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rmI've been harbouring a series of thoughts about stage management and I for a couple of days, that just sort of coallesced, as my thoughts often do, doing some morning reading.
To a certain extend saying I stage manage to learn about all aspects of the theater is dishonest. It implies waiting to do what one really wants to do, which is so entirely _not_ what I am about. In its simplest reality, my stage managing is about feeding the generalist in me (I _have_ to know how to do everything, in a pinch or not, and as Kat can tell you, if one has a random how to question, pretty much everyone who knows me calls me, because I'm just a wealth of the type of information and ingenious little ideas for every day life that you'd never thought you'd need).
What it's also about is learning the mechanisms and behavior of theater. Listening to how directors direct and conceive things helps me as an actor, and has really added to my sense of possibility in terms of what I can do with writing (I feel a lot less limited these days both about form, and about the style of story telling I tend to prefer for myself -- which is to say small things, ordinary things, that are uncomfortably illuminating. Why should I only specialize in illuminating the most poignantly mundane aspects of our existence -- I mean for fuck's sake, we do that well enough on our own, don't you think) and has of course led to the directing bug of doom all performers eventually wind up with.
Of course, the preceeding paragraph is the positive spin. The more honest, the more "how I am screwy and how that drives me" response is -- I grew up in a very unpredictable setting, around adults and around a social class that I was expected to conform to the rules of, without being told the rules. My childhood was much like the card game MOW -- which is a game where most of the players don't know the rules, and have to figure them out as they go. It was somewhere between a cruel joke and a clever logic puzzle of childhood, which I eagerly perpetrated on others, once it could no longer be done to me.
But the point is that I grew up very watchful, and found ways to imitate absolutely everything in my surroundings, which allowed me to just not be seen, when I could stand for that to be the case. Mostly though, I took crazy risks, mainly because I refused to accept that the rules we're different for me. Behavior, dress and makeup (and we're talking about grade school here) that was acceptable for popular kids was not acceptable for me. So my mimicry of them would often fall flat and lead me not to acceptance with them (or my teachers who often collude and are grateful for the politics of children), but the ability (that I still have) to hoodwink strangers who did not know I was an interloper.
So a lot of this period of stage management is unavoidably about not my safety (because my childhood wasn't unsafe in the least -- just chaotic -- in the way that in a restaurant the cachaphony prevents you from understanding the words you know all around you), but this little preparatory thing I always have to do to master anything. On the one hand, I get annoyed with myself about it, am sure it is a sign of utterly useless and time wasting timidity. But on the other hand, it's like learning to do foite turns -- you prep a lot in the beginning and then you can just keep going. God, that's a shitty trite metaphor. But yeah. Growing up I used my skills of imagination and mimicry to survive -- not physically -- so much as emotionally -- to fit in, to have friends, to have a social world, to reassure my parents and to seperate myself from their dramas. But those same skills were often the proof that I was a bit of a strange kid, and they were the very same things that required me to find ways to manage the world around me for my comfort.
I have a sudden memory related to my gym report cards. I can't often talk about my childhood without thinking about my physicality or lack there of, mainly because I was discouraged from routine physical stuff (climbing on jungle gyms, ice skating) because fear wasn't worth getting over and danger wasn't worth confronting. At Hewitt, our report cards involved very detailed comments. And I always remember how desperately they tried to be positive about my grande and petitte motor skills -- but I could always tell something was off in the comments, and I'd ask my parents -- "oh, it's just because you're not very good yet at catching the ball". "Why does that matter?" I would shriek, "that's not a learning thing, that's not useful! Why is that in school?" This was like second grade. Imagine my absolute horror when I went to public school and suddenly gym was a daily affair, instead of three times a week.
The other driving issue of my childhood was, of course, my voice. Which, after years of speech therapy I consider to be an extremely precise instrument, if not always pleasing in tone. Recording these audblogs posts has brought one thing home to me -- I still mimic the parents of rich children, and my speech is woefully laconic. I understand why people suppose I hate them because I carry this weird drawl, and I can't decide if it's a wonderful bit of precise and peculiar character, or something that absolutely must go, because it gets in the way of people perceiving both my energy and ideas.
To a certain extend saying I stage manage to learn about all aspects of the theater is dishonest. It implies waiting to do what one really wants to do, which is so entirely _not_ what I am about. In its simplest reality, my stage managing is about feeding the generalist in me (I _have_ to know how to do everything, in a pinch or not, and as Kat can tell you, if one has a random how to question, pretty much everyone who knows me calls me, because I'm just a wealth of the type of information and ingenious little ideas for every day life that you'd never thought you'd need).
