Odin 7. Grotowski room, dreamlord, dragons

This post was added later, backdated to when it was written.
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I am living in the Grotowski Room. It is the room Eugenio built for Grotowski to use when he visited. It is tiny, at the top of a flight of golden stairs, across from Eugenio's office. It is a sunken room, into which one steps steeply down, with white walls, a small desk, a skylight, and a bed tucked under the eaves. I open the skylight, look out onto snow and pink buds, and breathe icy air.

The theatre has a tiny dryer, so most people dry their clothes -- and costumes -- on the hot water pipes by the music room. I gazed at Iben's Itsi Bitsi costume there for long minutes. The entire performance is embodied in that costume. Yet at the same time, it's just a light piece of white cotton with red piping, hanging in the hall.

There are two refrigerators in our kitchen. Each person keeps their food in a plastic box in the fridge with their name on it. The whole counter is butcher-block-topped, so 20 people can make tea and lunch at once.

In Denmark there is no one Happy Birthdaysong; there are several. We sing one or many, and drink to the birthday person who has provided the lunch.

It is a theatre monastery. As plain, unremarkable, rare.

Each actor is a buddha, the director is a buddha, and when they are working in the room, it's a single buddha mind. The whole room responds to the slightest change in energy. In some phases, the director says what to do. In other phases, the actors and technicians and director move in their own orbits, preparing and working individually. At times, the director and actors and technicians sit in a circle, gazing at the empty stage, as if listening for the play to speak. Whoever hears it first, says something, or stands up and moves or sings, to demonstrate. No one speaks unless the spirit moves them to. Sometimes we are silent for a long time.

This theatre, like all Grotowski-lineage theatres, is grounded in daily physical and vocal training. "A fall of one centimeter is still a fall" says Roberta, moving in ultra-slow-motion from standing to lying down. These actors can do the precise wailing of Peking opera, the ululations of a Balinese shaman, the vibrating groan of a Tibetan monk.

Work starts at the theatre at 8:00. The schedule is:

Staff - 8-5, Mon-Fri, though some come in on Sundays too
Actors - 8-10, individual training
10-4 rehearsal
4-on, one's own work for the theatre
Tuesdays at 8:15-9:15am, all-company meeting

"Murrrrrr-deh, murrrrrrr-deh," cries Roberta through the halls on Tuesday mornings, sounding like a cheerful Lady Macbeth.

I have edited the website, two papers, and a plaque, and translated a long poem from Danish to English, then retranslated it to make it singable. Working for the theatre feels like cleaning it; when I serve it, I belong.

I brought with me a laptop, Wacom tablet, printer, and current-converter. I write and draw, and watch the DVD, About A Boy, in my room. There is a resonance between its theme -- "Two people is not enough" -- and the Odin.

Usually I have a steady sense of purpose; but my purpose has always been, to get to a place like this. Now that I'm here, I feel only white silence. "I am dreamless in the house of the dreamlord," I wrote Eugenio last week. Which is ironic, since I, too, am a dreamlord.

But a baby one, my wings still furled, crouched contentedly in the weir from which great dragons come and go. Sigrid, who has done the company's finances for years, is one such dragon. Ulrik, an actor in the company for years, now the liaison with the town, is another. Even the apprentices are dragons, wheeling on the winds of the Odin, bathed in sunlight and flame.

Odin 6. The apprentice actors, one huge Yes

The apprentice actors are ages 23-27. They do physical and vocal training each morning from 8-noon, then rehearse & do work for the theatre in the afternoon and evenings. They are supple, acrobatic, physical, spiritual; they can sing, juggle, do firework, stilts, mask, puppets, compose, arrange, and play multiple instruments. They are beyond anything I have dreamt of -- a baby company, being raised in the heart of a mature company.

These actors are one huge Yes. The only limits are mine. I find that many of my structures are only to get non-actors past their fears, into their bodies & voices. These actors are already there. Their only question is How.

I think Grotowski and Stanislavski took different roads to the same destination -- an actor's precise internal map of meaning.

Odin 5. Chekhov, great rehearsal, insights of space

This post was added later, backdated to when it was written.
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Two good conversations, and I feel like myself again.

I have 2 weeks left.

Yale wrote to say they have booked my hotel for final MFA directing auditions. I chose Chekhov, Masha & Vershinin from Three Sisters.

I asked if I could borrow the three Odin apprentice actors to re-explore the scene. For them, it is unusual to do a scripted work, since most of their work is devised; and exotic to do Chekhov in English instead of -- naturally -- Danish. For me it is completely exotic to do Chekhov with such finely trained physical-theatre actors as the Odin apprentices.

Grotowski once said he thought fatigue helped artists -- that when we are tired, we cannot keep up our ordinary masks and defenses, so the truth has a better chance of seeping through. He always summed up his practice as the removing of things which block spiritual transfiguration in the actor.

