Anyway, this is all just to say: My recent Open Studio at BAX was a challenge to concoct (though ultimately rewarding, with tremendously helpful feedback from the audience).

Whenever my process is made public, I become (naturally?) preoccupied with the audience.  Most artists I know get very angry when you mention the audience.  Especially non-American artists!  They always seem more likely to think about their art in terms of their own self-fulfillment and personal vision.  American artists seem a little more self-conscious, a little more eager to please.  (A little more like they’re running for office?)

I am American, and I never know what I want.

So many different people have seen so many different versions of this piece, and they all want different things.  I am embarrassed to admit in a public forum how much this confuses me. But honestly, if you’re sitting in my audience watching my show, I really care about what you’re thinking.  I really want you to follow me, trust me, get uncomfortable with me…. I don’t need you to like me, or like the show, or even have a terribly good time, but, in the case of “thirtynothing,” I really need you to walk away having considered some very specific ideas about history, about AIDS, about death, about civic responsibility…  And the more I think about that — the more I think about my NEED for you to think these things — the more I realize that experimental theater isn’t about experimenting WITH theater.  It’s about experimenting with YOU.

Performance is alchemical. Something about the audience, the vulnerability, the exchange ignites the room in ways that working alone in the studio can never quite prepare you for. I fantasize about the audience, how it will feel, strategies for engaging them, but the reality is always more intense and messy and full of information than I could ever prepare for. What starts to seem flat, dull and rote in rehearsal becomes layered and charged in performance, so long as I’m able to commit myself to the experience. I dread the constant ups and downs of the rehearsal process. One minute I’m in love with something, the next minute I think it’s pointless and empty. It’s this instability that keeps driving me forward, and ultimately keeps me invested in this form. I like not knowing. I like creating a situation where performance has the potential to be a place of transformation. I like the fact that performance is a phenomenon that is too much to take in, that leaves an impression rather than a document, that cultivates a different kind of knowledge.

For now, I’ve decided to call this work “For You, The Audience.” Not sure about that, but it certainly has a lot to do with seeing and being seen. The room we’re in, the moment we are sharing, even if the roles are oppositional and charged. I’m trying to understand both my feelings about “production” and my personal practice of making work (which is always changing). How can I create a relationship between the two, where one doesn’t negate the other? I don’t want the performance to simply demonstrate what I would do in the studio on my own, but I also don’t want to erase the hours and hours I spend investigating this form simply because it is now a public presentation. Rather than making something designed for effect, I’m trying to investigate my relationship to movement, my body, my ideas and propose a specific translation for that relationship into a structure that can be called “performance.”

Lately, I’ve been holding off on defining steps or setting movement. I’m hoping the structures of things will keep becoming clearer as I spend time with them. I have to trust that spending time is enough. That being receptive is enough. It’s hard. Already I’m thinking “Holy Christ, I’ve got to make a piece now!” It was useful when Marya reminded me that I shouldn’t stop exploring just because I’m aware there is a show coming up (I’m paraphrasing). It’s easy to get derailed when the spectre of “production” starts to appear. And anyways, I’m still trying to understand what things I’m drawn to in the studio.

Hopefully I’ll manage to stay out of my own way.

I’d also like to thank everyone who came to the Open Studio showing. Because this work is so dependent on the presence of an audience, it’s incredibly helpful to start to understand how this feels. And to see how you feel after experiencing it. So thanks!

Apologies in advance for the lame, amateur physics reference, but I kept thinking of it as I wrote this post, so you’re stuck with it.

I have a conflicted relationship with open rehearsals: I love them for other people’s work but not so much for my own.   I find it very difficult to share my own work at an embryonic stage and am often fearful that, once a potential audience member has witnessed my undigested ideas, he or she will become less interested in the work as a finished product.

I opened my rehearsal last week as part of my participation in my residency program.  I had done the same thing last year and it went really well, but this year I didn’t feel ready at all and found the experience quite wrenching.  The feedback was really valuable however, and perfectly timed since I am about to go off to MacDowell for a month and I don’t think I would have made these discoveries alone in the woods without the audience’s input.

