CONVERSATION a performance piece & dialogue

"Conversation" Rehearsal, Brooklyn Arts ExchangeAugust 15, 2010

It’s been a little bit of a while since I’ve taken on the role of performer, beyond the occasional short reading or brief workshop performance of excerpts from pieces I’m developing. It’s a major shift for me, from being not only the creator of the piece, but also the one responsible for presenting the ideas to an audience. It’s a choice that I’ve been looking forward to and one that I’ve made very deliberately, but it’s also intimidatingly unfamiliar territory.

Performers have to make sense of a piece in very different ways than someone who stays only in the role of writer. Actors are not only in dialogue with the script and other actors (when it’s more than one character), they’re also in dialogue with the director and, of course, the audience. On a literal level, it involves much more conversation around the work. As a writer I can stay inside of myself, inside of the world of the thing that I’ve created, and not have to actively question or interrogate my choices, outside of the usual inner conflicts about the path the piece or its characters are taking. Writing is known as a lonely occupation for very real reasons. You spend most of your time doing it alone in a room, making things up as you go along.

I’ve read about solo performers talking about that also being a lonely occupation, particularly when they go on tour. Eric Bogosian describes it with particular insight—sitting alone in the dressing room in those quiet moments before a show begins, no clutter from other performers readying themselves, no pre-show banter to engage in or deflect. And then, standing alone up there on the stage, sometimes so blinded by the lights and engaged in the show that it’s difficult to tell if there are 5 or 500 people in the audience.

But in the process of rehearsal, after the script is done (or done enough to start reading it) and before the ushers have taken their places, there is this wonderful and continuous conversation that is a necessary step on the way to a finished product. I don’t think I realized that I missed that part of performing until now. Sure, sometimes is doesn’t go well—I’ve certainly sat in rehearsals where directors and actors spend more time struggling for power than exchanging ideas; or there’s the case of an actor friend of mine who feels like the dialogue that the director is offering is ultimately banal and uninspiring. It’s the same as every other thing we do in life—sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. But to be able to re-engage with my own work in this particular way is, for me, at this moment in my career, a very exciting thing.

Oddly enough, with this show, I’ve also spent much more time discussing outside of the rehearsal process as well. The Kickstarter campaign (which has successfully reached it’s goal—many thanks to all those who contributed) has had me not only describing the work in video and online, but also in person, as many of the backers or people I know well or work with or have worked with in the past. Also at the zine fest I attended two weekends ago, where I had goodies from show out for sale and had to describe and engage strangers about the work. These dialogues have helped me build a relationship to the show and a momentum around it that is new to me and very exciting to watch. I’m someone who’s used to juggling many large projects, staying very focused on the list of tasks that I have to accomplish in order to complete the work. That will and determination has done a lot for me, but it also excludes people, which I was aware of, to some degree or another, but couldn’t fully see the effect of in the past. Accomplishing the goal was the point. And it still is—it has to be. There is just an enormous amount of work that’s required to make a show happen. But this new layer, this rekindled desire for and enjoyment in inclusion and exchange, it feels wonferful. It is, inevitably, a work-in-progress, but all the better for being that, I think.