all's well

Well a lot has happened in the five months that I have gone missing from the Blogosphere! I shall keep it brief here and start posting regularly with more details...

First off, I was indeed accepted in to Solofest 2010 at the Filling Station. The Bark & the Tree was selected as one of the festival openers on Friday night, along with Linda Rodeck’s Action Improv piece. We had a great house of close to 50 people. Linda’s piece was brilliant. It was a mode of working that I had never seen used as solo performance. It is truly compelling work. All the plays through out the festival were fantastic.

The premier of my solo piece was very well received. I was so involved in the process of getting it finished, rehearsed and produced that it was a bit of a wild ride to the last. The first performance felt emotionally connected and informed, the second show, the following week at the end of the fest, felt like a runaway train. The staging by Eb Lottimer was active and served the piece well and greatly helped the mission of getting the play up and running.

I later performed the play in Taos, to two sold out houses of friends and Art of the Song listeners at the Metta Theatre. Bruce MacIntosh creates a lovely intimate room for performance that is beautifully suited to solo performance work. It was there that the truth of the play began to show its self. After a delicious week of rehearsal, all by myself in this delightful theater, the text became more grounded and home-like.

And it was there that I took the risk of Stillness. Stillness on stage can be terrifying for both the actor and the audience. If the actor is not completely engaged in their thought process during the Stillness, the audience will become unsure, believing ultimately that something is amiss. As a performer, I chose to go for The Stillness because in some instances I simply had to stop, think about where I was, and how I felt about it. I owed it to the play somehow, to take time with the events and give them air. The fearsome thing is that it become too self involved, tipping the balance into a wallow of self reflection.

Feedback relayed that the pace was just right, that the silence allowed the audience to catch up and dig in a little deeper. Whew.

more news... I am shooting a pilot for ABC Family this week, playing Coach Lee, coach of the tennis team in The Lying Game, a new TV series based on a book by Sara Shepard featuring Helen Slater. ;-)

Learning to think differently

Exciting times. I've been wearing my producer hat for a long time now for radio. Wearing it channels a way of thinking that is more concerned with the whats and hows of a project than than the whys and how it feels. While 28 pages of original material doesn't seem like much in the face of my husband's new 160 page book, or my friends 130,000 word memoir, it is still a considerable piece of work that required me to let go of the hows and what for a time and just be in the presence of "other."

This week however I have been back in a How and What comfort zone, but challenging the edges of my particular sand box of artistic expression by looking at the sound and light design for the piece. I contacted a designer, Karen Perlow, who's work I have admired both from the audience perspective and from the stage as an actor involved in her work. Learning to explain what my vision is and why I had written in a particular effect is a great exercise. As a rookie at this, I simply wrote down what I saw and heard in my minds senses. Karen asked questions, which made me deepen my own understanding of the effect. For example, she asked "Why a constellation effect" and it helped me understand that I was trying for a feeling of distance that can at once make you feel small and insignificant, but also open and filled with potential.

This is a new form of creative thinking and a new form of producing that I find to be very rewarding.

Oh yes, and the great news is I have been accepted into the Filling Station's Solo Fest! July 9-12 and July 16 -18. Dates are not firm yet but I will be performing twice, once each weekend. I'll keep you posted.

Gusty Winds May Exist

Its amazing to me how easy it is to slip into the feeling that once you are blown off course, you have a long road back. Glory hallelujah. I discovered that isn't true. Getting blown off course is sometimes be an important part of the process. Its taken 18 years to understand and accept that.

I am so excited to say that I have a 28 page script in hand!

The main gift of this process has been to allow myself the freedom to be a creative without the pressure of thinking that I need to be something or somewhere else.

I am ready to begin the rehearsal process. I also need to find a lighting designer, and start picking music. Meeting today with Lynn Miller to start the process of how to stage, and where to apply for performance gigs.

I am now a playwright of sorts. What a great feeling.

nuff said.

