It’s 4:00 am, and I’m up in the loft listening to the rain and the ghost furnace. The house has a hydronic heating system, but the furnace / boiler is toast and needs to be replaced. The wood stove is providing backup heat, though there’s not much need on this balmy October morning. The only other infrastructure in the house is the well pump. So what’s that furnace noise I notice occasionally? It’s a very subtle rushing rumble, just like my boiler used to make when it worked. Now the noise has kicked off, as if the boiler has finished it’s cycle. There is a history of paranormal happenings here, but who ever heard of a ghost furnace? My life is just weird. Wait… I guess it’s the fridge, never mind. Guess I won’t be needing Mark Boccuzzi after all.
Last night I was at the second iteration of a homegrown dance performance. I was looking forward to a more polished version of the first iteration, but instead it was just… different. Some good ideas were thrown out, a bit of awkward material repeated and lots of new flourishes added. Working up a detailed critique might be a worthy exercise from a directorial perspective. It could also be an atonement – I wasn’t a very good audience member. The on-stage action seemed almost incidental, so distracted was I by the show inside my own head.
Front row center, awash in epiphanies. I want to develop as a director, how does that work? What’s the course plan?
There’s good and then there’s brilliant. What’s the diff? The ability to recognize an asset and the commitment to invest in it. Practice. Polish. Anyone can create, but being able to deepen, refine and complete work, that’s the artist’s way. Art takes dedication, concentration and patience. Being able to listen and watch. Rehearse while staying fresh, forever.
That last bit seems like a contradiction, isn’t it risky to rehearse too much? Consider practices like tai chi and yoga, basically a specific series of movements. By rehearsing these movements repeatedly, the body is endowed with special qualities and powers. Can one do too much tai chi and yoga? Certainly ignorant practice can be injurious and counter productive, but if both the underlying principles and physics are understood and integrated, then there’s no danger of doing too much, in fact the question becomes nonsensical. Can we have too much life?
Rehearsal is either effective or it’s not. Ineffective rehearsals produce low energy and lackluster performance, ie being over rehearsed. Effective rehearsals generate freshness and vitality, you can never have too many. What are the underlying principles and physics of effective rehearsals?
Learning lines and/or movement, that’s the beginning. Once the basic material is assimilated, it can be integrated. This happens through a playful approach, by pushing the material through a variety of perceptive and kinesthetic filters. For example, an actor might deliver a line with anger and then switch to hilarity and then to melancholy. Different qualities might emerge which can be noted and discussed, depth and meaning discovered. A dancer could explore his movement wearing a blindfold, with weights on his left wrist and ankle, or with a splash of rose water on his collar. Again, different feelings might emerge. These explorations add texture and dimension to the work, perhaps by expanding the complexity of neural connections or the network of associations made to the material.
This is a prop and game based approach to George Leonard’s ideas about mastery. The willingness to return to the beginning, to settle into the plateaus between the leaps of progress, that’s the masters path. Cultivating that perspective reveals the endless subtlety inherent in any experience, making practice forever new and fresh.
Props and games are not essential, but dreaming up new applications for them is certainly fun. By developing an appropriate cognitive tableaux, an attentive director triggers spectacular breakthroughs, helping actors experience what they must.
After the Tuesday and Thursday tai chi class, the core group has been learning how to safely do stunts, parkour and stage fighting, based on the book Combat Mime by J. D. Martinez. Of course I imagined that combat mime would be highly useful for future movie projects, but while staring at the dancers the other night I realized that these evening classes were actually rehearsals. I could approach them as workshops for developing future actors and performance collaborators. I re-imagined myself as director of a future cast, either for movies or theater.
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