Moments of Anticipation

I've realized I need to become less precious with the communications I share via this blog. Since coming back from Shakespeare and Company this February (wow hard to believe it's been that long) I've started to write a whole bunch of blog posts and then either stopped and not finished them or meant to go back to them or what have you.

Part of this I think had to do with how Shakespeare and Company dealt with the subject of communication in their training, in that they teach you to talk about things as succinctly and specifically as possible. This lead to a struggle in my writing to continue doing that, and when I've felt like I don't completely or succinctly communicate something in a first pass, I get frustrated and want to write it over until I get annoyed with writing it or move on to something else and then I have no writing to share!

That's silly. I have observed my writing process is that I'm most likely to actually get a blog post at the end of a writing session if I commit fully to writing down the thoughts I have in a given moment, ideally doing a quick pass of an edit, and then sharing it and moving on. The blessing and the curse of the internet is how easy it is to access quantity in a sense that it's removed from the expenses of physical media, so you can quickly and cheaply create things and so there are lots of things being created. Vast numbers of things, so many that it becomes counter productive at a certain point to spend too much time worrying about the quality.

But that's another blog post.

I'm pretty far into rehearsals for Caucasian Chalk Circle, we've been getting into the really rough and difficult parts of the "birthing" as it were of this piece of art. Is that an appropriate analogy? There's a lot of collective pain and suffering as we work through the gritty details and logistics of mastering the text, smoothing over the staging, sweating out blocking and staging. For many of us in particular a big part of this has been mastering our Spanish lines, I know it has been for me! I studied Spanish a good deal in school, so I'm not coming in completely ignorant to how it works, but back then I never worked very hard at it, or was ever a preternatural talent for the language, I don't think. So that's been very challenging. But also pretty cool and kind of rewarding. I really like the Spanish text and it's fun getting to work with different sets of actors on the same scenes but in different languages. It's basically equivalent to rehearsing two shows at once. On the hand, that sucks, you're rehearsing two shows at once and it's a lot of work. But also, I'm getting to rehearse two shows at once, so I feel like I'm growing perhaps faster or at least exercising new and different muscles than I normally do as an actor and that's really rewarding.

I talked in that last process about how creating theatre feels like giving birth. Obviously, I haven't ever and will never get the chance to experience that particular component of the human experience, which is honestly something I sort of regret. If I could do it, I would do it. Is that weird and over sharey? I remember talking to my mother as a younger person about her experiences birthing myself and my two brothers. She talked about doing it naturally, and that when I was conceived the philosophy was that the feeling of giving birth can be perceived as being pain but that it's not, it's something else and if you can learn to experience it as that something else pain killers become unnecessary.

So maybe this analogy is stretching it a little bit, but what the hell. For us as artists, what other people might perceive as the tedious, frustrating or painful work of putting something together maybe what sets us apart is that we're able to see the process of birthing work as that something else, something joyful.

This is especially true in theatre, where getting to that final result is such an ecstatic experience, sharing work with an audience, sharing moments with cast members, getting to relive and redo and retry each individual moment night after night and watch it grow and change. I find myself in a series of moments of anticipation as we're on the verge of those final contractions before we can share our creation with the world. I see all the beautiful things beginning to happen, I can see all the things I've already discovered and can already imagine the moments of discovery to come. It's an amazing feeling.

Remind me to make sure I get back into the habit of blogging about it, OK? Thanks.

Do It Like It Matters (Until It Actually Does)

Here's a profound thought for the day. I haven't been writing as much in this blog, because I've been putting more of my energy into my joint podcasting and musical effort with my podcasting/music partner Jesse, which has not only been consuming the energy I'd been putting into writing when I was writing in this more or less weekly (times when I'd be writing I'm instead editing audio, for example) and in the process it's been fulfilling my need to be creative in a comparable way to how this blog has in the past. Also, probably because I haven't really been acting except for a few small readings and a little film shoot, and I mainly blog about acting stuff, therefore not much to blog about.

But here's something. Often on the subject of consistently releasing new podcasts, which I try to do every Sunday and have been pretty consistent at doing (with the exception of this Sunday, which is a more complicated issue) either Jesse or I will say "oh but it doesn't really matter". And in a very literal sense this is true. According to the statistics on Buzzsprout, the website that I'm using to host podcasts (for the time being) the average number of plays for a given episode is 14, with episode 4 having been played 21 times, and episode 8 having been played 8 times and the other ones existing in a spectrum in between. This is to be expected, since I haven't gone any lengths to expose my efforts to the outside world except through my social media network and given the weird, misunderstood, nichey nature of podcasts it's even more expected and who's going to Buzzsprout for podcasts? People go to iTunes, and we're not even on there, so basically I'm the only person in the universe with an investment in a new podcast being released to the internet every Sunday.

Except, as the proprietor and creator of this product that's exactly as it should be at this moment. And I should continue to be invested in maintaining that strict schedule because if I ever want to court a wider audience, and eventually that would be nice, I need to maintain that dedication throughout the time period in which it matters to no one else until eventually it does matter.

And this is the way to success in any creative field, through sheer tenacity and not giving up. Because when you start acting, or painting, or making music or whatever of course no one's going to care when you start and probably they shouldn't because you won't be very good. You have to care though, and no matter how long it takes for other people to care enough to give you money for what your doing (if that is your goal) you just have to keep going until that happens. Ya dig?

Well anyway, I do, and it really summarizes where I'm at with this podcast thing right now. Sure only eight people have clicked on my latest podcast, but in many respects it's improved on what we'd done before and hopefully the next one will have improved on that and so on and so fourth until eventually hopefully if we've been doing it long enough someone will start to notice. Or at least I have to tell myself that, and in the meantime just take as much satisfaction as I can from the work itself.

The end. Of this blog post, but not this blog! In fact, I'll be taking a forced hiatus from the podcast during the month of January while I'm doing the January intensive at Shakespeare and Company, so look out for blog posts then, I hope! Assuming I have the energy or focus after all the intense Shakespeare boot camp stuff I'll be doing.