![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 21st, 2003 06:05 amVery very stressed out. It's that week that all shows experience where everything that can go wrong does -- almost never with the show itself -- but with items tangentally critical to making it exactly what we all want it to be.
Apparently however, stress is good for me, or so thinks my voice teacher who had no idea where my voice was coming from in the way it was yesterday. It remains a strange process to me.
We did have a great conversation after the lesson though -- she's from Kansas so she was asking me questions about growing up in New York and I talked about how I really think it's an incredible opportunity for kids, and was a profoundly positive thing for me. That said, for the first time, in the last few months, I've also really felt that being a life-long NY'er can really hinder artistic development -- I'm not sure always having lived here gives us the urgency and desire we need to make a life in the arts. I also think that the amount of people who seem to have it easy because of connections to the well established here can be depressing and daunting. And finally, with all the lives and opportunities and sub-cultures that exist in New York, one doesn't develop an imagination of creation, so much as one develops an imagination of integration -- which is to say, maybe this is a great town to grow up in if you want to be a dancer or an actor or a reporter, but maybe a terrible town to grow up in if you want to be a choreographer or a director or a novelist. By having always lived here, I have never had to create the world anew, and I suffer a certain loss for that.
All of this was a much more pleasant thing than all I experienced on the way up from our Soho rehearsal space to her studio on the UWS. With the war, NYC has been overrun with street preachers, which while fascinating and macabre don't really help anyone get anything done as far as I can tell. There were special "prayer stations" set up in the subway system, and people chanting about the end of the world on street corners, and it all just seems to strange to me, that in the face of war -- regardless of whether we agree with it or not -- we cannot remember to do our best to live.
Tonight I have to seriously get on my homework for Monday's class, so after I take care of some other things in my life it's that, before I cook myself some dinner and veg in front of the TV for a bit.
Could write something long and boring about Lust of Result, but we all know it, right? Time to take up meditation.
Apparently however, stress is good for me, or so thinks my voice teacher who had no idea where my voice was coming from in the way it was yesterday. It remains a strange process to me.
We did have a great conversation after the lesson though -- she's from Kansas so she was asking me questions about growing up in New York and I talked about how I really think it's an incredible opportunity for kids, and was a profoundly positive thing for me. That said, for the first time, in the last few months, I've also really felt that being a life-long NY'er can really hinder artistic development -- I'm not sure always having lived here gives us the urgency and desire we need to make a life in the arts. I also think that the amount of people who seem to have it easy because of connections to the well established here can be depressing and daunting. And finally, with all the lives and opportunities and sub-cultures that exist in New York, one doesn't develop an imagination of creation, so much as one develops an imagination of integration -- which is to say, maybe this is a great town to grow up in if you want to be a dancer or an actor or a reporter, but maybe a terrible town to grow up in if you want to be a choreographer or a director or a novelist. By having always lived here, I have never had to create the world anew, and I suffer a certain loss for that.
All of this was a much more pleasant thing than all I experienced on the way up from our Soho rehearsal space to her studio on the UWS. With the war, NYC has been overrun with street preachers, which while fascinating and macabre don't really help anyone get anything done as far as I can tell. There were special "prayer stations" set up in the subway system, and people chanting about the end of the world on street corners, and it all just seems to strange to me, that in the face of war -- regardless of whether we agree with it or not -- we cannot remember to do our best to live.
Tonight I have to seriously get on my homework for Monday's class, so after I take care of some other things in my life it's that, before I cook myself some dinner and veg in front of the TV for a bit.
Could write something long and boring about Lust of Result, but we all know it, right? Time to take up meditation.
