GET TICKETS FOR FOR ARTISTS ONLY

There's a blip right now on Ontological's Website. It should be fixed in the next couple of days. To get tickets go to this link: http://www.ontological.com/INCUBATOR/nellietinder09.html.

My favorite unsolicited junk message today

Subject: A Muse for Amorous Deeds.
Isn't that pretty, rhythmic and elegant?

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster - Act III, Scene II: A Play that Gives Back

Antonio: I do wonder why hard-favour'd ladies,/ For the most part, keep worse-favour'd waiting-women / To attend them, and cannot endure fair ones. Duchess: O, That's soon answer'd / Did you ever in your life know an ill painter Desire to have his dwelling next door to the shop / Of an excellent picture-maker? (45-51)

Bosola: I would sooner swim to the Bermudas on / Two politicians' rotten bladders, tied / Together with an intelligencer's heart-string, / Than depend on so changeable a prince's favour. (266-269)

Ferdinand: Thou art undone: / And thou hast ta'en that massy sheet of lead / That hid they husband's bones, and folded it / About my heart.(110-113)

Duchess: Past sorrows, let us moderately lament tham / For those to come, seek wisely to prevent them. (321-322)

Webster's dialogue at first I found alienating. But the closer I read it, the more I love its macabre, observational lines. The idea of a conversation about how pretty women keep pretty maids and ugly women keep ugly maids seems a very current observation, especially in the midst of such an old-fashioned, melodramatic, plot-driven play. Swimming to the Bermudas on the rotten bladders of two politicians is an image I never quite thought of before. Folding a sheet of bones of a dead person around a heart has a physicality to it that we don't see as much in Shakespeare, and I simply like the phrase "moderately lament," as to our modern ears it seems oxymoronic.

Interactive Buddhism

I've always felt as though meditation is essential for making artwork, but I've realized in the past couple of months that your practice also has to be a continual subversion of your assumptions not in formal meditation practice, but in waking, communicating life. If I was an advanced Buddhist, I think I'd try and teach talking meditation. While formal practice is excellent, I think we could all benefit from interactive meditation. How to listen when you're talking and talk while you're listening.

Harold Pinter

Betrayal is a good play, I think, but it is one of those plays that for the life of me I don't understand why. Its language is okay, it's obviously very rhythmic, and I suppose the event of the affair going backwards is actually very touching. The best scene to me is the scene in which Jerry and Emma talk about leaving the flat, but that could simply be because I've actually seen that scene performed several times and I haven't seen the full play. This is my ongoing puzzlement about being in a playwriting MFA program. I know there are ways to do things with text that stimulate something more in me than Pinter. For instance, the Wallace Shawn monologues I've been reading lately have been incredibly inspiring. But my teacher said to me something brilliant the other day. He said, "once you have two people onstage, you have a society. You're presenting a world" (I'm paraphrasing). That's an endorsement for dialogue if I ever heard one.

Sarah Kane

While I think that Sarah Kane's Blasted is a good play (as Caryl Churchill said, "A rather tender play"), I do not think one can perform 4:48 Psychosis without it being voyeuristic. It's impossible to disconnect the words from the author's narrative. I also think any attempt to distance from the author's narrative is false. Therefore I can only think that the best version of 4:48 Psychosis would be staged as someone actually pretending to be Sarah Kane. We can't escape the biography, so let us not pretend to.

I don't understand the terrible facade of self-promotion. Every bit of advice I've ever received about getting people to come to your show, getting critics to come, etc., involves being shameless, pestering, begging, pleading, confident to the point of blind in a way. Marketing is the opposite kind of listening it takes to make sensitive artwork because it involves willfully ignoring both yourself and the feelings of others. And yet if we show a crack, if we show a moment of desperation, if we show any moment of soft, mushy, "I need you to come" and "I need you to like it" then we are supposedly alluding to some flaw in our work or ourselves, etc. What I know is nothing makes me feel more hateful to myself and others than self-promotion.

Putting it Together.

There was an article in the NYTimes about Kenneth Lonergan directing his own work: “Right now we’re in tech rehearsals, and it’s alternately a time of great hope and total despair,” he said. “It’s my job to keep everyone in the cast and crew from feeling that this is a rambling disaster, to keep everyone from panicking.” I feel very similarly making my show right now - not so much that I feel despair about my product, but more about the amount that I have to do. It does not help that I spilled the juice from a plate of kale onto my computer and cannot use my return key (Hence, no line breaks. I'm living a life free of line breaks). Other things that do not help include my bike being stolen, my record player (a key prop for my show) deciding not to work, no heat in my apartment and running out of checks. For some reason, running out of checks feels particularly unfair.

Fiction. Oh Boy.

Last night, taking the plane home from Oregon from my grandparent's joint 90th birthday (they were born within a month of each other), I was listening to the New Yorker Fiction podcast, as I like to do to relax for a half hour here and there in between scheduling actors and graduate school assignments.

I was listening to David Bezmozgis reading Sergei Dovlatov’s “The Colonel Says I Love You," and I was struck by a particular line.

In the story, Sergie Dovlatov's wife, ultimately placid, has one sentence of encouragement for her fledgling writer husband: Write 2000 stories, she says, One of them will get published.

And he says something along the lines of, I used to think she was wrong and insensitive, but now I realize she's right. Volume is what conquers the world. If you have any doubt about that just look at history.

I thought that was a useful thing to think about.

Michael Clark Choreography