if . . .

later

five years of wandering through strange rooms through hospitals through uninhabited islands how thin are the threads that hold us together with the world how painful the spider webs dying to break free exhausted fevered we run and run searching for shelter for a homeland and our every step is documented registered and evaluated by the one who follows us and punishes with silence, mishap, suspicion, hopelessness (1980) ( Time to Transplant In Memory of Nijole Miliauskaite by Laima Sruoginis) :: comment :: . . . writer honouring writer . . . testimony, celebration, memoriam . . . giving thanks . . . why is it that the everyday challenges us to the extreme . . . the joys of adolescence . . the disquiet of old age . . . driving the straight highway into the big sky . . . thank the warning bumps that startle into awareness . . . wake up . . .

The Way of the Actor by Brian Bates Published by Shambala in 1987 (Chapter 9. Dream: Images of Power. pages 128 - 130) Fantasy is taboo. In the secular, instrumental world of today, to indulge in fantasy is to dwell in a 'realm of unreality'. It is considered to be a waste of time. An indulgence.       Liv Ullmann decries this, but thinks it is important to distinguish between different sorts of fantasy. 'I think there's good fantasy and bad fantasy. The bad fantasy is what you see on television - the commercials that tell you if you use this hair spray, a fantasy life will follow - your husband will come home on a white horse. That is dangerous fantasy because that is not how life is.' This is the sort of fantasy that we all recognize as unreal, and the promotion of unrealistic expectations about life Ullmann considers dangerous and frustrating, '. . . People live in anguish because they've based their whole lives on unreality.'      ...

(a working process) A B L A D E OF B I T T E R B R E A T H THRENODY REPRISE moved out for no reason. didn't change any place It's no better. & the dreams uprooted the ancient tree rotten no strength required What you must accept, fully A man with the black wool high up the neck for protecting the throat. (E)motional ________________________________________________________________ I had left the temple waterless and frozen fatigued and peeling. On the edge of no return at least that's the case this winter solstice thousand two. how many years later? ________________________________________________________________ It's cold outside ________________________________________________________________ Golden light shadows the face On wall (through blinds, glass window, everywhere) "Schwarze Milch der Frühe" crisis doesn't lie lost daylight (anger doesn't see the many deaths) uprising into her burial zone No . . . ten footsteps . . . to the left future nigh...

           Such Desperate Joy Imagining Jackson Pollock edited by Helen A. Harrison. Published Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, New York NY, 2000.                  (Chapter . Title. pages )       As an individual who found his calling in the arts, I was drawn to Pollock as an artist who achieved a mode of expression, a form of creativity, that was not derivative of the art of his own time, or of any other time. Yes, it was "derived," in that it came out of his understanding of its precendents. But the actual art, the paint on the canvas, was truly original. Pollock's desire to arrive at his own originality, the need, the courage to open himself up and surrender to that openness - and his unrestrained commitment to take it to its limit - drew me to him.       A desperate need for approval usually forces one into...

The Way of the Actor by Brian Bates Published by Shambala in 1987 (Chapter 6. Transformation: Changing Selves. pages 96 - 98) 'Persona' originally referred to the masks that actors used in the classical period of Greek history. Implied in each mask was a complete separate personality, often of a diety, which possessed the actor who wore the mask. But today, 'persona' is a psychological term, and refers to the personal façade that one exhibits publicly. This outward face includes significant aspects of physical appearance, but particularly encompasses the personal style or presence that an individual presents to the world. And this includes a strong element of conformity because the aspect of oneself which is bing presented at any one time is meant to fit in with, and satisfy, the people with whom one is interacting. The persona is the outward face of our psyche, the face that the world sees. And as we all know, what we show the world does not necessarily correspond w...