Today I was tired, only 2 hours sleep last night. Eugenio was having a fantastic rehearsal. When the director gets in the zone, the room goes to a whole new level.

What gets the director in the zone? In this case, his day began with receiving unexpected art. Then, fresh flowers were on the table for the weekly company meeting. And his assistant director, Lilicherie Macgregor, had just finished her PhD thesis. Fed with beauty & accomplishment, he began rehearsal with an Art talk. Inspired in turn, the actors lifted off.

When the director takes wing, things which are normally laboriously sequential, happen at once, spontaneously. New forms arise -- processes as soft, unconscious, unspeakable, and swift as a baby, a lion cub. The work becomes play, becomes absorption. There is no one thinking, it's just children doing; just being. This is the characteristic that McCarthy Teamworx calls "Greatness", that Cziesentmihalyi calls "Flow," that Stanislavski called "Nature creating."

They say if you study with the sages, eventually you do know how to move a mountain. And that, once you know how to do it, you also know why not to.

When Eugenio is having a great rehearsal, transcending himself, it's like sitting in a fantastic jazz cafe. My fatigue helps. There is so much stimulation and Nature pouring through the room, and so little defense, that my thinking lifts to a new plane.

I am having amazing insights today.

I have little incentive to write any of it down because in this shining moment, it all seems so obvious. Everything is connected and I can see how. The bread IS the sacrament. But I have learned to leave clues for myself, for after I have left this state.

Today, my realizations are around Leonid's mantra, "Affect the space first." I realized this doesn't mean only the space -- as in, have a space, clean the space, respect the space, have rituals to enter, use, and leave the space. It also means, "Affect time."

Leonid says, "Before we can rehearse, first we must slow down time." Jim McCarthy says, "To have more time, come more present."

If time is a space to be affected first, then start on time, end on time, slow down time, learn to ride and respect the elasticity of time. Make sure there is enough time to do what must be accomplished. Set up the time before, the time during, the time after, and the time sideways.

I notice, living with Jeff, that we have an almost infinite ability to create kinds of time for ourselves. We have sesh times, get-the-house beautiful times, spiritual times, solitude times, moody times, food times. It is similar at the Odin. I wash dishes next to the same person for whom I was just mending a costume, who tore my heart out with their singing in rehearsal, who later will give me a lift into town.

Money is a space. If you can affect the money so there is enough, no leaks, no uncertainties, that too will affect the work. Andrew McMasters' trinity for a successful theatre is, "Freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of space."

Self-care-- starting with enough sleep -- is a HUGE space to affect first.

Another way to affect the time/space is to build for iteration. Any time I have to think something out perfectly ahead of time and then do it only once, I am doomed. I get richer, faster, easier successes by just doing, again and again.

You just can't beat the human life as the perfect space for the formation of an artist.

===

I carry the book I want to write inside myself as a network of connections. If I can just find how to enter it, I will write unstoppably.

Eugenio says that he thinks my book might be a dream. "It is very unusual, the way you write," he said. "Perhaps your book is a dream." Looking at me with his bright grey bird eyes, I realized I am as much an enigmatic character whom he is observing, as he is one for me.

My working title is Theatre Monastery.

Each time I find a new point of entry, the whole web shifts and reillumines. I just keep moving towards the THING that underlies all of this in me. Like Joseph Campbell inexorably moved toward myths, Jung towards archetypes, Buckminster Fuller toward geodesic domes, Rumi towards ecstatic union with the divine, Feynman towards the eternal "How?"

I wonder what I am moving towards.

My therapist, Jim Rapson, talks about organic growth. How one day you have an itch so you scratch it. And then you look at the hindlimb you used to scratch and wonder, "Where did THAT come from? When did I grow THAT?" And, even as you ask, you realize you DO know where it came from, you remember everything about how it grew, it's just not important any more.

the tricky part is
there is no single trick -- just
a chaotic zone

Eugenio frowns
over the lobby plant, an old
man poking, fixing

the thing about en-
lightenment is even you
don't know how it works

or why one plant's health
might be the reason the whole
play fails or succeeds

I eat hot cheesy
lasagna with cold cucumbers
from Italy

God be at your ta-
ble, says Ophelia, shining
with meaning, mad, free

Odin 4. Missing home, learning how to have one

This post was added later, backdated to when it was written.
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I am lonely today, and miss Jeff.

I feel if I am floating down a wet green river, but am neither drinking nor swimming. I don't know if this is because, in the midst of theatre everywhere, I am not making any. Or if it is because the Odin is such a physical theatre, and I am so out of shape, so immobile.

On the spiritual level, I have lost my horse. I was riding along the empty road towards home; now I am walking.

I'm still searching for my path. Much of theatre does not fit me; yet a bright green wind through its center does. Much of software does not fit me; yet the seethe of platinum minds and blinding fluency does.

