Category Archives: art

April 24, 2013 · 6:41 am

It’s Already Been Done: A Particular Lie

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At any given moment, there are millions of artists and craftspeople working around the world, making things that may or may not have any pragmatic use (depending on how you define pragmatics), and for most of human history, those artists worked in small corners, unnoticed except by the few.

Not so today, thankfully.   An explosion of exposure to the truly stunning array of creativity on this planet is now at our fingertips, and for me, the effect of this exposure has multiple prongs.   I’d be curious to know how you deal with it.

First of all, there’s inspiration.  Yes, I can barely tear myself away from browsing among artists’ websites, and now that Pinterest is here, so many curators make discovery a simple process.  Simply find a board displaying the kind of artistic sensibilities that turn you on, and begin to follow the trail to site after site after site of truly creative, beautiful things.  Sometimes these artifacts and pieces are done for social cause, but more often not.   Beauty of line, form, color, and composition just calls to us, and there are images and sculptures and fashions that catch our attention, make us laugh, amaze us, make us point and share and post to Facebook.  We “repin” things all the time, saying “look at that,” “look at that,” “and that, too!”

And with that energy running, we turn to our own work, and get to it.

But there’s another piece to this, and I’m wondering if you feel it as I do.

It’s that what you’re about to make, as much as it comes from your own heart and sensibility, has already been done, perhaps—if not probably—better than you’re about to do it.   Follow the threads of photography, art, color, and design on Pinterest, Flikr, whatever, and there is such brilliance there, it seems as if it is ubiquitous already.  What is the need of yet another picture of a tulip?  What is the need of another play on racism (well, maybe we do need one of those) or better yet, King Arthur, of all things?  (For those of you that know my playwriting.) What will a poet say that has not been said far better? (An easy thought to think on Shakespeare’s birthday, which was yesterday.)

All of this, of course, cuts to motive and the heart.  Why do we make what we make?  What are seeking?  What do we hope for as we forge our novels, plays, paintings, and poems?   I don’t know the answer to this.   Here’s one of my mantras: motives are always mixed.   Humans are not purists in this way; we are motivated in gradients and mixtures, the slider leaning toward the noble or the more selfish, depending on the day.  In secure times, we lean toward complete service, hoping to further all the love and altruism the world can take on.  In lean moments, when the terror of utter failure raises its head, we can become self-serving sellouts, desperate to pay the bills or get the one nod of approval we think is going to restore our sanity.

Stephen Pressfield (The War of Art) writes all this off to resistance, which he calls evil.  I’m paraphrasing him, but Pressfield says resistance not only wants to shut your voice down, it wants to kill you.   He’s serious about this, I think, and as I sit here writing this post, I think I’d better be, too.  Because he’s right.

And finally, my own pushback to this notion that what I’m making is not needed because there’s so much great stuff out there already, is simply this:

What I’ve always wanted were moments.  Moments in which the curtains part and something of that invisible trail that leads to God (or insight or beauty or love or whatever it is you want to call it) becomes visible, slips into your spirit, fills up your soul, and you are reborn a little bit.   When I had those moments as a young man in my teens and twenties, I couldn’t name it, but I could sense—feel—what I was after.

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A moment of light through a petal’s delicate membrane; a moment of a human body held in tension on the point of balance wherein all is still; a moment of voice uttering words five hundred years old in such a way as to break a postmodern heart.  A moment of holy silence in a chapel holding nothing but us poor, ignorant humans splayed out before the mystery of things.   A moment at a desk laboring to capture that elusive future moment when an actor will play an action that you’ll write today, and in some far off place, a person you will never meet will sit in the dark for an hour, and, responding to a moment you dreamed of years ago, he or she will make a small turn of heart, and hope will enter the world again.

Moments are not repeatable or interchangeable.   A human moment is about here and now, mindfulness, about being awake.

There will never be enough of such moments.   How many will you find, make, and share today?

“You are the light of the world.  A city set on a hill cannot be hid.  Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket.  No.  They set it on a table and it gives light to everyone in the house.  So let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good work and glorify your father who is in heaven.”

– Jesus of Nazareth

We can be such fools…

 

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October 29, 2012 · 11:04 am

Faith and Art: What is the Heart of the Matter?

What is at the heart of the conversation between art (in all its form and expression) and the faith of the Christian (in its multiple and varied flavors)?

Here we go again…for more than a decade I’ve been leading an annual discussion with undergraduates at Abilene Christian University concerning the intersection between the real world making of art and the living reality of Christian faith.   When I started this class, I knew what the answers were.  Well, that’s an overstatement, but I was pretty sure I was on the right track.   Now?  Oh, it’s a topsy-turvy world we’ve got going here, and I often wonder…what in the world was the Creator thinking as He got to work in that “let-there-be-light”, big bang impulse of a moment?

