Incorporation

Next week I'll be performing a show twice daily down at the World Financial Center, under the auspices of The Women's Project. The show is called Corporate Carnival, and is much as it sounds -- a sort of carnival (though more circus) celebration (though more satire) of corporate America (though more capitalist America at large). It will be performing in the "Winter Garden" section, May 14 - 16, showtimes at 1:00 and 7:00, and the 15th thrice, the previous times plus a 4:00. We earn our money over there at The Women's Project, fo' sho'.

The show itself is interesting to me for a return to collaborative creation and my status within it. I'm one of a sort of inconsequential chorus called "The Temps." We burst through between main acts with commercial-like interruptions, and supplement the other actors' "scenes." We're also on stage even when we're "backstage," owing to the nature of our staging the show in an open area, and we're all responsible for developing a "greenshow" act. Greenshow acts are sort of a roving warm-up before the main stage begins, especially useful in this format because they get people's attention by adhering to a busking style. So we're doing all that (see above "fo' sho'"), but our additions to the show itself are not necessarily especially skilled. I'm stilting for one commercial, but for the most part the Temps' contributions aren't particularly physically demanding. In spite of the many circumstantial similarities between this project and the work of Cirque Boom and Kirkos (particularly Cirque Boom's Circus of Vices and Virtues, in which I played a stilt-walking businessman), they're very different in that regard.

I've had to create a lot of self-generated output recently. So much, in fact, that today I began to worry for the first time if I wasn't just recycling and regurgitating. This is due in part to hammering out an outline for a potential performance piece (pah pah pah) for Italy, under the auspices of Zuppa del Giorno. I took the three archetypal clowns we portrayed in Silent Lives, and bits and sequences from all our shows (Zuppa-related or no), added a dash of some of my favorite stage conventions and voilà! A . . . show! Of sorts! I kind of hate it! But the idea is that we'll all get into a room together soon (somehow) and develop it, or something that doesn't resemble it in the slightest. Not sure which one I'm hoping for at this point.

Sludging through this effort reminded me of working on my clown film (see 3/27/08), in that I was writing out actions more than words, trying to tell a story through humorous, true deeds and bits. It was also reminiscent of the film in that I was frequently stuck, trying to figure out how to go on from a given point, and I've been feeling pretty stuck on the film script as well. It seems that once Our Hero (this is what I've been calling the clown character in the script) gets out of Central Park, I have very little direction for him. And now, after a couple of weeks of contributing to generate original scenes for Corporate Carnival, I have to develop a greenshow act for it, and I'm drawing blank. It's a little like I've run out of gas. Cough! Cough! Sputtterrrrr . . .

Yet on Sunday (see 5/5/08), with eager and communicative collaborators, the ideas were flowing like gasoline in the 1990s. Perhaps what I need to do is engage in dialogue with someone who is inclined to be energetic about this kind of thing. Perhaps, too, I need to just get out of my mind and into my body. That was definitely a key element in Sunday's successful creation. This block may be entirely symptomatic, in fact, of a period of relative creative isolation of late. I started writing the clown film when I was between day jobs, and there were no theatre commitments, and very little energy on my part going into find them. At the time I viewed my individual effort as reclaiming a little of my work for myself (as part of my process of dealing with letting go of As Far As We Know [see 1/15/08]), and so it was. Yet it was also a retreat.

That's the nice thing about work. As long as you're doing it, you're working.

Such Great Heights

Yesterday was a Sunday, and I've relished those Sundays in the past few years that allowed me to sleep in, do a crossword and generally rock the low-key rockin'. I generally hate to rehearse on a Sunday night. Someone always wants you to. It's driven by desperation, largely. The scale of production I generally work on in the city doesn't pay one enough to quit his or her day job, so the folks managing schedules are confronted with a barrage of money-making conflicts. No one wants to rehearse early on Sunday, because of God. Also, because it follows too close on the heels of festive Saturday night. So someone invariably suggests Sunday night for rehearsals, and I invariably have to say, "Oh yeah, no, that's my knitting-circle night," or some such. Yesterday I had a rehearsal at mid-day, which was okay. If the trains hadn't been wearing their special helmets, I might have even made it on time.

