resting on a Sunday, bee, corpus christi carol

I am sitting in my office. It is clean, silent, empty; Sunday night, 8:37pm.

No, says my inner self. No work tonight.

Instead, I've been listening to Kelly Joe Phelps play the blues while driftily browsing. I have read about perfect numbers; the theory of relativity; how to calculate your net worth; Naropa's buddhism-based MA in Divinity; Jeff Buckley singing "Hallelujiah" in concert; a library of essential dlls; photos of Devon marshes & moors; the ruined abbey & crypt at York; Venice's red roofs & stone waterside doorsteps; and the inside of Andrew & Gennie's new house.

My underconscious is chewing on something. Not work.

This is the first rest I've had in weeks. I wonder why today is so restful.

I think because this phase has finished, and the winds are coming. My projects are in hand, the nights are icy, my relationships are cleaning up. Even the earth has shifted; it's winter now, and all my windows are open.

Cold air sheeting through, two loads of laundry done, dishes washed, oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies baked, fresh tunafish with purple cabbage chilling in the fridge. I visit my mom next weekend.

Even my bones are relaxed.

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Someday you will meet something that brings you to your knees, says Natalie Goldberg. And you will finally find your voice.

Theatre was that for me. I think intimacy, the intimacy I am now capable of, will do it again.

I took a quiz recently that asked, "How often do men 10 years older than you hit on you?" The answer is almost never. But men 10 to 20 years younger, all the time.

I find that when my days are full of theatre, I am liquid in technique; steeped in the difficulty of how bodies move and light falls, of how two people touch. Times like now, though, I know what theatre is about. The currents & complexities, intimacies & strangenesses at work illuminate Shakespeare's courts. It's never black and white. It's always interconnected, shaded, incongruous. Small fierce intact weather systems, marked with grace.

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Today a yellow-jacket flew in my open dining-room window. Lumbering, mazed with cold, it buzzed and crawled on the window pane, heading away from the open air. I tried to shoo it out with a sheet of paper. It buzzed angrily and headed even more determinedly the wrong direction.

I cupped the paper a couple inches behind it. As I watched, it suddenly stopped buzzing and began furiously to wash its nose and face. I was reminded exactly of an old woman who, rushed and flurried, stops for a cup of tea and to powder her face.

I waited while the old-lady bee finished her toilet and got calm again. Then I slid the paper next to her, so she had to step backwards onto it. I poked it out the window and she sailed off. Or he; who knows with bees.

I'm heading home. I'll leave you with Jeff keening the Corpus Christi Carol. First read the lyrics below. Then click the link, lie down, shut your eyes, and let him sing to you.

He bare her off, he bare her down
He bare her into an orchard ground

Lu li lu lay lu li lu lay
The falcon hath bourne my mate away

And in this orchard there was a hold
That was hanged with purple and gold
And in that hold there was a bed
And it was hanged with gold so red

Lu li lu lay lu li lu lay
The falcon hath bourne my mate away

And on this bed there lyeth a knight
His wound is bleeding day and night
By his bedside kneeleth a maid
And she weepeth both night and day

Lu li lu lay lu li lu lay
The falcon hath bourne my mate away

By his bedside standeth a stone
Corpus christi written thereon

-- Old English, arranged by Benjamin Britten for male soprano, sung by Jeff Buckley

a teacher made of mud

Ever read The Mahabharata? There's a story about a boy who wants to be a warrior. He goes and finds a teacher but the teacher keeps putting him off. So the boy builds a copy of the teacher made of mud and he washes it every day, and he learns to do his thing. And the whole symbolism is that the teacher is inside. I made teachers out of Ray Charles, Billie Holliday, Dylan, Judy Garland. I learned about phrasing, pitch, everything.

-- Jeff Buckley, 1993

Some of my teachers are made of mud. See-through mud. Jeff Buckley is one of my teachers made of mud.

I have a Eugenio from his books, made of mud of sun and moonlight. I have a Eugenio who is a sharp, present man in sandals, blinking and watching the actors.

tracking mastery, Jeff Buckley

The first year of theatre, I was soaking & changing beyond recognition -- but it wasn't until a year later, when I began teaching, that anyone could see the change.

Right now at work is like that. Working on a booted team, I am absorbing task and product like they are the hidden word of god. My dreams are changing. My project is changing. My relationships. My perspective.

