Creative Practice forum

misunderstanding misinformation and rationalization in creative practice – a question of perception

“The Moreno story seems to depict the fault line between the privacy of practice and the public domain of art. Do others also read it this way? In a class on political theatre, I found myself defending Moreno’s attempt against the idea that only qualified professional therapists should ever attempt to work with people’s real emotions. For me it is impossible to imagine a profound theatrical work that does not on some level touch the emotional life of the artists as well as that of the audience. How then should the line be drawn? What is the ethics of traversing the border between private and public?” Ben Spatz on the Moreno suicides, September 17th, 2009.

Ben Spatz raises some profoundly complicated questions, if not too literal. In my opinion, these questions beg qualifying criteria which can’t be applied when practicing or “doing” anything, whether in the realm of culture work or in the throes of life altering decisions in private, or in the day to day practices of survival.

The artificial line drawn between people for the sake of art, between public and private, is one of the accepted, the necessary criteria, or rationalizations, I suggest, which are the result of dissonance caused by cultural forces beyond each one of us.

The world of thoughts, of rational decisions, of ethical struggles, is different from the world of action. Or better stated, a different world of action. There, words like “real emotions”, can lead to misunderstandings.

for its own sake

Last week I began a practice for its own sake. I’ve rented a studio for two hours each tuesday evening to work. Not to work on a product or show or technique but to work on practice. To work on presence. To see what I need as a body, a voice, in order to be fully present in a space. To let that space become spaces within my sound and movement, to fill the time by fulfilling it- without initial pedagogy or formality.

I have never done something like this. My work is always attached to either a class or a specific project, and I have a feeling I am not alone in this. Yet to practice for the sake of itself is truly amazing. Terrifying and exhilarating. I laughed. I cried. I ran in a circle for 20 minutes singing. I worked on the smallest muscles near my spine. In the end, I felt like I had gone swimming in a clear pond and my sleep was like drying off in the sun. Read more

on the practice of new work

“Good training will show in your work
People who know will recognize it.
Those who don’t – will see something too.”
Grotowski

At best I could only hope to not be imitating Grotowski, but at worst I feel I have scratched the surface towards his aesthetic without the sacrifice of daily work- perhaps no sacrifice is enough while I am still caught in my own daily performance. Peter Brook once remarked that “the temptation to be an armchair Grotowski will always be hard to resist,” but it has never been my intention to create his work; it’s too small a placement on too narrow a stage. How do we hold a daily practice while reaching past the rarifed form into something new?

New work has always had a savior complex: persecuted first and exalted later. There is also the risk of a survival essentialism- the new way often gets self-touted as the best way or the only way in its hope to survive. Bertolt Brecht once responded to this accusation, “Is this new style of production the new style? …The answer is no. It is one way, the way in which we have gone. Experiments must continue. The same problem exists for all art, and it is a gigantic one.” Often new work hails to remove itself from institutions and tradition, to be more accessible, more diverse and more affordable, but ends up co-opted by the only ones who can afford the novelty of newness. Read more

What do you practice?

This site is getting between ten and thirty unique hits per day, but most people who visit are not leaving comments. I wonder why. People are reading my “starting points” post, but not responding to it. Are the questions too broad? Too theoretical? Does it sound academic? Or esoteric?

Part of the purpose of this forum is to put forth the notion of “creative practice” as a link between artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and scholars. Over the next few months, I’d like to learn more about who is visiting this site and how it can be useful to different communities.

Here are three questions that everyone can answer:

1) What do you practice?
Do you practice law? Medicine? Painting? Dance? Therapy?
What do you do every day? Where do you do it? With whom?

2) What brought you to Creative Practice forum?
What search terms led you to this website?
Did you find what you were looking for here?

3) What do you want from a site like this?
Are these posts relevant to you? Are they useful?
How could this forum serve your daily practice?

I specifically invite first-time visitors to answer these questions through comments. Anyone can write a comment – you don’t have to register (although you are welcome to). Please introduce yourself!

The Embodied Art of Metal Sculpting

For a little over a year now I’ve been working as an assistant in the studio of a master metal sculptor named Robert Cole. Mr. Cole has been working as a sculptor since the early sixties, for a long time in plastics (a material which he describes as too caustic to continue with), then in wood (among other things he has manufactured over 100 handmade instruments) and ultimately in bronze and stainless steel. For over twenty years Cole has been crafting handmade metal sculpture of varying sizes, from the miniature (4 inches or so) to the monumental (up to 16’ tall and weighing upwards of a ton and a half). All but a few of Cole’s works have been assembled from individual pieces of sheet metal cut, hammered and welded into place. Blending the figurative with the abstract, his works continue to strike me as impressive, evocative and mysterious even after seeing them for over a year. What is more, working in Mr. Cole’s studio draws upon many of the skills I’ve developed in the course of training as a physical performer. In my work as his assistant, stance, balance, fine muscle control and breath coordination all find daily exercise. Read more

Bibhaban’s Journey

The obvious questions that come to our mind in this context are like this:

What is the journey?

Where is the journey headed?

Whose journey is it?

Why is it a journey?

