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Posts Tagged ‘peace’
War is Over
Saturday, December 30th, 2006When the star of the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon is asked by a reporter what he thinks Nixon should do to end the Vietnam War, Lennon stares incredulously into the camera. “He should declare peace.” As if this was the most obvious solution in the world.
Drums are the Tongues of the Sacred
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006I am probably too tired to be writing at the moment, but I don’t have rehearsal until the afternoon tomorrow, so I think I can stand to be up for a few more minutes. We had our first tech rehearsal for Queen Coziah today. It went fairly well. We have had a variety of technical set backs that caused us to not get the lighting system operational until a few minutes into the rehearsal so there was a lot of lost prep time. But in the end it happened and we got to work.
The lighting for this piece is very simple. The venue demands it. There are very few dimmers, so control of the lighting is rather limited. Fortunately the play is, for the most part, rather straight forward. It takes place in the front yard of a woman’s house as she recounts the story of the non-violent workers rebellion she led and won. This is not a story well known in this country. I was totally unfamiliar with it prior to beginning my work on this project, but Queen Coziah is a historical figure whose non-violent protests proceeded those of the better known Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
The show is a musical. A very dance heavy musical. The band is composed of a number of drummers, flute, and guitar. Two of the musicians are priests, one a Voodoo Priest, the other a Santeria Priest. While there is an incantation to various Lwa during the play, it is by an actor and not one of the priests. Having such strong personalities can certainly make for an intense experience.
Writing light cues this evening I fell into a wonderful trance precipitated by the music. Relaxing into my seat and letting the music guide my cueing was a wonderfully freeing experience. It reminded me of years ago when I would light all night dance parties in an Episcopal Church. Just letting the rhythms of the dance take over and guide the light where it wants to be. You, as designer, become more a vessel than an agent of action. It is more meditative than active.
The play only performs two days, at FIT, this Wednesday and Thursday and our rehearsal time is limited. I think we will get some good work done on the piece, but it will not be as polished as I would like. However, the people involved area lot of fun and do some good work.
My thesis at NYU was a design for Wole Soyinka’s adaptation of The Bacchae. It is interesting how much of the research I did for that is coming back to me. I have a recreational interest in Comparative Religions and looking at the parallels between the Yoruba gods and their American analogues is quite fascinating to me. So much of it is a direct transplantation from one soil to another. Many of the names are similar if not the same. The use of a highly structured color symbolism is also there.
The lighting at times engages these aspects and at times pulls against them. I think that is the best way. I have found this to be a common current in a lot of work I have done recently. Exploring harmony and counterpoint with the dramatic action in relationship to a lighting environment that at once exists wholly inside that dramatic action and is simultaneously outside it.
I used to have an obsessive need to find the exact structural mirror to the action in the lighting. The lighting had to follow the pace of the drama minute to minute, second to second. After that I spent quite some time exploring chance operations and random events. Both of these felt to me to fall short of the mark. Light is nothing so rigid as to be all one or the other. I find it to resist rigid categorizations and often falls through the cracks in any external system one attempts to erect around it.
Creating Dynamic Peace
Friday, May 19th, 2006Momus makes an interesting point about the relationship between art and politics. Using the metaphor of textures and talking of an anti-war noise band he disagrees with the efficacy of their work in saying “I disagree with this. Two quotes here: Susan Sontag said that rock music was “aggressive normality”, a loud noise on behalf of the status quo. And Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world”. (Not “angrily demand it from your representatives”, note: be it.)”
This is an important point for both activists and politically minded artists. At a certain level it is simply a matter of contrast.
Scenario 1:
Person A yells.
Person B yells back.
Outcome:
No difference.
Scenario 2:
Person A Yells.
Person B replies quietly deliberately and forcefully
Outcome:
Person A looks like a bafoon.
This is a simple principal in acting. If everyone yells we lose the drama. If there is variation, the texture in the writing comes out more strongly. It is a good and solid technique. It is also a good way to live life. To get ‘angry’ and flustered and start yelling is to already lose. You are no longer in control. AND you are no longer peaceful.
The same thing is true of fear. If you allow yourself to be consumed by fear you can not be brave, you can only endure. If nothing else this is simply exhausting. But the expenditure of willpower to overcome the fear and the anger and live with peace and stability is ultimately something that can feed your soul much stronger than nearly anything else. It is not about ignoring emotions and being cold. It is being in full touch with your emotions and knowing that like thoughts they are part of the illusion. The necessary illusion of human existence.
Yesterday I had been surfing the internet looking for audio clips of speeches by Che Guevara. I found one and while I was waiting for Quicktime to load the rather large file I pressed play on my iTunes. A Tibetan prayer chant came on and as I went back to work listening to the chant I almost totally forgot about the audio clip I had set for download. Several minutes later the forceful and powerful voice of Che mixed into the prayer for peace. A whole amazing new layer to both emerged from the juxtaposition of the two. An accidental Fugue.
A soft melodic prayer for peace was underscoring a UN speech about how ‘Peaceful Co-Existence’ can not just be between the superpowers. But rather, for peaceful co-existence to be an authentic value it must extend to all peoples of the world. And yes I understand that these words of his exist within the same man who was more than willing to execute any opposition to the Cuban Revolution. And perhaps that is the point. Perhaps his inability to find peaceful co-existance on the micro level contributed to a world where it was not possible on the macro level.
Be the change you want to see in the world
When you live with a set of values deeply rooted in your Self, no matter what language you use or styles you employ, those values will come forth. The radical intellectualism of Beckett for example, holds within it some of the most tender and human emotions. I found the style of the film Derrida rather dull and self conscious. However, a number of the interviews were absolutely fascinating. At one point he is sitting with his wife, in the kitchen I believe, and is asked about why he never writes about love. He gives a wry smile to his wife and says something to the effect of ‘everything I write is about love.’
When you open yourself up to authentic experience there is no part of You that is left out. When you create from a place of total openness and ‘self’-less-ness, the whole of your non-ego Self is allowed to come forth and aid in the creation. Just as a play could not happen without the director, actors, designers, stage managers, riggers, carpenters, PR department, janitors etc. so too is it impossible for an action to happen without the entirety of experience behind it.
So when you create or when you simply act in the world, how you act is as important as what you do. Are you coming from a place of violence and control? Or rather are you acting from a place of calm and peace. Are you the still point around which the chaos of life whirls or an aggressive agent forcing change on an already tumultuous Earth? Perhpas you understand that these dichotomies do not really exist and are nothing more than linguistic constructs.
Be the change you want to see and you will see the world changed.
We must approach creativity as a collaborative process of mutual exploration. There is no end goal, no ideas of progress or success or failure. There is only motion, interaction, curiosity and play. The idea is not to “change the world” ; the world is in a constant state of change. The idea is to direct this change in a way that allows human beings to recognize the reality of their freedom, creativity, and collaboration in the whole process.