Cirque Boom has been requested to perform at a benefit for NYFA, and I and three other performers were requested by Ruth Juliet Wikler-Luker to participate. One Ms. Cody Schreger is joining me for acrobatic duets, largely of the standing variety, owing to the constraints of the space. True to Cirque Boom form, we're playing energetically eccentric characters. I'm playing a tormented, mute poet, immigrated to America some years ago in a quest for a new love; Cody his first lover from "The Olde Country," venturing to America for the first time in the hopes of bringing him safely back into her embrace. This is all an elaborate excuse for flamboyant gesture and expressive acrobalance. We met yesterday in an apartment/studio in Brooklyn to refresh our (read: my) memories and choreograph.

I hurt today. And it is a good pain.

Approximately three years ago, Kirkos, a circus-theatre-et-al. troupe I was a founding member of, effectively folded. A little while later, Ruth of Cirque-Boom fame left the country for a year. These were my two core sources not only for "acro" exposure and practice, but for my expressive physical activity in general. In the intervening years between then and now, I've kept busy and tried to apply all I learned between 2002 and 2005 to other shows I've worked on and in workshops I taught. I worked so hard at that, in fact, that I had come to believe that I was maintaining my practice sufficiently, if not with as great rigor or regularity. It's amazing how complacent a person can become if he or she only wills it to be so.

I've written here before about the good ol' days of my acro career, when I was young(er) and doing handstands in the corridors of my day job with Friend Melissa (see 12/5/07). The emphasis of that writing was craving a return to that level of activity and physical maintenance, which has been a strong desire for me as well. What I learned from Sunday, however, is that part of the reason that's been so difficult for me is that it's been all me. I mean, not all me. On the occasions when we're working on a show together, Friend Heather and I train in acro a bit, and Friend Geoff and I both have a love/hate relationship with jogging, etc. What I mean to say is, I've discovered I've been missing more than the exercise. Last summer I worked myself into a muscle-bound frenzy (not so's you'd necessarily notice, mind you) for my part in As Far As We Know, but I wasn't building anything but myself, and it faded.

Sunday's rehearsal was even in a space that reminded me of Friend Kate's loft, where Kirkos met and tumbled about. It was in a, shall we say, less-developed section of Brooklyn, in a converted space with plenty of raw-lumber beams and old factory floorboards about. We climbed the stairs, removed our shoes, laid mats and started warming up. The warm-up wasn't just to loosen our joints, or "awake" our physical sensitivity, it was serious -- stretching out and warming up muscles and tendons that would soon be asked a lot of. We took our time, chatted, doped one anothers' stretches if they looked good, as a group will when they've worked together before and don't need to acknowledge social conventions. After a good, long warm-up, we began.

I'll skip the details of development. Suffice it to say that we choreographed quickly, everyone throwing in ideas and interpretations. Within minutes, I found myself performing tricks I had forgotten I'd known, and doing some I hadn't been able to do years before. The sensation was incredible. I'm not at this time in the greatest shape of my life, but working with an experienced acrobat like Cody made everything easier, and it does seem as though I've gotten stronger in some regard over the past few years. Though, by the end of the two hours, I was definitely quite winded. And, as I put it above, I hurt today.

All this leads me to conclude that it's past time for me to be regularly involved in this training again, whether I can find a group to join, or have to start one myself. The common approach for most of my acro friends of late has been to team up with someone who they can count on, train and prepare for performance opportunities with. And that's well and good, and works great, but I need a group. I need a community that can sustain itself even when I'm off in Italy, applying the skills from that group to my commedia dell'arte work. And it may be up to me to form it.

We may even have to meet on Sundays.

To-Day Is Wednesday, the 11th

The above is a phrase I'd like to coin, but one which will never come into common parlance. It's altogether too obscure. You, however, dear reader, will comprehend me when I speak it. You, and you alone, will have any clue what I'm trying to say. Bask in the glow of privilege.

