Liberation

Several weeks ago I posted saying that I felt I had reached a paralysis point. This was a general assessment of the semester as a whole, how busy I'd become, and how all these new thoughts working through me were just adding up to me freezing up. Not sure what to do or where to start.

I feel like I've come out of the other end of that, but not because any of those things have necessarily changed. There's still two weeks of the semester. I still have 3 very large papers due (one of which I feel "done" with, one which is nearing that point but the third I haven't even started), and I still have all of my end of semester grading on deck, not to mention the show I've been working on which opens May 12.

If anything has changed, it's likely that I feel like I've given in. Not in a defeated-throwing-my-hands-up-way, but really more like in a I'm-doing-the-best-I-can-and-therefore-things-have-to-work-out way. I am ok with not having a strangle-hold on certain aspects of my life right now. Truth is, I wouldn't have had that even if I'd made myself believe that I had.

And, instead of allowing all this to freeze me up, I'm trying to allow the generative aspects of this uncertainty come to the fore. This isn't a laziness or a cop-out (I think I say things like this a lot when talking about this subject because I've always been told/believed this style to be passive and lacking direction, when, truth is, I feel like that's totally not the truth anymore) but just a different way of looking at the same things. Now, what was once stifling has become liberating.

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Perhaps in supplement to my paper I should also offer another bit of an update on my rehearsal process. I'm not sure I have room to fit this into the paper itself because I am already over the page range we were given and I'm trying to work on cutting it down, not adding to.

Last night after our run through of the show, S and I (the AD) went out for a pint and to compile thoughts from the run to pass on to the actors. This was a really fascinating conversation full of reflexive turns: in addition to the reflecting-on-reflections I've already mentioned in the paper (backtalk about talk about a memory), and the discussions of directorial choices/steering/collaboration which I've also already talked about, we got int0 a conversation about how our personal relationships can really inform how we "see" things in context of rehearsal and how those relationships really color not only how we "see" their work but how we relate to them in the process. I guess an easy parallel to draw might be that if you were to see an actor or performer of some sort deliver an interview or speech where they are espousing an ideology or peddling a cause that really rubbed you the wrong way that you might carry that over in your head when you see that next performance because whatever that resistance is that you had to their out-of-performance context gets carried over to the in-context perception.

This of course works the other way as well when you just simply "love" a performer for their work as a performer or activist or what-have-you that we may carry that rose-tinted vision (we have several metaphors for tainted vision, don't we? Green with envy, rose-colored glasses, seeing red) onto their performance where someone else not so smitten may not see anything of the sort.

In either case - being blinded by a love or not able to see past "hating" on someone we can really do some damage here by creating blindnesses.

So that was a lot of the conversation, talking about specific actors in specific contexts and particularly as a director how we have to keep looping back and having these conversations. Otherwise wouldn't it be far too easy to "go easy" on one performer who you may just happen to really like while "beating up on" another who may have just said something to make you mad one day? I think we learned a lot from each other as well as ourselves through this open discussion, and I think it's going to prove valuable to the overall process.