INTERVIEW PROJECT

INTERVIEW PROJECTis a beautiful road trip movie made of short interviews of people encountered on the way.
Produced by David Lynch, this is my new obsession.
It has the bittersweet feeling of The Straight Story and ultimately captures the beauty and struggles of being a human being.

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Lexington play to be webcast tonight !

From Amanda Palmer's blog :

the kindly folks at lexmedia, who run lexington cable access, are helping us WEBCAST the entire show, with 3-4 cameras under the direction of the talented and astonishing michael pope (director of almost every dolls and AFP video you’ve ever seen - now twittering at @popecinema).

this is awesome!

we are 90% sure this is going to work, so please bear with us if there are tech problems, but things are looking good.

call friends, get ready huddle around the computer like people used to huddle around the wireless radio in the old days, plan a popcorn share and bring a hanky. the show is heavy and intense. the duration of the show is just over 2 hours.

we’ll be going live from partyontheinternet.com at 7:30 pm EST TONIGHT (saturday night).

"Honest to blog."

I just saw Juno for the first time.
Shoot me, I'm in grad school.
I am deleting boring theatre blogs who have turned into personal ad campaigns from my rss feeds and adding psychology blogs.
Shoot me again.

I am still trying to figure out what to do with this space.
I figure if I end up coming back, there is still a use for it.
Just like there is probably a use for the unfinished plays that still sit on my hard drive.
Apparently I also can't write more than one sentence per line.

Gotta go.
I have facebook to update, tweets to tweet and Wii to play.
Oh. And a paper or 2 to write, yeah.

I still want to tell you all about drama therapy. I just don't know how yet.

Aeroplane Over the Sea, Amanda Palmer and High Schoolers.

I would love love love to see this.
Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of my favorite albums of all times. It played on repeat in my cd player for probably a good 6 months...

amanda fucking palmer » blog

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Moreno on Spontaneity.

"The universe in infinite creativity. But what is spontaneity ?
Is it a kind of energy ?
If it is energy it is unconservable, if the meaning of spontaneity should be kept consistent. We must, therefore, differentiate between two varieties or energy, conservable and unconservable energy. There is an energy which is conservable in the form of "cultural" conserves., which can be saved up, which can be spent at will in selected parts and used at different points in time; it is like a robot at the disposal of its owner. There is another form of energy which emerges and which is spent in a moment, which must emerge to be spent and which must be spent to make place for emergence, like the life of some animals that are born and die in the love-act.
It is a truism to say that the universe cannot exist without physical and mental energy which can be preserved. But it is more important to realize that without the other kind of energy, the unconservable one - or spontaneity - the creativity of the universe could not start and could not run. It would come to a standstill.
There is apparently little spontaneity in the universe, or at least, if there is any abundance of it only a small particle is available to man, hardly enough to keep him surviving. In the past he has done everything to discourage its development. he could not rely upon the instability and insecurity of the moment, with an organism which was not ready to deal with it adequately, he encouraged the development of devices as intelligence, memory , social and cultural conserves, which would give him the needed support with the result that he gradually became the slave of his own crutches. If there is a neurological localization of the spontaneity-creativity process it is the least developed function of man's nervous system. The difficulty is that one cannot store spontaneity, one either is spontaneous at a given moment or one is not. If spontaneity is such an important factor for man's world why is it so little developed ? The answer is: man fears spontaneity, just like his ancestor in the jungle feared fire; he feared fire until he learned how to make it. Man will fear spontaneity until he will learn how to train it."
(Moreno, J.L. 1953: 19)

On what I am learning in grad school.

A while ago, I started graduate school for Drama Therapy in San Francisco and I decided that I would use this blog to talk about drama therapy and what I am getting.
I've just realized that because my passion for the theatre is still so strong and because I very much feel a part of the theatre bloggers still (though I stopped really blogging here in the way I used to) I have had fear about sharing about drama therapy here. Fear that suddenly, I wouldn't belong to the theatre anymore if I began to claim my new found identity as a drama therapist. Fear that nobody would read or comment, etc.
Then I realized that in a way that's why so much theatre is bad. The atmosphere of judgment and criticism that thrives there has gotten out of hand. I noticed that the artists who are still loving theatre are the ones who in many ways are doing the work and staying away from the long diatribes about why it should die or not die, or about why we should do it, or about whether we should go to grad school for it or not (unless they are making shows out of that subject - i am looking at you Mike Daisey-, which is the smartest thing to do if you're really frustrated or intrigued by any issue).

So this is a long winded way of saying that I want to start sharing what I am getting from the drama therapy training and what it's opening up in the theatre artist in me that will never die.

One of the things I get to practice in grad school, is putting down thoughts, reactions and feelings on paper without having much time to craft it all. So that's what I'll do here too.
When I was trying to do it all perfectly and spending way too much time, I wasn't actually learning what I think is valuable to learn. I was just being a perfectionist who thought she did a good job because she spent a lot of time on things and worked very hard (some people have that relationship to bitching a lot, have you noticed ? )

But after seeing my results from last semester, I can see that (yes, hard work pays of and there is something to be said for spending time) there are a few assignments that I worked on very rapidly, instinctively and on little sleep that turned out really well. It wasn't luck. It was me just trusting myself and training myself to think faster and share more openly.
In my line of work,it is what is necessary as a practitioner so I am glad that the academics are lining up with the skills in that way.
I am amazed by how incredibly faithful to the mission of Integral Studies, CIIS is.

It has been so fun this past week not to assign value to my work based on how hard I have worked or how much time I have spent. By letting go of these measures, I have found that I have been able to play with the readings and writings and though sometimes I am sure I end up spending just as much time as I did before, there is a sense of play and openness that I get from my studies, that I didn't have before.
Again, this is an example of how much other people's measures and the culture's measures weigh on us if we don't pay attention.
It has been amazing lately to continue exploring Being instead of Doing and to find and create joy in places where I was used to suffering.

The theatre world could use more of the stuff I am learning about and I am firmly intent on bringing a lot of what I am learning back to it.
I am witnessing so many of my friends and theatre practitioners caught in a dialectic of right or wrong, good or bad, commercial vs non commercial, play development vs lack thereof (the list goes on and on just like it goes on and on in politics)
But what if the freedom and the rebirth wasn't in discussing any of these things ?
What if hope,passion,love, respect and pure dedication to the art form and the communities we live in was all that was needed ?
I know these words have lost their luster with the backlash of the 60's. We have many associations and touchy feely isn't what we want from our theatre. God knows we wouldn't want it to turn into therapy without our noticing (okay, I'll stop the sarcasm now but it's a good way to express my fear of being one of these feel good people that everyone is afraid of, ha)
I also know that we need to invent new words and have new conversations around these words (in a sense, that's what Obama is at work on in my opinion). But for now, these words are what I have and if don't use them, I lose them.

Welcome back to the new spice of freedom that never really left.
And welcome to the mash-up world of psychology and theatre : what we call drama therapy.

Fun with syllables.

Matt Freeman wants you to write a haiku about the state of the theatre.