In One Week (which, if my search criteria hasn't changed by now, you can see in its entirety in the video bar to the left), Buster Keaton uses inter cuts of a daily calendar to establish time in his movie, the central action of which is the construction -- and eventual destruction -- of a house. It's a DIY, build-by-numbers house, and a malevolent suitor switches some numbers on ol' Buster. The result is a great reveal, midway through the week, of a completed house that contains all the elements of "house," but is just awfully wrong. The roof is on the wrong way. one whole side seems pulled a la Dali out of its natural frame. And it spins.

The calendar page revealed just before this image appears informs us "To-Day Is / Wednesday / 11".

Sometimes you work on a show (or "project," for those of you less exhibitionist in nature), and you give it your all, and you're very excited to see it put together, because you know it's going to be some of your most impressive work, and the curtain goes up, and . . . it doesn't quite look like you thought it would. And it feels sort of false, especially for something you've put so much of yourself into. And you're not sure -- it could just be you -- but it seems as though the audience isn't being much more than overtly polite.

This, to me, is a "Wednesday the 11th." You can't figure where exactly you went wrong. You did everything you were supposed to, and, hell: you're a generally capable guy and/or girl. It's "Wednesday the 11ths" that bring us to those silent moments of questioning things like fate and the existence of God. You're not overwhelmed with grief, or shaking your rhetorical fist in the general direction of the allegorical heavens, but you are quietly talking to yourself in your mind. "Man, where did I go wrong? Am I being punished? How serious is this? Is this a sign? If it's mysterious in cause, it's got to be mysterious in significance, right? Man..."

It's really taxing to perform a show that didn't turn out even close to what you had hoped for, but the real long-term effect is in the questioning that can so easily result from it. Nine times out of ten, I'd say, you just missed something. It could happen to anyone. It doesn't mean we're less concerned with the virtues of our work if we accept this concept, and move on. Some days are simply Wednesdays, the 11th.

The Vasty Deep

I grew up around Washington, D.C., so the first time I went to a museum in New York and was asked for $15 "suggested" admission, I did a double take. I wondered if I had wandered into some incredibly large Imax movie theatre instead of the MoMA. The students around the D.C. area are quite accustomed to all their field trips taking them to some place in or around the Smithsonian Institute. We hear of touring factories or a post office on such trips, and think, "Why would you go somewhere like that, when you could have dinosaurs instead?" I took it for granted. I also took it for granted that, at some point, at least one field trip per year would terrify me beyond my endurance.

I had many powerful, irrational fears when I was young. I feared standing near tall buildings, or under high ceilings, homeless people, alternately cats and dogs, etc. I've gotten past all of those, even going as far with most of them as to learn to love them, in their various ways. I retain, however, my fear of large sea creatures. Even fictional ones. It makes me pretty jumpy even to think of them enough to write the words. Suffice it to say, when you see me having to act fearful on stage, I may just be resorting to a little sense-memory indulgence.

As one enters the National Museum of Natural History, you are immediately confronted by an impressive rotunda and a stuffed elephant smack dab in the middle. That was all well and good, once I got over my fear of being under high ceilings, but to one's left upon entering was a room in which I'm still not entirely comfortable. It contains a giant model of a Blue Whale suspended from the ceiling in such a way as to greet you upon your entrance with its face. The lighting, too, is especially dim and moves in lazy waves, simulating the effect of being deep underwater. If I'm remembering correctly, they even have whale-song playing in there. Relaxing, no?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! [Man runs screaming from own memories...]

I don't know quite why this manner of thing is frightening to me. The model Blue Whale in the New York museum doesn't scare me quite so badly. It's suspended in a much larger room, with generally brighter lighting. But if I go to the far left corner, to see the diorama of a fight between a Giant Squid and a whale, I get panicky again. That's a much darker scene, and I'm reminded of Natalie Wood's fear of "dark water." I think the dark-water part is key in my anxiety, but certainly there are plenty of creatures to augment anxiety into outright dread.

