The last day of 2011

What a glorious unexpected crazy huge fucking year.

Change in a chaotic system begins imperceptibly, in tiny motes, at the edges. 

In the first year of theatre, I did not know it was the first year of theatre, either. The whole time, I thought I was going back to Microsoft in six weeks. I did not know that I would do nothing but theatre for four years, and stay in thrall to theatre for three more years, even after returning to work. Or that I would spend a year in Europe studying it, and become an ensemble theatre director with a sure hand for Chekhov and devising physical theatre. I did not know any of that.

2011 has been that kind of year.

   one day you're eating

   mulberries, then -- you're on a 
   strange road with strangers

This was a year of rending. Things I had held true of myself, I could no longer hold true. Things I had thought and believed, I no longer thought or believed. New, more coherent, more explored pieces of systems of ideas had appeared.

I can point at all the things that happened this year, and yet, I cannot see the pattern. Only points of light.

Points and points and points of light.

When you inject energy into a closed system, there WILL be changes. You cannot predict where or what the changes will be. But you can, with absolute certainty, predict that there will be changes. 
-- Benjamin Ellinger 

I got sick Christmas day with a high fever, and for six days lay in bed, drinking only water, sleeping 20 to 24 hours a day. I was processing, and moulting, burning, fitful, restless, consumed. Solve the puzzle, I kept thinking, as I rolled in fiery slumber. Solve it. But after days, I realized it was not solvable. Trying to, even from the depths, just spiked my fever higher. Finally I let it go until I could think again.

I have leveled up. I have left the level of Do It Alone and entered the level of Do It With Others. Few of my reflexes or habits work, and almost all of them are anti-patterns. It is the shift to working as a system, not a node. 

This was my desktop background all year:

A tsunami isn't a tidal wave but a series of waves—or wave train—in which the first isn't necessarily the most dangerous. Seen from on shore, a tsunami may be more like a rapidly rising tide than a series of giant breaking waves.

When you start to play together and evolve, the first thing that happens is that all your old habits break. It is destruction of a precise and remorseless magnitude.

If I had to name 2011, I would say it was The Year Of Entering The Discrete State Change.

Auditions

I attended the Theatre Puget Sound General Auditions this year. I was a yearly auditor from 1999 - 2001; this is the first time I have attended since then.

This was TPS's first year of "going digital." Auditors received all the actors' headshots and resumes printed out, on regular non-photo paper in a binder, along with a CD of the same. The headshots were numbered, in audition order.

What I noticed is, I have shifted.

I have "leveled up," as gamers say; I have grown. I am committed. My commitment level at DigiPen is intense, as is the commitment level of the students I am working with. They have committed four years of their life, and eighty thousand dollars to this work. I have been here three years, and it has gone by like a spring week. What I notice is that most of the non-equity actors do not register on the same scale of commitment (although many of them likely are); they do not have that solid day-in, day-out feel to them. Interestingly, the Jet City Improv company actors do; they look at home on a stage, real, connected, alive; they look like equity actors, like company actors from other countries. But overall -- only the equity actors feel right to me.

I have gone pro. In all respects.

I felt matter-of-fact about looking into how to hire and pay them. I talked with Rik Deskin, our Equity contact, and said I would be sending him an email. If this is something I can afford, he will work it out with Los Angeles, who handles all the Seattle equity contracts.

DREAM: Black and gold octopus statue in the square / TPS actors

I dreamed that I was in an old stone, thick-walled Polish building -- as if in the Krakow main plaza, overlooking the square. I was looking out through a quiet window (although there was no window; just open air).

The square was covered by the statue of a giant octopus, with its head over 8 feet tall in the center, and the tentacles raying crookedly out to 8 corners of the square. The gold had been burnished in places, by years of children sitting on the tentacles. The head was also gold, with a black patch or leather cap covering about 1/3 of the head. The cap was made of leather (most likely), or possibly obsidian.

The octopus statue had two eyes, which gazed my direction. As I watched, the octopus blinked its eyes, and winced its head slightly, softening; then it straightened back up.

I was horrified to realize that it was alive. I felt like we were torturing it. It seemed calm and peaceful, though, and did not seem to be in pain. I ran down to the sea, and brought back a container of water, which I poured on its leg. I could not remember if octopi could live out of water or not; I thought not, although in the dream they clearly could, as this octopus had been there for years.

I realized that the octopus was almost entirely made of gold. Over 85% of it was solid gold, like the Tibetan buddha statues. If I could turn the rest of it to gold, it would come back to life, and return to the sea. Almost all of it was healed (gold), except the third of its head which was covered in, and made of, black leather or obsidian. (From my window, it looked like obsidian from my window, but close-up, it looked like supple well-used black leather.)

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INTERPRETATION

The octopus is me.

I have almost completely healed. But something -- a third of my head? -- still needs to be healed. I am not in pain, but am not alive either; and am not in my element. I am respected, loved, a fixture, a thing of formal power and beauty; a central part of the town square. I am almost entirely immobile. I am big.

I think the missing third is theatre; or body; or love; or the three, melted into one. The other two thirds, software/games and Core Protocols, are rich and fully developed. The other two thirds also refers to Ben and Chris, my DigiPen partners, who seem more fully realized to me.

I decided to hire actors from the Theatre Puget Sound regional auditions, to develop my next piece with and on, at least to the staged reading level.

You can never enter the river the same way, twice.

This is different, all right.

One semester into Goddard's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts

I have completed my first semester. It was a rough, but illuminating ride.

I had not planned well for how to add a fulltime graduate program to my already over-full life; so in the middle of my first semester, I fell blazingly sick, until I figured out how to interweave the two.

The Goddard MFA is pretty consistently a 5-semester practice of increasing clarification. What people come out with is always related to what they come in wanting -- but it is distilled, purified, shifted in some way.

I entered my MFA with a focus on high-performant ensembles and the Core Protocols; but found in the first semester that my connection to theatre had deepened while dormant. I have shifted.

My current two areas of focus are Theatre Directing/Devising and Writing; the high-performant team work is a topic of much of the writing.

All of this sits, like a jewel in a rich and glorious setting, in the ever-fertile, ever-changing software laboratory of my dreams, which is the DigiPen Institute of Technology, and the software programmers and game teams I teach.

There is a line, in the Brad Pitt movie, "Legends of the Fall," after all the drama of the first couple acts is done, and before the drama of the final climax has begun -- which goes: Then Tristan entered into the sweet heart of his life.

That is how I feel. I am in the sweet heart of my life. If I were to stay here for 30 or 40 years, it would feel like an extremely short time. The rounds of the DigiPen year are as deep and orderly as at a monastery, and the personal practice is as intense; it feels like the Odin; it feels like me. I find that the longer I work here, the deeper I blossom.

I have found that most rare of things, a true rich creative home.