A man with no memory

I know, through two or three different friends, of a man who lost his memory. He's an actor, which explains how we all know each other. A few months back he hit his head and lost 3 or 4 years. At first no one believed him, but after a while it became clear this was so.

Anyway, I'm about to go look at, and likely buy, his beater car. He can't drive for a while, and is happy to send it to another member of the theatre community.

This whole thing feels like something out of Chekhov.

What does it mean, to be driving the car of the man with no memory?

It is too early and all of us are awake

Out my window is nothing but green. This being May, in the state whose primeval state is rainforest, there's green for a mile. Fifteen feet in the air, among the maples, blooms a single dark red rose.

It's a wild rose, left so long it's climbed the tree. When you glance, you think it's a hummingbird. It makes some mad sense, this one rose mysteriously high. Like theatre. Like a dream.

I am reading Chekhov. After years in his plays, I am reading his stories. They are more distilled than his plays, thick black-green syrup. It's like having a telescope to 1900 Russia. Here is a horse, legs stiff with cold, standing in the harness with snow piled on his back. Here is his taxi-man master, white-faced in a black coat, bent double on the wagon-seat, waiting for a fare. Snow lies on his back as thick as on the horse's. His son died this week.

A wild grey cat slinks onto the porch outside my window. He sits above the grasses, intent.

It is too early, and all of us are awake.

The playwright listens to god

I'm writing this play, Nanda Devi, for and with eight actors. I still use my old Win95 computer for this, with the macros taped to the keys -- Stage Directions (blue), Dialog (yellow), Character Name (purple), Lyrics (green).

Writing is like dredging. Each line of dialog has to carry the whole weight of the play, and work at every level. I can't tell when I'm writing if it's any good. I can only tell if it's working.

But directing... directing, I know everything. And I know it fast.

The weird thing is, I can only do one at a time. I can either be IN the play, writing it. Or I can be OUTSIDE, directing it. The two sides of my brain pass each other letters, in the form of the script.

On the deeper level, I notice a new ease. There's no drama now, I just sit down and write. It's fine to write crappy scenes, I can improve them after the director takes a look. The ease comes because we all trust the director.

Leonid Anisimov says,

The playwright listens to god, and writes down what he hears. This takes all his attention. The director listens to the play, and translates to the actors. This takes all his attention. The actor listens to the character. The actor knows the character better than anyone -- better than the playwright, better than god. This takes all his attention. The audience listens to the play. They receive it and are purified by it. They give their dirtinesses to the actors, who take them out into Nature and give them back to god. This is the Great Circle of theatre.

At the Odin Teatret, the whole company listens to god. I think the Nanda Devi cast could be listening to god, if I would stop talking so much.

A crunch, a spin, and the grassy bank

Driving home from rehearsal tonight on 202 -- a two-lane road -- a car suddenly pulled out from oncoming traffic to pass, and hit me head-on at 60 miles an hour.

Well, not quite head-on -- I veered immediately to the right, so we did one long brutal metal-twisting scrape, but at 60 miles an hour, that was enough to spin me out and throw my car into the oppposite ditch. My car is totalled. I'm sore and shook up, but unhurt.

He was a 17-year-old who had been looking down. When he looked up, he found the car ahead of him had put on their brakes to turn left into their driveway. He panicked, swerved -- clipping the car ahead of him on the way -- and pulled out into oncoming traffic. Which was me.

One and a half seconds till impact.

"Ease on by," I thought, watching headlights roar toward me in both lanes. "No sudden moves," as I veered onto the shoulder. That was my last thought before a crunch, a spin, and the grassy bank plowing toward me VERY fast, another crunch, and a BANG. Took a while to find my glasses and my shoes. Bit my tongue, sore shoulder & chest, but basically okay.

Bystanders, three crunched cars, broken glasses, state patrol, phone numbers, tow trucks. Now I'm home. The car's dead in the driveway.

I am lucky to be here.