I dreaded the open studio because I felt we had very little to show anyone.  In the past few weeks of rehearsal, we’ve done very little other than fielding interference; we only cast the Dad (a pivotal character) a few weeks ago, and that performer won’t be joining us until January.  We have a wonderful female performer standing in for him, but she can only do so much to provide an emotional marker for the other performers.  Our show is very dependent on music, physical set pieces and video that the performers are interacting with, and few of those things are in a presentable stage.

For these reasons, I didn’t really feel like I could “choose” my material—I settled for the few scenes that we had had a chance to rehearse.  I felt that I was asking the audience to imagine their way around the strange staging we’ve created to interact with set pieces and video cameras that are not yet there, creating a video picture they cannot yet see, with performers who are substituting for people they will have to imagine.  I felt that handing out an essay about our intentions might have been just as effective.

But I still managed to get a lot out of it.  This is my first time writing a piece entirely (my previous work has relied on my edits of found text), and the open studio helped to articulate what the problems are.  The project rides more than one fine line: it is a memory play in which the characters square off about their shared history.  So there are a lot of scenes that should play ambiguously, but not vaguely.  It should be possible for different audience members to walk away with very distinct and different interpretations of a single scene.  There have been a few things that felt “wrong” to me and to the performers.  The feedback after the open studio articulated a lot of those problems for us, and our rehearsal the following night was very productive.  There are a lot of things that need further development, and I would sum them up by stating that they fall in the realm of articulating intention.  While it is fine and even compelling that a lot of the story line and character changes remain unspoken and mysterious, we have not gone far enough in choosing exactly WHAT will remain mysterious, and what should be revealed.  At the time of the rehearsal, it was all quite messy and vague, and the audience was confused about plot points that to me were “obvious.”  So we had to look at the script with an eye for clarity and be sure we were getting across whatever information needed to be understood to fully experience those scenes.  This might never have dawned on me had I not spoken with several audience members wrestling with the same questions.

I have sort of set myself up to experience this in a more intense way in January.  We are staging a special presentation for programmers in NY for Under the Radar, and opening our rehearsals to them as well.  I insisted on this development myself as a way to get accustomed to creating relationships with programmers and rehearsing in front of an audience.  It will be good for us but probably painful.

–CATHARINE DILL

Best wishes,

Mina

Missed the show opening?
Can’t make it to Brooklyn to see the show in-person?

Click here to view it online.

Jennie MaryTai Liu wove a world, a language, senses you could smell and stayed with you in LANDS AND PEOPLES.

Victoria Libertore wrote and performed a masterful — smart, funny, provocative,  investigation of Countess Elizabeth Bathory in GIRL MEAT, the second work she has made in her  residency.

Abigail Browde wrote, directed and performed in THANGKS FOR NOTHIN  — I thank her for producing a work of such satisfying quality and I cannot wait to see how this successful production influences her future work.

luciana achugar created PURO DESEO — I was spellbound experiencing a production that was unlike any I had seen before.

Thanks to these four extraordinary women for this season and their unique contributions.

I think I have also mentioned this following concept in the blog back in January.  But, I’ll say it again.  I just remembered the servant archetype.  I do a lot of archetypal work in preparation for my performance and while I’m performing.  It’s a technique I’ve been developing, and I pass on to my students.  While toasting my gluten-free, egg-free waffle, I just remembered the servant archetype.  The servant in the best sense:  giving.  Instead of thinking today/tonight with the opening of the show, “Look at me.  Think I’m great.  Approve of me,” I simply think (as the servant), “I have a little gift to give you.”

This helps open up my heart and put everything in perspective.  But, of course, the audience is also giving me a gift by giving me their time and energy.  Well, back to balancing the books, some lunch with my wonderful friends Duck, Andrew and Heidi (who came into town from Chicago for the show), running lines, a light rehearsal, transformation into The Countess and then the show.  GO team!

PHOTO CREDIT: ANGELA JIMENEZ