So without much fanfare, I want to ask you, my friends from far and wide, some of whom I know, and some of whom I don’t…if you were to try to launch a group of passionate young artists on this life long conversation of making form from varied and disparate material, somehow letting that making being informed by a faith in Christ in one of its multiple and various forms (my emerging biases are showing now), how would you articulate the question at the heart of the matter?

How would you articulate the question at the heart of the matter?

I’d like to say it’s simple, but at least for me, I’m still plowing through mounds of complexity.  But before I tell you what I think the deal is, as seriously as I know how to ask, please pitch in here.  I’d love to have a no-kidding, gather-around-the-question-without-any-great-desire-to-win kind of discussion here.  Many of you are far more grounded than I am, and just now I’m sitting in my chair in class, hoping the instructor shows up.

Your turn…

…and thanks in advance.    

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September 24, 2012 · 7:53 am

On Forgetting Your Lines…

The opening night audience, all a-flutter with anticipation, arrives at what is known as the summation scene of a mystery thriller, the famous detective having cleverly solved what was heretofore a thorny puzzle.    He meticulously lays out the clues and their natural conclusion, the culprit is apprehended, and lights come up, and everyone goes home happy and satisfied with the comedy, the drama, and the romance.

Unless of the course, the actor playing the famous detective short-circuits, and has an experience we call in the theatre, “going up.”   Which, in more common language, means he forgets his lines.

Truth is, this sort of thing is fairly common in the theatre.   You know what you’re doing, and suddenly, you don’t.  The audience may or may not be able to tell that you’re struggling, but your fellow actors know, and for a few brief seconds that seem like a few long years, your mind is a white-out, and you are falling through an abyss that is the heart of the actor’s nightmare.

I had a couple of these moments over the opening weekend of Taproot Theatre’s Gaudy Night, and I suspect it’s not all that proper to talk about these things in public, but the experience of that kind of terror (too strong a word here, but not far from it) has spiritual and ordinary life analogs that I think are worth considering.

I’ve heard a couple of accomplished people lately (a leading Broadway actor and I forget who the other one was) say that in truth, no one in the world knows much about what they’re doing—we’re all just winging it as best we can.    We’re making it up as we go, and as we have all experienced, the thin veneer of confident presentation can suddenly come apart, it’s sickening disappearance amazingly swift.   A credit card doesn’t clear and we’re standing in the grocery line as everyone stares at the insolvent dude, humiliation pretty complete.   We sit on the freeway, car dead, backing up traffic for miles, suffering the withering stares of passing folks who used to be in a hurry.   Sexual performance short-circuits, critics call your writing bad names, a junior high audience of two-hundred popular kids from around the state of Texas bursts into loud catcalls of laughter when you begin to sing at show and tell, and you’re serious as all get-out (as we used to say in Texas.)  What do you do?  You wilt, you hide under a rock, you climb back into bed, you sing on to the end—by God, let ‘em laugh!

That last event (the laughing junior high crowd) was one of the epic experiences of my childhood, one that marked me more deeply than I care to admit.  Failure is confusing.  I’ve been in a couple of plays where I lost my lines so badly that there was really no escape.   Should we admit these things?  I don’t know, but it’s the truth…this is life.   We lose our lines.   We forget what play we’re in, what character we’re playing, and who the hell knows what action we’re supposed to be playing at the moment?   Our actor partners get bug-eyed, stammering, wanting to help, and they do in some way rescue you, but truth is, you will either get back on track or you won’t, and the play (or the job, or the marriage, or the education, or the poem) will live or die, and employment will go on or end, and either way, you’ll go home at the end of the night and decide how you will respond to this ongoing yawning reality that tomorrow will bring yet another opportunity to public embarrass yourself.

Welcome to risk.  Welcome to opportunity.  Welcome to what it means to be alive.  As my wise mentor/voice teacher/second mom told me years (I was about to get married, and the comment referred to the possibility of having a child sooner than later), “If you don’t want to play, don’t suit up.”

“If you don’t want to play, don’t suit up.”

Truth is, when I’m at the theatre as an audience member, I always enjoy the moments when actors get lost a bit, mostly because it immediately illuminates the difference between theatrical time, that magic state of mind where we travel imaginatively to where the play has us going, and actual time, where flesh and blood panic, and adrenaline rushes not because of anything fictional, but because suddenly, the very real human stakes of accomplishment and failure are laid bare, and now, something alive is happening, drama running all over the body, capturing in a heartbeat the human struggle we all face, every day.    It’s not good, it shouldn’t happen, we’re all professionals here, it’s a breaking of the contract with the audience.   But truth is, it happens, and we get back up and go on.