Alan Watts, one of the first western writers of Zen, says in his autobiography, "I have written 20 books, and they all lead to the same place. Each one starts from a different point on the hub, follows a different spoke to the center."

The easiest way for me to show what I'm learning would be to give examples from my work projects, which I can't do.

What can I tell you.

I work seven days a week. Sometimes I make myself stay away on Saturdays, but when I do, I pace for hours, thinking about work.

I track the work itself. But mostly I focus on the first derivative of the work -- on how the mastery of this compares to & informs the mastery of theatre directing & theCore/bootcamps. Any shift or illumination in one system ripples & radiates through two others. It is these systemic insights that are keeping me riveted.

I love talking to my brother; his masteries are of fishing, boats, wilderness, oceans, and children.

I am reading Jeff Buckley's biography. Jeff's story is like a Greek tragedy or a commedia -- I can scroll backward and forward, from laughing blond child with eidetic music memory, to the man vanishing in the undertow of the Mississippi river. Backward -- silver spandex pants at his first high-school gig. Forward -- renting a Memphis house to write in. Backward -- taking breaks from working at the cafe to get up & perform, crowds spilling into the street. Forward -- Half hour Kanga Roo jams at the end of each concert.

Backwards. Forwards.

My death awaits me as surely as my birth. Between, I balance on this green moment.

Backwards: Working in Carbonated Games, just after she had moved into that new office. Listening to country music that night she was lonely, when Jason, Joshua, Rich, & Brett were out of town.

When Jeff Buckley sings he transfigures, an artist lost in the labyrinth of the song, finding his way inward & upward to the holy end. Lost, lost, lost, true, true, true.

It looks like what I am doing is creating software, but actually I am following a Song as alluring and mysterious as Jeff Buckley's.

It is 1:00am. I am stopping now. I will write two project status reports, a group status, a monthly update, and a project doc before I go home. Today has already had 9 hours of meetings and writing three other docs. Tomorrow begins in 6 hours.

Whatever feels like prayer, I like to do constantly.

On my left hang the Medicine Buddha thangka painting; an iron tibetan gong engraved with conches; a photo of a prayer room with Jerusalem buildings painted on its wooden walls, its crossbeams overhead latticed with wisteria, open to the sky; and a picture of my last bootcamp's v1 painting that looks like primordial interstellar fire.

you are made in the image of what you desire

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

-- Thomas Merton, Trappist monk

the Tarot said November

On my birthday I got a tarot reading for the upcoming year. The general arc was: "May through October is about integrity; doing the right thing, which will also be the hard thing. November it all comes together -- everything flowers in November."

working hard, growing lots

I am spending 90% of my attention and time at work. Working hard, growing lots, never home. Getting strong.

a tree in my livingroom

Friday they trimmed the branches by the powerlines. I found a magnificent vinemaple, as large as a small tree. Its trunk is the girth of a flagpole, spreading gracefully into 4 or 5 branches of delicate small Japanese-maple-like leaves, reaching 15 feet high and 18 feet wide.

I have been having this vision lately that my inner self -- whom I often visualize as a house -- has sprouted a tree from its floor, is peeling its roof back, and is growing the tree up through the center of the house toward the sky.

I couldn't wait to try it out.

I brought the tree inside, and did slowtens carrying it for two hours.

I felt like Dunsinane woods incarnate. When I moved, the whole tree moved with me, leaves trembling. Looking up, I gazed through a crown of leaves. Tadashi Suzuki says, When you turn, turn the whole world with your spine. I turned like a flower opening, mesmerized, watching the tree wheel above me, my house insubstantial behind it, for the length of a CD.

After a while I stood the tree in a bowl of water, standing upright against the cathedral windows. It is almost two stories high. Then I did slowtens inside it looking out; entwining between its branches; lowering until I was lying on the floor gazing up through its leaves. I saw:

- two leafy branches in the foreground; beyond them, dappled with leaves, my wall of theatre books. The tree looked real, the books looked like a dream. Like standing in green Narnia, looking back through the wardrobe
- a tree inside a window inside more trees
- a tree more real than my house, bursting with life inside the house
- a tree more real than my art table, standing stiff & pale beyond the leaves

It was the first theatre I have made in a long time. How do I put the spectator inside a tree? Can the spectators be Dunsinane? From which vantages does a tree retain this incredible impact? What would be better than a tree? How could I imperil a greek chorus?

