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.

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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