Or we don’t.

That impulse to stop, to lay down, to quit making, to quit risking, to quit giving, to quit putting yourself in the place where failure is not only possible, but likely…I get it.   Life is hell, sometimes.   It hurts.   It breaks our backs.    We get betrayed, or we betray, and desperate, we think we can’t go on.   Been there, done that, may go back to it someday.  Maybe today if the wind changes.

So yes, I forgot my lines.   There are reasons, but they don’t matter really.   And let’s not overdramatize.   Truth is, I got back on track, and we delivered the play.   Disaster avoided.   Mostly.   But when the lights go down, and you know you have another show in a few hours, here’s what you do.   You go to work, you do your damndest to make sure it doesn’t happen again.   And you take courage and comfort in the words of the actors around you, all of whom have been there, as they offer you grace and strength to go out and do it again.   And again.   And again.   And again.  And that night, you sweat bullets, and the words are there, every one of them.    And you thank God, and move on.

Go be a part of your life’s drama today.   Who knows what part of the play you’re in?  If you’re struggling with your lines, speak anyway.   Trust that they’ll come.   And if you see any fellow actors, those friends caught up in the intersection of your story with theirs, struggling with their lines, elevate the attention you’re paying, and hold them up.   The audience they’re playing for needs you to help them.

Those audiences may well be divine.

Speak the speech, I pray thee, trippingly on the tongue….

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August 15, 2012 · 6:40 am

Acting 101: For All of Us

Here’s what actors do, in one way or another.  Imaginatively, they work to enter the experience of a person, a character, imagining circumstances, beliefs, thought-life, sensory preferences, histories of relationships, and perhaps most importantly, what their particular characters are hungry for, long for, and have been living without.   They then shift their physical and emotional lives to somehow begin to interact with other players to present a story of what it means to be human in a very particular place with very particular cultural, historical, and personal factors in play.  (Note: Imaginative, sensory detail is important.  Where does the character’s particular hunger land in their body?)

One of the cardinal rules of acting is that you cannot judge your character and hope to enter into their hearts and minds.   Be it a murderer, a savior, a lover, or a hated foe, to judge the other as an actor is to kill the process of entering in.    People judge from the outside.   When you’re inside the head of the character, none of that judgment can be going on, because it’s not going in their heads.   Get it?   Whenever you watch an actor that somehow isn’t quite succeeding in disappearing into the character, one of the culprits to watch for is a position of judgment in the approach.

This is a process of play and of work.  It is imaginative, muscular work that takes time, energy, thought, research, conversation, experimentation, and failure.  We watch, we offer the work to others, we try to learn what we can about what it means to be human through these interactions.   Our work is to humanize the 2-D characters that lie on the writer’s page, enflesh them, give them voice, and hopefully, serve that character without judgment.

Will I play characters that are not like me?   Characters who hold opinions in politics and religion and sexuality and economics that differ from mine?   I hope so, or there won’t be much to do.

All of this is simply to suggest an exercise for all of us.   Especially if you’re not an actor, give this a shot.   Pick a person, a real human being (call them a character if you’d like) that sits on the opposite side of the fence from you on some piece of human living that you think is really important.   Perhaps it’s a person (in actor terms, a character) that you don’t like very much, that you’d shout down if you could, or maybe it’s someone you fear.  Pretend you got cast as that person, and now it’s your job to get inside their head, without judgment, to grasp what their hearts are like.   Where they came from, what they’re up to, what they see as important and necessary.    Where do their disappointments lie?   What are their heartbreaks?   What is the shape of their human brokenness?  What makes them laugh?   And what do they long for?   What do they want?

If you’re really gutsy, you’ll realize the only way to actually find any of this out is to move beyond your imagination and actually go ask them.   Befriend them, get to know them, differences and all.   Of course, the actor’s work is not try to change their characters.  The characters are what they are.   We will only understand them or not, enter in fully or not, offer our bodies as places for their stories to live or not, and finally, love them or not.

That’s all.

Let’s say you get all this good information about the character.   What’s the next step?   What’s the next piece of the work?  (You’re going to like this.)   Now your job is to figure out where all the deep, soulful things you found out about the other lie in you.   Because the work of the actor is not to find how the character differs from them, but to find where the places of intersection are.  How are we alike?   The assumption is this; all the soulful things that make one person unique are somehow also located in me, and all possibilities lie within us all.

Maybe call this the deep drilling into the old phrase, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

We are all the other.

Humanizing, isn’t it?

