completely. There are still cracks in the armor. And this is what we can do as artists. Ask those questions that need be asked and perhaps we might get some light through those cracks. Perhaps we will find the counter force to totalitarianism and control. Perhaps we will risk everything and fail gloriously.

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Practical Praxis

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

Every age it seems must reinvent the wheel. In art, at least, I think this is a necessary thing. The same old questions must be asked, such that new answers can be arrived at. Brecht, in A Short Organum for the Theatre, searches for a theatre that is relevant to young people of his time. The truths he found do not apply to us. We live in a different age. Yet we must ask the same questions and perhaps even redo the same experiments. Because art is not science. It is not fixed. The same question will result in different answers depending upon when and who is asked. And they are all true. Art differs from most activities in that it is about the asking of questions rather than the seeking of answers. Any answer that art gives is really just a question waiting to be asked.

This distinction between the asking of questions and the seeking of answers is another form of that old dichotomy of Theory and Practice. Answers become reified as theories and are held up by the academy as inviolate. Questioning on the other hand, is a way of being in the world. A mode of existence. Matt Freeman notes a controversy of sorts in the comments to this post between Joshua James and Scott Walters that in many ways centers around these very issues. To the reasoned theories of academia, ‘Finish the Fucker’ must appear reductive and intellectually weak. The truth is far from that.

The Theatre world is filled with theories. Writers and directors and designers and producers and audiences and even academics all have theories about what makes good theatre. But this kind of theorizing is not scientific theory. It is a kind of reverse engineered attempt at understanding the miracle of creation. That process, indeed practice, of making choices, consciously and unconsciously, that results in a work of beauty. And indeed it is a work. We may call it a play, and even have fun on occasion, but theatre is a full time job. Creativity is not easy. Creativity on a deadline is brutal. FTF might be a useful way of working for some artists. It is necessary in a theatre production. One does not have the luxury of inspiration. Inspiration often comes from opening night being three days away.

My first job out of Graduate School was as the Lighting Assistant for the San Francisco Opera. I had three years of intense theorizing within the safe haven of academia. I could try out ideas and experiment and it was wonderful. The focus was on a kind of purity of craft and aesthetics. Form derived from theories. Then there was the opera. And it was a total wake up call. Every formal theory I had internalized was put to the test. A lot of it did not work. Many things I was told to never do were brilliant practical solutions to problems. Zay talks about tactic switching, and indeed I needed to learn or go under.

Joshua James, in a different context, makes the point quite well:

[S]ome things cannot be given or lent out, they must be earned. There are just some things I could tell ya but it wouldn’t necessarily do you any good.

What does that mean? Well, it’s like in kickboxing, one of the passions I share with Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything…. You can take classes on kickboxing, you can learn kickboxing combinations and techniques up the wazoo, but until you get kicked in the face, it’s all just theory.

School is fabulous and I would not trade the training I got for anything, but in the end it is just theory. Getting kicked in the head, that is practice. Every creative person can and must find their own path. The technique that gives form to vision is a personal and private practice one must construct for oneself. Theories are put forth in schools but praxis determines their usefulness. If it works, use it. And if it is not useful discard it. Theory is good, but it is only a small part of creating work. And in theory lies the danger of trapping us in anachronistic modes of thinking.

I once made the point that what makes you good at something is doing it. You can be taught rules and ‘craft’ and so forth, but even still you must go out and reinvent the wheel. Like Grotowski who went into his laboratory and asked the same questions every theatre artist asks and came out with his own answers. This is not science. There are no absolute answers. With enough work we can find our personal truths, but never an answer. And the truth comes from within not without. Even if your experiments and failures and success leads to the same conclusions you were taught, you must do them, you must question the rules. For without questioning the rules, they become hollow formulaic dogma. Some might consider this ‘Non-Thinking’ but in fact it is the most powerful and forceful kind of thinking possible. It is action. It is praxis. It is a practice.

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