I want wealth and time. Brilliance and fallowness. Love and independence.

I miss myself.

this white driftwood came
from the sea -- a tree that grew,
blew down, bleached, beached, burnt

your own true path is
waiting and you are on it --
even this has purpose

if you are a crea-
ture of the wind, no amount
of sun can please you

all the torrents you
desire lie just beyond this
dessication: walk

Perhaps I am not here to learn about theatre. Perhaps I am here to learn how to cook, how wonderful fresh foods taste when served together, how warm a long table can be, how much the spirit craves fresh flowers, candlefire dotted carelessly, shining wood floors, and the ease of after-dinner talk in silky languages. To learn how to have a home.

Odin 3. Farm, lunch, languages, wind

This post was added later, backdated to when it was written.
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Here I am, enjoying my Saturday ritual of coming into town, eating fish and chips at the Family Bistro, then spending hours drinking bad coffee, playing games, writing email, and relishing the fast computers, here amid the loud teenage-boy wargamers, who cheer as one, or moan, "Nye, nye, nye, nye, nye", in this smoky upstairs internet cafe/pool-hall in Holstebro, where I am a regular.

I came once when it was closed. The lights were off. Wordlessly, the manager opened the door for me, let me in, and waved toward a machine. I didn't have to pay, we never turned on the lights, and only the hard-core were present.

My first month at the Odin, I could only describe the buildings. As if by physically naming the surroundings, I could somehow grasp the experience.

The training of artists is the training of souls.

Where do the monks find work?

===

Odin this year celebrates its 40th anniversary, and doing so with many of its original actors.

Their longevity comes from a conscious focus on sustainability. Like Andrew McMasters, artistic director of Seattle's Jet City Improv, who keeps taped to his door, Every artistic decision is a financial one. Every financial decision is an artistic one.

Odin, by design, never got too big. They have 9 actors, 1 director, 3 technicians, and 13 staff. They tour nine months of the year, and spend as much time giving workshops and work-demonstrations as performances. They have become, thanks to their own physical-theatre work, and to Eugenio Barba's warmth and gift for connecting, a global hub for physical-theatre anthropology and cultural exchange.

Their home is an old cow-and-pig farm and its buildings, in which they have built 4 shining performance spaces, several tiny rooms for offices (for staff & researchers) and green rooms (for each actor), as well as a library, computer room, kitchen, dining room, music room, sewing room, meditation tower, outbuilding storage, and shops. This is the first place I have ever seen Stanislavski's mandate brought to life -- Each actor should have his own cell, with a bed, a table, sink, window, and door.

This year the Odin will be building a whole third storey onto the theatre, to house the new Centre for Theatre Laboratory Research which they are co-sponsoring with the University of Åarhus, to collect the archives from the Grotowski Centre, the Living Theatre, and one other theatre I am forgetting. This is typical of their win-win win -- we-we-we -- approach to the world. When I say, "They will build", I mean that literally: the actors, the staff, the apprentices. Just as my family built each new room onto our house, one room a summer, staining and hammering the boards.

At the heart of the Odin is a three-fold approach. 1) They do physical and vocal training every day; 2) they work on their performances, of which there are currently 10 in repertory, each in 4 languages, plus the new one in development; and 3)they do their work for the theatre, including emails, conferences, magazines & publishing, workshops, barters, liaison with the town, cultural exchanges, hosting visiting professors & colleagues, and training the apprentices. There are 3 young actors and 1 young director, all in their probationary period; none have yet been accepted as official apprentices of the theatre. The probationary period, as in a monastery, is slow and sure, creating the space within which both parties can grow towards & discover the truth of the correct way to proceed.

The farm has seeped into the company. The day begins early, ends when the sun goes down, and everyone works hard. But it is human and humane work. The work is all toward the shared vision. It is real, it's necessary, it matters. No other work exists. The core ethics of the company, and their physical bodies, are clean and strong. It is like living at a very good small company in any field, where the ethics & integrity of the founder are impeccable, so those of the company are, so the work they produce is, too.

And yet, it's not idyllic. But because there is enough space and support for each person, and each project, there is also left enough empty space in which to grow. Enough space for god, if you happen to believe, or wide skies and sweet winds if you don't.

In rehearsal, the whole room shifts, pulsates, breathes, responds as one. Eugenio does not pick up a handful of the newly-arrived plastic snow to see how it drops; he picks up one flake, and follows its progress with his finger, tracing its fall in the air. There is no carelessness with object or person; the attention is deep and reflexive. A new song can arise after lunch, arcing across four voices and two instruments in spontaneous arrangement, just because the performance needs it. The whole company is in a deep state of "kinesthetic response," as the Viewpoints technique of the Viewpoints would call it, all the time.