audblog audio post

". . . ideas want expression and they get expressed and then they have a life of their own." ( Mirrors Reflected : vog blog:vlog 2.0 :Adrian Miles) :: comment :: . . . who is the 'me' . . . I choose to be an actor on the stage becoming a character . . . I choose to post on the web becoming a persona . . . ( more ... ) . . . the way of the actor can be an invitation of self-possession . . . finding identities to enable transformation . . . changing identities, reliving a life, seeing with freshness, dreaming images of power, risk filling the moment, extending beyond the boundaries, open, sensitive and intuitive . . . that creates the energy of intimate communication . . .

nietzsche slumbers what exists before waiting rain breach birthing old aged grey tonight the thunder rocked the earth and the thought of unforgiving longing tempered the voice activating all inner channels demanding answers from secret sources sources exposed during wild strokes of invention leaping into the hearts of others stomping and shouting relentless smashings forced entries beast wanderings howling horror the sight of dry rain barren concrete warning past haunting memory burning

( "Fisherman and the Widow" /Luke Anguhadluq /Baker Lake) " IQUALUIT - A community of Baffin Island printmakers recently celebrated its 30th anniversary with the launch of its 2003 collection." (CBC: Baffin Island printmakers launch new collection Joanne Stassen, The Arts Report ) more . . . :: comment :: . . . searching for a sense of community . . . community is this deep and lasting working together and a celebration of that creative act . . . community is a shared space . . . hmmm . . . don't we all share this space and aren't we all involved in a deep and lasting working together . . . or is it a matter of sense . . . sensibility . . .does the sense shape the community . . . physical,environmental,aesthetical sense . . .

"'I felt a terrific longing for a kind of ensemble,' Mr. Chaikin told author William Goldman, for the book, "The Season." "I wanted to play with actors, actors who felt a sensitivity for one another... In order to come to a vocabulary, we had to teach each other: we had no ambitions other than to meet and play around..." ( Playbill : Joseph Chaikin, Director and Actor Who Founded Avant Garde Open Theatre, Dead at 67 By Kenneth Jones) :: comment :: . . . met Chaikin ever so briefly in a workshop . . . a time of crossroads . . . he had just disbanded the Open Theater and looked remarkably vulnerable . . . in fact in my mind he always looks vulnerable . . . read his writings and honoured his work . . . have followed his ideas&directions for decades . . . will continue to challenge his immense vocabulary . . . thank you Joseph for your "terrific longings" . . . the sensitivity with which you touched so many will be felt in the tomorrow of...

". . . he watched nearly every interview ever done with him - and was disappointed by what he found. "There's nothing in them about spontaneity as the secret of life, nothing about the protective qualities of art," he says. 'So that's what I decided to look at in the film. Let's give the public the Fellini that we don't know..." Fellini ruminates about everything from religion and death to art and memory. He discusses the process of filmmaking: "The instant when I begin to work- when I become a filmmaker - someone takes over. A mysterious invader, an invader that I don't know... He directs everything for me. But it's someone else, not me, with whom I coexist, someone I don't know, or know only by hearsay." And he offers this fabulist little anti sound bite, from which Pettigrew takes his title: "I'm a born liar. For me the things that are most real are invented." (NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL: Directing the Director ...

audblog audio post first test (words in Fri Jun 20 post)

". . . last year in Zhouzhuang I [(c) 2003 eugene kuo] shot the picture below of a woman backstage preparing for a performance of Kunqu opera." ( carte blanche pedicure ) :: comment :: . . . the personal story and accompanying photo sent me towards . . . beautiful exploration . . . the traditional is exotic / conventions are mysterious / inner private transformed into open public / backstage is onstage / presentational is ceremonial . . apply make-up to reveal/ make up to remember . . . unrelated question: Is posting a detail from a picture like quoting from a text passage? . . . ( Chinese Opera . Jessica Tan Gudnason. From the photgraph- ers foreward