The daily dailies

So I notice the blogs I love to read are very in-the-moment. "The daily dailies" I call them, and I read them every morning with my coffee. I am glad the world is going round, and that these people are in it.

I love how much MomBrain loves her kid. How cheerfully, irreverently, and excellently Odious Woman is doing in her job, her marriage, and her gym. I want her for MY manager. I love how pragmatic IcewardBound is about Antartica, theatre, the military. I love IzzlePfaff's recoiling pessimism and clear heart, even though he often shocks me; with him protecting the rights of cancer patients and plying our stages, we're all in much better hands.

Me, though... I feel like I'm standing with a megaphone on the edge of my bathtub, shouting, "I've Had Another Important Thought."

Good lord.

(But I do. I have LOTS of Important Thoughts. I have them all the time.)

PIX: Eugenio and me

Eugenio Barba, Rachel Rutherford at Odin Teatret - Nov 8, 2003 

STRUCTURE: Five Truths, now Eight Truths

[Updated 6/11/12 to be the Eight Truths.]

There is never a single truth about anything. This is a structure I created to help uncover the truths about a complex and troubling situation. Like the five rings of the samurai, there are actually six. [And now, years later, eight.] I will give the structure, then give an example.

STRUCTURE

0. Pick the topic you want to examine.
The default topic is, "My life right now." But it could also be, "My job," "This relationship," "My car," whatever is chewing at you.

1. The Apparent Truth
How it looks from the outside. To you. To anybody.

2. The Real Truth
What it's really like for you, on the inside. There are usually a lot of these, and they don't necessarily line up. If you haven't said a lot of them, keep going. Keep saying, "The Real Truth is..." "The Real Truth is..." The early ones reveal the middle ones, which reveal the later ones. Go until you run dry.

3. The Spirit Truth
If this were serving a spiritual purpose in your life -- if there were a spiritual lesson in this -- what would it be? Or, to put it another way, if you had created this situation deliberately, from some deep inner wisdom, in order to learn a Lesson you really wanted to learn, what is it? If you are religious, this might be a religious parable or proverb. If not, it might be something from nature. "This is the sowing of the fields." "This is the return of the Prodigal Son." "This is the heading out into the wilderness period."

4. The Shadow Truth
What is the dark side, the thing you don't want to admit you're getting from this? A true shadow has a juiciness to it, a savagery, a zing. It may relate to death, bleakness, cruelty, vengefulness, suicide, sabotage; it may be the thing you are spending a lot of energy trying to ignore.

5. The Fairy-Tale Truth
If this were in a fairy tale, known or unknown, what would it be, and what part are you? This could be, "This is Cinderella, and this is the part where I am returning from the ball with sore feet, one shoe, a pumpkin, and some mice." Or, "You know how in every fairy tale, there is a Prince? Well, this is the part where the Prince is saddling up his horse in the stable, and I am a mouse under the straw watching him." Or, "You know how in Star Wars, when Luke..." It can come from any archetypal story -- movie, book, myth, game, legend -- that your unconscious pops up for you. 

6. The Unsaid Truth
If there is any truth remaining, that is arising for you after all those have been said, what is it? If there is one -- and sometimes there is not -- it might be related, or it might be something that seems completely sideways and unrelated, but is somehow needing to be said to complete this. "I miss my grandmother."

Some years later, I found there was also a seventh truth.

7. The Sexual Truth
If this were a sexual act, which sexual act is it and which part are you playing?


Some years after that, I found there was an eighth truth.

8. The Song Truth
If this were a song -- or, rather, if there were the perfect song to describe what is going on -- what song is it? Can you sing, or say, the lyrics you remember? Don't try to think of the song. Just go kind of blank, focus on the problem, and listen for what song your unconscious gives to you.


When you are done with all Eight Truths, you will feel refreshed and clean. Usually, one or two the lenses have given some truly unexpected insight. They have, finally, helped explain this confusing situation. So finally, instead of worrying over and over in the same patterns, you have some new paths that can lead you out. You feel peace.

