Paralysis Point

Call it pre-Spring break burnout (Ok, it's still 3 weeks away, but that's close enough, right?), or perhaps it's taking 2 PhD seminars (which I was not advised against, but honestly should have probably paid more attention to) AND Burke in one semester. Perhaps it's even just my own self-doubt that I'll actually, eventually, pull this semester off as I stare at deadlines and a mountain of papers.

The result is simply that I just feel paralyzed, which is stalling me on projects I may (or so I'd like to believe) have otherwise already started. I'm not *technically* behind on anything, but I feel like I'm just barely making deadlines. I don't like working that way. It makes me paranoid. Too much pressure. I'm sure that speaks on some level about my preference for feeling like I'm in control of a situation as opposed to the other way around.

Or maybe I simply fear showing up to CIS one day and everyone insisting that I Have No Clothes.

Pressure

Pushing down on me

Pressing down on you

No man ask for

Pressure

...

It's the terror of knowing

what this world is about

watching some good friends scream

LET ME OUT

- Queen, David Bowie "Under Pressure" (excerpt)

I could really use a day or two to allow my mind to go quiet. I think from that point I might come out the other side (once looped back and headed again in a forward direction) that I will be much more productive.

I think I may have just talked myself into giving myself a mental health day tomorrow. Now, let's see if Jenkins allows me to actually do it though ...

***

Once I began considering all of the ways that Reflexivity can (and has) informed my practical work I've been moreso attaching thoughts to the administrative/organizational aspects, most likely since that is the hat I am currently wearing. On March 19, I go back into rehearsal as a director (what was that I was just saying about feeling buried with school? Oh, and I'm now going to have less time to keep up with the reading/writing that already feels overwhelming? Woo lard.) and I am hoping that I have more thoughts there. Looking forward to it, actually.

This is not to knock the organizational applications of it, I just think that I am going to be more excited about how this plays into notions of collaborative creation and to my own process.

That's an odd paradox. I'm complaining about feeling buried now but I'm looking forward to having more to do, thinking it's going to be somehow liberating and give me a new burst. And you know what? It probably will.

I'd like to speculate though that there's a reflexive process at work with a great many actors. There are a lot of planes of thought and recognition that have to happen, and to even talk about makes it seem a far more complicated thing than most would likely give it credit for.

An actor first and foremost is always working through their own personal orientation. In a scripted play they then have a text, but which the many actors in a show as well as the director could all have different interpretations of. So we now have X # of frames in operation (X of course being the # of people involved). Any skilled ensemble is going to spend as much time as they can though "getting in the same frame" and it's arguable in general or in specific cases if this is accurate (or even possible). Add to this potential resistance from an actor towards the director's frame, and even a director's inability to co-create that frame with an ensemble an you can easily find a muddle as a result. Actor-Text-Character-Director-Actor-Character.

We now approach the space where an actor playing a character is in the direct act of working with those other actors playing characters in a "hands off" sort of rehearsal where I director won't stop and start. Like a run through of an scene, act or the show. We now have interaction of these actor-characters and certainly it's going to be hard to locate where one begins and another one ends.

We finally get to the final step (which should never be the afterthought but to often is) of adding an audience who literally have a frame forced on them though they walk in with their own orientation. They are now being asked as a whole to see things the same way, the same way that the director will likely say was the "right" interpretation of the text that they "coached" the performers up to accurately. (So, so many issues of reflexivity to consider here in "interpretation" "translation" and "direction" that already my head swims - questions are only begetting questions)

What precisely the hell is going on then? Internal and external issues within the individual (audience member, actor), between the actors and audience, between the actors and the direction and the text and that possibility of character as self as well as other simultaneously who is also encountering other actors who are in the same exact predicament.

As the semester moves forward and I get into rehearsal I will make a point to take notes where ever I can on what I'm seeing (and not seeing(, the questions that I am asking (and not asking), and what is possible (or impossible).

See, just thinking on this has my heart and head lighter than when I began. Somewhere along the way I stopped feeling sorry for myself and am actually now wearing a smile.

Though I still think I'm going to give myself that mental health day tomorrow. The yard needs tending, and I need quiet.