We all are very conditioned and comfortable with getting answers – but not questions. Questions unsettle us, make us uncomfortable, and sometimes force us to rethink and question our own belief systems, thoughts and perspectives, and the established norms and conventions of society.

Returning to the unanswered question: “Journey” literally means travel or passage from one place to another; travel upon or across; to travel over or through; to traverse. So, literally, journey is quite similar to travel or traverse – but then the question arises why the term journey and not travel or traverse. We leave this for you to think and ponder upon. It might get a little confusing, but Bibhaban loves to live & think like this. We want to understand the simplest and the smallest of things by experiencing them, by walking a little extra mile with these literary words where we can transcend their immediate meaning and understand their deeper meaning through a process where we share intimate moments with them, where we observe, experience and try to understand our existence through the co-existence of these moments. “Journey” is rather a collection of moments of co-existence in the relationship between it’s participants.

PRACTICE and PLAY in the context of SPACE

When we pursuit work in the studio and call it Practice, we almost never achieve Play.

When we pursuit Play in the studio we rarely achieve anything practical.

Play occurs most spontaneously outside of the structure of “knowing” and the pursuit of “Technique.”

And yet, it is through Play that we explore, discover and perhaps even develop practical technique.

Useful practical research into Play, its usefulness as a tool and modality for performance, must take into consideration the space and overall environmental context of the space.

Play which is more fully realized through embodied associations and reflexes gives rise to natural, intuitive, and purposeful participation.

I have found it useful in practice to account for “Fields of Play” within the architecture of the specific environment we are using.

All of the mechanical actions of daily life are subdivided and guided by field boundaries, many of which are literally drawn into the landscapes of our daily environments.

Consider a performance studio or theatrical “space” is drawn to be just that, a special place for “rehearsing” or “performing.” Rehearsal is strained practice which leads to presentation under pressure of maintaining what was practiced. These kinds of environments elicit both excitement and fear. After a great deal of time, familiarity with the environment relieves this tension, but it is always renewed when new members come into the space of the practicing company.

2009: 11/12
POSTED BY: jef johnson
CATEGORY: Embodied Practices
Pedagogy
Performing Arts
Play!
2 comments

some thoughts on practice as research

Hi, I’m new to this forum and quite interested in what’s being discussed. I just completed what in the UK is referred to as a ‘practice as research’ PhD, meaning that a percentage of the PhD is judged based on practical work, which is in some way integrated with the thinking/writing in the written thesis. Mine was called Apocryphal Theatre: practicing philosophies and discussed an idea that I am still fleshing out, namely that some theatre can be considered an act of philosophy. I stuck with post WWII artists and their relation to post-structuralist philosophy primarily, using John Cage’s 4′33″ as a seminal act of philosophy wherein the spectator turns into an active witness and sound becomes music. Deleuze and Guattari catch up with him many years later in A Thousand Plateaus.

Apocryphal Theatre has evolved out of on-going research labs begun in 2004 in London, which in turn evolved out of labs I directed in NYC from 1998-2001 (one lab and one longer workshop/lab). In the process of these labs certain concepts turned into concrete exercise and vice-versa. The terminology and tools discovered were also in the thesis, and the practical component were our two most recent shows which came out of work in the lab and non-linear stage texts that I wrote and the players memorized, but without lines assigned, so their response to the text was similar in some ways to musicians’ responses to one another and a melody in a jazz improvisation.

Notes from the yard… (Part 1)

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(translated with assistance from Francesca Netto and Ben Spatz)

NOTES FROM THE YARD OF NON-THEATER (Part 1)

“In the beginning was the word.” So begins the Book, and with the Book begins the era of writing. For long centuries, the Book has been the Truth. Today the word – the books – are mainly lies, ways of cheating and of making people silent. Cheap culture.

We look for Truth. We go back before the beginning, to the sound. The sound, the vibration, cannot lie. We do not listen to the word but to the way it is pronounced, its color and vibration, how it resonates within us. Then, like animals, we react.

Before the beginning, there was a vibration, a sound and an ear to hear it. The ear of an animal or a child. A bundle of nerves behind a subtle skin, ready to react. This is the origin: vibration, sound, and action.

What is technique?

This week I will participate in the “Performance as Research” working group at the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference in Puerto Rico. The paper I have been developing for this working group turns on the notion of TECHNIQUE, which I now realize is probably going to be central to my dissertation as well. So my big theoretical project right now is the development of these twin concepts: technique and practice, practice and technique.

I define practice as anything that people do in repetition. (This is just my current working definition, of course – neither commonly accepted nor even fully satisfactory to me.) I would also add that “embodied” practice implies repetition through the body. Technique, for me, is the thing that is repeated.

I am trying to get away from the notion of brand-name “Techniques” (with a capital T): Stanislavski technique, Meisner technique, Viewpoints, Contact Improvisation, Aikido… It’s not that I don’t believe these things exist in a meaningful way – they obviously do, some more than others. But I don’t want to call them techniques (or, even worse, methods) because that suggests to me that they are static and codified, when in fact they are constantly changing both in passing from one person to another and also within the practice of an individual.

What is really clear for me is the idea of a single element of technique – sort of like an “atom” of technique. Read more

On the art of practice and the practice of art