". . . the links that constitute your blog and blogging. What this weaves a community which is not community as people, but an emergent semantic or epistemological community, people are sort of attached there, bit like avatars, but this link economy has its own forces and logics and it isn't really about community as social agency, but community as information nodes meeting up. People are just the vehicle these information nodes exploit." ( vog blog::vlog 2.0 ) vs "I believe that blogging is not about personal publishing. It's about finding your identity in conversations with others. Blogging tools are not mature yet and for an occasional reader it's difficult to see the roots of blogging dialogues. I hope that this collection of links can help you to trace conversations that feed my thought and writing." ( Mathemagenic sidebar) :: comment :: . . . prefer the ecosystem over avatar . . . prefer . . . "1. Keep a Research Diary 2. Maintain an Elect...

burnt smell in the air haze brings tears static hears rain settle down into the cool wind erotic tension rises sky clears blinds bang against the window startles the dusk no penance I am catholic

"As Eric Jensen points out, "Emotions drive the threesome of attention, meaning, and memory." In essence, that just about sums up what we know about learning: attending to information, constructing meaning, and lodging it in our memory. Brain researchers have shown that emotions are critical to patterning, which is the way that information is organized in the brain, how we are able to retrieve that information. Emotions assist in both evaluating and integrating information and experiences." "However, as we know, not all emotions facilitate learning. Stress, frustration, anger, fear--all can overwhelm the brain with hormones and thought patterns that totally shut down one's ability to learn. When major emotional flooding occurs it is true that one literally cannot think straight." ( Educator's Voice )

"Susan Sontag to get German publishers' prize: Germany's book publishers association has announced that its peace prize this year will go Susan Sontag, the U.S. author and cultural critic. She will receive it at the Frankfurt Book Fair this October. Today, the association said Sontag stood for the "dignity of free thinking" in a world "of falsified images and mutilated truths"." ( Deutsche Welle ) :: comment :: . . . peace out . . . "We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American forei...

" The poet does not believe in miracles, but in mysteries." (from THE FOREST AND THE TREES : Four Seasons From a Journal About Place and Poetry Wesley McNair) (once again thanks to wood s lot who has a screenful of wondrous links 06.18.2003)

". . .the Cartier Foundation of Contemporary Art in Paris: "Yanomami: The Spirit of the Forest," which runs through Oct. 12. The exhibition is not an ethnographic show. Rather it is an attempt to explore the parallels between the imagination of the Yanomami and the creative process of Western artists." (NYTimes:Arts: Artists Touched by Amazon Tribe By ALAN RIDING )

. . . contemplating trust . . . it's about passion, genuineness, integrity . . . respect not accuracy/truth . . . truth is too illusive & just facts which can often be manipulated . . . whose truth . . . to care . . .

"God bless Canada. First it gave the world the manifold joys of Hockey Night in Canada. Now it's presented us with En Français, Comme en Anglais, It's Easy to Criticize, a captivating performance piece by Jacob Wren and PME, mounted at P.S. 122. Toronto-Quebec kissing cousins of ERS and Collapsable Giraffe, but more somber and purposeful, the five-member group has created a collage that's part dance, part social critique, part heady fucking around." "Four tables supporting stereo equipment anchor the dimly lit stage. Lacking a conventional plot, the piece comprises a sequence of moments that appear random but have their own internal logic. Performers Martin Bélanger and Tracy Wright discuss theorist Gilles Deleuze on one side of the stage; on the other, two women (Julie Andrée T. and Sylvie Lachance) dance together silently. Bélanger disappears, but later speaks in French over a walkie-talkie illuminated by a spotlight. Wren runs repeatedly between the front...

"One of the greatest of 20th-century German critics, Theodor Adorno is remembered for his much misunderstood remark that "it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz." But within another of his statements lies the true imperative of political theater: "Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives, but resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings." " ( TheVillageVoice :Theater:Beyond Neurosis What Kind of Political Theater Are We Really After? by Charles McNulty) "Yet the ensemble's dancer-like discipline and formal finesse (especially noted in the fluidity of its environmental staging) made it impossible for me to dismiss Problématique Provisoire as clichéd avant-garde indulgence. The production provided compelling research into the nature of cultivated artistic bodies in theatrical space—and our inherently leering relationship to them as spectators. ...