At lunch, we break rehearsal for 45 minutes. The actors change clothes, we all congregate in the kitchen, get food from our respective boxes with our names taped on them in the two refrigerators, and make food, according to our custom. Herring sandwiches. A whole avocado. A cheese sandwich. Warmed-up soup from last night's dinner. Tea or brilliantly strong Italian coffee. In silence, everyone disperses to the tables or newspapers. Monasteries have The Grand Silence after dinner; here we have it during lunch. With ten minutes left, liesurely, with no rush, the actors clear their dishes, change clothes, and we reconvene in the rehearsal room.

"A clean theatre and a clean yard is a loved theatre and a loved yard" says Eugenio. We are each responsible for cleaning one or more of the rooms. I have the Grotowski room, where I am living, and the "bibliotek," which is the library/dining room/computer room. Eugenio comes in on Saturdays to vacuum and air out his office. I speak about the cleaning again and again, because it is so tangible and so transformative. Our theatre looks like the samurai temple, in The Last Samurai. You could eat off any wooden floor in this theatre.

It is like living at King Arthur's court, an analogy I also come back to repeatedly. Wholly unremarkable, in the grittiness and inescapability of each day's requirements. The floor needs to be washed; there is new work to be done on the puppets; the paper you are reviewing needs to be sent back with corrections today to the author in Italy; there is food to be cooked for long-time friend of the theatre, Nando Taviani, who arrives tonight; today's script revisions need to be translated into Danish, Italian, and English in the computer and printed out for everyone; you are out of milk so you walk to the store; the architect who designed the set is coming Saturday so we need to get his sheets washed and his room ready; and then the floor needs to be washed AGAIN. Completely ordinary. Except, of course, that very few places like this exist on earth.

It is the ethics and integrity that make it so remarkable. The Odin, like all theatres, face continual financial challenges. The Odin actors are, with rare exception, in their 50s and 60s. They have families and commitments, their own lives. There is no magic.

A farm, a monastery, a family, a garden, a life -- we grow these over years. There is a Polish saying, To be remembered after your death, takes your whole life.

At the heart of all practice here, lie the four empty rehearsal rooms with their shining wood floors. Those floors summon the actors and director to their training and rehearsals, and from those flow all other work.

"Without us, the actors would not be able to perform," said one of the technicians. "But without them, we would have no show. Everyone is necessary."

The language of rehearsal -- decided after considerable discussion -- is Danish. The languages of the theatre are Danish and Italian. Danish, because most of the staff is Danish; Italian, because the director, some actors, and many of the visiting professors & researchers are Italian. English is peppered throughout, used as the midway language or in courtesy to the rare English or American visitor. Most of my days are passed in a lilting sea of Danish and Italian. That is one of my favorite immersions here, and the most poetic; to be absorbing so much grace through unknown thrumming choral song -- like being allowed into a pod of humpback whales, bathed in strange vibration.

I do not know what I am here to learn, so I absorb it all. My feeling about the Odin is the feeling I had at Xerox's research labs, Apple's design labs, Microsoft's financial and strategic planning meetings. Whenever I am experiencing a company in the heart of their belief, in the core of what they do best, it is fractal, hologrammatic, isometric -- each mote contains the whole. As with Shakespeare, any word can be unpacked to reveal the entire play.

They say the Tibetan Buddhist masters left secrets down the timestream, thousands of years in the future, to be opened and translated when the capable person appeared.

For the past six years, the gods talk to me all the time. They murmur in my ear, carrying me in a deep green river toward an assured unseeable future. Ever since I have been here, though, they have been silent. I am just -- quiet.

It is fine. I am fine. Soon I will get up and go do all my busy things. But right now, someone else is taking care of things very well, and I can just gaze at the clouds and not think.

I have not rested like this in years, or felt so ignorant and weak.

===

Oh. And, in my one personal message FROM the gods, when they returned with all their potency and blasted me to pieces, the WIND here is PHENOMENAL. It roars straight across the North Atlantic from Greenland, to blow all night and all day, thundering the rehearsal rooms. Whenever these Danish winds come growling, I sunder. I just come apart. I stand outside at night for hours in it, shuddering, watching the scudding clouds and bitter moon. Shaking, I finally asked the Danish people the next day, "What is the word for this wind?" They looked at me blankly and said, "What wind?" Followed by, "Oh, THIS is not WIND. In the winter we get WIND."

That was the first time I seriously thought about moving here. Not here, exactly, but nearer the ocean. Someplace where I, and the actors, and the spectators, would be pelted by those violent catapulting winds.

If theatre lives at the membrane of life and death, surely death creeps nearer when the trees could fall, and the waves pour over your hearth.

My mother lives in a small cabin on stilts, over Puget Sound. Last grey Christmas, the high-tide waves did just that -- washed up over the boardwalk in back of the cabins, splashed between the floorboards into the house where we sat eating our steaming chicken and hot sweet potatoes and asparagus.