Anne Bogart always says . . .

Second day back from NYC and lots to do. Two weeks with the SITI Company was of course just enough to really start exploring, but it's okay: I have my work laid out for me.

Our two weeks at Columbia constituted daily Suzuki and Viewpoints training with the SITI ensemble; Anne Bogart also occasionally led Viewpoints training. We also worked on original compositions, from still images to ten-minute pieces, based on our responses to Antigone-- the story, not just the play. Any and all versions were fair game, from Sophocles to Anouilh to Euripides' lost text (where Dionysus intercedes and Antigone and Haemon get married) to the Jocelyn Clarke version that the SITI Company is using for their production. I ended up in two pieces: one a Frost-Nixon-esque media examination of Creon interspersed with moments inside his head; the other an ambiguous wedding-funeral where Antigone left Haemon at the altar and so became the source of a communion.

Collaboration was inspiring, and even more so was seeing everyone else's work, including some who had trained with the company for years and others completely new. Lots of great people, and I was less slow to make new friends than usual. Many of the best moments came from treating the characters just as people and not as ideas with bodies like I tend to read them. One of many reminders of obvious truths that I tend to forget.

Ideas that I am stuck on:

Feed forward/feedback - an actor's balance - feed forward is giving, feedback is receiving, finding out the effects of what you did, a sensory experience. While I'm consciously aware of both, I'm reminded that I don't give the second enough time. The idea that even just having a sensory experience onstage can constitute performance is radical for me.

Mirror neurons - a discovery that Anne shared with us-- that anyone watching an action experiences it on some level as if they'd done it-- more or less so depending on whether the action was familiar (e.g. ballet dancers' mirror neurons go crazy when watching ballet, less so when watching other types of dance). In basic, fundamental actions, especially breathing, this gives the performer great power.

Breath scoring - choreographing a performance down to the level of breathing. I have never done this and it's shockingly hard. Ellen Lauren put me and a classmate through even so simple an exercise as speaking a dialogue while holding hands and squeezing the partner's hand whenever we inhaled, and it was almost impossible to keep it together.

Overwhelming - Ellen Lauren asked me to go onstage alone and threw text, a physical score, a breathing score and a focus at me all at once, then added in music, too-- the struggle was to use being overwhelmed to engage further, not to back out and start again. This is one of the fights I'm fighting in my personal life, too. Something else Anne said-- it's impossible to multitask. What we can do is integrate multiple simple tasks into a complex task and learn it. Hence rehearsal.

Voice as a result of shape - vocal truthfulness comes not only from an understanding of the meaning and intention of a text, but also, because text is a last resort, from the shape of the body at the time of speaking. For me, this is very much a case of letting. I discovered a whole new voice when speaking in bridge posture.

Viewpoints as a rehearsal technique - there are definitely ways that a director, without having a cast trained in Viewpoints, can use them for rehearsal. In one class we paired up and made seven still images of a problematic but ultimately loving relationship, then used them in several improvisations. My partner and I, for example, went through ours as a sequence, with the transitions ours to decide, with a dialogue and another couple doing the same thing, all of us having to integrate each other into what we made. It generated some powerful results, and very quickly.


My problems as a performer and my problems as a person are one and the same. One priority since leaving has been my alignment-- I'm still leading with my head, though less than ever-- and I can feel a real difference. Breath, relaxation and social engagement are big priorities too, but I think they will naturally follow.

And of course, I got lots of ideas for Bob. We have a public staged reading on Monday and plenty to do before then.

I'm deeply thankful to the company as well as my classmates, and I hope I will see them all again.