There are no lenses which are always more powerful, or less powerful. Just answer each one simply, while listening to the nudges from your unconscious, and it will work.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
EXAMPLE

0. Truths about: My life right now.

1. The Apparent Truth about my life right now is that everything's back to normal. After a few months off to check out group theatres in Eastern Europe, I'm back in my house, rehearsing a new performance like always, living with my housemate, driving my old car, about to go get another job.

2. The Real Truth about my life right now is that I carry the Odin like a glowing golden egg in my chest. I am translucent. I am in the slow process of saying goodbye to America and my house, and moving to Denmark. I have outgrown most of the way I am rehearsing. There are Himalayas in my soul. The Real Truth is, I am holding on as long as I can, feeling it slip through my fingers like silk. The Real Truth is, this isn't nearly as easy as I make it sound; it is just happening, all by itself.

3. The Spirit Truth of my life right now is Plate Tectonics. Truths which have served me all my life are being ground slowly to dust against harder, purer truths which are emerging.

4. The Shadow Truth of my life right now is Destruction. There is a savage deliciousness in destroying. I could go too far. I will go too far. I am already too far.

5. The FairyTale Truth of my life right now is I am Wart, young King Arthur, in The Sword In The Stone, just after he has pulled the sword from the stone. It is silent. No one is there. Just leaves rustling in the sunny courtyard. He doesn't know what it means. There's just that... presentiment... that shiver, and the incredibly natural feel of a hefted iron sword. "I was born for this," you realize, even though you don't really get what "this" is.

6. The Unsaid Truth of my life right now is that this is all happening perfectly. Clumsiness, slowness, and all. I feel like I'm pregnant. Great changes are in motion. If I were painting myself, I'd draw rosebushes coming out all over my body, budding toward flower. When they're done, there might be no body left, only rosebush. Destruction, creation -- same thing.

7. The Sexual Truth. Pregnancy.

8. The Song Truth. "May the circle... be unbroken... by and by, lord... by and by."

Whoever it was that told the rose -- Rumi

One good rehearsal can heal a city

Just got back from rehearsing in a Microsoft conference room.

Not ideal -- we only have an hour, at lunchtime, in a room whose huge table cannot move. It's raining, we've all had stressful mornings, one actor's pants leg is ripped, and the meeting before us ran long so we're late getting into the room.

We begin. Clear away the chairs, circle on the floor. We Check In, our ritual of entering the work. At the end, we'll Check Out. These two rituals create the sanctuary of rehearsal. This is especially necessary when you work in many spaces.

Okay. We're here.

I sketch our set on the whiteboard, draw my ideas for this scene. One actor, also an artist, adds a quick perspective drawing, to show how we could use the doors. We talk it through. Black and blue marker, swift drawings on top of each other. I used to draw just like this, on these same Microsoft boards, with animators on Xbox games. Once we've got the gist, we create a makeshift set from chairs, coats, and a corner of the mammoth table. Our Himalayan village street corner is born.

They've done text-analysis and are off-book, memorized. We set a rough blocking (who moves where, on which line), then run it in a variety of scenarios. She likes him, he wants her to go away. He likes her, she wants him to go away. At this point, we are all searching for the play. This is flexing, for an actor, warming into the world. Playing. "There's a reason we're called Players," as Mark Williams, my acting teacher, used to say.

The unconscious is not a beast you can approach head-on.

Stanislavski, the great theatre innovator, says (paraphrased), "Everything is easy when you're in the zone. The question is, How do you get in the zone?" His answer is, "You can only do it like Nature does it." Meaning, YOU can't grow a carnation. But you can plant one, water it, fertilize it, place it in the sun. If you're lucky, the carnation will grow itself. You do your part, Nature does the rest.

Ten minutes left. We're hot and loose. Time has slowed way down. (This is the first task of the director, to slow down time.) We've laughed, fought, discovered, hit our stride. Like ball players, you could throw us anything now, we could catch it.