Case in point: Not only are there Giant Squid out there, menacing the depths, but apparently now there are also Colossal Squid. It's like the giants of the sea are victims of an escalating Japanese advertising campaign. I next expect to hear about the Super-Amazing-Healthiest-Truly-Enormous Squid. Not only is the Colossal Squid scary in its bigness, its suckers have rotating claws within, it has the largest eyes of anything we know of ever, and a freaking "conveyor-belt-like tongue," with teeth jutting from it. If there is a more literal killing machine, would it please step forward now and politely go extinct immediately?

Finally, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I fear fictional animals of the deep. It's true. The supposed Loch Ness creature scares the bejeezus out of me. All I have to do is imagine seeing such a thing in the water, and I am immediately fearful for my life. Do I feel this way when I see a tiger, or someone I think is a gang member? No. Imagine a plesiosaur surprising me from out of a lake, though, and I lose all feeling in my knees.

Why? What does it all mean? Who can ultimately say? I don't really buy into past-life explanations. Reincarnation be what it may, I find it romantic to a fault to presume that "memories" from past lives could exert a strong influence on the present. Repressed memories are another somewhat romantic explanation, in my opinion (though certainly more arguable than centuries-old personal habits). I'm more inclined to explain these things in two ways: in evolutionary terms and psychological theory. From my point of view, most emotions can be pretty directly linked to instinct, particularly survival instinct. Self-awareness brought us to a more detailed evaluation of our inner experiences, and so words like anger and irritation came to replace "that feeling of badly needing to kill something," and the word "hunger" took on multiple duties, applied to all sorts of things unrelated to food. From this perspective, it's natural for me to fear large, unpredictable forces in a dark environment; an environment in which, incidentally, I am not overly capable. Rather a weak swimmer here, actually. But that's a chicken/egg/chicken thing if ever there were one. Am I a'feared of deep water because I don't swim well, or do I not swim well because I'm so a'feared of deep water?

Ultimately, from the more psychological perspective, the connections are pretty explicit. I'm a meticulous sort at heart, someone who needs to understand everything he can and savors spontaneity only so long as it doesn't surprise him too much. Is there anything more surprising than discovering an alien creature right next to you, where one never was before? That's the effect of dark water -- nothing can be seen coming until it's already close, and it can come from literally any direction. The Y axis enters the picture in a big way underwater. Of course, what's most interesting to me about this fear is that the terror is not contained in the creature, be it whale, squid or Dread Cthulhu. The creature involved only actualizes the terror, forcing me to acknowledge it. No, the persistent, inescapable fear, the real psychological consideration, is me, in that deep, dark water, waiting. And given that environment, that solitude, who's to say what I even am to myself? Who am I, that alone? Identity is lost so completely, even crying out may do no good to remind me that I am still there.

These waters deep enough for you? Watch out for the Colossal Squid.

The COMPLEAT VICTROLA SESSIONS - Part 2

Yesterday was my second and final day of filming on The Compleat Victrola Sessions (see 4/28/08 for my first and introductory). This time we were in The Miller Theatre, just off the glorious Columbia University main campus at 116th Street, which was something of an improvement in location over the last shoot I attended, at least in hygiene if not general character.

Some of the excitement of doing background work had worn off for me by yesterday, but it was still a little thrill to consider showing up in a silent film. Our focus was on filming audience reactions most of the day, so fifteen-odd of we few (we lucky few, we band of extras) sat in a convincing spread of seats in different arrangements, representing two different nights of a live musical performance, as well as one audience watching a movie. Thereafter, we had a good hour break, and on our return we filmed a sequence that took place just outside the dressing rooms of two of the featured characters.