"The fact is that we are not even masters of our own conscious memory. What we remember and what we do not is subject to an emotional control, which follows a simple principle. If a given impression has emotional meaning we learn it. If it does not trigger emotional response it is not learned. In this case amygdala works as a kind of ‘emotiometer’, which regulates hippocampus and conscious learning. This serves a purpose: to economise the resources with regard to what to learn. So, if you want someone to remember what you say, make sure that it has emotional meaning for the person who has to remember it." ( elearningpost : June 11/2003 via Learning Circuits ) "This is a spooky, melancholy work, merely 65 minutes in length but concentrated in its intentions, Beckett-like in its ellipses (though largely without Beckett's wry and painful humor) and finely layered with suggestions that performing is remembering, that remembering is itself living, that the stage is n...

( SELECTED SCHOOL AND COLLEGE BUILDINGS FROM A CAMPUS designed and built by Christopher Alexander and his associates from PATTERNLANGUAGE.COM / CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STRUCTURE ) "The structure of life I have described in buildings -- the structure which I believe to be objective -- is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling. In this fourth volume I shall approach this topic of the inner feeling in a building, where there is a kind of personal thickness -- a source, or ground, something almost occult -- in which we find that the ultimate questions of architecture and art concern some connection of incalculable depth, between the made work (building, painting, ornament, street) and the inner 'I' which each of us experiences." "What I call 'the I' is that interior element in a work of art, which makes one feel related to it. It may occur in a leaf, or in a picture, in a house, in ...

"The critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) may be destined to enter into a new relationship of mutual learning." (Daniel W. Smith. "A Life of Pure Immanenece": Deleuze's "Critique et Clinique" Project) :: comment :: . . . reevaluation of the directing class . . . cold & cruel . . .

". . .a rare tour de force of literary imagination and philosophical speculation" (bbc: Entertainment & aegeantimes ) :: comment :: . . . listened to Writers &Company /Sunday:CBC Radio . . . Host Eleanor Wachtel speaks with Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's best-selling novelist. Pamuk deftly combines religious and historical themes with Western post-modernism. His latest book, "My Name Is Red," has just won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. . . . a wonderful interviewer probing an eloquent and meticulous writer able to voice freely . . . listen (at least for a week) . . .

"What Mr. Bergman has now done, he says, is to take out 'a pair of big metal scissors and cut Ibsen's iron corset into pieces without altering the basic themes. It's a resonant analogy from a man whose art is based on peeling layers - social and psychological - to unveil the skin beneath the clothes, the skull beneath the skin and the soul beyond the skull. Anyone who knows Bergman film classics like "The Seventh Seal" and "Persona" is well aware of this penetrating gift for finding the spirit in the flesh and vice versa. But the same skill has been equally evident in Mr. Bergman's work for the stage, including his revelatory, searingly physical productions of "A Doll's House" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night," both seen at the Brooklyn Academy more than a decade ago." (nytimes: Arts ) :: comment :: . . . first Bergman has been an enormous influence in why I went & than stopped going to movies/films...

"All of the actor's exercises and preparations, then, are directed at reaching the body at that point where it functions as matrix and threshold. The objective is to "re-code" the body, as it were, so that when it behaves in the context of the scene it will presence the character in the play and not the actor. The actor's training, according to Barba, teaches her how to separate herself from what her body shows. The effacement that lies at the heart of the theatre metamorphosis is achieved when a new form is instituted which functions as the soul 'of a living but re-invented body ... [giving rise to] a behaviour which has been separated from the behaviour of every day, a naturalness which is the fruit of artificiality.'" (Barba. The Paper Canoe, p. 104.) ( Performance as Metamorphosis. Aldo Tassi) :: comment :: . . . excellent essay on the way of the actor . . . nice historical survey with exceptional insight . . . yes theory but de...