A day later, the leaves had lost their fragrance. Two days later, they crisp and droop.

Last night I made art for hours, listening to U2's Rattle & Hum video over and over, drawing myself as a flowering tree.

I am working at the meta level almost constantly. Work projects and home ones look translucent, as if they are part of a play I don't realize I am creating, but which is shimmering into being.

Burn team

I have a friend, Danielle, who acted in my Medea a few years back. She works a lot in Seattle, and has since also become part of a professional burn team. If your movie or outdoor event needs someone, a professional stuntperson, to be set on fire, you can hire their team. She is the one who burns -- who is dowsed and set alight. There are four other people on the team, each with specific responsibilities to make sure the fire is safe, and that she is. The worst that has ever happened is once she singed her eyelashes.

An actor's resume has:

- all their stage roles
- all their film roles
- any backstage, design, or tech roles
- education & training
- Special Skills

The Special Skills section gives directors an idea of the actor's unique skills. If the actor can play guitar, for example, or juggle, the director might put those in the production.

The audience often does not realize how much training actors have. Here is the Special Skills section of Danielle's resume.

Special Skills
Singing, scuba diving (cold water/drysuit, wreck diving, rescue diving), swimming, footfalls, fire burns, stair falls, air ram, fighting for the camera or stage, high falls, bulldogging, ratchet work, riding jet skis, intermediate Spanish language, typing, computers, trapeze/aerial dance, horseback riding, skiing, softball, volleyball, yoga, dog training, basic wire work.

Passed basic proficiency with the Society of American Fight Directors in single sword and unarmed combat (2003), smallsword, broadsword, rapier and dagger, knife fighting (2004), and Quarterstaff (2005).

Her amount of stunt training is specialized & unique -- but almost any actor you see at the Rep or the Intiman likely holds similar Fight certification.

what are slow tens & shakuhachis?

Suzuki training with sticks

This is a brief overview -- a glimpse, not a full description.

Suzuki Training is a physical theatre training created by theatre director, Tadashi Suzuki. From the SITI, Saratoga International Theatre Institute site whose artistic director, Anne Bogart, is a long-time colleague of Tadashi Suzuki's:

SUZUKI METHOD
Developed by internationally acclaimed director, Tadashi Suzuki and the Suzuki Company of Toga, the Suzuki Actor Training Method's principal concern is with restoring the wholeness of the human body to the theatrical context and uncovering the actor's innate expressive abilities. A rigorous physical discipline drawn from such diverse influences as ballet, traditional Japanese and Greek theater and martial arts, the training seeks to heighten the actor's emotional and physical power and commitment to each moment on the stage. Attention is on the lower body and a vocabulary of footwork, sharpening the actor's breath control and concentration.

Slowtens are essentially a form of radiant ultra-slow walking. You only do these after you are dripping with sweat from an hour of hard physical movement. Like classical ballet floorwork, which is only begun after an hour of barre, slowtens are only done after the body is supple and hot from an hour of Walking, Marching, and Statues.

When you see people doing slowtens, they look like driftwood moving. Their glances are fixed, their gaze luminous, their bodies caught in windswept positions. They seem to not so much wade through space, as drift through it. They move like underwater statues. You want to, and can, examine the actors very closely when they are in such a state. They are like a suspended moment of a person, transfixing.


Slowtens used in performance


Robyn Hunt, my Suzuki teacher, in slowtens in The Water Station

Moving inside this form makes your thoughts as radiant and slow as the movement. You are not thinking, but slow truths arise.

Don't think, don't think, don't think. Don't know, don't know, don't know. Don't think.

One point of the training is that power for an actor arises from the earth. Connected to the earth, an actor can do anything.

Another point is to learn how to let the truth arise in each moment. Don't plan. Don't know before you get there. The truth of each moment discovered in that moment is far more wondrous and real than any forethought.

If you can learn to move this way, you can learn to live on stage, and in the world.


Performers at the end of a shakuhachi

Shakuhachis -- so-called because the song to which this part of the training is taught is played on the shakuhachi bamboo flute -- are the same ultra-slow-mo, moment-to-moment movement, but these begin with the actor lying collapsed on the floor.

When the music starts, the actor 1) slowly oozes upward to standing, 2) drifts to the front edge of the stage, 3) drifts back, and 4) sinks infinitesimally slowly all the way back to the earth. Extremely difficult and exacting.