What it's also about is learning the mechanisms and behavior of theater. Listening to how directors direct and conceive things helps me as an actor, and has really added to my sense of possibility in terms of what I can do with writing (I feel a lot less limited these days both about form, and about the style of story telling I tend to prefer for myself -- which is to say small things, ordinary things, that are uncomfortably illuminating. Why should I only specialize in illuminating the most poignantly mundane aspects of our existence -- I mean for fuck's sake, we do that well enough on our own, don't you think) and has of course led to the directing bug of doom all performers eventually wind up with.
Of course, the preceeding paragraph is the positive spin. The more honest, the more "how I am screwy and how that drives me" response is -- I grew up in a very unpredictable setting, around adults and around a social class that I was expected to conform to the rules of, without being told the rules. My childhood was much like the card game MOW -- which is a game where most of the players don't know the rules, and have to figure them out as they go. It was somewhere between a cruel joke and a clever logic puzzle of childhood, which I eagerly perpetrated on others, once it could no longer be done to me.
But the point is that I grew up very watchful, and found ways to imitate absolutely everything in my surroundings, which allowed me to just not be seen, when I could stand for that to be the case. Mostly though, I took crazy risks, mainly because I refused to accept that the rules we're different for me. Behavior, dress and makeup (and we're talking about grade school here) that was acceptable for popular kids was not acceptable for me. So my mimicry of them would often fall flat and lead me not to acceptance with them (or my teachers who often collude and are grateful for the politics of children), but the ability (that I still have) to hoodwink strangers who did not know I was an interloper.
So a lot of this period of stage management is unavoidably about not my safety (because my childhood wasn't unsafe in the least -- just chaotic -- in the way that in a restaurant the cachaphony prevents you from understanding the words you know all around you), but this little preparatory thing I always have to do to master anything. On the one hand, I get annoyed with myself about it, am sure it is a sign of utterly useless and time wasting timidity. But on the other hand, it's like learning to do foite turns -- you prep a lot in the beginning and then you can just keep going. God, that's a shitty trite metaphor. But yeah. Growing up I used my skills of imagination and mimicry to survive -- not physically -- so much as emotionally -- to fit in, to have friends, to have a social world, to reassure my parents and to seperate myself from their dramas. But those same skills were often the proof that I was a bit of a strange kid, and they were the very same things that required me to find ways to manage the world around me for my comfort.
I have a sudden memory related to my gym report cards. I can't often talk about my childhood without thinking about my physicality or lack there of, mainly because I was discouraged from routine physical stuff (climbing on jungle gyms, ice skating) because fear wasn't worth getting over and danger wasn't worth confronting. At Hewitt, our report cards involved very detailed comments. And I always remember how desperately they tried to be positive about my grande and petitte motor skills -- but I could always tell something was off in the comments, and I'd ask my parents -- "oh, it's just because you're not very good yet at catching the ball". "Why does that matter?" I would shriek, "that's not a learning thing, that's not useful! Why is that in school?" This was like second grade. Imagine my absolute horror when I went to public school and suddenly gym was a daily affair, instead of three times a week.
The other driving issue of my childhood was, of course, my voice. Which, after years of speech therapy I consider to be an extremely precise instrument, if not always pleasing in tone. Recording these audblogs posts has brought one thing home to me -- I still mimic the parents of rich children, and my speech is woefully laconic. I understand why people suppose I hate them because I carry this weird drawl, and I can't decide if it's a wonderful bit of precise and peculiar character, or something that absolutely must go, because it gets in the way of people perceiving both my energy and ideas.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-08 09:45 am (UTC)my gym classes were a nightmare b/c I didn't wear my glasses (broke them once in gym and my mom got so mad that it wasn't worth risking THAT again) and was so blind that I had to learn to recognize my classmates by their gym clothes. sometimes I think, well, at least I was learning to develop my memory coz lord knows I wasn't learning how to play ANY of the games at all.
I think you sound sort of like my sister in the audioblogs, which doesn't make that much sense (grew up in the midwest with a european mother and a industrial city father, both with recognizable accents, which we each have a little bit of when drunk or tired, and we each had speech therapy, esp around the 'th' issue, which I lose first, sometimes even in typing) and means you might sound sort of like me (kill? are you the only person who could respond to this?) except I don't really know what I sound like and I do know what my sister sounds like.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-08 09:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-08 01:29 pm (UTC)If you know EVERYthing about a process, there is less room for you to be surprised about when your focused on yourself in rehersal later. So you never get thrown.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-08 01:32 pm (UTC)