"Let's swap," says one of the actors. They switch costumes and props, take their places. This time they will only say the OTHER person's lines, do the other person's moves.

The scene runs itself.

This is an astounding thing the actors just did. It means they know the whole scene well enough to play anyone in it. They own it now. This is the kind of work you can only do when you are Not Thinking. If you thought, trading places would be too scary, too hard.

We circle up for Check Out. "Peaceful, clean, happy. That was fun." "Relaxed. Hungry for the rest of the play." "Glad, hungry."

We restore the space -- always leave a theatre cleaner than you found it -- and leave.

Leonid Anisimov, Honored Artist of Russia, says,

"One good rehearsal can heal a city."

Rehearsal is a process of spiritual purification. After such a rehearsal -- even a small one like this -- the participants leave cleaner. This affects their interactions, which in turn affects others. On the deeper level, such work is like prayer. It powerfully affects the unseen.

I am dissolving toward a different way of working -- more space, time, money, commitment. This is my last time here. Like summer school after your senior year of high school. No one notices. You look around one hot quiet day and realize you will never again walk past these cement pillars and fern-lined fountain with the carved killer-whale totem pole.

Childhood has ended.

I rehearse like some people meditate or run. It is a practice. Even if we only do it for an hour in a Microsoft conference room, that is a good hour. A good day.

Okay, chickies. I'm off to an apartment complex across town for my next one. This one's three hours long, with three actors.

POEM - Kraken changes

kraken changes are
wrought only in the Deep; you
must go home alone

the unconscious is
a genius -- amoral, pure. it
needs its breathing time

hurry is not a
word a rosebush understands
or a baby, you

slow moments are all
we have. swiftness comes like grace,
unbidden, scrying

ecclesiastes
got it right -- to every thing
there is a season

even, dear one, You

Do you want to be an artist?

My sister-in-law, got into pottery a few years back. Bought a wheel, set it up, started throwing. So did her kids. Every Christmas, we would get some turquoise clay creation. It looked like everybody's first pottery -- lumpy, cheerful, homey.

Five years went by.

The pots became masks, halibut soap dishes, tea pots. Not lumpy any more, and starting to be hung on people's walls.

Two more years.

Suddenly, she's discovered her own form of Raku, a wild hand-of-god force that creates fantastic riven pottery. The rough dark vase in my Christmas box, necklaced with jewels, is breathtaking. The income from their garage -- including pottery, commissions, teaching, and sales -- has risen to a seriously respectable level.

She is an artist who did her woodshedding, as the jazz musicians would say. She put in the time. It helped that she had already gotten her education and teaching degree. Those helped her learn the business, as well as the art side. It also helped to have a breadwinner during those first three years. What helped most is that she kept going back to the wheel.

Zen master Katagiri Roshi says,

Make positive effort for the good. Do not get tossed away.

I have been walking into rehearsal rooms as long as my sister-in-law. has been sitting at her wheel. My first scenes and plays looked like her first pots; mostly turquoise. Maybe all art is turquoise until you abandon to the gods.

Katagiri again --

You must decide:
Do you want to be an artist?
Or do you want to let everything fall away and devote yourself to art?

Great artists ship

Now HERE's a playground. Google, our cheerful fetch-dog of a search engine, has an R&D space called Google Labs where they think up all kinds of new searches, and let you try them. You don't appreciate a Ferrari until you see it accelerate.

Venture capitalist Martin Tobias says,

"In the end with every new data type, the guy who does search makes the most money. The publishing tools get driven to zero. Hosting gets commoditized. It costs too much to build a brand or to deliver premium content. Consumers want free and easy access."

I believe in live prototyping. Ship early, ship often, and tweak along the way.

I have created four performances a year for almost 7 years. All the books helped. The teachers helped more. But nothing helped as much as the crucible of knowing we HAD to perform, an audience was coming. Eugenio Barba says, "Don't just train. Train AND develop a performance. Do both, from the start."