As Roberta Carerri of the Odin says and Robyn Hunt, my Suzuki teacher, would agree, "A fall of even a millimetre is a fall."

Medea was a Highwayman

I did slowtens last night, using work projects as my visualizations instead of Hamlet & Ophelia, to the soundtrack of my Medea.

The thing is before my eyes
Learned from no rumor or lies:
Medea, without city or friends
And nowhere where pity extends --
O how you must suffer

Let a man rot
in an odious lot
if he never unshutters
his heart to the cleansing
esteem of another --
he'll not be my friend, no never

I did slowtens last week at work, in the room where we'd just finished a long team meeting. I moved like a drowned statue, wading in ultra-slow-motion from one corner of the room to the other. Flipcharts, tables, walls wavered, became flimsy in comparison to the pouring slowtruth, the keening vocals.

Whatever you want to memorize, do slowtens through it.

I have done slowtens through my mother's kitchen while she was cooking; from the back wall of the ghost-lit Seattle Opera House to the stage.

Last week I did them from one end of our small conference room to the other, amid bamboo stalks, leopard glass, orange gladiolias, stickybacked flipchart papers, cokes, tablets, markers, diamond-patterned chairs, whiteboards, turquoise fabric, The Timeless Way of Building, and Lorenna McKennit singing my father's favorite poem.

The road was a ribbon of moonlight
over the purple moor
when the Highwayman came riding
riding, riding
when the Highwayman came riding
up to the old inn door

Medea was a Highwayman. I am unshuttering my heart.

Slowtens are, for me, a harbinger of change. When I start to move physically, life moves are not far behind. I am doing slowtens, paying my bills, cleaning my house, running four projects at work, and dancing.

Joel on software

Paul, one of the developers on my team, turned me on to this guy Joel Spolsky, who writes a column called "Joel on software." The straight scoop.

I borrowed Paul's book, Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity.

006. booted team-PMs

Cymbeline

In theatre I learned best when I was:

- assisting or studying with a master director, while also
- directing my own play, while also
- teaching an acting class.

"Theatre is a received art," said Bart Sher during a Servant Of Two Masters rehearsal one afternoon. "Theatre is a received art," I told the students that night whom I was directing in Electra, and promptly taught them commedia techniques.

There is one chair in a rehearsal room for the Assistant Director. It is reserved for a young director to absorb the ecosystem of rehearsal. I love this chair. I sat in it for years, watching Mark, Leonid, Burke, Andrew, Lee, Bart, Vanessa, Nicolette, Robyn, Joseph, Jennifer, Eugenio.

The first day of rehearsal I would shiver, imagining that god had created the entire universe to give me this moment. The whole earth, all humans who have ever lived, theatre, Shakespeare, my parents; educating every person involved, creating this building & theatre, paying everyone, and bringing them all to this room this Tuesday, to incinerate in the truth of this text -- just to teach me.

Rachel. Meet Cymbeline, whispers god.
You do not meet a man but frowns: our bloods
No more obey the heavens than our courtiers
Still seem as does the king.

When I was assistant-directing, I would cover my paper with notes & sketches of what the director was doing. In the margins, I would write the principles I was abstracting.

PRINCIPLE: When teaching actors to sing, stand in a circle close enough that the song vibrates your body.
PRINCIPLE: When teaching actors to sing, don't talk. Sing.
PRINCIPLE: 1.5 hours of open voice-work/exploration in rehearsal triggers more breakthrough than 8 hours of straight rehearsal.
PRINCIPLE: Lining up shoes neatly outside the rehearsal room door shapes rehearsal ethics.

I'm doing the same thing now for a team of booted program managers, who are team-PMing their projects. The form changes, but the Work is the same: How to create ultra-high-performance ensembles which incarnate & create the Mystery.

PRINCIPLE: When doing something you don't know how to do, say "I don't know any other way to do this, other than to just start and go through the whole thing."
PRINCIPLE: Boot the team then boot the product.
PRINCIPLE: Have a booted team boot the team.
PRINCIPLE: The more unknown the task, the more iterations of studying it you should plan in the investigation phase.
PRINCIPLE: To understand a system, examine three levels of its meta plus a fourth to verify.
PRINCIPLE: Finish the biggest thing every meeting.
PRINCIPLE: Begin finishing the project before you start it.

Those apply precisely to directing a play.