The audience work was rather dull, for the most part. You can imagine. We sat and, on cue, looked intently at a particular position on stage. It would have been an interesting exercise, were it not for its complete lack of interest. Still, I tried to make the best of it, thinking to myself all the while that this must be what it's like to act with a green screen. What was most interesting about this, in fact, was the fact that our crowd included some Italians. I don't know why they in particular were there exactly; I think they were someone's friends, visiting the country. They all spoke very good English, but naturally opted for their native tongue most of the time. It was difficult for me not to try to join in, but I kept getting images of them either becoming impatient with my relative ignorance, or slowing things down to a crawl in order to accommodate me; I couldn't decide which would be worst.

I brought two outfits for the day, plus my Lloyd-esque glasses in the hopes that there'd be a chance to use them. The first outfit was my evening wear which, in spite of costing me a pretty penny, was almost as motley an assortment as The Tramp's genesis-wardrobe. That morning I realized I had forgotten to get studs for the tuxedo shirt I bought, and began frantically sewing the smallest black buttons I could find together. They were still too big, so I had to nip the ends of the surging on my outer button holes. The "waiter's jacket" I had (imagine a tailored look on top, as with tails, sans tails) just barely covered the buttons holding my suspenders to my pants. This was important, because those buttons are still miniature grinning skulls, a remnant of a costume for a show from years ago. The suspenders themselves were some clever costumer's trick, made as they were of restitched, patterned neckties. My tie was a bow tie, the real kind, and I felt confident with my Internet instructions for tying it. This effort predominated my preparations once at the location, and I never really got it right. Still and all, I was proud. Once hat, gloves and cane were added, the effect was distinct and good. Held together with scotch tape, but solid-looking.

For the movie scene, I traded the jacket for a standard black sport one, removed the tie and donned my Lloyd glasses. This prompted the director to exclaim that I was a "man of 1,000 looks" as she referenced how different I was from my bartender on day one. I'll admit I was proud of this, too, bringing to mind as it did memories of Lon Chaney (Sr.). After a little while, however, I remembered me that this was film, a medium within which most actors consider it career suicide to change their look too drastically. Gary Oldman, as always, my hat flies effortlessly from my brow to you, good sir.

Funny story: In the movie-theatre scene, my glasses will not be noticeable. Largely this is because I look to be sucking face with someone sitting next to me. I play one-half of the couple that makes the feature couple feel alternately randy and awkward. I am not, however, actually sucking face. The director favored making the process "PG-13," and so asked me to feign smooching by placing my distant hand between our mouths. Yes. She did. Ah, movie magic! I could have taken the time to explain that this was, in fact, much more awkward than making out with a stranger, but it would have taken time (the most precious commodity in film, it seems) and possibly made me out to be a perv. So the fingertips of my right hand got some serious play that day.

The day also served to demonstrate for me that a film set is far more fertile ground for personal drama and diva tactics than even a theatre (I wish I could account for opera in this scale, but I lack experience [come to think, we were in a theatre this day...maybe that added? {whatever.}]). In film, if you're on the main crew or a featured player, you are nigh-literally living with the same people day in and day out, slavishly devoting your schedule to the sake of the film itself. If you're on location, you don't even "go home" at the end of the sometimes-18-hour day. It's far more intense in this regard than theatre, even a gig that may be out of town. Never mind that much of the time is spent "doing nothing"; it's an environment of hurry-up-and-wait. It is one intense, prolonged tech day, is what it is. Amazing anything gets done, and amazing no one gets killed in the process.

My last duty within this environment was to play an adoring fan of Ms. Rebecca Cherry's character, awaiting her exit from her dressing room. It was back into the evening wear for this. I was to hand her a bunch of flowers, then remain to be crowd as other things happened. The final thing to happen was for one character to assault another and take her away. This was my moment to shine, where my expertise with all things physical would hold sway and help to pave my way into film infamy. I eagerly leapt into the discussion of choreography.

It ended up being a shove. My job was to catch the shoved one and transplant him safely to the floor, making it look like he had simply fallen into me, taking us both down. I did it about half a dozen times. But hey: I did it without yawning. And hey again: People were very impressed with the job I did. Catching a guy who was a foot away from me six times in a row without dropping him? Wow. I must work out.

I must make my own silent film.