Jim McCarthy and Michele McCarthy -- developers of Software Development Bootcamp (McCarthy Technologies), and authors of Software For Your Head: Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision -- would call this "Versioning your way toward the Vision," the straightest route to greatness. Picasso would paint until his studio was full, then move into an empty studio and begin again, letting people sell what was left behind. Stanislavski would train a group of actors, develop a methodology, then leave to found a new studio when the current actors resisted innovation.

Like Jim McCarthy says, "Great artists ship."

Eugenio Barba, head of Odin Teatret in Denmark, believes in "We." He and the Odin reflexively begin with, "What would be best for me... AND you... AND us... AND our community... AND the world?" They are only interested in solutions which work on all levels. You would not believe how much this simple filter improves the quality of solution. Thinking of this, walking through autumn fields in Paris toward Theatre du Soleil, I came up with a slogan for my theatre work:

"Say We. C'est oui."

When you get past all the bad language puns (those two phrases rhyme), it means, "Say "we." It is yes."

Andrew McMasters' theatre, Jet City Improv, which has performed every Friday and Saturday night for 14 years, is probably the closest I know to a theatre doing live prototyping. Their theatre innovation/iteration rate is unconscious, but growing with the slow steadiness of time; their business iteration rate is conscious and swift. Andrew, a pragmatic idealist like Eugenio, has integrity, a "yes" attitude, a "we" outlook, and an incredible network. "The answer is always Yes," says Andrew. "It's just a question of How."

Integrity makes us points of light.

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.
-- William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1:1

The Art of Profitability

I just read Adrian Slywotsky's The Art of Profitability. Loved it.

I am educating myself about wealth, starting with venture capitalism. VCs study businesses, groups of people who make things. Well, that's all a theatre is. Except the VC lens is to study profitability, as well as quality of product. I want a profitable theatre. More accurately, I want to know what the minds who have studied profit the way I have studied theatre, have found.

Check it out. It's written in the guru-talks-to-novice format. Worth reading just for the Blockbuster Profit chapter, on how Marc Geron makes R&D really work.

Integrity, Odin, soft summer

Early summer. My house glows. Golden floors, quiet sunlight, white walls. Outside, an explosion of big-leaf maples, green-tipped firs, cotton poplars, vine-maples, giant ferns, and a tall stump crowned with salal. Buttercups sprout among the licorice grass.

Sun is the one factor that throws off software schedules in the Pacific Northwest. We creep outside, rain-white faces to the sky, blinking.

My mother can sleep on the water. She is the only one of our family buoyant enough to do this. I rest in my life right now, that same boneless way.

After seven years of rigorous training toward having a group-theatre company, I spent February and March in a Director Residency at the Odin Teatret in Denmark. The Odin, led by Eugenio Barba, is one of the finest ensemble theatres in the world. And one of the oldest. They turn 40 this year. "It is not natural to stay together this long," says Eugenio. "Most group theatres live about ten years. It is our mutations that have kept us alive." I would say, it is their deep practice of presence. When the moment changes, they are able to recognize and change with it. Even if, phoenix-like, it is the moment of destruction for where they have lived or how they have worked.

I lived in Grotowski's room in the theatre, observed rehearsals of Andersen's Dream, cleaned the great-room, worked on my book, and gave Chekhov Training to the apprentice actors.

The Odin is a company of shining integrity. Integrity, like excellence, is a process that grows one decision, one act, at a time. Living at the Odin was a fine clean time. When I came home, I could see what else to clean up.

My next step requires, like an electron leaping orbitals, immense energy and momentum. For now, I drift on the soft air of summer.

Sweeping the temple

Let's start with the benefits devotion.

May this blog, and all its connections, be for the benefit of all sentient beings. May we be like the prayer flags, wind blowing through us. May all sentient beings be happy. May all sentient beings find peace.

And a small poem.

dandelions dot
ragweed, licorice grass. you! me!
we! the Mystery!