Tag: All good men

Control is a community managed resource

There are times of quiet grace, peace, and joy in all of our lives. For me: times sitting on a dock, or enjoying a meal. But there are also, for all of us, times of pain, suffering, and desperation. Not to make a joke of it, but I think of the saying, “Life: No one gets out alive.”

About two weeks ago I posted as my Facebook status, “Control is over-rated: Discuss.” I got some very interesting comments. I think the positivity of control is largely an issue of balance. I wrote something similar about Pride a few weeks ago, which you can see here. Im a big fan of E.B. White, who once wrote a version of a psalm in saying,

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

When I hear and see pain in the world Im always brought to the moment with that feeling White describes. What should I be doing about this? I experienced that tension vibrantly the other day. I met a new friend and colleague for a very enjoyable lunch. We sat outside. As I was stuffing my mouth with my first big bite – and I do mean, like, stuffing my mouth – a homeless person walked by and asked for change. Im mumbling a denial of money for food as Im stuffing my face with a really delicious salad.

I wrote in an earlier post about how money buys you isolation. It buys you distance from many of the pains that people without money go through. That does not negate the pains that we all have. But we all do not share the same amount of control. For some reason it seems that those with more control should (and I mean this morally) try to give some of that control to the people with less of it. Gloriously, lots of people with greater control have been with that project for some time.

There are sad, internal times in all our lives. A friends mother is suffering from cancer. I can see what that feels like. And there is no way to control it. It is like flying in a helicopter upside down. We control each other so little, and influence each other so very much. This is a lot of thoughts for one post. I’ll end with this possibility: The less control you have, the simpler things are. Control is a complication managed by our collective humanity.

I don’t want to pollute this idealistic post with the crass realism of the real world. But that is in fact where we all live. It’s because of the project I’m working on that I’ve been thinking about control. Dylan Thomas created these characters who are good, and bad, and who all influence one another. In the preface to my book (out in two weeks!) I quote Albert Einstein who said that we should seek the simplest solutions and not simpler. I believe that understanding control as a community managed resource can help us negotiate sharing of our capacity to influence each other toward the good.

About All Good Men

I’ve written a number of posts about creating my new evening lenght show. This post sort of condenses lots of the writing from those earlier posts, and adds a little more context.

From 2002-2004 I had a company  called the Blackbird Dance Ensemble. I made two evening length shows in consecutive summers, and with the support of grants I was able to perform in DC, New York City, Boston, and at the American Dance Festival. People responded positively to the work, but I didnt. I didnt grow up dancing, and I realized that I needed to become a better dancer to become the choreographer I know I can be. You can only focus on so many things at once.

Ive worked very hard on my dancing over the last five years, and it has paid off. Ive had the opportunity to dance for a bunch of local companies (Jane Franklin, Alexandria Ballet, Maida Withers, etc) and even got to perform and teach in Russia – a dancers Mecca. I decided last year it was time to start choreographing again. But I didnt get any of the grants I applied for, and so wasnt able to do a show. I didnt get any grants this year either, but I realized I simply had to get the party started. I know what Ive got, and have no doubt that one makes it easier to be overlooked when youre not out there making things. In December of 2008 I finalized my plan, and began working on the project that will premiere in the Fringe Festival under the title, All Good Men.

My work for the project began with the development of a script to use as the root for the evening. I picked up a Dylan Thomas film-script in a used bookstore in the fall of 2008, and was really grabbed by it. I decided to do a dance / theater adaptation. For little while I tried to rope in a theater director to help with the adaptation, and to co-direct. That being un-successful, I settled down to doing it on my own.

You might know Dylan Thomas as the poet famous for such lines as: “Do not go gentle into that good night”, and “Wow, I finished the bottle of scotch already?!?” (Thomas was a professional writer who died from an alcoholism-related illness at age 39.) His most famous script is the radio play Under Milkwood. Im producing an adaptation of  The Doctor and the Devils. After reading everything I could by Dylan (LOC, yeah you know me) I started typing up the script. The task was to take a 150+ scene film-script and translate it into something that could work on a stage, with dance.

The Doctor and the Devils is centrally concerned with the interaction between a medical professor/doctor and a group of people who dug up bodies to sell to the doctor for use in dissection in the academy. All of the characters are very complex, and the language is brilliant. I needed to simplify the plot, cut characters, and cut scene locations to make it viable on a stage. (Its now down to 20 scenes, seven characters.) Part of the process was figuring out where the dances would occur, and why. For me the core of the script is about our interaction on slippery moral slopes; how we all jostle and push each other up and down moral slopes. Dance is a very in-efficient replacement for language, but for handling the ineffable, its far more efficient than words. The dances expand and personalize the issues raised by the text in a way that simple theater couldnt.

Last month we started rehearsing the dances. Im really pleased with how its going. Ive told the cast that I think the fascia that holds the whole piece together is within the dances. While we did a read-through at the first rehearsal, since then weve only been dancing. Ill put up some rehearsal photos and perhaps some video in a future post, and perhaps talk more about what were doing with some of the specific dances, but Ive gone on long enough for now.

More on ‘All Good Men’

05_noltenaz_1I usually get the clicker. I want to be clear about that. But sometimes I don’t. This evening F tuned us into a movie called ‘Mother Night’, right as it was starting. I’m really glad that she did.

The movie Mother Night by Robert Weide- starring Nick Nolte, and with a supporting cast that includes Alan Arkin, John Goodman, and a wee Kirsten Dunst – is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s book of the same name. To see a piece that Weide wrote about the film for Paul Krassner’s The Realist (Autumn, 1997), click here.

The film is about a writer who hides out from his conscious, serving in communications for the Nazi’s. He was a playwright before the war, and really doesn’t care one way or another for politics. What Vonnegut and Weide show very dramatically is that one does not have the option not to participate in the moral/social life of one’s times. That is an issue I deal with/am dealing with for my current project: All Good Men.

Mother Night makes very good use of some film music by Gavin Bryars. While his famous ‘songs’, well utilized in the dance world, develop lovely melodies, this music had the sheen and tension, but just…. kept… going. Somehow the in-monotonous almost beautiful tension filled the spaces just that little bit to help carry the images along without the one relying overly on the other.

My first rehearsal for All Good Men is Thursday evening, and I’ve been thinking about where to start the choreography. I had decided on the most thematically central ‘track’ to start with, thinking it would help us find some meaningful core. But I was unhappy with the choice cause it’s very fast paced, and to develop cast coherence I think something more moderate might serve better. Now I’m thinking of using an Adams track….