I found this beautiful Sinead O'Connor performance...The Women Of Ireland

She's baaack...

My life feels as if it is virtually everyone else's at the moment and I am trying to rectify that with a few hours in the anonymity of a busy cafe.

Taking refuge this morning from everyone and everything. To catch up with myself. Its amazing to think that it was a month ago that I was upstate and heading down to be in NYC. I really enjoyed being there.

The visit to the City was amazing. I had a lot of time to myself and reconnected to a strength and a fragility that I had forgotten out here in the desert. To be in there again awakened the dichotomy of individuality and connectedness that I had lost track of in the west. I deeply love and miss the humanity of New York City. The collision of dreams and passion, with the day to day work of maintaining a life there; getting where you need to be, in the time you have to do it, with a measure of tranquility in the face of insanity.

I love it. I miss it. I need it. I know that I need New Mexico too. So how that is all going to work out, I do not know.

I visited with my old agent. Feels like we have more in common now than before. She has a 20 hours of footage about the place we met... Claremont Riding Academy. A real piece of history that was closed a number of years ago. We may work on it together... would be big fun... I did drum up the courage to ask if she would represent me if I lived there again... She didn't say no which is fantastic.

I visited with some dear friends from Grad School which was great and reminded me why I need NM. The spacious spiritual core that comes from living here is an essential part of my life now.

In some way it seems that the two places run the same energy ... the one an intense human experience in the company of 17 million people in a manufactured world, the other an intense human experience in the company of a few people, in a world manufactured by the sky, the wind and a little rain. But the energy in both feels like it has a similar root, none the less.

NYC and NM are like the flip sides of my favorite 45 ... at once A & B.

Successful visit to the cafe, produced 6 more pages to my play. I need to have a draft by the end of May so I can rehearse in June.

Cheer me on?

victorious

What is it about setting a schedule, getting into a routine and then having a trip come up that creates a disruption in the pattern? Its seems to be more the norm than having an unencumbered schedule.

But I am victorious. Even with a travel day and visiting with my mother, I have gotten three new pages written. I like writing on planes, so I swapped Tuesday for Wednesday and wrote more.

I remembered some images from a stab at a memoir a few years ago. So I have stripped it for parts and am including the more arresting rhythmical language in the solo piece. And tonight I am sending to two friends.

Very tired... but wanted to be sure to get something up here before the week got away.

Being on the east coast feels really good. I love Upstate New York. So glad to be here for a bit.

Resting my eyes now...

One of these things is not like the other...

Our solo work class started on Monday with a great small group of people. So interesting that it all happened organically. Glad to have the input of Lynn Miller and my classmates to support the work.

Today is a really good day. I have been writing from within today. An improvement over obsessing on the externals and the obstacles. A day of focus feeling my way into the script with music and poetry. I found a song that has some particularly poignant lyrics around the loyalty theme called A Nobleman's Wedding and learned it... playing and singing brought me to a very grounded place, as music always will.

There is a line in the song that references "Never come between the bark and the tree." Its such a powerful image. We know that when the bark is separated from the tree, the tree will die. So I have been playing with the idea. That must be how an deported Irish citizen, deported by a foreign government from their own ancestral land must have felt. As if they had been separated from all that protected and supported them. Perhaps that is how Eva felt... that she had separated the bark from the tree when she told Kevin to turn down the plea agreement in favor of 7 years transportation to a penal colony in Van Dieman's Land. I know that neither of them were ever the same again.

When the writing slowed up I started a list of how Eva and I are similar and how we are different. Surprised to find that we are very much the same, and very very different in ways I wouldn't have expected.

Also made some plans for my trip to NYC and have an appointment to visit with Marilynn Scott Murphy, of Professional Artists, the agent I was with when I lived & worked there. It was like yesterday, and I have been gone 10 years. Need to process that a little... okay... a lot.

Feeling really good about the work even though I know I have a long way to go. That's what its about isn't it? Having faith in the project and putting in the hours?