"Several field trips to Africa and Afghanistan during his course of study launched his idea to write an all-encompassing, scientific theory of nomadology. With this extensive project he intended to prove that the human race, in the process of becoming human, had acquired a strong migratory drive or instinct to walk long distances through the seasons. This instinctive wanderlust had been repressed into the unconscious as humans had become increasingly sedentary, but it continued to well up under the warped conditions of settlement and found its outlets in violence, greed, territoriality, status-seeking, or a mania of the new." (www.LitEncyc.com. Richard Utz ) . . . reflecting on connections between Bruce Chatwin and the SongLines with the nomadic virtual walkabouts I so love listening simultaneously to the radio & visiting web sites . . . continuing the shaping of memory . . . living with history deliberately forgetting . . . making myth . . . " The Songli...

"The government document talks about 'creativity' as a capacity for spontaneous expression lying dormant within each individual, just waiting to be set free. 'Everyone is creative', announces the report: 'imagination, innovation and original expression are vital components of what it is to be human and to be part of society.'" (Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). 2001 Green Paper Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years [pdf]) vs "For a start, they talk about artistic creation as being painful and scary rather than uplifting. 'It's the most terrifying thing to do. It causes me a great deal of pain', said composer Harrison Birtwistle. His problems with the latest score stop him sleeping - and even dominate his dreams. The painter Paula Rego describes her work as 'fraught with danger and risk of total embarrassment' - it is a leap into the unknown, and most of these leaps end in failure: 'the idea goes w...

However, I ask this of them: when my sons grow up punish them, men, by bothering them on these things as I bothered you, if it seems to you they care about money or anything else more than about virtue, or if they seem to be something they are not, reproach them as I have you, because they do not care about what they should, and think they are something when they are worth nothing. And if you do these things, I will have experienced justice from you, both myself and my sons. But now it is already time to go away, I to die, and you to live; but which of us goes to a better situation, is unclear to all except to God. (Apologia Sokratous Defense Of Socrates by Plato Translated by Sanderson Beck: Final Admonitions ) At once rational and passionate, Socrates' final speech to the Senate before he was sentenced to death is a moving defence of his right to free speech. Adapted and performed by Nick Mancuso. ( radio one:cbc:ideas:june 3 ) ...

"To write this poem, I had to tell myself to lie still in the bed and listen for just the right line or word to come out of the air. I had to force myself because there were so many easy flippant wrong lines. But I had to be still and listen late at night or early in the morning. And then, still half asleep, get myself the proverbial pen and paper and write down my perception. Sometimes I would fall asleep at my desk and do this, too: Dream a line and snap myself into wakefulness. After I had all the lines, I needed to arrange them, not especially chronologically, but so as to both make sense and draw meaning and feeling. It took me several months to bring this poem to completion because I cared so much for the writing and for the person, which gave me both discouragement and stimulus." ( WORKING NOTES , MARSHA CAMPBELL) TO BE THAT AND TO BE NOT TO BE KNOWN TO BE THAT We laughed clear lake-water. The mysterious depths were science-fiction. ( more . . ....

"Maxwell's and ERS's pieces are very contemporary takes on what Grotowski, Brook, and Barba were investigating 30 years ago. However, being modern media kids, they approach theatrical moments with an off-the-cuff informality that's very different from the formal reverence many of the '60 experiments held dear. Actually, Grotowski's work always had a biting edge of Eastern European sarcasm that never came across in the writings about the work, that could only be experienced. This ironic edge gave the work a great complexity and depth - a trickster theater that implicated the audience." ( The Village Voice : Theater: Obies: The Happy Awkward Moment by Mark Russell) :: comment :: . . . another comment not frozen in space or time . . . must devote thoughts to recollections of Apocalysis cum Figuris by the Polish Theater Lab . . . a marker . . . an event which shaped the way of seeing . . .