To restate the exercise: Be an actor.  Lay down your opinions for a minute and try to imaginatively enter the experience of those you oppose.  Your convictions may not change (changing anyone’s convictions is not the point), but I’m guessing the tone of voice, rhetoric, and conversation might.

And then, who knows what the possibilities might be.

All the world’s a stage…

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November 3, 2011 · 9:21 am

5 Positive Things Critique Can Do For You

I finished the 4th draft of my new play, and in spite of as much focused and deep work as I’ve done on a play and a group of characters, still missed the goal by a mile.  (Well, maybe more like a half-mile, but still.)  Not that there are not some good things about the play–there are–but on the whole, it is deeply flawed, especially as it relates to one character and her action, experience, and choices. Fortunately for me, I have professional friends and colleagues who are not afraid to look me in the eye and tell me, “This is wrong.”

It’s hard to swallow, but if you’re going to grow as an artist (and as a person), you have to listen.  There are times when the critics are wrong, and you just suck it up and move on, sticking to your guns. And there are times when the critics are dead right, and you know it in a flash.    Choices then follow, and how you respond will go a long way toward finding the kind of result (and by result, I mean the quality of the work) you’re looking for.

Here are five positive things that strong, you-blew-it-this-time critique can do for you.

  1. Gives you practice in humility.   My mistakes in the play run in two directions.  One deals with playwriting and character, the other with human understanding especially as it relates to culturally located skin color issues.   Funny…I often say to people that if I could ask God for one quality to acquire, model, and live out, it would be humility.   And I often do ask God for just that.    Well, these days, God seems more than happy to oblige me with opportunity to practice.
  2. Gives you practice in listening through the fog of emotion.    It’s hard to hear that you’ve just directed the most “tedious play I’ve ever seen.” (A directing mentor years ago.)  Or that your writing is “facile.”  (The Seattle Times. Ouch.)  Or that “I couldn’t find anything in that play that I liked.”  (A friend about a musical I wrote years ago.)  In each moment, for me at least, the brain sort of blows up, and the next few minutes are chaotic, as I try to make sense of whatever the person across from me is saying.   The amygdala hijack, some call it.   But when you ask people to explain what they mean by whatever it is you’ve said, you have to listen carefully to make sense of it.
  3. Forces your creativity to another level.   Frankly, once I became aware of the flaw, I was incredibly discouraged for a couple of days, wracking my brain trying to figure how to fix things.  Nothing came.   I went to bed Tuesday night thinking I might just have to chuck the thing, and told my subconscious mind to get to work on it, and then I went to sleep.   Then, Wednesday,  I had a very strong critique session with a good friend, who pulled no punches, and with clarity and passion, was enormously instructive.   When the friend left, I seriously considered giving up writing altogether (not really, but you know what I mean), but about a half-hour later, after telling at least two people on the phone I wasn’t going think about it for awhile, a very credible solution rose up in my mind, so much so that I immediately got to work fleshing it out.   Whether I can make it work this time around, who knows?  But the point is, without that deep critique, the new answer–which is clearly much better for about a thousand reasons–would not have occurred to me.
  4. Demonstrates in real time who cares about your work.   Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to take someone to the cleaners to prove you care about their work (all my friend are now lining up to have their turn), but when someone is willing to walk through that fire with you, risking who knows what (they have no idea how you’ll really respond, and sometimes there’s heavy cost), pay attention.   The person who is coming at you hardest may be the one person you need most to listen to, because they’re the ones who aren’t going to be satisfied with “good enough.”
  5. Gives you an opportunity to model a process that every body likes to talk about, but few like to practice.   I believe in the process of critique, but it’s hard to put into practice. Lots of times, my sense is that we just lie to each other to keep up appearances, and figure that the standards that identify good artistic work from not as good are squishy, hard to define, and just end up costing us friends and feelings.  What’s weird is that lots of times, that’s just fine.   We get by, and maybe never get to the kind of quality of work we wanted just because we never hear these good words:  ”You can do better.”
Critique can also be devastating.   After my friend’s comment on my musical years ago, it was about six months before I wrote anything again.   Sure…you get gunshy.  But it’s a war, according to Pressfield, and good critique is not resistance.  Your response to it might be, if you let it stop the work.   But truth is, even if it is devastating, we really only have two choices.  We can quit, or go on.   Quitting was taken off the list of options a long time ago.   Now it’s just about getting down to work.

By the way, I wrote this blog by creating the title, and then figuring out 5 things that might make sense.   Am I wrong?  Tell me about it.   Or give me some more positives about receiving critique well. There are probably a hundred.

“Here what’s wrong with this post…”  Go…

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